Moral judgments

Since the financial crisis began, I have noticed phrases like “free market fundamentalists” being thrown around, and an accusation being leveled against “unregulated” capitalism. Thousands of newspaper columns and hundreds of columnists have repeated the same thing over and over. And so have many other people and bloggers. The facts are crystal clear – there is no “unregulated capitalism” at play anywhere in the world, and the crisis was definitely not caused by any such non-existent entity; you could just as easily claim that Fred Flintstone caused the crisis. The fact is that the crisis was caused by government intervention in the economy; as long as “any” regulation exists, the government is in direct or indirect control of the economy. Once the government asserts its influence over the economy, its natural that crooks will rush towards it so that they can benefit by modifying the regulations to suit themselves. Such crooks are not capitalists. They are what I have already called them – crooks.

So what does that say about the people making such claims? (This question is very significant when it comes to morality, and instead of inventing an example, I will continue using the present one. Further, this article is why I thought I should write about it, and wgreen asks a similar question here.) The claim can only be made by the following people-

• Those who are ignorant of the state of affairs, either purposefully, or as a result of an error.
• Those who are aware of it but are lying through their teeth because it suits their ideology.

A moral judgment needs to be passed on each of these. I will come to the “why” later.

1. Those who are purposefully ignorant are immoral because they are guilty of evasion.
2. Those who, after careful thought, believe in an ideology that doesn’t respect individual rights are evil. They may “honestly” believe that egalitarianism is good, but that doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t. And the unprincipled from that lot may even lie to further their agenda.
3. Only those who are ignorant as a result of an error – in judgment, or brought on by lack of sufficient information/ incorrect information can be said to be moral, but this is not a license that is granted for perpetuity.

Note that there are always degrees when it comes to moral judgments – a murderer is worse than a thief. So is a man who holds that there is nothing wrong in murder (even though he hasn’t actually committed a murder).

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Sometime in the 1980s, the “movement” around Ayn Rand’s philosophy split on a question of principles. One of the questions was that of passing moral judgments and whether “ideas” can be judged “good or bad/ evil” or whether they can only be “true or false.” Kelley said (see Appendix A)-

[E]vil and error are not the same.

The concept of evil applies primarily to actions, and to the people who perform them. Schwartz asserts that we should not sanction the Soviets because they are “philosophical enemies.” This is a bizarre interpretation of their sins. Soviet tyrants are not evil because they believe in Marxian collectivism. They are evil because they have murdered millions of people and enslaved hundreds of millions more. An academic Marxist who subscribes to the same ideas as Lenin or Stalin does not have the same moral status. He is guilty of the same intellectual error, but not of their crimes (unless and to the extent that he actively supported them, as many did in the 1930s, although even here we must recognize a difference in degree of culpability).

Truth and falsity, not good or evil, are the primary evaluative concepts that apply to ideas as such. It is true that the horrors of this century were made possible by irrationalist and collectivist ideas. Bad ideas can be dangerous; that’s one reason we shouldn’t endorse them. But they are dangerous because people use them to perpetrate evil. We are not Hegelians: ideas per se are not agents in the world. Truth or falsity is the essential property of an idea; the good or ill it produces is derivative. It is also true that a given person may adopt false ideas through evasion, which is morally wrong. But another person might adopt the same idea through honest error.

From my understanding of his statement, he’s making a “guns don’t kill people, other people do” argument. He says, then, that ideas don’t have a moral component to them – they can only be true or false. And that its actions that are good or evil; that its actions that can be morally judged.

Peikoff responded in a lengthy paper-

As one of his examples of an intellectually honest man, to whom others should show “tolerance” and “benevolence,” David Kelley offers not a groping teenager, but “an academic Marxist,” i.e., an adult who devotes his life to the job of teaching unreason, self-sacrifice and slavery to generations of young minds. When I speak of truth and falsehood in what follows, therefore, I am presupposing a definite (adult) context. I am speaking of truth qua truth (not of the arbitrary)—and of falsehood on the kind of scale and issues that preclude honest, short-lived errors.

[...]

In some contexts, a man is properly held blameless for an unreasonable idea, so long as he himself does not act on it. For example: if I conclude that, though you are innocent of any wrongdoing, your death would be a wonderful thing, but I then remind myself of your rights, hold myself in check and refrain from killing you, I may be free of blame and can even be given a certain moral credit: “He kept his idea within his own mind,” one could say, “he did not allow it to lead to the destruction of the innocent; to that extent, in actual practice, he was moved by the recognition of reality.” But this kind of analysis does not exonerate the philosophic advocate of unreason. In regard to him, one cannot say: “He implicitly advocates murder, but does not himself commit it, so he is morally innocent.” The philosopher of irrationalism, though legally innocent of any crime, is not “keeping his ideas within his own mind.” He is urging them on the world and into actual practice. Such a man is moved not by the recognition of reality, but by the opposite: by the desire to annihilate it. In spiritual terms, he is guilty of a heinous crime: he is inciting men to commit murder on a mass scale. Advocacy of this kind is a form of action: it represents an entire life spent on subverting man’s mind at its base. Can anyone honestly hold that such advocacy pertains not to “action,” but merely to the world of “ideas,” and therefore that verdicts such as “good” and “evil” do not apply to it?

Yet such is the essence of David Kelley’s viewpoint. “Truth” and “falsity,” he says, apply primarily to “ideas”; “good” and “evil,” to “actions, and to the people who perform them.” In regard to evil, he says, we must not be tolerant; but in regard to ideas, moral judgment is a mistake. In the cognitive realm, he says, the virtue to be practiced in regard to all comers, no matter what their viewpoint, is “tolerance” and “benevolence,” i.e., cool, open-minded, friendly discussion among civilized moral equals. Stalin, in this view, has killed people, so he is evil and intolerable; but Kant or “an academic Marxist”—he is merely a thinker of a different school, with whom one happens to disagree (and from whom, Kelley adds, we might even learn something “if we are willing to listen”). In regard to Kant and his academic progeny, therefore, moral judgment is inapplicable and even “hysterical.”

None of the excerpts do justice either to Kelley or to Peikoff. So reading their complete papers is recommended.

I agree with Peikoff that ideas “can” be moral or immoral and can thus be good, bad, evil etc. However I don’t agree with his narrow definition of “honest errors” (and therefore agree with Kelley – see Appendix B). I know from personal experience that errors are not the exclusive domain of youngsters, retards and illiterates. Depending on the kind of knowledge, the amount of material one has to wade through before reaching any kind of conclusion, and the ability that such a task demands, errors are more common place than Peikoff is willing to admit, particularly in the field of philosophy. I don’t refer to broad and thus simple principles – individual rights for example, but more technical and complex questions. If “such errors are not nearly so common as some people wish to think, especially in the field of philosophy” why is it then that two 40+ year old “rational” men who believe in individual rights are sparring over a question of “moral judgment?”

Note that Peikoff’s response is to Kelley’s brief paper. Kelley has written in depth about the subject of moral judgments in his book which I have linked to (but haven’t read beyond the two papers of interest.)

As for Schwartz’s addendum where he writes, among other things-

The Libertarian movement is not some innocuous debating club. It is a movement that embraces the advocates of child-molesting, the proponents of unilateral U.S. disarmament, the LSD-taking and bomb-throwing members of the New Left, the communist guerrillas in Central America and the baby-killing followers of Yassir Arafat. These views have all been accepted under the Libertarian umbrella (and remain accepted under it by everyone who still calls himself a Libertarian). It is these types of vermin that one is lifting into respectability whenever one sanctions Libertarianism—or whenever one maintains that ideas can be analyzed without being evaluated.

moral judgment doesn’t apply here like he thinks it does. He’s attacking an umbrella term. People cannot change that according to his convenience. Not everyone is C.S.Peirce.

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The “why.” A judgment has to be made because the Krugmans and DeLongs and Stiglitzs and thousands of other statist economists, philosophers and politicians are not indulging in this subterfuge and gross disregard for individual rights out of some “honest error” – they are knowingly supporting a stance that is anti-liberty in every conceivable way. And thus they cannot be given the “benefit of the doubt.”

Parallels

I finally finished reading Peikoff’s book (“The Ominous Parallels”) yesterday, two-odd months after I started it. I will (hopefully) write about it in some future post, but the following extract shows the parallels between the Germany of the 1930s and the USA of today. This is not to say that the US will adopt National Socialism to the extent Germany did, but the signs are there and the fact that the US is philosophically bankrupt means that the idea is within the realm of possibility with no “politically relevant” block available to question it. Well, more on that later. The following paragraphs are from the chapter “The Killers Take Over”, p. 215-218-

The Great Depression merely forced the issue, which had been implicit all along in the Germans’ philosophy. Economic catastrophe in Germany was an effect, the last link in a long chain of ideas and events—and a catalyst, which gave Hitler a real opportunity for the final cashing in. The catalyst worked because the nation was already ripe for Hitler’s kind of cashing in.

If a man long addicted to a toxic drug suffers sudden convulsions and then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the cause of the death, so long as one remembers the cause of the cause. The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology.

* * *

For several years after the inflationary debacle, the Republic had seemed to return to normal, enjoying its so-called “period of prosperity.” It was a shaky, foredoomed prosperity built on credit and quicksands.

In essence, Germany’s recovery was the result of a massive inflow of foreign—primarily American—capital, in the form of huge loans along with large purchases of German securities. America was experiencing the artificial boom of the twenties, a pyramid of highly speculative investments and wild spending made possible by a variety of governmental actions—most notably, the action of the Federal Reserve Board in generating a cheap-money policy in the banks. The influx of this capital into Germany, which also lacked the free-market restraints on inordinate speculation and spending, helped to fuel a similar artificial boom.

In particular, the various levels of government in Germany, which had learned nothing and forgotten everything from the inflationary crisis, were once again pouring out money and piling up debts; they were endowing lavish public works, starting a program of unemployment benefits, enlarging the bureaucracy, raising its salaries, and the like. This time, however, the governments were not counting on the printing press to finance their activities, but on the Americans. “I must ask you always to remember,” said Gustav Stresemann to his countrymen, “that during the past years we have been living on borrowed money. If a crisis were to arise and the Americans were to call in their short-term loans we should be faced with bankruptcy.” He said it to deaf ears, in 1928.

When the New York stock-market crash signaled the collapse of the American boom, the collapse of Germany followed immediately, as a matter of course. For the second time in less than a decade a protracted agony struck the country, this time involving plummeting investments, the crash of famous financial houses, cascading bankruptcies, soaring unemployment, tobogganing farm prices, and widespread destitution.

The mania of the inflation years had been succeeded by a wave of giddy, unreal prosperity. Now the unreal stood revealed as unreal. Giddiness gave way to panic and to black despair.

The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crisis, these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.

When Hans Fallada in his popular novel of the time asked Little Man, What Now? the little men in Germany (and the other kinds, too) knew the answer, which seemed to them self-evident. They turned to the group—to their economic class or trade association—as their only security; each group blamed the others for the crisis; each party demanded action, the kind of action it understood, government action, i.e., more controls.

Man is rotten, the omnipresent chorus of “Weimar culture” was crying, the individual is helpless, freedom has failed.

The Social Democrats, however, playing out to the end their founding contradiction, were unable to act. One union leader at a party convention indicated the reason eloquently. He asked whether the party at this juncture should strive to preserve the “capitalist” Weimar system, or to topple it. Should socialists stand “at the sick-bed of capitalism” as “the doctor who seeks to cure,” he wondered, or as “joyous heirs, who can hardly wait for the end and would even like to help it along with poison?” His answer was that the party is “condemned” to play both roles at once, which in fact is what it did, by switching back and forth at random between them.

In the early months of 1930, with the nation desperate for leadership, the party stumbled into its “proletarian” stance: it decided to bring down a coalition government headed by a Social Democratic Chancellor, Hermann Mueller, because of a proposed measure that might have had the effect of reducing unemployment benefits in the future. The Weimar politicians had long been engaged in Kühhandel, as the Germans called it, “cattletrading,” and had treated the country to a procession of musical-chair coalitions, sudden governmental collapses, and continual new elections. The spectacle had evoked widespread contempt for popular government even before the depression. After the Mueller cabinet fell on March 27, however—the “black day” of the Republic—no new coalition could be formed; the economic warfare among the parties was too virulent. The Germans’ contempt for the Reichstag became disgust. There was only one solution that seemed feasible.

On March 28, 1930, the Reichstag’s normal legislative prerogatives were suspended by President Hindenberg. A semi-dictatorial system of government, a system of rule by emergency executive decree, was established under Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a conservative Centrist. Popular government was abandoned for the duration of the emergency. The dichotomy between political and economic freedom was breaking down by itself, without any help from the Nazis.

In regard to methods, the Brüning government was dictatorial. In regard to policies, however, it was democratic. The program Brüning (and his two short-lived, authoritarian successors in 1932) enacted was an exact reflection of the popular will. These men “did something,” in the German sense of the term.

The government issued a torrent of new decrees. It raised the tariffs, the taxes, the unemployment-insurance premiums; it expanded public works, imposed rigid restrictions on foreign exchange, and introduced a twenty-month “voluntary labor service” for young people; etc. Most important of all, the Reich in this period effectively erased the last significant remnants of private economic power, by turning the banks, the cartels, and the labor unions into mere administrative organs of the state. The Republic, writes Gustav Stolper (a member of the Reichstag at the time), “came close to being a thoroughly developed state socialism. . . . Government was omnipresent, and the individual had been used to turning to it in every need.”

The government’s policies did not work. Among other things, hyperprotectionism (in Germany and abroad) was strangling the country’s vital foreign trade; the cascade of sudden new taxes and emergency decrees was creating a climate of acute business uncertainty, which made impossible any significant recovery of German investment and production; the unions’ adamant opposition to further wage cuts was exacerbating the unemployment.

The Germans attempted to assess the situation and determine the cause of government’s failure. “At last,” writes Stolper,

it became common knowledge that all this state interference . . . was of no avail in the most disastrous economic crisis that had befallen Germany in the course of her history. Paradoxically, the system of state interference as such, being far too deeply rooted in the German political and economic tradition, was not blamed by the opposition. On the contrary, the general mood of the public backed the demands that this imperfect and incomplete system of state intervention be superseded by one more perfect and complete. This was the content of the so-called anti-capitalistic yearning which, according to a National Socialist slogan of the time, was said to pervade the German nation.

Naomi Wolf (not Klein) thought that fascism would creep into America from the right, and given Bush’s track record, few would deny the fear. But what must not be forgotten is this – it can just as easily come in from the left; the right does not hold a patent on fascism.

Socialism

Yesterday, while tag surfing, I read a post on some blog which basically questioned the notion that the American political system is socialist in nature. The argument offered was that under socialism, the “means of production” are owned by the state (that’s what everybody, including me, seem to have learned at school), whereas that is not the case in present day America. K.M. made a similar argument (that its not socialism) without taking recourse to the “means of production” criterion, some months back. He said-

Finally, as a tactical matter, it is incorrect and therefore damaging to label the statist and welfarist policies of most politicians today as socialist. They are not. Miller’s worldview is what socialism means. And fortunately, very few people subscribe to it. Many people share some of the moral ideals of socialism implicitly. But they also believe in personal responsibility, individual freedom and free enterprise (however inconsistent there beliefs may be. Calling them socialist when they explicitly reject socialism (as Miller’s frustration shows) is not the best way to reason with them.

Whatever the political system – socialism, fascism, communism or capitalism – it always comes down to their position on “individual rights.” And “property rights” are a necessary part of individual rights. Capitalism stands for absolute – inviolable – property rights; socialism and communism differ in degree, but their coercive form (I am not sure a non- coercive form is politically possible) – as practiced in China, USSR, India and every country in the world even today – has zero regard for property rights – all property rights exist at the pleasure of the state. Fascism as an ideology doesn’t even merit discussion in this context.

I started reading Leonard Peikoff’s book, “The Ominous Parallels”, yesterday. And in the very first chapter – “The Cause of Nazism” – he tackles the issue of “control” of property. Peikoff writes-

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it—or its representative, the state—deems this desirable.

Fascism, said one of its leading spokesmen, Alfredo Rocco, stresses-

the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society…. For Liberalism [i.e., individualism], the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.

“[T]he higher interests involved in the life of the whole,” said Hitler in a 1933 speech, “must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual.” Men, echoed the Nazis, have to “realize that the State is more important than the individual, that individuals must be willing and ready to sacrifice themselves for Nation and Fuhrer.” The people, said the Nazis, “form a true organism,” a “living unity,” whose cells are individual persons. In reality, therefore—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—there is no such thing as an “isolated individual” or an autonomous man.

Just as the individual is to be regarded merely as a fragment of the group, the Nazis said, so his possessions are to be regarded as a fragment of the group’s wealth.

“Private property” as conceived under the liberalistic economic order was a reversal of the true concept of property [wrote Huber]. This “private property” represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property, as he pleased, without regard for the general interests…. German socialism had to overcome this “private,” that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

If “ownership” means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a contentless deed, which conferred no rights on its holder. Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.

The Nazis called themselves socialists, and they did take over “control” of the “means of production.” The same is true in every modern “republic,” America included. While citizens (probably) won’t tolerate Jews (or any other minority) being gassed, not only do they tolerate government intervention in the market, they actually clamor for it. From zoning laws that determine how you are allowed to “use” your land, to taxation of every kind – income tax, wealth tax, inheritance tax, property tax, to “eminent domain”, to laws that lay down quantitative and qualitative limits on production, to laws that actually control or ban production of certain products – the modern state has de facto control over – ownership of – the property of its citizens. And this is without getting into the state monopoly over the “means of exchange” – money.

That’s why I don’t think there is anything wrong in referring to America, or any other country in the world for that matter, as socialist. They may not be “by the book” socialists, but the results – consequences – of their measures are the same.