Chapter 2: Libertarianism
I. Economics
The same teacher that I had for that American History class, where I started this journey, also taught a course in economics. I thought that economics would be a good place to go to find some of the answers that I was looking for.
How could economics help me?
Well, one of the most important questions, at least during the cold-war era of the 1970s, was, “Which economic system is best; capitalism or communism?” Each system claimed an advantage in being able to create a civilization in which individuals could lead better lives. If I was going to make the world better than it would have otherwise been, should I be working to promote communism, or capitalism?
The next year, during my senior year of high school, I registered for Mr. Frank’s economics course.
II. A Case Study: Minimum Wage
I was immediately rewarded for my choice with a whole class devoted to evaluating different policies according to which ones actually made the world better than it would have otherwise been.
I particularly remember the discussion on minimum wage, and once again seeing how easy it is for a person who advocates a particular policy for all the right reasons to bring harm to many of the people they want to help.
One of the first things that Mr. Frank taught us was how to read a simple chart illustrating “the law of supply and demand”. Here was a tool that I would grow to love.
The chart said that, as the price of something increased, the quantity that people demanded of that commodity decreased. At the same time, the quantity that people would tend to provide would increase. The two lines met at the “market clearing price”, where people produced exactly as much as was consumed, meaning that there was no surplus, and no shortage.
Now, what happened when you raised the price of anything above this market price?
There are two effects. First, the quantity demanded of that particular good decreases. People are simply less willing to buy as much of it at the higher price. Second, the quantity supplied of that product increases. Because people are getting more per unit sold of the commodity, they have an incentive to sell more.
In this case, we are talking about the supply and demand for unskilled labor. So, we are talking about decreasing the demand (making fewer jobs available), and increasing the supply (more people seeking to work more hours).
A. The Demand Side of Minimum Wage
On the demand side, the number of available jobs goes down. In other words, the increase in minimum wage decreases the opportunities for employment for the very people that those arguing for a higher minimum wage say they want to help.
People who do not want to pay a higher minimum wage have a number of options available for controlling cost.
First, low-paying jobs are typically the types of jobs that can be most easily automated. As the minimum wage goes up, owners fire workers and hire machines. Wal-Mart and Albertsons remove checkout stands run by cashiers and baggers, and put in scanners and self-bagging stations where one person can do the work of four.
Second, some marginal businesses simply close down. We can pretty much guarantee that, somewhere out there, there is a marginal business whose owner is just barely doing well enough to stay in business. When the minimum wage goes up, that owner has less of a reason to stay in business. He simply cannot afford to pay the that higher wage. So, those businesses close their doors, and those workers get thrown into the unemployment lines.
Third, one way that a business can cover the higher wage costs is by raising their own prices. However, their own higher prices implies less demand for their goods and services. Less demand means that they can now lay off some of their workers, or cut their hours.
On this third item, another relevant question to ask is, “Who is paying those higher prices?” Well, the people who keep their jobs, and get the higher wage, discover that they now have to pay a higher price for what they buy. Sure, their paycheck is larger, but their bills are higher as well. As for those in the first two categories who have lost their jobs; they find themselves paying higher prices as well.
B. The Supply Side of Minimum Wage
On the supply side, the graph suggests that as prices rise, people will tend to offer more of a commodity. How do people offer more labor?
One way in which the supply of labor can go up is for people to enter the job market who would have otherwise done other things. Family members who had been staying at home to take care of children or elderly relatives have more of an incentive to enter the workplace. These voluntarily unemployed people start looking for work, competing with others for the same job, sometimes forcing others into involuntary unemployment.
A second group of people who can be expected, at least to some degree, to give up other options are high-school and college-age individuals. As a result of the higher perspective wage rate, the relative advantage of having an education diminishes. Each year, we know that there are some who think it is better to get a job rather than continue to get an education. An increase in the minimum wage means that the number can be expected to go up at least by a little bit.
A third way in which people can seek to offer more labor is to seek two jobs where they otherwise would have had only one job. This would include individuals who have decent primary jobs picking up a part time second job so that they could afford a few more luxuries.
The drive to raise the minimum wage is typically inspired by a sincere desire to help those who are the primary wage earners in a family to get more money. As a result, those primary wage earners find themselves competing for fewer jobs against more qualified applicants who otherwise would have elected to stay out of the job market.
C. Lessons Learned
Mr. Frank made a convincing case that those who fought to increase the minimum wage were just the type of people that I wanted to avoid being. They were people who spent their day working toward a goal that they thought was worthwhile, who went to bed each night with a sense of pride that they had done well, who had actually made the world worse than it would have otherwise been.
How do we help these primary wage earners who are earning just a few dollars an hour? The graph gives us a way to answer that question as well. I will get to that at the end of the chapter. My reason for bringing up this example is not to discuss the merits of minimum wage, but to examine the next step in my quest to figure out how to make the world better than it would have otherwise been.
In this economics class, I found excellent examples of people applying reason to wide range of issues, and coming up with answers to the question of how to make the world better than it would have otherwise been. Furthermore, they were answers that did not require a deity. The laws of economics were sound or unsound regardless of the religious views of the reader. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists alike could read the same conclusions off of a graph showing supply and demand.
There was still the possibility of error — there always will be. However, we could at least identify some of those errors and, through our joint efforts and the application of reason, identify the route that seemed the safest and best.
Think about driving a car. You can drive a car either by shutting your eyes and hoping to intuit the turns and obstacles along the way. Or you can drive with your eyes open. Driving with your eyes open does not guarantee that you will not crash into something. However, your chances of running into something are a lot less than it is for the person who closes his eyes and depends on faith. What I learned in Mr. Frank’s economics class did not guarantee freedom from error, but it at least allowed a student to examine social policy with his eyes open.
Though Mr. Frank made his opinions known, he had a unique way of teaching an economics class. He had a bookcase full of books, and our job as students was to pick books, read them, and file reports on what we read, for which he would “pay” us in class money. That money would then be used to ‘purchase’ grades at auction at the end of the semester.
That bookshelf contained works on views other than those that Mr. Franks defended, and I had a habit of preferring the writings of those who disagreed with my favorite view to the writings of those who agreed with me. So, I picked the books on socialism and other economic systems and wrote my reports on those.
As a side note, in my high school, mid-term grades did not go on the final transcript. When Mr. Frank held his auction for midterm grades, I purchased a very low mid-term grade (a ‘C’). I then loaned out the rest of my money to students wanting to purchase a higher grade. They promised to pay me back before the end of the semester. When the end of the semester came around, I had enough money from the interest on my loans to buy myself an A. I like to think that I earned my ‘A’ by putting what I learned in the class into practice.
III. Problems with Libertarianism
I thought that libertarian capitalism held promise for making the world better than it would have otherwise been, but I had some problems with it from the beginning. Eventually, those problems would become insurmountable, and I would leave it behind.
A. Libertarian Crack No. 1: The Special Value of Life (Survival)
After I graduated from high school, I went to college at Montana State University. MSU was a conservative college, with a conservative economics department that built on the lessons that Mr. Frank had taught me in high school. At college, I joined the Libertarian Party, and made a few libertarian friends. Several of them were followers of Ayn Rand. I, too, had delved into some of her writings. Yet, some of her arguments puzzled me.
For example, one of the foundational elements of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, at least as she was being interpreted by my friends, was that life had intrinsic value.
The argument started off by noting that, no matter what one wanted, one needed life in order to pursue it. A corpse could not get a hamburger, or go fishing with his son, or anything. All value depended on life. Therefore, life had intrinsic value.
My Randian friends would go from here to derive a right to life, and from here a right to liberty (because it made no sense to say that a person had a right to life but had to spend that life as a slave to others). Following John Locke, they argued further for a right to property, because once a person mixed his labor — his life — with some object that nobody else had a prior claim to, then his right to his own life transferred to that object, giving him as much of a right to that object as he had to the life that he put into it.
Yet, one part of this argument seemed clearly false to me; that, no matter what one wants, one has to be alive to get it.
One clear example of when this is false is for the person who has an aversion to pain, but whose life is filled to the brim with the most extreme agony. A desire for freedom from pain drives most of us to act — to refrain from moving in ways that cause pain or to get a pain reliever. This is another way of saying that avoiding pain is a reason for action; a goal that has a particular influence on our decisions. The person who cannot avoid pain does not suddenly care nothing about the pain he is in. He still wants to be rid of it.
The statement that freedom from pain is something that is only available to a person who is alive is clearly false. One action one can take to successfully avoid agonizing pain is through death. In this case, death brings the person more of what he wants than life.
Another clear example of a desire that, under certain circumstances, gives an agent a reason to prefer death over life is, for example, the father who sacrifices his life to save his children. Similar to this is the case of the soldier facing torture who fears he may give vital information to the enemy. In both of these cases, the agent is better able to realize (make real) what he really cares about through death, rather than through life.
When I brought these objections up to one of my friends, he answered that the person seeking freedom from pain must still be alive in order to do something about getting rid of the pain. One has to be alive to give one’s life for one’s children or one’s friends.
It’s true that the father seeking to save his children must still be alive in order to give his life for them. In addition, the soldier who wishes to keep vital information from the enemy must be alive in order to kill himself to prevent the enemy from getting that information. However, this argument makes no sense. It is like saying that garbage has value because, if you want to throw the garbage away, there must first be garbage there to throw away. It is like saying that a job one hates and will quit has value because one cannot quit a hated job that one does not have.
The claim that life has value is only meaningful if it means that everything one wants can best be obtained through continuing to live. That is simply not true.
(a) Intrinsic vs. Instrumental Value
Ultimately, the problem goes deeper than this. Understanding the depth of the problem requires that we look at the distinction between intrinsic value and instrumental value in more detail.
The distinction, by the way, comes from Aristotle’s NICHOMACHEAN ETHICS, though I did not know of Aristotle’s writings on the subject at the time.
We start by noting that some things have value for the sake of something else. The hammer has value because it is useful in pounding nails to build a sawhorse. A sawhorse has value for holding the lumber that one is cutting to build a house. A house has value because it allows us to keep out the cold (among other things).
We can imagine playing a child’s game by asking “Why?” to every answer we are given. Why does the hammer have value? Why does the sawhorse have value? In each case, we can name something further in which that value is anchored. But, inevitably, we will get to an end. Why do we want to be warm? Well, we just do, that’s all.
Of course, we need to pay attention to the fact that different people are comfortable at different temperatures, it is still the case that the temperature that suits a person does not have value because of its usefulness. This is not ‘instrumental value’ any more.
This example of a value train can be represented as follows:
A(hammer) -> B(sawhorse) -> C(house) -> D(staying warm),
where the value of D provides the engine for the values of A, B, and C. That is to say, the value of everything on the left side of D on the value train is derivative, depending on the value of whatever sits on the far right side of the value train. The value of the item on the far right of the value chain is not derivative.
To say that something has instrumental value says that it exists on the left side of this chain. To say that something has intrinsic value is to say that it is the item at the right end of the chain — that it has value for its own sake.
(b) The Meaning of ‘Intrinsic Value’
I need to make a quick statement about terminology that is going to become important in later chapters. I have problems with using the term ‘intrinsic value’ for whatever engine drives any particular value train. ‘Intrinsic value’ is commonly taken to mean more than ‘being the engine for a value train.” It is often taken to mean, ‘being at the end of the value train in virtue of its intrinsic properties’. This is why it is called ‘intrinsic’ value.
I do not think ‘intrinsic value’ in this sense exists, so I am reluctant to use the word. For the time being, I will stick to traditional usage. However, eventually, I will argue against the existence of ‘intrinsic value’ in the sense of ‘value in virtue of its intrinsic properties’. Yet, I will not argue against the existence of various engines for pulling the various value trains.
The ancient Greeks made the same kind of mistake when they called the smallest pieces of an element an ‘atom’ — which literally meant ‘having no parts’. They rashly assumed that the smallest pieces of an element would not have any parts, and built ‘not having any parts’ into the meaning of the word. Ultimately, their assumption turned out to be a mistake. Now we know that atoms have parts.
I will argue in future chapters that value engines do not have ‘intrinsic’ value.
For now, I’ll just use ‘intrinsic value’ to mean ‘existing as the engine for some value train’ and leave off any assumptions as to why or how it is there.
(c) Having Both Intrinsic and Instrumental Value
I also want to make it clear that the same object can have both instrumental value and intrinsic value at the same time. For example, an individual may be interested in a piece of art both because of its aesthetic beauty (value as an end), and because owning it will help him impress the people he wants to impress (value as a means).
In fact, I cannot think of a value train where the engine is something that is always and entirely nothing but something valued as an end; something that is not at the same time useful for something else. Certainly, it would be more difficult for me to focus on writing this book if I was not in a room that was at a comfortable temperature. Yet, even if I was not writing this book, I would rather be comfortable than freezing. This level of comfort remains something that I value in part for its own sake, even if not exclusively for its own sake.
(d) Back to the Libertarian Argument
Now, let us look at the libertarian argument again. The libertarian argument states that because life is useful for whatever else one may desire (which, as I have already explained, is false), life has intrinsic value.
However, once we understand the difference between value as a means and value as an end, we see that the argument confuses the distinction. In effect, the argument for the special value of life (or survival) is:
We see that, whatever has value as an end in a person’s life, it is something that one must be alive in order to obtain. That is to say, whatever value engine a person may have (whatever plays the role of (D) in the above example), “I am alive” is always somewhere in the list of items to the left of it. Because being alive has a value-as-means in many (all?) value trains, reason dictates treating being alive as the ultimate value-as-an-end.
The conclusion does not, in fact, follow from the premises. Being a nearly universal ‘value-as-a-means’ does not imply being a value-as-an-end. Money is also something that has nearly universal value-as-a-means; yet, it is not inconsistent to hold that its value continues to reside in nothing more than its usefulness. It is not something to value for its own sake.
B. Libertarian Crack #2: Selfishness Abounds.
Many of my libertarian friends also insisted that everybody is always totally selfish. The claim, often asserted even by many who are not libertarians, is that no person ever does anything except that which was in their own self-interest. For any example anyone cares to throw out, they answer with a selfish interpretation. The person who gives to charity does so only so that others will think well of him. Those who give anonymously do so for the pleasure of giving. The soldier who throws himself on a grenade in order to save his buddies did so because he wanted his buddies to think favorably of him, or because he would not be able to live with the pain of their deaths.
Psychological egosim, which is what this view is called, is not a necessary part of libertarianism. However, the two are frequent traveling companions that are thought to mutually support each other.
Psychological egoism, however, cannot lend any support to libertarianism, because it is false.
If we put this view in terms of the value trains discussed in the previous section, it states that the engine for all value trains is the pleasure, happiness, well-being, or self-interest of the agent. There are different versions of psychological egoism for different possible engines. However, all of these theories share the trait that the engine is always intimately concerned with the agent.
(a) ‘Should not’ and ‘Can not’
One logical oddity with this way of thinking looked to the fact that my Randian friends also promoted what was called ‘the virtue of selfishness’. Being self-interested is, on this view, not only a psychological compulsion, but a duty — the cornerstone of ethical behavior.
How can selfishness be a virtue if no person could ever be anything but totally selfish? What sense does it make to give arguments saying that nobody should do anything other than A, if nobody can do anything but A?
(b) The source of pleasure and the meaning of ‘selfish’
We can start digging toward another problem with psychological egoism by asking about the sources of this pleasure for the person who gives to charity, for example. Why would the truly selfish person feel any pleasure at giving to charity? Why would he feel pain at the loss of his battlefield friends — other than, perhaps, the same loss that he would feel if his gun got destroyed or he misplaced his body armor or some other useful tool? Clearly, the loss of a useful tool does not justify the sacrifice of one’s own life to save it. A soldier does not jump on a grenade to prevent his body armor from being harmed. The value people put in their friends seems to be a totally different type from that which they place on mere tools.
The claim that everybody is selfish seems to require a play on words; inventing a whole new definition of the word ‘selfish’. When my friends said that people always do what they want, this seems true. The person who gives to charity does so because he wants to help others. The person who jumps on a grenade to save his friends does so because he wants his friends to go on living. But ‘selfishness’ means more than ‘doing what you want.’ It means ‘wanting only your own well being’. It means having no interest in helping others, and having no interest in the lives of one’s friends, except to have the same type of interest in keeping them handy as useful tools.
Some have argued that everybody acts for pleasure — and they only help others because of the jolt of pleasure that results. I will argue against this shortly, but let’s accept it for the time being. We still have reason to distinguish those who get their jolts of pleasure from helping other people, and those who get their jolts of pleasure from helping themselves. This is the distinction that the term ‘selfish’ was meant to describe. Those who want to call ‘selfish’ those who act for the sake of a jolt of pleasure, without considering how they get it, have pulled the term out of its normal context.
Ultimately, I am going to accept the claim that people always do what they want. However, they do not always want that which benefits them. This is the distinction the psychological egoist fails to recognize. They begin by claiming that people always want that which is in their own best interests. When confronted with counter-examples, they answer with explanations saying that the agents are doing what they want. They treat these two as identical. However, they are not.
It’s like asserting that all herbivores are cows, and when confronted with a counter-examples, such as a horse, answering that ‘by ‘cow’ I mean ‘anything that eats plants’.
(c) A Counter-Example to Egoism
Assume, as a parent, you have been captured by a mad scientist and imprisoned in a cell from which you cannot escape. The scientist offers you two options:
Option 1: Your child will live a healthy and happy life; the scientist will arrange for the child’s education and health care and protect the child from harm. However, you, the parent, will be made to be totally convinced that your child is suffering a most horrendous torture.
Option 2: Your child will be captured and brought into a dungeon from which there is no escape, and caused to suffer the most horrendous torture. However, you will be totally convinced that your child is living a healthy and happy life.
If psychological egoism were true, all parents would select Option 2. There is no benefit to the agent of selecting Option 1; all that is in it for the agent is the misery and agony of thinking of their child’s suffering.
Yet, most people would claim to prefer Option 1 over Option 2.
Of course, we are not going to actually kidnap people and force them to make this choice in order to test this hypothesis. But this question still provides a set of observations that the psychological egoist cannot explain. Psychological egoism not only has to say that rational people would select option 2, but also has to answer the question of why the average parent cannot or will not admit that when asked a hypothetical question such as this. Why do so many of them give what, to the psychological egoist, is the wrong answer as to what they will do, and show every sign that they do not think it is the wrong answer?
Psychological egoists have to invent a convoluted story to explain this mass self-deception. However, those who deny psychological egoism can easily answer why so many people say they would select Option 1. It is because they are more interested in the welfare of the child than in their own welfare.
In other words, psychological egoism is false.
C: Libertarian Crack #3: Rights over Happiness.
In listening to my libertarian friends, I noticed a curious pattern to their arguments. On the one hand, they never lost any opportunity to profess how much better off we would all be in a capitalist utopia. They routinely claimed that capitalism would yield a flourishing of inventiveness and productivity that no other system could possibly match, increasing the quantity of goods and services available and lowering the price to levels that could only be described as miraculous. Ultimately, we could each obtain anything we wanted at such a low price that the poorest among us would live as kings, with robots and machines as our loyal and obedient subjects.
However, in the next breath, they would condemn any who would defend free-market systems because of its usefulness. They were worried that any defense grounded on usefulness would imply that some other system should be used instead if it could be shown to be more useful than capitalism. So, they would assert that capitalism is ultimately be defended simply because it is the right thing to do. If, in the mean time, capitalism happened to produce great prosperity, then that is a fortunate side effect — the proverbial icing on the cake. However, it has nothing to do with what makes capitalism great.
In this way, they distinguished between utilitarian capitalists (those who defended capitalism based on its utility) and rights-based capitalists (those who defended capitalism on the basis of natural rights), and place libertarianism firmly in the latter camp.
I would ask them, “So, in fact, all of the benefits of capitalism that you claim are waiting for us actually do not provide any reason for preferring capitalism over any other system, right?”
Them: “Yes. The utilitarian capitalist does not really understand capitalism. Capitalism is based on a doctrine of natural rights derived by reason from the nature of man qua man — man as a rational animal. It is not based on what produces the best benefit to society. The moral foundation of capitalism has nothing to do with its benefits, those benefits are irrelevant.”
Me: “So, if it turned out that capitalism did not produce these great benefits — that, instead, it spread misery and suffering — it would still be the morally right economic system, because it is the only system consistent with these natural rights and duties.”
Them: “Well, yes. But that wouldn’t happen. Capitalism produces great benefits.”
Me: “But if it did not. If it lead to people living in sickness and squalor, we should still be capitalists.”
Them: “Capitalism does not do that. Capitalism produces more wealth and happiness than any other system probably could.”
Me: “Perhaps, my libertarian friend, but you said that those things were irrelevant. If they are irrelevant, then we can dismiss them as not worth bringing up. Tell me, if capitalism produced misery and squalor, would it still be worth defending?”
Among all of my libertarian friends, I could not find one who thought that capitalism would fail to produce these tremendous benefits, and yet should be defended anyway on the grounds that it was right.
This could be explained away if it was the case that no reasonable person could doubt the benefits of capitalism. However, society is filled with people who doubt its benefits. In fact, those who think that capitalism is a perfect system are very rare. Yet, I could not find one who both doubted the benefits of capitalism and endorsed capitalism as ‘the right thing to do’.
This observation — that everyone who defended capitalism as the right thing to do spoke well of its benefits, and all who rejected it doubted those benefits — suggested that “natural rights” was not the real reason people rejected or accepted capitalism. The real reason concerned their beliefs about its ability to produce these benefits. The rightness of capitalism, then, depends more on whether these perceived benefits are real, then with some form of ‘natural right discoverable by reason.
D: Libertarian Crack #4: The Crashed Airplane Counter-Example
Over time, I started to develop a hypothetical situation that created serious problems for the libertarian philosophy I heard my friends defend.
Assume that an airplane crash-lands in a desert, hundreds of miles from any sign of civilization, except for a the nearby house of a man who ships in water to maintain a nice lawn and garden, a swimming pool, several fountains, and a huge aquarium. The crash survivors go up to the man and ask, “May we have some water, please?”
He answers, “I will sell you water for $1,000,000 per cup.” He arrives at this figure by careful calculation; 25 passengers can pay this price for a total return of $25,000,000. There are 100 passengers can afford to pay $100,000, but that would bring a total return of only $10,000,000. He does not want to resort to a two-price system because the money he would lose to inefficiencies — people who could and would pay more but who get by paying less because he cannot prove their worth.
It is, after all, his water, and he has a right to sell it for whatever price he wants.
Those who do not get water will die.
The strict libertarian/objectivist would argue that the passengers taking some of this water — by force, if necessary — in order to survive is an act of aggression strictly prohibited under libertarian principles. They have no right to ‘redistribute the (water) wealth’ from this owner to the benefit of passengers too poor to afford whatever price the owner wants to charge.
It at least seems more reasonable to hold that the passengers who would otherwise die have every right to redistribute the (water) wealth to some extent. The principles of libertarian capitalism seemed to have its limits.
Ayn Rand did discuss a similar case, in which she argued that a person who is lost in the woods confronted by a deadly blizzard had a right to break into an abandoned cabin to survive, so long as he provided the owner with compensation. However, Rand’s example contains an important difference. The cabin in her example is abandoned. The desert home in my example is not.
Ayn Rand, to the best of my knowledge, did not discuss the ‘right thing to do’ if the cabin was not abandoned, yet the owner refused to provide shelter. Her doctrine suggests that the stranded hiker is obligated to freeze to death, rather than use force to gain access to the shelter of the cabin when its owners refuse. This seems a reductio-ad-absurdum of her objectivist ethics.
Of course, if we do say that he has a right to force the cabin owners to provide him with shelter, what does this say about the right to life-saving food and medicine?
E: Libertarian Crack #5: Deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’.
I want to give the argument that follows special attention for two reasons. First, it is very important in the history of moral philosophy. Second, it was the proverbial last straw when it came to my rejection of libertarian ethics.
I saw the first four cracks as philosophical puzzles. I felt that, some day some gifted libertarian philosopher would provide answers to these questions. This view, however, pointed to a crack in the very foundation of libertarianism — a crack in the logic on which libertarianism was being built.
I encountered this flaw as a result of my habit of asking for writings from people who disagreed with the theory I was defending. I said to one of my libertarian friends, “Obviously, there are a lot of people who think that this wonderful idea does not work. Is there anything you can point me to that explains why these people do not see the obvious truth in this system?”
He handed me a small, thin collection of articles, and pointed to an article that met my criterion. I wish I could remember the book, the article, or the author so that I could give proper credit. However, it happened a long time ago and these details have since escaped my memory. I do, however, remember the argument. In trying to find that article, I have discovered that there are a lot of people who have raised this objection, and I do not know the author of the specific article that I read.
(a) David Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’
The author of this article argued that Ayn Rand’s so-called ‘Objectivism’ contained a fallacy identified in the 1700s by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Interestingly, the core of Hume’s argument appeared largely as an afterthought in his book A TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE. Hume wrote this paragraph as if to say, “Oh, by the way, in addition to all of the important stuff I have already covered, I hereby refute all popular moral systems. Let me quickly mention the refutation, then I will get right back to the important stuff.”
The passage, a single (though long) paragraph, became one of the most important and influential pieces of philosophy ever written, so I present that passage here in its entirety.
I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, ‘is’, and ‘is not’, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ‘ought’, or an ‘ought not’. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.
(A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III: Of Morals, Part I: Of Virtue and Vice in General, Section I: Moral Distinctions Not Deriv’d From Reason)
(b) An Example: Divine Command
In reading Hume’s argument, I immediately thought of an application that made the distinction clear to me. I knew people who argued “God created man, therefore man has a duty to obey God.” The first statement, “God created man” is an ‘is’ statement — a descriptive statement. It happens to be false, but for the sake of understanding Hume’s point the truth or falsity of this premise is unimportant. Let’s assume that it’s true.
The second statement, ‘Man ought to obey God’, is not an ‘is’ statement at all. It is an ‘ought’ statement — a prescriptive statement.
The question that Hume asked was, “How, logically, do you get from a premise that is descriptive, to a conclusion that is prescriptive?” Whoever wants to make such a leap needs to say something to show that this is legitimate. All systems of morality that fail to provide such an explanation have as much merit as a person who argues, “Sharks have teeth; therefore, snails move very quickly.”
Again, it doesn’t matter whether the statement about shark’s teeth is true or false. It can be true, but it has nothing to do with the speed of a snail, so it makes no sense to say that the statement about snail’s speed follows from the statement about shark’s teeth.
It doesn’t matter whether the statement about God creating man is true or false. It can be true. Even if it is, it does not entail anything about how people ought to behave. It makes no sense to say that a statement about what people ought to do follows from the statement about how man came into existence.
For example, it is at least logically possible that man was created by a being that loved cruel and arbitrary power. He longed for a planet full of beings, living in misery, violence, and suffering. He invented plagues, earthquakes, and tsunamis for this purpose. When he created such a planet, he looked down and said that it was good. If the inference, “God created man, therefore man ought to obey God” were true, then even if God were a cruel and malicious psychopath, we would be obligated to obey him. We would be obligated to condemn ourselves to a life that fulfills this deity’s lust for our misery and suffering. Such an inference seems, at best, to be logically questionable.
(c) Is/Ought Applied Against Randian ‘Objectivism’
After reading this article, I went over to the library and found works by Rand, Murray Rothbard, and others who defended Randian Objectivism, and looked through the arguments. I read through the first chapter and, universally, I could find the point in the very first chapter, where they made this illegitimate leap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. Their writings started with claims of the form ‘man qua man is a rational animal’ — an ‘is’ or ‘descriptive’ statement. They then leap to pages full of claims about how man ‘ought’ to act — using ‘ought’ or ‘prescriptive’ statements, without explaining the leap from one to the other.
Even the claim, ‘man qua man is a rational animal’ has its problems. It appears in the writings as a descriptive statement; man is a rational animal. However, as a descriptive statement, it is false. Some humans are more rational than others, and some are not rational at all. What these authors were, in fact, saying at the start is that man ought to be rational, or the ideal man is rational. However, under this interpretation, they are begging the question, since the whole purpose of their essay is to derive the conclusion that man ought to be rational, and to describe what it means to be rational, on the basis of what they claim is a purely descriptive statement of what man is.
However, let us grant that man is a rational animal. How do we get from this to the conclusion that man ought to act rationally? ‘Ought’ says something different from ‘is’, so we need at least a few sentences explaining what ‘ought’ means and its relationship to ‘is’. Without this explanation, the argument fails.
We could say that man is found exclusively on earth. It does not follow from this that we ought to be found exclusively on earth — that it would be wrong for us to go elsewhere. We could say that man is bipedal. It does not follow from this that it is a sin for us to crawl or use a wheelchair. We could say that man has a life expectancy of about 80 years, but we could not conclude from this that it is wrong to live to be a hundred.
What man is places no limits on what man ought to be. Or, if it does, it is something that needs to be explained.
(d)Conclusion
Reason cannot reach as far as my Objectivist friends wanted it to, because reason had to stop at the is-ought gap, and could carry the argument no further. At the very least, they needed some sort of explanation as to how they could bridge that gap. I never found one that made any sense.
F. Libertarianism: Final Thoughts
There were a couple of things that I found no fault with among libertarians. One was their respect for reason. I accepted their argument that, if we are to solve our problems we have to understand them and reason. Reason allows us to do this, and to evaluate the various answers to that problem. Magic solutions based on myth, superstition, and disregard for the facts, are risky at best.
Also, I could find no objection to the claim that people always do what they want — though I rejected the extension that libertarians often added to this, that they always ultimately only want what is best for themselves.
Eventually, I would have questions about Hume’s is/ought distinction, just as I had questions about Aristotle’s ‘intrinsic value’ assumptions. I would come up with arguments suggesting that there has to be a bridge, somewhere, across the is-ought gap. However, I will save that issue for another time.
At this time, the relevant point is that the libertarianism/Objectivism I became familiar with ultimately failed to provide any evidence that they had found that bridge, or that reason can actually carry their argument across the is/ought chasm.
(a) Moral Philosophy
On a more general level, I found two unexpected elements in this field of study called ‘philosophy’ in which Hume and Aristotle were a part.
I discovered that there was a whole group of people who had been discussing, debating, and developing ideas to the very questions that interested me. It was like discovering that I already had a huge head start on my journey; all I had to do was make myself familiar with what had come before. It would be like wanting to have an airplane, buying a farm, and discovering an old airplane in the barn — that others had been working on for years.
Also, I was surprised to discover that, for the last 400 years, moral philosophers have been examining the question of right and wrong with only a few basing their conclusions on religoius premises. All of the greatest participants seemed to share the assumption that right and wrong can be known independent of knowing even one word of biblical text. They acted as if moral principles, like scientific principles, were not the type of things to be revealed by God, but by making observations of the real world and finding out how it worked.
(b) A Post Script on Minimum Wage
This chapter was not meant to be a discussion of the merits of minimum wage laws as much as a demonstration of the use of reason to examine ethical systems, using libertarianism as an example. Still, I don’t want to leave that discussion where I left it, out of fear a reader may get the wrong impression.
After I became more open to the possibility of the problems with free-market economies, I saw how the same laws of supply and demand offered in opposition to a minimum wage provided options that would benefit the people that the supporters of a minimum wage wanted to help.
The law of supply and demand says that simply raising the minimum wage by legislative fiat is counter-productive. However, it does identify two ways to increase the minimum wage that could be effective and useful.
One way is to increase the demand for such workers. Increased demand for a good or service drives up prices.
The other option is to reduce the supply of minimum-wage workers, again allowing competition for the scarcer commodity to drive up the price of that commodity.
Tax cuts, for the purpose of promoting economic activity, leading to higher demand for workers and greater employment, can be viewed as an attempt to increase minimum wages by driving up demand. However, the standard policy advocated for bringing this about is ‘trickle down economics’, where the tax cuts are given to the wealthiest individuals. The idea is that if the Lords and Masters of society can afford more servants, then the demand for servant labor increases. As the demand for servant labor increases, so does the price for servant labor.
If we are going to have tax cuts in order to increase the quality of life for the economically disadvantaged, I tend to think that a ‘trickle up’ theory would work better. In such a system, we cut the taxes for those on the bottom of the economic ladder, and let them keep more of their money. The business leaders then could make their money by better serving the wants and needs of the average American Rather than making the average American the servants of wealthiest few, trickle-up tax cuts would make the owners of industry servants of the average person.
If we want to look at decreasing the supply of minimum-wage workers, rather than increasing demand, one option would be to provide people with better educational opportunities, so that they no longer need to accept minimum wage jobs. Each person provided with a useful and marketable skill is one less person competing for minimum-wage jobs. This adds to the scarcity and increases the price of minimum-wage laborers.
Compulsory education combined with child-labor laws was a significant step in this direction. They pulled a significant number of people out of the job market, creating scarcity for unskilled workers that drove up the price. It also created scarcity in that children who took advantage of the system and became educated were more in a position to attract higher salaries because of their skills.
I offer these thoughts concerning the minimum wage as a way of further illustrating the practice of approaching these issues through reason. Libertarians claimed to love reason, and hold it as the best way to find solutions to the problems that we face. It was a bit sad and surprising to discover that reason, ultimately, would show me the cracks in the foundation upon which libertarian philosophy was built.
I also think that the minimum wage issue illustrates another important fact. These are not curious intellectual puzzles to be put aside when real-world issues demand our attention. These questions concern people’s lives, and all that makes life worth living. In an essay, where we are simply dealing with words, it is too easy to trivialize the significance of those words. When it comes to the issue of value, the questions, and their answers, are far from trivial.
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