Primordial PoliticsStuart K. Hayashi
Note: This essay is Copyright (C) 2006 Stuart K. Hayashi and may not be reproduced by any means in any form without his expressed written permission.
This essay is actually the first chapter in a five-chapter treatise. I do not yet know whether the other four installments will appear on this blog.“Live free or die.”
General John Stark (1728–1822) proclaimed these words to be his credo as he led his troops in the American Revolution.
Due to his efforts the phrase has become the official motto of New Hampshire.[01] Of course, one need not be from that particular state to love that battle cry. People across the country share its sentiment. But what does it truly mean to “live free”?
Many would answer that freedom is the ability to live peaceably in society, without one’s person or possessions being threatened by just about any violent thug roaming the streets. By that standard, one has attained liberty when the government protects his rights from such dangers.
Yet that raises another question -- where do rights come from? One school of thought believes a Judeo-Christian God created such rights. Since there is no empirical proof of this, the proponents of this view say the existence of these rights should be accepted on faith.
A rival school of thought, which is much more influential among public policymakers, insists that rights are arbitrary social constructs that politicians, activists, and community leaders may rightfully alter or ignore whenever it suits a consensus of them. The problem with such an approach is that it allows officeholders to arbitrarily invent new, harebrained “rights” that contradict much more logically defined rights.
And so a politician will first say that having a right to one’s own fortune means that the money that Harry earns may not be forcibly seized by anyone else. Then that same politician will say a right to one’s money also means that, if Jack has no cash, then the government is right to forcibly seize some of Harry’s and give it to Jack. That second kind of “right to money” negates the first.
In truth, individual rights are neither subjective social inventions nor faith-based,
a-priori entities. Instead, the objective existence of rights can be proven through reason, and such proof is what the book you are now reading shall deliver.
In Part One, I provide the secular, biological basis for the establishment of individual rights. Part Two describes the inescapable nature of government while Part Three explains how a rights-based government should work.
Part Four rebuts some of the likeliest objections to such a system. Finally, Part Five shows how a utilitarian economics concept known as the “Coase Theorem” builds a bridge between the ethical and utilitarian cases for free enterprise.
* Abstract Ethics Rooted in Concrete BiologyI wrote this book as a consequence of my having a difficult time explaining to politicians and activists how their legislation has trampled upon what I consider “natural rights.”
Such politicians and activists frequently presume that anyone’s belief in natural rights must be based solely on reasonless dogma. When I tell people that stealing is unethical, for instance, they look at me as if I just made that up.
Of course, the folks I talk to assume as much because they buy into a theory propagated by Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776).
Hume may not be as famous as Elvis Presley (1935–1977), but he substantially influenced many of the West’s most powerful leaders when they learned his ideas in college. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) himself identified Hume as one of his favorite philosophers.[02] Many Westerners repeat Hume’s ideas without any awareness of how many of their favorite clichés originated with him.
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) -- a novelist and philosopher I love -- saw the scope of Hume’s reach. She asked the 1973 graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, “Have you ever thought or said the following? ‘Don’t be so sure -- nobody can be certain of anything.’”[03]
“You got that notion,” she told her audience, “from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him.”[04]
The confusion of both David Hume and the West comes from a misunderstanding of epistemology -- the philosophic study over what is the best means of determining what is real and true, such as whether one can ascertain facts more easily through reason and empirical verification or through supernatural revelation.[05]
Indeed, it was Hume who popularized the notion that no moral principles can ever be inductively derived from solid facts.[06]
This appears to be the mainstream view in America today.
Sadly, widespread acceptance of this bromide has done great harm to society. At root, the problem with Hume’s epistemology is its specious debunking of induction.
Induction is the reasoning process whereby one first observes concrete facts and then forms abstract conclusions about them. In contrast, one uses
deduction by starting with abstract principles already in mind and then applying them to discern the traits of various concretes.
Both methods of reasoning are valid as long as one keeps in mind that the first bit of knowledge a baby ever holds is inductive rather than deductive, as no human embryo, fetus, or newborn possesses innate knowledge about the universe.[07] A baby first learns about the external world through her senses.
Inductive reasoning happens very often. One can notice that (1) a rock thrown in the air will then fall toward the ground, (2) a ball tossed in the air will then fall toward the ground, and (3) a pen thrown in the air will fall toward the ground. From these concrete observations, one can then
inductively conclude the general principle that objects thrown up in the air will eventually be pulled toward the ground. It was through such inductive reasoning that Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) discovered gravity.
Yet Hume denies the veracity of that and every other inductive conclusion. So it is no surprise that, as a corollary, he dismisses all inductive conclusions made about morality.
Hume’s presumption extends Plato’s (427–347 B.C.) proposition that the realm of consciousness (that of mind, feelings, theories, principles, abstractions, ideals, concepts, dreams, spirituality, generalizations, and ethics) is in no way relates to the realm of matter (of facts, physical reality, practice, feasibility, concretes, biological necessity, percepts, tangibility, logistics, specific details, and the flesh).[08]
Consequently, many people now cling to the tenet that no conclusion about what “ought” to be done -- particularly as far as ethics is concerned -- can ever be correctly induced from that which “is.”
But one can detect the defect in Hume’s postulate when one notices that there can be no “ought” without there
first being an “is.” In any situation calling for you to make a choice, ethics-related or otherwise, you must first look at what is -- that is, the facts framing the situation.
If you feel the urge to slug a man because his laugh annoyingly resembles a hyena’s, your decision over what you
ought to do has much to do with the concrete reality. Do the known circumstances, such as the fact that this silly person really has yet to show an actual physical danger to you, tell you that the situation ethically calls for you to slam your knuckles against his jaw?
If someone tries to murder you, the question of whether you should violently retaliate has a lot to do with the facts. It is a fact, for example, that this would-be murderer attempts to “rub you out” when you have not initiated any amount of comparable violence toward
him.
To make a well-considered moral choice in a complex situation always calls for awareness of the material conditions surrounding the decision—in other words, what “are.”
To this, political-science scholar Rudolph J. Rummel (b. 1932) counters that, even if the facts of a matter point in the direction of what you ought to do, your “ought” is presupposed by yet another “ought.” He claims this goes on
ad infinitum.
“No
ought statement can be validly derived from ‘is’ premises alone,” he surmises.[09]
In other words, if you decide that you
ought not to steal from Allan because you know for a fact that he has done nothing harmful to you or anyone else, you assess the facts but your “ought” is still contingent upon other
ought’s, such as “you
ought not to hurt people who have done nothing to hurt you or any other individual.”
Thankfully, Ayn Rand sees through the popular misconception Dr. Rummel promulgates in this arena of debate. She observes that every “ought” can eventually be traced back to one primary ethical prescription induced entirely from tangible reality -- life is the standard of objective value.
First, Rand begins with the premise that the universe exists and that every conclusion one makes about everything in it -- including moral principles -- must be inductively derived from a set of self-evident axioms. An axiom is a principle that proves itself to be true through the evidence of your senses.
For example, if one has vision, then it is an axiom that objects other than one’s eyes exist. If nothing existed besides one’s eyes, then there would be no objects in sight and one could not even be aware of having the ability to see.
All axiomatic knowledge is inductive.
The first and most important axiom is that your recognition of existence inexorably proves to you the existence of both the universe and your own consciousness. As Rand puts it,
If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something.[10]
Rand observes that you are alive and that it is in the natural order of organisms to perpetuate their own lives through such actions as eating and avoiding physical threats.
Further, she reasons that every value judgment you make stems from the fact that you are alive, since you would not be able to make any value judgments if you were never born.
The most basic “ought” decision you make is whether you want to live or die. Most people choose the former. Subsequent to that, every evaluation you make about something is based upon the extent to which you believe it sustains or enhances some organism’s life.
As one serves this primary “ought” in perpetuating one’s own life, one often finds him- or herself valuing other people, such as family members. Even if one chooses to die so that other people may benefit, the life of some living entity remains the primary value regarded as worth preserving.
Defying the philosophic
beau monde, Miss Rand demonstrates these truths when she notes that
Homo sapiens -- which is distinguished from all other species by its volitional consciousness -- “has no automatic course of behavior.” Every person “needs a code of values to guide his [or her] actions.”[11]
A value “is that which one acts to gain and keep” and that any value “presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what?” and “presupposes a standard, a purpose, and the necessity in the action in the face of an alternative.” Where “there are no alternatives, no values are possible.”[12]
For “living organisms there is only one fundamental alternative,” which is that of life or death. If an organism fails in its “self-sustaining and self-generated action,” then “it dies.” It should now be clear why “only the concept of ‘Life’...makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”[13]
Humans beings have a “particular distinction from all other living species” in that they “act in the face of alternatives by means of
volitional choice” (emphasis Rand’s), as humans possess “no automatic code of survival.” A person "has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires,” as not even a “desire to live” will give him “the knowledge required for living.”[14]
Such knowledge can only be obtained “by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.”[15]
For a human being to exercise his rational faculty, he must act on choice; “he has to hold his life as a value -- by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues -- by choice.”[16]
Such a “code of values accepted by choice,” she explains, “is a code of morality,” and a code that holds “
Man’s Life” (emphasis Rand’s) as “its standard of value” is “a morality of reason, a morality proper to man.”[17]
In such an ethical system, “that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good, all that which destroys it is evil.”[18] And if one chooses to continue living, then to practice morality is to live by a code that sustains one’s life in the long term. As we shall see later, an individual best preserves his own safety when living in a society in which he and everyone else agree not to ever initiate violence against anyone else.
* Answering ObjectionsUnfortunately, the prominent Harvard-employed libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002) unfairly denigrates Rand’s teachings.
Nozick’s philosophizing starts from the wrong side. He begins, not with facts from which he can induce empirical principles, but with a set of assumptions he arbitrarily cherry-picked. He then applies these assumptions to the facts of reality in order to make conclusions about the facts.
Following in the metaphysical and epistemological footsteps of Plato and Germany’s Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)[19], Nozick begins his political theorizing by assuming Kant to be correct that there are inborn moral tenets making it wrong for you to value someone else on account of the benefit he confers upon you. According to Nozick and Kant, you should only value this person as an innately great thing-in-itself.
Nozick rebukes Rand’s ethics because she holds that ethical precepts must be derived inductively from the facts, rather than arbitrarily deduced from an innate moral sense that one imagines oneself to have. Nozick uses no inductive argument to explain why Rand is wrong; he merely assumes from the outset that moral reasoning has to start with deduction instead of induction. His argument is as follows:
(1)
Implicit premise at beginning: You can never logically induce moral principles from the facts of reality.
(2)
Statement of fact: Rand says you can logically induce moral principles from the facts of reality.
(3)
Conclusion: Rand is wrong, because we already know that you can never logically induce moral principles from the facts of reality.
The exact words of his circular argument are written in a more pedantic style:
Consider the following argument [which Nozick expects the reader to believe is Rand’s argument]:
(1) Having values is itself a value
(2) A necessary condition for a value is a value
(3) Life is a necessary condition for having values
(4) Life itself is a value.
But is (2) true?[20]
Nozick subsequently deduces that Rand never refuted Hume’s “is-ought” verbiage because, if the fact that one’s valuation of something as desirable or undesirable is predicated upon the fact that one is alive, then that still does not explain why one should value the very state of “being alive.”
He laments that Rand’s philosophy “begs the question against
death’s being a value,” then asks “on what basis, which we have been given, do we
know that the greatest harm isn’t the extension of life’s experiences?” (emphasis his).[21]
Nozick does not see why the furtherance of life must be chosen as a fundamental goal, as opposed to “death” or “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” or any other arbitrarily chosen “possible goals...”[22]
Philosopher Douglas Rasmussen once criticized Nozick’s slam on Rand,[23] but now[24] states that Nozick is right to say that, if it is true that all moral values are predicated upon one’s choice to further one’s own life (which entails
valuing one’s own life), then it cannot be equally true that one commits some kind of moral treason by
not valuing or furthering one’s own life.
Indeed, if one only needs to accept ethical rules for the purpose of perpetuating one’s own life, then does this not mean that someone can escape from any binding moral constraints altogether if he decides not to value his life?
However, as Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl observed in 1978,[25] Nozick whacks at a straw man by saying that Rand claimed that (1) holding “values is itself a value” and that (2) a “necessary condition for a value is itself a value.” Nozick provides no credible evidence that Rand says as much.
For example, Rand argues that existence
existing is, in Nozick’s words, a “necessary condition for a value”; one could not value anything if nothing existed. Yet Rand does not then conclude that the existence of the universe is itself a value; she says it is
metaphysically given.[26]
“Metaphysically given” is a term Rand uses to denote the physical facts of reality that simply “are” -- facts that have no moral status
per se, but have an effect on human life and thus direct our moral choices.[27]
“Metaphysics” is the field of philosophy in which a man must determine what is real, while the given of “metaphysically given” is what man has ascertained through reason to be real.[28] The fact that existence
exists is the first “metaphysical given.”
Ayn Rand does not say that a necessary condition for having a value is itself a value. She says the universe’s existence is an important
condition for values; she
does not say the universe’s existence therefore becomes a value itself. The universe’s existence is just a fact that we have to work with.[29]
The only part Nozick gets right is that Rand holds -- this is in Nozick’s words, not hers -- “Life is a necessary condition for having values.” There can be no values without a valu
er -- that is, somebody who values other existents on account of the meaning they bring to his own days, or the extent to which they contribute to the quality of his own experiences.
Nozick’s criticisms of Rand flunk in myriad other respects.
First, a philosopher contradicts himself if he first explicitly denies that life is a necessary value and
then goes on living. The very fact that such a philosopher eschews suicide demonstrates that, on at least some visceral level, life remains an implicit value to him. For this man to refrain from extinguishing his own inner flame means that he chooses, at least by default, to live.
Secondly, it is true that if one does not choose to value his life from the outset, then an ethical code becomes somewhat unnecessary for his self-perpetuation. If a man is truly determined to commit suicide by his own hands, he will do so. That some people decide to kill themselves and then change their minds just before executing the action only goes to further demonstrate the bias that people have against their own immediate mortality.
If morality is relevant to only those who choose to continue living, then what can be said of some persons who decide to kill other people before immediately “offing” themselves? What of such nihilists who go on shooting rampages and then snuff themselves out soon afterward, like the duo of Columbine High School students who slaughtered their classmates in 1999, or of Middle-Eastern terrorists who unleash suicide-bombings? Are these people not the parties in greatest need of moral scolding?
Actually, after having plotted this course for an extended period, such individuals have more than likely closed themselves off from moral reasoning. To try to persuade a suicide-bomber of the wrongness of his own misdeed, just minutes before carrying it out, is like admonishing a highwayman for sticking you up; the malefactor will likely laugh at you for trying moral appeals on him.
When someone decides to kill you or your loved ones and then commit suicide, the best you can do is to protect yourself and your loved ones from this harm. The would-be suicide-murderer has already given up on self-preservation-based ethics, but you
have not, so he should not be surprised when he finds
you taking the actions necessary to foil his attempts to harm those you hold dear.
Ultimately, it
is true that accepting a moral code is only applicable for those who their own lives or the lives of others.[30] Those who would do your friends or family harm are to be fought to the bitter end, not because of innate Kantian moral rules that Nozick imagines to exist, but because those who would harm your loved ones pose a tremendous threat to your values.
Nor should Nozick be let off easy in his misbegotten assertion that Hume is right to dismiss the veracity of induction. One of the main reasons why Western philosophers from Kant onward have proclaimed that the first bit of information one gains is innate, and that all further knowledge precedes from deduction, is that they give Hume’s epistemological musings too much credit.
The reason why Hume said in the first place that one cannot derive “ought” from “is” alone is that he dismissed all inductive conclusions as invalid. This resulted from Hume having drawn an ill-conceived conclusion about the reliability of inductive reasoning.
Hume deems inductive reasoning wholly unreliable because inductive conclusions are often found to be the result of faulty
post-hoc reasoning. If I sneeze and the phone rings exactly one minute later, for example, I can erroneously infer that my sneezing
caused the phone to ring exactly one minute later.
Hume therefore concludes that, because so many incorrect
post-hoc conclusions are made inductively,
all induction must be categorically obsolete. And so Hume proposes, as an alternative epistemology, Universal Skepticism, which says you can be certain that you can be certain of nothing.
I find it interesting that Universal Skeptics do not appear even remotely skeptical of Skepticism.
Hume’s attack on induction destroys itself on two levels. First, one can only rationally determine an inductive conclusion to be inaccurate by . . .
using even more induction. After I wrongly conclude that my sneezing caused the telephone to ring exactly one minute later, for instance, I eventually notice other occasions on which my sneezing has no discernible effect on the telephone’s ringer a minute afterward.
Later I observe that the telephone always rings when someone on the other line intends to talk to me, and that somebody calling me on his own phone has much more to do with causing my phone to ring than my sneezes do.
From this, I induce that my prior inductive conclusion -- that the phone only rings exactly one minute after I sneeze -- is erroneous, and that sometimes one can make mistakes when using induction.
Without induction, one cannot verify that inductive reasoning can sometimes be fallible. Thus, Hume himself
uses induction to argue that induction is
useless.
Secondly, while trumpeting Universal Skepticism and claiming there are no absolutes, Hume takes for granted that there is some
universal absolute rule that induction necessarily has to be invalid if it does not
always give a thinker the correct answer.
In the end, Hume expects his readers to believe in the veracity of his abstract conclusion that abstract conclusions have no veracity, because inductive reasoning provided him with the knowledge that inductive reasoning can provide no knowledge.
In the debate over epistemology and ethics, Hume and Nozick and Kant and Rummel all lose.
Ayn Rand wins.
Now that we have established that ethical choices derive from the decision to continue the life of oneself or some other person or persons, what else can we conclude about which actions are necessary for survival?
* From Biology Come the Standards of Human RelationsFirst, to sustain her life, a woman must utilize the resources that physical reality makes available to her. She needs to eat what has been created by metaphysically-given Nature -- whether this food comes from a plant, animal, or mineral. As someone digests a morsel, she cannot share it with anyone.
“We can divide a meal among many men,” Rand states. “We cannot digest it in a collective stomach.”[31]
Nourishment in the process of digestion within one’s internal system is a basic,
implicit form of claiming individual ownership over something (though, as we shall see later, not
the most basic). Unless you regurgitate it, the supper in your belly is exclusively yours for a time period until, ahem, Nature Calls and makes one’s body relinquish this property.
Suffice to say that, if one did not, on a concrete, physical level, treat one’s digesting food as one’s private belonging, then one could not avoid perishing for more than a year.
The fueling of human life thus necessitates the
de-facto practice of recognizing personal property rights. Private property is a natural right in the sense that natural law requires that one take possession of one’s own morsels (for as long it is needed to satiate the body’s inner workings) to postpone one’s demise.
A college classmate of Sir Isaac Newton’s -- the physician and philosopher John Locke (1632–1694) -- understood this principle clearly. In his
Second Treatise on Government, he notes that the “condition of human life, which requires labour and materials to work on, necessarily introduces private possessions.”[32]
Even though they at least implicitly tolerated a person’s exclusive ownership over the meat and vegetables traveling down her esophagus, it is true that most early human societies did not formally codify private property rights.
And the lack of a formal institutionalization and enforcement of such rights led to much oppression, economic inefficiency, and tribal warfare for most of mankind’s two-million-year history.
Civilizations gradually learned over the centuries that they would benefit from laws that safeguarded private property rights. It was vital that government try to stop barbarians from breaking people’s limbs. They also had to combat the thieves who would strip their fellowmen of the material possessions needed in the struggle for existence.
And so Locke explicitly enumerated the natural individual rights from whence all other valid rights are logically derived. They are the “life, liberty, and estate”[33](with the last item referring to private possessions) that one has freely acquired without exercising
spoliation.
Dictionary.Com defines the four-syllable word
spoliation as the “act of despoiling or plundering,”[34] holding it as a synonym for the triple-syllable
spoilation, which is “the act of stripping and taking by force.”[35]
Both terms refer to the practice of
initiating -- that is,
starting -- physical force or the threat thereof against someone’s person or private belongings by means of nonconsensual physical battery, murder, rape, theft, poisoning, property damage, or contractual breach (a version of which is fraud). Unintentional violence, such as accidentally hurting someone or her property in a traffic accident, also counts as spoliation that the legal system must penalize.[36]
In discussions over private property and the form of spoliation known as theft, the term “rightful property” often comes up. “Rightful property” is a redundancy.
If Mickey rightfully owns a car, and Donald steals Mickey’s car, with Mickey never getting it back, that does not then make the car “Donald’s property.” The automobile remains
Mickey’s rightful property. Its only relation to Donald is that it is Donald’s
loot or
spoils. That is quite appropriate, semantics-wise, as “spoils” is the word from which spoilation and spoliation originated.[37]
Now we have the idea that there should be laws to punish the nonconsensual instigation of physical force against the life or material belongings of someone who has not started such force against anyone else’s person or belongings.
Though Locke invokes God’s name too frequently in his political writings, one need not believe in any supernatural entities to see that he is right that a government of individual rights -- free of spoliation -- is one best suited to maintaining an ethical, prosperous community.
What empirically vindicates Locke is not scripture, but natural law.
The “natural” in “natural law” refers to that which is concordant with the laws of physical reality[38] -- in other words, what logically follows from demonstrable scientific knowledge, such as the law of gravity.
And observations of the properties of our
metaphysically-given reality (what “
is”) give us strong indicators of what is, ethically, the most viable organization of society (how people ought to treat one another).
* The Rule of PeaceIf life is the standard of value, then a political system barring the instigation of physical force stands as the most natural -- in other words, logical -- type of social order to function in.
Under such a system, I can serve the interests of myself and anyone else I choose, safe from any lowlife attempting to deploy violence me. The sole condition of living under this security is that I refrain from subjecting anyone else to such spoliation.[39]
Inasmuch as a government shields its citizens from spoliation -- and opts not to commit its own brand of spoliation -- internal peace ensues. We find the “domestic tranquility” the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble alludes to.
Throughout the rest of my treatise, the following terms shall be employed interchangeably to denote the aforementioned political system: “Lockeanism” (named for John Locke), “
laissez faire,” “liberty,” “rights,” “natural rights,” “individual rights,” “freedom,” “liberalization,” “republicanism,” “capitalism,” “the market,” “free enterprise,” “private enterprise,” “privatization,” and “the night watchman state.”
Whatever name one calls it, one need not wish goodwill upon everyone else to see the rationality of this social arrangement. Even if one only cares about serving
one’s own long-term self-interest in terms of survival and wealth, one can see the advantages in having a statecraft that defends him from spoliation and only asks of him that he abstain from plundering others.
Despite what some “Social Contract” theorists assert, such political infrastructure does not entail giving up any amount of freedom.
The theory of the “Social Contract"[40] states that humans originally eked by under hazardous lawlessness until they all got together one day and made an oral pact in which everyone agreed to establish a government. This government would keep the peace by becoming the only party authorized by everyone in society to exercise violence against civilians.
English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), a pioneer of the “Social Contract” theory -- if not its founder -- states[41] that, when a man lives under a government that protects everyone from spoliation, every individual “renounceth”[42] some of his liberty as he “procures himself security”[43] to be provided by the State.
Contrary to Hobbes, a republic actually maximizes freedom for each person to the extent that it unleashes force against spoliators. It brings about a degree of freedom greater than any that could be experienced in a world of anarchic chaos.
“Where there is no law, there is no freedom,” Locke explains. He imparts that liberty cannot include a right to harm others, “for who could be free” when someone else can violently “domineer over him?...”[44]
The one true political freedom is life in a state wherein spoliation is absent or at least properly stopped or punished. “Social Contract” theorists thus contradict themselves when they say that living under a government limits your own freedom in exchange for “more security” if you agree that it should restrict everyone’s “freedom” to beat up other people and abscond with the fruits of their labor.
Given that a man’s freedom can only be denied to him if he is victimized through spoliation, true freedom would be impossible if everyone were “free” to spoliate -- and thus deny freedom to -- others. That would simply lead to what Hobbes calls a “war of all against all,” thereby encouraging the spoliation that happens to be totalitarianism’s most fundamentally oppressive characteristic.
No logical conflict exists between liberty and security. One has political
liberty insofar as one retains
security against the spoliation of her body or other assets. As Locke put it, to have a state of freedom means one is “free from restraint and violence from others[,] which cannot be where there is not law.”[46]
From this knowledge, we induce a contextually absolute rule of ethics -- that, since life is the standard of values, it is wrong to start nonconsensual violence or the threat thereof against the life or private property of one who has not started any such spoliation on anyone else.
In an essay critiquing the libertarian movement, Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute refers to this primary anti-spoliation imperative as “the noninitiation-of-force principle,”[47]which makes for a very long jumble of syllables. Some individuals sympathetic to Ayn Rand’s philosophy shorten the “non-initiation of force” principle into “NIOF."[48] With that abbreviation, the idea remains incredibly esoteric.
Libertarians themselves frequently call it “the non-aggression principle.” That still trips up the tongue when enunciated.
I propose that it simply be christened “The Rule of Peace.”
The Rule of Peace’s ethical veracity does not rest upon any kind of deliberately contrived “Social Contract.” The worn-out platitude that all society sprung from the formation of a great “first contract that everyone agreed to follow” reeks of so much falsehood.
In reality, apes have lived among one another in groups throughout natural history, and biological evidence suggests that humanity’s primate ancestors inhabited “proto-clans”
before humans evolved the faculty of reason necessary to making the volitional agreements known as contracts.
The social groups of proto-human anthropoids each had status hierarchies dominated by an “alpha male” that served as an institutional precursor to our modern heads of state -- chieftains, kings, maharajahs, emperors, prime ministers, and U.S. Presidents.[49]
In the case of primates, the alpha male usually gains his position in the hierarchy, not because other members of his clan delegated the power to him, but because he beat up any other apes (of either gender) vying for dominance.
Clans with patriarchs are not truly “stateless societies,” for that is an oxymoron. Any primitive society with a leader whose rules are enforced by the threat of violence has a State.
My book defines “State” and “government” as a party of one or more persons that has attained a near monopoly on the use of violence within the defined borders of one or more geographic regions -- regions not necessarily connected by land -- on account of the fact that the majority of the members of the community governed refrain from fighting back against it.
In sum, society and government are not the consequence of a contract. Instead, contracts arose as a result of humans
already having societies and governments.
Since it has always been the socio-biological nature of humans to live in a tribe led by a chief executive, Locke erred when he used the phrase “state of nature”[50] to denote anarchy.
It turns out that life under government is the original, natural,
default position of mankind from the earliest days, while anarchy has always been the aberration.
Likewise, it is “big government”
tyranny that primitive societies live under. The more human society advances, the more
laissez faire and liberalized it becomes.
Unfortunately, in his push for a “Social Contract” theory, Locke unfairly dismissed nonbelievers who pointed out to him that there “never were any men” living in anarchy.[51]
As was typical of many cultured European men of his time, he assessed tribal societies to be anarchistic, just because he assumed that a chieftain’s rule-setting had to resemble a European administration in order for his reign to be fairly called a “government.”[52]
Locke additionally replied to his critics -- unconvincingly -- that
every person exists under anarchy until choosing to consent to living under government (even though government will really rule over someone whether he assents to its laws or not). Locke also retorted that he considered countries torn by civil war to be in anarchy.[53]
However, a civil war involves, not any kind of long-term anarchy, but the fracturing of a government into two or more quasi-governmental factions that fight one another until the contested domain can be reunited under the full control of the victorious clique.
If a “night watchman state” based on individual rights were the result of some compact, one would conclude that it is a planned contrivance that emerged despite or in defiance of Nature.[54]
On the contrary, these Lockean individual rights are natural since, so long as rational preservation of your life remains your standard of value, such rights establish the most practicable social system for anyone.
Locke provided a completely verifiable definition of individual rights, but he was mistaken in ascribing their source to a Social Contract. Instead, the legitimacy of his “night watchman state” was borne directly of the inner workings of human nature itself -- from the metaphysically-given socio-biological makeup that man has attained from the evolutionary process.
The Rule of Peace naturally applies to everyone in every station of a community. No institution -- not even the government -- can be properly exempted from it. It is the most ethical guiding maxim of any society in any region, regardless of its past traditions or customs.
Thus, it must be realized that any government -- even a democracy or constitutional republic -- has the physical capability of unethically violating the Rule of Peace through the practice of state-institutionalized spoliation.
All law enforcement, after all, is backed by violence in the long run, even if the original punishment for a certain crime is a trifling fine or injunction.
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ENDNOTES[01] “State Emblem,”
The New Hampshire Almanac, [http://www.nh.gov/nhinfo/emblem.html], accessed Sunday, July 30, 2006.
[02] Einstein quoted in
Short Bio of David Hume, [http://wn.elib.com/Bio/Hume.html], accessed Sunday, August 13, 2006.
[03] Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” an address given to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974, republished in Rand 1984, 4.
[04] Ibid.
[05]
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000) defines epistemology thusly: “The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity.” That was quoted by
“Epistemology,” Dictionary.Com, [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epistemology], accessed Sunday, August 13, 2006.
[06] Rachel Cohon,
“Hume’s Moral Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed Sunday, August 13, 2006.
[07] The genetic “information” held within a cell’s nucleus is not the exact same kind of information that a volitional consciousness processes when making deliberate decisions. The context is different.
[08] Chris Eliasmith, “Mind-Body Problem,”
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, last updated May 11, 2004, [http://artsci.wustl], accessed Sunday, August 13, 2006.
[09]
Rummel 1981, accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[10] Rand 1987, 942.
[11] Ibid., 939-940.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Very early on in his seminal work on political philosophy,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick cites Immanuel Kant’s theory of context-free, baseless, innate, disembodied categorical ethical prescriptions (Nozick 1974, 32) in arguing that some inherent rules of moral human behavior justifies the formation of a Social Contract to create a Lockean government.
In their essay “Nozick on the Randian Argument,” in
The Personalist, Spring 1978, (reprinted in Paul ed. 1981, 263) writers Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen notice also notice the implicitly Kantian premise behind Nozick’s assault on Rand’s ethics in his Personalist piece “On the Randian Argument”: "...Nozick seems to be in the Kantian camp by regarding moral activity as a mere obedience to [a-priori] moral law. His example comes down to a contemporary facsimile of Kant’s arguments for the separation of moral law from interest.”
[20] Nozick, “On the Randian Argument,”
The Personalist, Spring 1971, reprinted in Paul, ed. 1981, 209.
[21] Ibid., 210.
[22] Ibid., 211.
[23] Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, “Nozick on the Randian Argument,”
The Personalist, Spring 1978, reprinted in Paul ed. 1981, 232-269.
[24] Rasmussen, “Rand on Obligation and Value,” in Younkins ed. 2005, 173-85.
[25] Den Uyl and Rasmussen, op cit., 241.
[26] “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” originally published in two installments, first in
The Ayn Rand Letter vol. 2, (no. 12, March 12, 1973) and then in (no. 13, March 26, 1973), republished in Rand 1984, 25.
[27] Ibid., 27.
[28] Ibid., 25.
[29] Ibid., 27.
[30] This is not to say that someone who decides to commit suicide has given up on ethics under any circumstance. Leonard Peikoff (1993, 248-49) explains this very well: “Suicide is justified when a man’s life, owing to circumstances outside of a person’s control, is no longer possible; an example might be a person with a painful terminal illness, or a prisoner in a concentration camp who sees no chance of escape. ... Self-destruction in such contexts may amount to the tortured cry: ‘Man’s life means so much to me that I will not settle for anything less. I will not accept a living death as a substitute.’”
[31] Rand 1992, 679.
[32] John Locke, 1689,
Two Treaties of Government, see
The Second Treatise of Government,
Ch. 5, Sec. 35, from The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, Vol. 4, (London: Rivington, 1824, 12th edition), republished on the Online Library of Liberty, [http://tinyurl.com/amovw], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[33] Ibid., Ch. 7, Sec. 87, [http://tinyurl.com/9586r], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[34] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition, 2000, cit. by "Spoliation" at
Dictionary.Com, accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[35]
WordNet 2.0, Princeton University, 2003, cit. by
"Spoliation" at
Dictionary.Com, accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[36] Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), one of the few French Parliament Members in history to propagate Locke’s political philosophy, actually employed the term spoliation to describe the same manner of evildoing that I have herein described. He did so in his 1848 pamphlet The Law, though his English translators unfortunately changed it to the much less precise “plunder.”
For confirmation that Bastiat originally used the word
spoliation, see the translator’s footnote in the section “Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty” in Bastiat 1996, 22, online
at [http://tinyurl.com/z5qc3], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[37] Should there ever come a time when police are able to address the problem of returning Mickey’s rightful property from Donald’s estate to Mickey’s estate, of course, rationality may require that there be a certain statute of limitations. If Donald stole 250 acres of Mickey’s land in 1,000 B.C., and, in 2050 A.D., Donald’s descendants are still living on that real estate, it would be counterproductive for Mickey’s descendants to then claim that they are the land’s true owners. Such land claims are what lead to terrible civil wars in which neither party really wins.
[38] My book does not use the term
nature the same way that many politically-correct anti-capitalist environmentalists do. When I say “nature,” I am not referring to a state of wilderness absent of any human intervention.
[39] In The Wealth of Nations, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) summarizes the best form of government thusly: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” That is from Smith 1904,
Book IV, Ch. 9, Paragraph 51, [http://tinyurl.com/c4prk], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
Unfortunately, in this section, Adam Smith also erroneously stated that government taxation was necessary to finance public goods. That notion is refuted in the very essay you are reading.
[40] The concept of the Social Contract goes all the way back to the English versions of Thomas Hobbes’s <
De Cive and
Leviathan, both published in 1651. John Locke addresses in his
Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689. However, the term “Social Contract” itself did not come up in either of their works’. The phrase might have originated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–1778) aptly titled
The Social Contract, printed in 1762.
[41] Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, 1909 rpt., republished online in the
Library of Economics and Liberty, see
Ch. 18 at [http://tinyurl.com/ele4b], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[42] Hobbes,
De Cive (The Civilian) 1651a,
Ch. 2, Sec. 4, [http://www.constitution.org/th/decive02.htm], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Locke 1824. rpt.,
Ch. 6, Sec. 57, [http://tinyurl.com/chhjm], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[45] For this phrase, see Hobbes 1651a,
Ch. 1, Sec. 13, [http://www.constitution.org/th/decive01.htm], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[46] Ibid.,
Ch. 6, Sec. 57, [http://tinyurl.com/chhjm], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[47] Peter Schwartz used the term “noninitiation-of-force principle” in his essay, “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty,” which was originally serialized in the magazine he founded,
The Intellectual Activist vol. 5, in 1989. The term also appears in the republished version, Schwartz Undated, 10, 58, and in the condensed version anthologized in Peikoff ed. 1989, 332
[48] An example of the esoteric acronym “NIOF” being used is in
Rowlands 2006, [http://tinyurl.com/lskjb], accessed Sunday, August 13, 2006.
[49] I refer the reader to the studies of apes by primatologists like Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall. While these primatologists have very flawed philosophies and make simplistic assumptions about altruism, their observations of the behavior of apes are worthy of attention.
[50] Locke That phrase is used throughout Locke 1842,
Ch. 2, [http://tinyurl.com/aqaer], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[51] Locke 1842,
Ch. 2, Sec. 15, [http://tinyurl.com/aqaer], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[52] Ibid.,
Ch. 8, Sec. 102, [http://tinyurl.com/8efhy], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[53] Ibid.,
Ch. 2, Sec. 14, [http://tinyurl.com/aqaer], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
[54] You can see a more detailed, multi-installment refutation of the Social Contract theory by Stuart K. Hayashi, beginning with
“The Myth of the Social Contract, Pt. 1: ‘Social Contract’ Theory as Flawed from the Beginning,” dated Monday, April 11, 2005, at [http://tinyurl.com/fpbpk], accessed Saturday, February 25, 2006.
The above essay is Copyright (C) 2006 Stuart K. Hayashi and may not be reproduced by any means in any form without his expressed written permission.
