Free Thoughts Blog

Today Smith moves from the roots of state education to the history of its critics. He begins the series with a discussion of Joseph Priestley, the Englishman who discovered oxygen.

Revisionist works on the history of education are of uneven value, to say the least. Some blame the problems of American education on “capitalism” – that ever-popular bogeyman of restless intellectuals. For example, in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976),  Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis throw everything except the proverbial kitchen sink at the feet of capitalism, including “drugs, suicide, mental instability, personal insecurity, predatory sexuality, depression, loneliness, bigotry, and hatred….” This is alarming news, indeed, but it is at least good to know that such problems do not exist in noncapitalistic societies. (Only academics could get away with this kind of Marxian claptrap.)

Even among the better revisionist works we find a troubling omission: Most pay scant attention, if any, to the libertarian critics of state schooling who flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet these advocates of free-market education – or “Voluntaryists,” as they called themselves in nineteenth-century Britain – predicted that governmental control of education would result in precisely those problems that revisionists later complained about.

Read it here.

Today we posted video of a talk Libertarianism.org regular George H. Smith gave back in 1996 on the moral right to resist authority, chiefly from the perspective of the American Revolution.

Libertarianism is the ideology that liberty should be observed first as a social rule. As the content of my other posts are variations on this theme, not much need appear in this entry. However, it ought to be noted briefly that this definition is a version of, if not identical with, classical liberalism. So it is about the protection of persons and their  non-aggressively acquired property allowing for maximal free markets and minimal state control.

One interesting assumption is that libertarianism is necessarily a moral position. Surely it almost always is. However, it would be consistent to advocate it for, for instance, non-moral narrowly self-interested reasons (as anyone is more likely to thrive if liberty is generally respected) or even misanthropic reasons (but here the advocate must consider the results a disaster for most people).

Many, probably most, libertarians think they need some form of justification, foundation or support for their ideology. Various attempts include basing it on autonomy, contractarianism, natural law, utilitarianism or some other form of consequentialism, and, of course, empirical evidence. Although one can subscribe to, or simply use, any of these to defend, or criticize, libertarianism without also being a justificationist.

There is an explicit non-justificationist alternative: critical-rationalist libertarianism. If someone asks a critical-rationalist libertarian to justify his views, he would probably decline to attempt this as he thinks it impossible. He does not adhere to libertarianism on any basis whatsoever. Like all theories, it is ultimately a mere conjecture. All one can do with a conjecture is test it with empirical evidence and intellectual criticism; both of which must also involve conjectures that themselves always remain open to testing. Thus the only reasonable policy is to look for the best tests or criticisms available.

If it comes to convincing a critic, this can only mean answering his specific criticisms as far as possible. Even if this were eventually done to the satisfaction of the critic, it remains just as much an unjustified conjecture as before. It simply wastes time to attempt a futile justification when one will have to answer the specific criticisms of all comers anyway; yet one can also usefully think up criticisms for oneself and attempt to answer them.

People from Charles Murray to Rick Santorum worry about moral decline in modern America. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, sees a different reality. He writes in the New York Times:

It’s easy to focus on the idiocies of the present and forget those of the past. But a century ago our greatest writers extolled the beauty and holiness of war. [See more on this in the forthcoming March-April issue of Cato Policy Report.] Heroes like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson avowed racist beliefs that today would make people’s flesh crawl. Women were barred from juries in rape trials because supposedly they would be embarrassed by the testimony. Homosexuality was a felony. At various times, contraception, anesthesia, vaccination, life insurance and blood transfusion were considered immoral.

People such as the reformed slave trader who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” Martin Luther King Jr., and Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde might attribute such moral progress to a better understanding of Christian faith. Pinker attributes it to a different factor:

…in one important sense, people have been getting smarter, not dumber, over time. The increase is not in raw brainpower, nor in crystallized skills like arithmetic or vocabulary, but in abstract reasoning: the ability to ignore appearances and reckon in formal categories. …

Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason.

Whatever the source, it’s a reality that should be considered when we try to assess the state of morality in the modern world. Some people do see it. A commenter named  Evan at econlog offered a similar perspective in a vigorous debate about Bryan Caplan’s claim that average people today have more material comforts than George Vanderbilt, the builder of Biltmore, had:

One thing I haven’t heard anyone address yet is moral progress. The values of earlier time periods were sickeningly depraved. One reason I’d never want to have been born in the past, rather than today, even if my past status would have been higher, is that I enjoy being the kind of person who doesn’t burn witches, own slaves, participate in pogroms, or bash gays. I think if you asked most poor people if they’d rather be a wealthy slaveowner in the past, they’d all look at you with horror.

Perhaps Martin Luther King was right when he said, echoing the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Any disvalued effect on other persons and their legitimate property that someone initiates (i.e., the effect is not a, proportional, reaction to something those others did first) can be said to be a ‘proactive imposition’ on those others. This expression enables us to explain and theorize social or interpersonal liberty as the ‘absence of proactive impositions’ (and so where clashes are unavoidable it is libertarian to minimize proactive impositions). It can be useful to view this formulation of liberty in two related ways: 1) the pure pre-propertarian, state of nature, interpretation, and 2) the rule-of-thumb propertarian interpretation.

1) Here ‘impositions’ are interpreted only as costs, meaning the opposite of benefits rather than opportunity costs. From applying this pure interpretation of liberty in a state-of-nature thought experiment, we can derive the existence of self-ownership itself, initial acquisition and private property generally, intellectual property, and contracts, and also resolve paradoxical or problem cases.

2) Here ‘impositions’ are interpreted as the flouting of self-ownership, private property and contracts, which therefore presupposes some such derivations as occur in 1, in order to deal with apparently clear property cases rather than start from first principles every time.

Libertarians usually have a good intuition of what is libertarian in practice and are very able to defend it. But without some explicit libertarian theory of liberty it is hard to do such things as give a clear account of what makes one thing liberty and another thing license, or to deal with novel or difficult cases in any principled way, or to answer even fairly simple philosophical questions or criticisms with any clarity or cogency. So the above theory appears to be an advance on merely assuming that self-ownership and private property are manifestly what constitutes liberty. And it leaves room for dispute, even among libertarians, about the nature and examples of being ‘proactive’ an ‘imposition’ and a ‘cost’.

Today George H. Smith continues his examination of the intellectual roots of state education by turning to the views of Plato’s most famous student.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was born in Stagira, a small coastal town in the political orbit of Macedonia. He traveled to Athens while still in his teens and enrolled in Plato’s Academy, where he remained for almost twenty years. Plato’s influence on Aristotle was profound, but there were also significant differences. For example, Aristotle criticized Plato’s stress on uniformity; and, in response to Plato’s call to institute communal property among the guardians (the elite class of rulers), Aristotle defended private property with arguments that would be used for centuries thereafter.

Aristotle explicitly repudiated the notion of limited government that was defended by some of his contemporaries. He quoted the sophist Lycophron as saying that a government exists “for the sake of alliance and security from injustice” and that laws should serve as “a surety to one another of justice.” Aristotle disagreed. Rather than confine itself to this negative function — the enforcement of justice — the state should actively promote the good  life.

Read it here.