Tag: Philosophy

The discussion with Dr. Danny Cline continues. He sent me his reply to my previous post yesterday. I read it and thought about it and then read it again.

This is a difficult topic because the discussion goes to something so fundamental that the words we’re forced to use carry many layers of meaning, while what we’re trying to do is flay them back and be unerringly precise in what we’re saying. There’s much opportunity for misinterpretation here, though I think we’re approaching a consensus on the topic. As I did before, I’m going to post Dr. Cline’s submittal for you all to read and think on, then later I will post my reply which will be predated to appear physically below this post. That way, anyone stumbling onto this full front page or reading a monthly archive will be able to read the two posts as one continuous piece.

Dr. Cline emailed to me in plain text, so I have taken the liberty to edit his piece very slightly for readability (if I screw anything up, Danny, leave a comment and I’ll fix it.) Here is his latest response:

First let me say that the order in which I’ll respond to your comments is not necessarily the order they appear in your post. First I think I’ll take up the statement:

“I think Dr. Cline believes that man has an innate moral instinct.”

Well, I’m not going to argue much against this statement. I do indeed believe that man has innate moral knowledge (I wouldn’t say an instinct, but that’s a pretty minor problem). I should say rather that I believe that I have innate moral knowledge. I’ve never been very convinced of the applicability of knowledge about one’s self to knowledge about others. So instead let’s say that I believe that I have moral knowledge and I suspect that some others do as well. However, that belief is not the underlying support of my quibble with your posts. The source of my support is rather the question of whether there is an objective standard of morality. Note that the question of whether or not there is an objective standard of morality is wholly different from the question of how or if, we have access to this standard. My belief is that there is. I would gather from this post that you would disagree and say that either that there is no morality, morality is meaningless (i.e. morality is just a word), or perhaps morality only exists relative to a certain society or certain people.

This gets us to the first of a series of difficult questions, namely, how can we have a priori knowledge (knowledge not based on experience – of which our discussion of morals and rights certainly brings into question)? Now, although our questions are ones of morality here, there are many other areas in which the knowledge (as much as it seems to be very concrete) is still a priori. For example, the axioms of geometry, or even the truth of arithmetic are not things that we feel need to be proven, and are as such a priori knowledge. Indeed, in 1931 Kurt Gödel demonstrated that there is no way to completely list all of the necessary axioms for a complex system such as mathematics. Any attempt at a list of all necessary axioms (again a priori knowledge) will necessarily generate propositions that are undecidable within the system. These propositions could be made into axioms themselves, but then would be still more undecidable statements generated within the system.

Thus, some things we accept (the axioms underlying arithmetic and geometry) are indeed knowledge we are neither able to prove nor knowledge that we even derive from experience. This is the essence of a priori knowledge. Now, one certainly could claim that a rejection of all a priori knowledge (including such things as simple arithmetic) is valid. However, while not inherently self-contradictory, that sort of skepticism is notoriously unproductive, and not even in line with how we (or I, at least) view the world. One might instead claim that certain claims of a priori knowledge is justified (perhaps the truth of the laws of logic and mathematics) while other such claims are not (in this case, the existence of an objective standard of morality). Here we are still treading on difficult ground, as we’d need to examine why certain claims can be considered true without proof, while others cannot. For example, why should we accept that there are external objective truths of arithmetic and logic but not such objective truths of morality? The claims some make about moral truths being relative to society are intended to be such a difference. However, this seems to me to be nothing more than the claim that we cannot have objective standards of morality because people (or perhaps one of these complainants might say “reasonable people”) might disagree about them. In my experience teaching mathematics at the college level, I have found the same thing occurs.

Many (otherwise) reasonable people cannot add fractions correctly, or cannot understand that IF we know that P implies Q AND we know that P is true THEN we know that Q is true. At the higher levels of mathematics, even those who have studied mathematics and know a great deal about it have disagreements, not because there is no right answer but simply because the questions are hard. Thus, either the complaint that morality has no objective standards because otherwise reasonable people may disagree on issues of morality fails or mathematics, and indeed logic itself suffer the same problem (and if we reject logic, there is little point in continuing this, or any other, argument). The fact that this sort of a priori knowledge causes disagreements is not a sign of its non-existence but rather its difficulty. This knowledge does not spring fully grown, armed, and armored from our heads like Athena; it must be sought out. Reflection is our path to this knowledge, and often it is a difficult path confusing even our greatest minds. The fact that we may be unsure of the contents of an objective standard of morality does not imply that none exists.

Indeed, at one point in your response, you do claim that there is such an objective standard, with a quote from Ayn Rand:

“A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.”

Immediately afterward you say that

“[t]hat right is, in my opinion, REAL, but it can and has been trampled, folded, spindled, mutilated, and – worst of all – unrealized, for the overwhelming majority of Man’s existence upon the Earth.”

This is entirely correct. The right and its corollaries ARE real AND they have been violated. One of these clauses does not negate the possibility of the other. A right is not like a law of physics; it is simply a statement of morality. It is not a statement of what CAN happen, but what SHOULD happen. However, almost immediately, you contradict this statement with:

“[Jefferson] and the other Founders may have held those truths to be “self-evident,” but for centuries if not [millennia] before they were neither self-evident nor true.”

This statement is only half-correct, and in that half you don’t go far enough. In the millennia before, the statements were true – but they were not then, nor were they in Jefferson’s day, nor are they now self-evident. These truths, like all a priori knowledge are not things that we can prove, but are things that we must discover. It is not easy to uncover reality or truth – not in mathematics, not in morality, and not in science.

Finally, in response to your statement and the following question:

“Telling a murderer that he is violating your rights won’t stop him from doing it, and if he kills you is he not “taking away your right to life”? The question I have is: the claim to whom? [To whom] do we go to with our claims to our proper rights?”

The answers are as follows: No, the killer is not taking away your right to life – he is violating it. He is taking away your life, not your right to it. Rights and guarantees are not the same; rights are simply statements of what is right and wrong. The answer to your second question “the claim to whom” is a rather sad one, namely, that we can take it to no one as this is not that kind of claim. Rights are not a part of some cosmic insurance policy in which if they’re violated we get a new toaster. Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, they are simply statements of what is right and what is wrong. The rights are universal conditions “which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore” quote we have been bouncing back and forth in these emails is correct enough in its way but can be very misleading. The rights can’t be taken away, the things they grant are ours can be. A tyrant couldn’t take away my right to life, but unfortunately he (or she) could take away my life. Mr. Dale Franks makes this exact same fallacy in his quote. Rights are NOT laws of physics, and as much as we might hope that they should be, their nature does not prevent their violation. A right does not exist in the same way as a table, or a molecule. His questions:

“Where are your rights now? What protection do they afford you?”

are answered easily enough. My rights are “where” they always are. They are ideas, and have no physical form, much as Newton’s second law has no physical form, or the number 567 has no physical form. “Where” is not the kind of thing one ought to ask about a nonphysical entity like truth or 43 if one wants an understandable answer. To the second question, my answer is again, sadly, they don’t afford me protection. They never have and never will. I’ll have to protect myself (or not) as I am able.

Again, I think your troubles with my post are related to an assumption that I am saying one doesn’t need to defend one’s self from murder or theft or imprisonment. I am most certainly not saying anything of the sort. If one wants to live, one may very well have to defend one’s self. My rights won’t defend me, but again, that is not what they are meant to do. They are meant to tell us what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.

You and Mr. Franks both come somewhat near the fallacy of the logical positivists, who said “any statement not of natural science is meaningless.” This was meant to put an end to all such questions of rights and morality. Unfortunately, it is self-contradictory, as it is itself a statement not of natural science. As you don’t quite cozy up to it, this is not an accusation, but your continued examinations into the questions about how rights are supposed to have a physical effect (they aren’t) comes tantalizingly near to it.

In the end you say that your objection to my position is that it encourages members of a society to disconnect. Perhaps it does. If we are arguing from consequences, though, I’d say your position – at least the one where you doubt the existence of right in any true universal way – encourages people to buy that whoever has the greatest might is justified in doing whatever he or she wants. Your question to me “[i]f you believe, as Dr. Cline believes, that “All rights are simply universal conditions ‘which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore'” then why would it be necessary to defend them?” I have answered several times – we do not defend the right, we defend what it claims is rightfully ours. This question prompts me to ask one of my own. If you believe that rights are not real or are meaningless (as you indicate in some places but not in others and Mr. Franks flatly states in the post of his you have quoted) what is the purpose of defending them or respecting those of others, particularly those incapable of defending theirs and unprotected by society?

See why I do this? The free exchange of ideas forces you to think. It’s work I thoroughly enjoy.

Back later. Maybe much later. This will be a tough one to get just right.

UPDATE: Part II is done.

I have to admit, it never occurred to me to attack the question of rights from the perspective of mathematics. I studied physics in college, and I remember plainly the division between physics professors and mathematics professors. The physics professors were uniformly disdainful of the mathematics professors, and vice versa. The mathematicians were interested in math for math’s sake, ignoring any practical applications and appreciating primarily the elegance of the science. The physicists were interested only in the practical application of mathematics to solving the questions of physical reality, appreciating the elegance mostly as evidence of the correct application of the tools.

You can imagine which side of this divide I rested on. However, as I said above, I think we’re approaching consensus here, but perhaps only asymptotically.

Dr. Cline in his opening explicitly connects the question of rights with the question of morals, and I think it’s important to make clear here that the two are associated, but not interchangeable. That’s probably understood, but as I said, it is necessary that we be unerringly precise in this discussion.

I quoted Ayn Rand’s statement that “A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” I believe this to be true, but Websters defines “moral” as “of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior.” A quick study of history shows that what is moral for one society may be immoral for another, as in the example I gave of the Maori and Moriori from Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Yet Dr. Cline’s position is that there is a single “objective standard of morality” and that objective standard is based on the rights of man which are corollaries of Rand’s “one fundamental right: a man’s right to his own life.”

Dr. Cline believes, and makes a good case, that those rights can be determined just the same way the laws of mathematics are: through discovery by logical thought.

We’re ==><== this close!

We’re stuck in that no-mans-land between mathematicians and physicists, I think. Dr. Cline argues for the theoretical ideal, while I’m oriented towards the pragmatic. His “this is the way it should be,” and my “does it work?“ Settle in for another dissertation-length essay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I stated in the earlier piece:

The whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, “moral.”

This is accurate, but incomplete. There are at least two bases for morality: survival, and individual rights. For the overwhelming majority of the existence of Man, the morality of any society has been based strictly on survival – anything that worked to ensure survival was, by definition, “moral.” For example, drawing another citation from Guns, Germs and Steel, New Guinean cannibalism can be pragmatically understood if you study the food sources available to the cannibal tribes. There simply wasn’t enough protein available in their environment to sustain their populations without it. Even though cannibalism can be dangerous to its practitioners for biological reasons (diseases like Kuru and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, for instance), when the alternative is rapid death from starvation or slow death through malnutrition, the choice seems obvious. Since their only significant available source of protein was meat, and the only large animal species in that ecosystem was humans, and it remained thus until these tribes were reached by Europeans bringing high-protein crops and domestic animals formerly unknown, then the choice of their source of dietary protein was simple. From our perspective, cannibalism is a moral horror; involving the taboos of both murder and of the consumption of human flesh. From an individual rights perspective, the systematic slaughter of people is wrong as it is violative of their rights. We can mitigate our revulsion if the situation is obviously extreme; sailors adrift at sea, isolated survivors of an air crash, but the idea of a culture based on cannibalism is abhorrent to us.

And perfectly normal, natural, and acceptable to them.

This is difficult to square with Dr. Cline’s insistence on the existence of one objective standard of morality if you do not recognize this dichotomy between the pragmatic and the ideal, and I must confess to not expressing this well or clearly earlier. The rules of a society’s morality, to use a mathematical analogy, are like the deceptively simple equations that define very complex bounded chaotic systems. So long as the overall system is stable within its bounds, the morality of that society “works,” despite how it might offend or even repulse members of another society, and regardless of how it relates to an ideal of individual rights. The only thing that can upset it is a catastrophic change imposed from outside, (the offended society attacking and slaughtering them, for instance) or something truly extraordinary from within.

Man has existed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, and our social structures have struggled slowly and painfully up from the band, to the tribe, to the chiefdom, to the state over that long time period. Throughout all of it we have done so without an ideal system of morality, just as we did without mathematics, agriculture, metallurgy, chemistry, or physics. We’ve been too busy just surviving. A theory of individual rights is much like mathematics – something of great value that requires time and resources to explore and develop. Dr. Cline states that such a theory of rights is every bit as real and as useful as the laws of mathematics, and he may be right – though I must throw out the caveat that it is crucial to recognize that man can survive without either, and might again. I quoted Rand earlier, concerning this:

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.

I think it’s critical that we remember it.

Dr. Cline believes that he has a personal “innate moral knowledge” and he “suspect(s) that others do as well,” but by stating that I think he admits that such knowledge may not be and probably is not universal. That “innate moral knowledge” is akin to Newton’s ability to develop the Calculus by his pure logic, or Einstein’s conception of the Theory of Relativity through his. These are talents that are rare in humans, and when such people apply themselves to the questions of morality, we call them “philosophers” – people like Rand, Kant, Popper, and Aristotle, and also Marx, Neitzche, and Kierkegaard. It is important to understand that when humanity is the topic, “irrational” implies much more than “the square-root of 2.”

During that long trek from band to tribe to chiefdom to state, it is arguable that the freedoms of individuals in those societies have been increasingly restricted, violated, and abrogated. In exchange, much of humanity has gone from a life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” to one of wealth, comfort, and health. It is understandable, then, when we see people willing to trade their freedoms for the security of even an oppressive society, and equally understandable when others would rather not. Would you rather live as a Kalahari Bushman, or as a Russian worker under Stalin? One was unquestionably more free, but the other had indoor toilets (though probably no toilet paper.) One might be killed by a lion, the other “disappeared” by the KGB. However, we have reached a point in human development where we have begun to restore freedoms once taken away, in part because the restriction of those freedoms is no longer essential to the survival of the society, and in part because we now have the time and resources to allow philosophers to think about it, and the technology to disseminate their thoughts broadly to those not so gifted.

Dr. Cline states that “rights are simply statements of what is right and wrong”. I think that’s a bit in error. Morals are simply statements of what is right and wrong; “Thou shall not murder.” Rights are the statements of an underlying philosophy that explains why; “Each individual has a right to his own life.” Conversely, the reason (as it probably was for centuries) could be given; “The power to murder is exclusive to the State. Violation of this rule will result in the execution of the non-state murderer.” No right involved. Stay in line or get hammered down.

Dr. Cline and I agree (I think) that the one fundamental right can be defined as Rand defines it, “the right to your own life.” The problem comes from trying to ascertain what all those corollary rights are. Dr. Cline believes that there is a single, determinable objective standard of morality, based on that fundamental right and its corollaries. I don’t. The reason I don’t is because we’re talking about human beings here, and not theoretical concepts like mathematics and physics. Remember: “irrational.” What Dr. Cline is arguing is also partially what he was protesting against when he took exception to my reference to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers citation:

Starship Troopers is not the correct novel to reference – at least not unless you’re a die-hard communist or fascist. The government presented therein is a fine example of a fascist/communist nanny-state, and its subjects/slaves are clearly worshippers of Nietzsche’s “New Idol” – the state.

Yet it is from that citation that this comes:

“A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.

“We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.”

That certainly sounds to me like Dr. Cline’s “objective moral standard” based on “a man’s right to his own life.” My problem is that I don’t think it’s really possible to “describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.” The equations of morality are deceivingly simple in appearance, but difficult to conceive and inherently sensitive to initial conditions. Logic can lead us down inescapable dead-end paths as it did the Moriori, if we neglect to consider that others exist who do not share our morality but to whom we try to extend it because our morality is obviously the “right” one. We see it still today in the policies of governments that try to protect their populaces by disarming them, and in nations that repeatedly attempt appeasement and accomodation when their antagonists see it as weakness and lack of will. On the converse, it is possible for logic to lead to aggression to force that “single objective standard” of morality onto others, which is what some on the Left are currently frothing at the mouth about and accusing the U.S. of doing in the Middle East (while their own attempt to subvert the current American morality for their Leftist one continues to fail), and it is what the Wahabist Jihadis are attempting – and failing – to accomplish worldwide.

In his initial comments, Dr. Cline stated:

I think what I am saying is an important point, indeed it is THE important point in the American Revolution and all of Ayn Rand’s writings. These rights are not things that can be removed; they are innate and inalienable; they are conditions of morality itself. If one TRULY believes that rights and morality are “socially constructed” the only sensible option is to join those in power (the always present “communist masters”) and claim your share of their unjustly gained loot.

I don’t believe this – I won’t DO this – and I think (I hope) the same is true of you.

This is the statement that “since thus-and-so is morally right, I will not act in violation of that moral.” In the main, this is true for me as there are acts that I will not perform even unto death. I was asked, in the comments of that original post, “Is it wrong to rape?” It is for me. There are no circumstances in which would commit it, and I believe its practice to be violative of rights and thus immoral and evil. But I recognize that this belief is not universally held. I believe, too, in that fundamental right to one’s own life, so I don’t support the idea of invading and attempting to force my morality upon those nations not so enlightened, but I have only mild objections to peacekeeping forces killing rapists out of hand when caught in the act. (The potential abuse of due process being the only one that comes immediately to mind.)

Dr. Cline also said in his last missive:

I would gather from this post that you would disagree and say that either that there is no morality, morality is meaningless (i.e. morality is just a word), or perhaps morality only exists relative to a certain society or certain people.

No. There is morality, and it is not meaningless. Nor is morality restricted to one people or society. There are MANY moralities, one for each society extant, of which the objective question is “do they work?” Do they support the continued existence of their societies? ALL societies are violative of Rand’s “one fundamental right” to some extent or another. This is the objection that the Spoonerist Anarchists have – any violation of rights, they believe, is grounds to abolish the governing force of that society. It’s an unfortunate truth, though, that societies that are coercive and violative of rights are successful and powerful and can easily overrun anarchic collectives. Because all societies are violative of the “one fundamental right,” from my pragmatic perspective only those “rights” that are generally recognized and defended by the majority of the populace are protected. Thus the premise of the original post: A “Right” is what the majority of a population believes it is. Otherwise it is not protected and may as well simply not exist.

Because man has no innate moral instinct, we are dependent on philosophers to use reason to determine what rights are actual corollaries to that one fundamental right, and to convince the rest of us as to their existence. That’s an ongoing struggle of some significance these past two thousand years or more.

I live, I believe, in a society that is the most free and most advantageous to the individual of any that has existed since tribalism supplanted free-roaming family bands of hunter-gatherers. Still, many of the freedoms that we have are severely restricted; some for survival reasons, some for reasons of societal inertia. These freedoms are being further restricted as the society ages because of the human nature of some to acquire power for the sake of wielding it, and the human nature of others to submit to such power in a search for safety.

It is not enough to believe that there is a single objective standard of morality, based on the corollaries of the fundamental right to one’s own life. It is necessary to convince others of the “rightness” of that standard and those corollaries, and to inspire them to support and defend that standard against attack by others who hold different moralities as “right.” No society currently exists based on that ideal single objective standard, and I honestly think it will be centuries – if ever- before one might. In the mean time, I believe that the basic rights first enumerated by the Founders of this nation are as close as we’ve ever gotten, and that we need to convince more of our population that they are valid and need defending. Else they may disappear as if they had never been expressed, and they will mean no more to a survivor smashing open a human thigh-bone for the marrow than would the concept of the mathematical construct; i.

Reader Dr. Danny Cline stumbled across my early essay What is a “Right”? and had some objections to it. His opening comment:

Most of what you post on this blog seems to have the right goals in mind. However, your comments on rights, particularly what you claim about the source of rights:

“A “right” is what the majority of a society believes it is.”

and

“Like all “Rights of the People” the right to arms is a social construct – a declaration by a society of what is “right and proper,” and generally agreed to by the population.”

is a dangerously Marxist/fascist idea (really it is THE Marxist/fascist idea), which comes very close to a justification for those who claim to be working on behalf of the government to remove whatever “rights” (quotes in honor of yours) they want to, in the name of “the will of the people” or “majority rule.” The concept of “rights” being a “social construct” is exactly the kind of nonsense preached by the Hegelian/Marxist aristocracy in college humanities departments throughout the US, and is exactly the justification for the removal of gun (and other) rights. Furthermore, the “majority of a society” or a “population” cannot believe anything – groups have no mind. This you should know – the quote from which you gain the title of your webpage says it all here.

Whether someone can or does violate a right of yours (or mine) says nothing about the content of the right itself. It is a mistake (leading to your straying near the idea that whatever “government” does is OK – as long as it has the force to back it up) to consider the question of what is a right to be a question of what is rather than what should be. Rights are not at all like physical laws; they are answers to questions of morality, which science (the realm of physical laws) has never been able to answer. The fact that many people considered (or still consider) rape, murder, and slavery to be morally acceptable is irrelevant to the correct answers to questions of morality. Many people have incorrect beliefs regarding morality (or even regarding physical laws for theat matter), and moral questions are notoriously tricky to answer. (This is quite probably the reason some philosophers decide to eventually go with the gibberish about rights and morality being meaningless, only a result of an act of will, or a “social construct” – out of laziness.)

I’m a fan of Heinlein as well, but in the case of questions about rights and morality, Starship Troopers is not the correct novel to reference – at least not unless you.re a die-hard communist or fascist. The government presented therein is a fine example of a fascist/communist nanny-state, and its subjects/slaves are clearly worshippers of Nietzche’s “New Idol” – the state. The criticism of the rights I hold dear (and I believe from the rest of your site that you hold them dear as well) in your quote misrepresents some rights and is simply wrong on others. The “right to life” described in the Declaration of Independence is not a “right not to die”, a “right to be immortal” or anything as silly as that. It is simply a right not to be murdered – further such a right does not state that it is impossible that you could be murdered, just that it is WRONG. The fact that rights can be unjustly violated does not mean that they are meaningless or incorrect. Nor does the fact that we sometimes need to defend our rights mean that if we do not defend them or fail in our defense that they dissolve. The final quote on rights from Heinlein comes closest to revealing his mistake (and by extension yours):

“The third ‘right’ – the ‘pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives — but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”

All rights are simply universal conditions “which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore.” Even your Webster’s definitions make this clear:

1: qualities (as adherence to duty or obedience to lawful authority) that together constitute the ideal of moral propriety or merit moral approval

2: something to which one has a just claim: as a: the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled b: the interest that one has in a piece of property – often used in plural (mineral rights)

3: something that one may properly claim as due

The words “moral,” “just,” and “properly” are the key here. The claim doesn’t cease to be “moral,” “just,” or “proper” simply because it is violated. The beliefs of the evil and the wrong do not make a thing right.

I do appreciate that you hold to a (probably) unpopular belief just because it is right (the right to bear arms). However, you need to rethink the premises you use to justify your beliefs, as they actually justify the opposite of your beliefs. Oddly enough, all of the comments your readers left were far more on the money than your article on the question of the source of rights. John T. Kennedy and Don Linsenbach in particular are spot on as far as they go. Even Rob G, who comes to the opposite conclusion from yours at least gets part of what he says right:

“what barbarian invading forces did is no proof text on morality.”

even if he reaches the wrong conclusion.

Perhaps you are trying to argue a different point than what I am reading, and you actually agree with what I am saying. If so, or if I have missed subtle evidence of parody or satire, I apologize for bothering you. However, if not, I think what I am saying is an important point, indeed it is THE important point in the American Revolution and all of Ayn Rand’s writings. These rights are not things that can be removed; they are innate and inalienable; they are conditions of morality itself. If one TRULY believes that rights and morality are “socially constructed” the only sensible option is to join those in power (the always present “communist masters”) and claim your share of their unjustly gained loot.

I don’t believe this – I won’t DO this – and I think (I hope) the same is true of you.

My reply:

Excellent comments, very well put. The purpose of this essay was to illustrate the pragmatic vs. the ideal. Perhaps the wording “majority believes” should have more accurately been “majority shares a belief,” but I thought it fairly obvious.

If you live in a society that does not have a majority that shares your belief in any particular right, then from a pragmatic standpoint that right is not exerciseable. You have a right to not be murdered, but if the State will do nothing to protect you from being murdered, and in fact may be the perpetrator OF your murder, what value does your right to life have?

If you’ve read the current main page of the blog, then surely you’ve seen the link to QandO Blog’s discussion of the “reality” of rights. As others have said, rights are like money: the more we believe in them, the better they work. “Moral,” “just,” and “proper” are all values, and as such they vary from society to society. For the ancient Romans, it was moral, just, and proper to practice infanticide by exposing deformed newborns, a practice that is considered criminal today.

I live in a society that is based on a concept of individual liberty heretofore unseen in the world. This belief was severely marred by its simultaneous support for slavery. We fought a war over that dichotomy, and as a result it was freedom that won out.

The purpose of this essay (and it’s unusually short for one of my pieces because – as I noted – I was restricted in length) was to illustrate to readers that if they want to preserve the rights this society is based on, it requires active involvement – because those rights are protected only as long as we protect them.

The problem I have is that when people hear about “natural rights,” they think that they’re something that is truly “unalienable” – when this is patently untrue, as history illustrates in bloody detail.

As I concluded the piece, “If you want to keep your rights, it is up to YOU to fight for them. Liberty is NEVER unalienable. You must always fight for it.”

I think the evidence shows that we’ve largely stopped fighting for it, and we’re suffering a decay of our rights because of it. If the barbarians win, our rights are GONE.

If you’d like to discuss this further, I’m willing.

Well, he did, and his reply was as follows:

I’ll try to keep my comments about what we’d discussed as short as possible, while still making my point as clearly as I can. First, I do appreciate your interest in the pragmatic side of human rights and political rights, and indeed, one should never become complacent enough to believe that another (or a group) will not try to violate one’s rights. This is without a doubt, a wise caution and an important point to make.

However, the point I was trying to make is that although such a pragmatic view is important when dealing with the realities of those who may not have my (or your, or anyone’s) best interests at heart, is that it is also important not to view such pragmatic beliefs as the SOURCE of rights. A view rights as a “social construct” or as only what can be defended is a dangerous view to have, primarily because of where it leads. If one views the only true rights are those that can be defended, as it seemed to me (perhaps incorrectly) you were doing in your article, then an immediate following question becomes apparent. Namely:

1. “Is it wrong for a thug to do whatever he (or she) wants to me or anyone else if he (or again, she) can back their actions up with force?”

Also, if one views rights as simply a “social construct” that has no meaning apart from what is practiced in the culture in question, we are again immediately provided with a question (or perhaps several):

2. “Are (or were) the governments of communist China, North Korea,Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany wrong in controlling all aspects of their subjects lives?”

3. “Was (or is, as the case may be) slavery (or murder, or the forcible confiscation of an individuals property by a government) wrong?”

My suspicion here is that your answers to these three questions would match my own, namely:

1, 2, 3. “Yes it is (or was) wrong.”

to all three questions. However, if we view a true right as being only what can be defended or somehow tied to what a society in general believes or accepts, we are forced to accept the following answers:

1. “No, it is not wrong. Unless you can defend yourself, you deserve what you get.”

2. “No they are not wrong. (At least in the case of China and North Korea; perhaps they are wrong in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, but only after the fact.)”

3. “No, the people of the time believed it was OK, and so it was OK for them.”

This is not to say that this answers the question of what the ultimate source of a human’s rights are. This is a much trickier question, one that is almost certainly impossible to answer definitively, though we can use questions like the one above to ultimately eliminate certain potential answers. (Here we can eliminate “There are no rights so they have no source” and “The source of a human’s rights is the will or good nature of its community or government.) If a claimed source of rights leads to a statement that violates what we know of our rights and morality in general (and I do believe we CAN say we know certain things about both of these topics), that claimed source cannot be the true source.

Unfortunately, I seem to have failed in my attempt to keep my discussion of these matters short. I guess my main point is that although it is wise to consider what one needs to do to effectively defend one’s rights, these sorts of pragmatic questions should not be confused with the source of one’s rights in the first place. I guess my answer to all of these questions marks me as a moral absolutist (which I won’t deny). Though sometimes that is hard to admit, especially as it often is viewed as implying an intolerance of others (especially for trivial reasons) that I believe is wrong, the moral relativism and moral nihilism that are the other options lead to places – bad places – that are well known throughout history, even in the twentieth century. This difference between what is necessary to defend rights and the source of rights may seem an unimportant issue to you, and admittedly, it is kind of a fine point when we seem to agree on much else. I also could be mistaken in some of my points here – the study of morality is a difficult one and I am only an amateur philosopher (though I have done a fair amount of study on my own and I do have a pretty good background in logic from my training in mathematics). However, I don’t think I am wrong in any important point.

Dr. Cline, I believe, has a Doctorate in Mathematics but not in philosophy, and I don’t have a Doctorate in anything, but his questions have caused me to reexamine my thoughts on this topic, and in the wee hours of the morning the last few days I have composed and recomposed my response in my head. (Brilliantly, I’ll have you know. Only when I wake up again at 5:40AM, I seem to have misplaced the precise points I wanted to make, and the eloquent and compelling phrases with which I was to make them.)

This promises to be a rather long piece, (I know, so unusual for me!) so I have decided to split it into two posts. I will pre-date the second piece so that it appears immediately below this one, and it will follow along (if I’m lucky) sometime later this evening. (It’s up, concluded below.)

And y’all? I expect comments.

(Continued from Part I)

There appear to be at least two interdependent questions here: the “realness” of rights, and the source of rights. There is a third, associated question: the “rightness” of rights. Let me begin by stating that the original post that spawned all of this was a bit too simplistic. Yes, I did state that “A ‘right’ is what the majority of a society believes it is,” and I’ll come back to that, but I am in agreement with Ayn Rand in her statement:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.

That right is, in my opinion, REAL, but it can be and has been trampled, folded, torn, spindled, mutilated, and – worst of all – unrealized, for the overwhelming majority of Man’s existence upon the Earth.

The source of this right?

Reason.

Or Nature. Yaweh. Christ. Vishnu, Mother Gaia, Barney the Dinosaur. I don’t know, nor do I care overly much, but reason works for me.

I believe that right is “real” because I believe that – given the chance – average specimens of humanity will conclude through reason that they are of value (to themselves if no one else), and that their physical selves and the product of their labor belongs to them and not another. However, it is difficult to build a society based on this belief alone. (The AnarchoCaptialists think it can – and should – be done, but admit that they don’t know how.)

History shows us, though, that for most of our existence this right has not been exercised. The right has been unrecognized by the majority in the societies in which people lived – from the tribal all the way through today’s modern Marxist states. The strong ruled the weak, and owned, de facto if not de jure, both their lives and their production. Again, I state: If the society you live in does not have a majority that shares and defends a belief in your rights, you cannot successfully exercise those rights. As it pertains to Rand’s “right to your own life,” Heinlein wrote, “You cannot enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him.” Or, as the recent protest placard from Lebanon quoted Braveheart: “They can take our lives… but they can never take our Freedom.”

But the “live free or die” option wasn’t chosen very often, it appears, Spartacus notwithstanding. The majority of those societies were far too willing to accommodate.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

He and the other Founders may have held those “truths to be self-evident,” but for centuries if not millenia before they were neither self-evident nor true. In fact, even today those “self-evident” rights are not acknowledged in much if not most of the world. As Rand stated,

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.

Dr. Cline wrote:

Whether someone can or does violate a right of yours (or mine) says nothing about the content of the right itself. It is a mistake (leading to your straying near the idea that whatever “government” does is OK – as long as it has the force to back it up) to consider the question of what is a right to be a question of what is rather than what should be. Rights are not at all like physical laws; they are answers to questions of morality, which science (the realm of physical laws) has never been able to answer. The fact that many people considered (or still consider) rape, murder, and slavery to be morally acceptable is irrelevant to the correct answers to questions of morality. Many people have incorrect beliefs regarding morality (or even regarding physical laws for theat matter), and moral questions are notoriously tricky to answer. (This is quite probably the reason some philosophers decide to eventually go with the gibberish about rights and morality being meaningless, only a result of an act of will, or a “social construct” – out of laziness.)

I’m not a big fan of moral relativism, but I have studied history and I think this is the point at which Dr. Cline and I part philosophical company. I’ve quoted from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers lecture on “History and Moral Philosophy” on a number of occasions – Dr. Cline objects, in fact, to my selection from that book because:

The government presented therein is a fine example of a fascist/communist nanny-state, and its subjects/slaves are clearly worshippers of Nietzche’s “New Idol” – the state.

Yet I think he suffers from what Heinlein’s “Col. Dubois” points to as the flaw in our own society:

“Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives), but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man had a moral instinct.”

“Sir? I thought — But he does! I have.”

“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not — and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.

“But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.

I think Dr. Cline believes that man has an innate moral instinct.

The whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, “moral.” If the practice of slavery increases the chances for survival, then the society will practice slavery, and its members will stare at you as if you had three heads if you try to convince them that what they are doing is morally wrong. If the practice of slavery will result in the enslaving society being attacked and destroyed by the ones it enslaves, then slavery will be abandoned as not worth the effort or (if realized too late) it will fall because its morality failed. But when slavery becomes a survival-neutral activity, inertia will carry it long past the point at which it should be abandoned – because man has no moral sense. (Bear in mind that slavery was a common human condition until – as Sarah of Carnaby Fudge has repeatedly pointed out – Protestant Christians took up its abolition as a moral cause. It is still practiced in some places today.)

From a pragmatic point of view, if it works, it’s good. If it doesn’t work, it’s bad. Nothing else matters. An “incorrect belief regarding morality” means one that is detrimental to the survival of the individual and the society, nothing more. An example: the Indian practice of sati. In the Indian culture the widow of a man was expected to commit suicide by self-immolation either on her husband’s funeral pyre or separately, in a demonstration of her loyalty and devotion to her husband. In that culture, the wife’s existance was pretty much defined through her husband, and when he died she became a burden on her society. For apparently pragmatic reasons she was expected to kill herself, and for religious reasons in this specific, agonizing way. There is some evidence that not all incidents of sati were voluntary. This practice dates back to probably the 1500’s, but it was prohibited by the British in 1829.

Is it wrong for a woman to do that? Is it wrong for a society to expect it of her? The (probably apocryphal) story of its ending was one of conflict between two moralities – the Indian, and the British. The Brits declared that sati was no longer to be practiced, and the Indians protested that it was their honored and religious tradition. The Brits responded that it was their honored and religious tradition to hang people who burned women to death, so the next funeral pyre would be accompanied by a gallows, and if sati occurred, a lot of hangings would as well.

The practice of sati declined dramatically, but it still occurs occasionally – once at least as recently as 1987. There’s that moral inertia thing, illustrated. Another example? Muslim “honor killings” of women – another whole post (if not more) in itself.

My point is that Dr. Cline essentially argues that there are certain specific “true” real rights that are universal for all people at all times and places. He lists murder, rape, and slavery as examples of things that are universally immoral and violative of rights. He states:

All rights are simply universal conditions “which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore.” Even your Webster’s definitions make this clear:

1: qualities (as adherence to duty or obedience to lawful authority) that together constitute the ideal of moral propriety or merit moral approval

2: something to which one has a just claim: as a: the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled b: the interest that one has in a piece of property – often used in plural (mineral rights)

3: something that one may properly claim as due

The words “moral,” “just,” and “properly” are the key here. The claim doesn’t cease to be “moral,” “just,” or “proper” simply because it is violated. The beliefs of the evil and the wrong do not make a thing right.

Telling a murderer that he is violating your rights won’t stop him from doing it, and if he kills you is he not “taking away your right to life”? The question I have is: the claim to whom? Who do we go to with our claims to our proper rights? It isn’t God, obviously, because if so, He hasn’t made His annoyance felt at any of the more egregious mass violations of individual rights, not to mention the plebeian everyday ones. To the populace of the society that has perpetrated the violation of rights? Fat lot of good that will do, as historically they’ve been complicit in the violation.

“All rights are simply universal conditions ‘which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore’?” I don’t think that’s true, and I think human history illuminates that point with a million-candlepower floodlight. But as we’ve progressed through time, changes in technology and the advantages these changes have given us have allowed us the freedom to think and to develop that newest of concepts: The Individual Right. And technology has given us, as I detailed in Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them, the individual ability to defend those individual rights against infringement by others.

Dale Franks in his QandO Blog post Natural Rights? said:

If rights are natural, then why do they not arise spontaneously? Indeed, for rights to even exist for any appreciable amount of time, they have to be reinforced with a massive hedge of social, legal, and political buttresses. We employ thousands of individuals as police, lawyers, judges, and politicians. That seems to be a pretty complex life support system for something that’s natural.

There are, of course, societies that exist without this life-support system. Somalia, for example, is a country in which everything it is possible for people to accomplish with guns has been accomplished. The only “rights” that exist there are those that the inhabitants can defend by force. So, why, after government collapsed in Somalia and the country devolved into anarchy, didn’t the recognition of “rights” spontaneously arise?

—

Let’s say you and I lived in a state of nature. What stops me from killing you? You have no recourse to the protection of the law. No community of fellow citizens who are pledged to protect you. There’s just you and me in the forest, and I don’t want you there. Where are your rights now? What protection do they afford you?

What you have is the ability to defend yourself. If you’re lucky, the fear of your ability to protect yourself might deter me. It might not. But the only thing that keeps me from killing you and taking your possessions is your ability to defend yourself. Your “right” to live is irrelevant. The only “rights” you have in nature are those you can secure for yourself by force. Your “rights” certainly won’t prevent me from bashing you over the head with a rock.

That “(t)he beliefs of the evil and the wrong do not make a thing right” may be true, does not stop the tyrant from acting. The only thing that can protect you is if a majority of the populace agrees on what are or are not “rights” – in this case, the right to live – and the willingness of that majority to act to defend those rights. If both of us agree that killing the other is wrong, we’ve just formed a society in which the majority (all both of us) holds a common belief system. If not, one of us is likely to die – and there can be no “proper claim” filed in protest of that fact. Further, any protestation of the “wrongness” of the act is meaningless.

So, in answer to the question, “Is it wrong for a thug to do whatever he (or she) wants to me or anyone else if he (or again, she) can back their actions up with force?” I must reply that the answer is dependent on whether this action occurs within a society that deems such actions to be wrong. If so, yes. If not, the answer is not “no,” the question is moot. The answer to the question “Are (or were) the governments of communist China, North Korea, Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany wrong in controlling all aspects of their subjects lives?” is much easier. Those actions all took place long after the concept of individual rights was firmly established in our society. Yes. They are all wrong. But that fact didn’t stop those governments. The rights of those individuals were all violated by their own governments through the actions of individuals in those societies, and the majority of those societies did not act to stop those violations – so what good were their rights? If they believed in their individual rights, yet did not defend their individual rights, how is this pragmatically different from their not having those rights?

In answer to the question “Was (or is, as the case may be) slavery (or murder, or the forcible confiscation of an individuals property by a government) wrong?” – again, it is wrong by our standards of enlightenment – but that alone does not prevent the actions from occurring.

This, then, brings us to the question of the rightness of any particular right. As I quote Rand above, the only fundamental right is a man’s right to his own life. All others are its consequences or corollaries. Chris Byrne of AnarchAngel divides rights into inherent and constructed. Inherent rights, he says,

are those rights we posess by virtue of being sentient beings; constructed rights, are all other things, taken as rights, which are not inherent rights. They are rights by law, but not by nature

For example, inherent rights would include, among others:

• The right to not be attacked or killed out of hand by your fellow man.
• The right to own and hold property
• The right to defend ones life and ones property against others.
• The right to determine the course of ones life through free choice
• The right to be judged fairly by ones actions (that one’s a bit fuzzy)
• The right to think those thoughts that you wish to think
• The right to speak those words that you wish to speak; presuming they are not, in effect, actions infringing the rights of others.

Inherent rights cannot be taken, or limited; but by force, or willing consent.

Constructed rights would include the right to privacy, the right to vote, the right to marry (civily), and others.

Not a bad list, as every one of those “inherent rights” can be seen as a corollary to “a man’s right to his own life.”

Professor Randy Barnett devotes a chapter of his book Restoring the Lost Constitution to “Natural Rights as Liberty Rights.” In it, he discusses the difficulty of identifying all the Rights of Man, beginning the chapter with the words of James Irdell from the North Carolina ratifying convention, July 29, 1788:

[I]t would not only be useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up; because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurpation; and it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let any one make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.

Barnett argues that the reason no complete list of the “rights of the people” was included in the Constitution is precisely the reason given by Irdell: such a list would be impossible to construct. First off, you could never get any group of people to agree to them all, and second, the list would be endless, trailing off into absurdity. But the point I was making in What is a “Right?” was this:

This nation was founded on the belief in a certain set of rights.

Those rights are based on the foundation of certain individual liberties heretofore unpracticed by any other society.

That foundation (for want of a better source) is Rand’s single fundamental right, come to by the power of REASON.

These rights were codified into the founding legal document of our nation.

The preservation of these rights requires active participation in their defense by the majority of the populace – else, rightly or wrongly, they will cease to be protected and will vanish as if they had never been.

The day after I put up that first post, I found a quotation by Antonin Scalia that pretty much said it all in a paragraph:

To some degree, a constitutional guarantee is like a commercial loan, you can only get it if, at the time, you don’t really need it. The most important, enduring, and stable portions of the Constitution represent such a deep social consensus that one suspects if they were entirely eliminated, very little would change. And the converse is also true. A guarantee may appear in the words of the Constitution, but when the society ceases to possess an abiding belief in it, it has no living effect. Consider the fate of the principle expressed in the Tenth Amendment that the federal government is a government of limited powers. I do not suggest that constitutionalization has no effect in helping the society to preserve allegiance to its fundamental principles. That is the whole purpose of a constitution. But the allegiance comes first and the preservation afterwards.

I came to be an activist because I recognized that fact, just from looking at how the Right to Arms has been steadily chipped away. This has happened because much of the society has lost its “abiding belief in it.” It is hardly the only right so affected, enumerated or not. I’ve had this conversation before, as detailed in the post Engage, or Disengage? I’m at somewhat of a loss over what to do about it, other than to try my damnedest to educate people so that they see it, too, before things get too far out of hand. I call that “trying to teach the horse to sing.”

My objection to the position that Dr. Cline takes is that it encourages members of the society to disconnect. If you believe, as Dr. Cline believes, that “All rights are simply universal conditions ‘which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore'” then why would it be necessary to defend them? But I think that sooner or later you will discover that the result of such a belief is finding a tyrant violating your rights is pragmatically no different from not having them at all.

UPDATE, 3/21: Solarvoid posts on the topic from the “sunny rose colored Jesus glasses” perspective. (His words!) Good piece.

Or: Why I Am a ‘Gun Nut’

First, let me say that despite the source of the quote that names this blog, I am not an Objectivist. While I respect much of what Rand had to say, I hold that she, like all idealists, ignored the influence of reality on her model of ideal human behavior – even though it was obvious from the example of her own life that even she could not live up to her ideals. Nevertheless, Rand propounded many important concepts, such as these:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.

—

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.

—

It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin.

I concur with much of the above, but the last line I’ve got some issues with.

I’ve written before, and extensively recently, on the concept of “rights” and what they, in practice, are. My position is that a right is what a society believes it to be, where a “society” is defined as a group of people living in a the same geographic region who share a set of beliefs. Rand proclaims that the one fundamental right is “a man’s right to his own life,” yet that right has been unrecognized throughout most of human history. Those with power had all the rights, and power was defined as physical might. Rand’s ideal of “a right to his own life” is meaningless when those who wield power don’t recognize that right, and the individual himself cannot defend it against infringement. An excellent example of this is the medieval idea of droit du seigneur – the supposed right of a feudal lord to have sex with any vassal’s bride on her wedding night. But bear in mind: The guy with the sword (or the most sword arms behind him) pretty much has the “right” to have sexual relations with anyone who cannot defend themselves, or is not ably defended by others. Droit du seigneur may have been more myth than fact, but rape and pillage by rampaging barbarians, and later, invading soldiers certainly was factual, and with a far longer history.

Steven Den Beste once wrote his list of the four most important inventions in human history:

In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.

I think Steven is right in his emphasis on what are all communications technologies as being most important, because it is through the exchange of ideas that societies form. Like-minded people organize, others learn from an exchange of information and are able to associate with those with whom they agree. The development of communications technologies allows people from larger and larger geographic areas to associate with others of similar mind – from tribe, to village, to city, to state, to world.

The invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid 15th Century is responsible for the exchange of more ideas than probably any other in history until the advent of the Internet. For example, the spread of the knowledge and philosophy of the ancient Greeks can be traced to Italian printers who, needing something to sell, printed the works of the Greek philosophers – in Greek, and later in translation – for public consumption. And consume them they did.

But what does any of this have to do with weapons? (Other than their being used to subjugate others?)

I believe that there are three things crucial to the rise of individual freedom: The ability to reason, the free exchange of ideas, and the ability to defend one’s person and property. The ability to reason and the free exchange of ideas will lead to the concept of individual liberty, but it requires the individual ability to defend one’s person and property to protect that liberty. The ability to reason exists, to some extent, in all people. (The severely mentally retarded and those who have suffered significant permanent brain injury are not, and in truth can never be truly “free” as they will be significantly dependent on others for their care and protection.) The free exchange of ideas is greatly dependent on the technologies of communication. The ability to defend your person and property – the ability to defend your right to your own life – is dependent on the technologies of individual force.

Let us consider for a moment the history of the technologies of individual force. At base, there is simple muscle and fist, and one step above it, the ability to use a club or throw a rock. In this case the strongest and most physically adept get to make and enforce the rules. Generally of this group the smartest strong-man rises to the top, and with the aid of other willing strong-men they cow and control the output of weaker people by recruiting the strongest and killing those who will not yeild. The invention of early weapons such as the sword merely increased the separation of the enforcers from the enforced, as competence with weapons of this type requires extensive training. Give a strong novice a sword and face him against a physically weaker but experienced swordsman, and the novice will shortly be looking at his internal organs spilling from his abdomen. Peasants with pitchforks and scythes are no match against trained soldiers with swords, as history has illustrated repeatedly. Consequently the peasants supplied the labor to support the soldiers who spend their time practicing the skills needed to control the peasants. It’s a self-sustaining cycle, or it was for centuries.

And then, too, there is war – when groups of these elites fight each other over territory, or resources, or religion, or whatever other reason occurrs to them. In every war, it is the common people who suffer the most, as they are taxed to support the war effort, their property and crops are stolen or destroyed, starvation and pestilence ravage the land, and they and their families are raped and murdered by the invaders or the defenders or both. Again, history has illustrated this too – repeatedly, for centuries, even up to today.

The history of civilization stuck to this model for literally thousands of years until there was one significant change in the technology of individual force – the English longbow – and the strategy of its proper use (and believe me, strategic thought is every bit as much of a technology as the yew bow.) From The Medieval English Longbow:

From the thirteenth until the sixteenth century, the national weapon of the English army was the longbow. It was this weapon which conquered Wales and Scotland, gave the English their victories in the Hundred Years War, and permitted England to replace France as the foremost military power in Medieval Europe. The longbow was the machine gun of the Middle Ages: accurate, deadly, possessed of a long-range and rapid rate of fire, the flight of its missilies was liken to a storm. Cheap and simple enough for the yeoman to own and master, it made him superior to a knight on the field of battle.

Note that last line – “Cheap and simple enough for the yeoman to own and master, it made him superior to a knight on the field of battle.”

Here’s the Webster’s definition for “yeoman” as it relates to that sentence:

(O)ne belonging to a class of English freeholders below the gentry

Below the gentry – the aristocracy, or ruling class. The guys with the swords.

For the first time a simple peasant could be superior to a man trained at arms, armored and astride a horse. To be sure the longbow required a great deal of training and strength itself, and a single archer was no match for an army of knights, but a single archer could best several knights by the virtue of his ability to strike from a distance. However, the critical factor in the technology of the longbow was the need for massed, skilled firepower. Training began as early as seven years of age, and the law of England made it mandatory for all men and boys to train with – and own – the longbow. There were periodic competitions, and only the best were taken to war. Note, however, the striking difference between the top-down rule of the nobility – the knights who were armored and armed with sword, lance, and other contact-distance weapons – and the archers who were otherwise mere peons. But skilled peons, and peons skilled at killing knights. This fact meant that there was to be a significant shift in philosophy, due to man’s ability to reason, and the free exchange of ideas.

What did it mean to the peasantry when they provided the striking power of the army? No longer relegated to the pike, where the armored knight was king of the battlefield. When they held in their hands the means with which to kill the ruling class? (The ruling class of the other side, to be sure, but a man in armor is a man in armor….) And what did it mean to the ruling class? What did they discuss in their camps at night after a battle?

It meant that there was a shift in power beginning in England. The peasants could no longer be simply viewed as a resource and otherwise ignored, and they knew it.

In 1215 King John was forced by his Norman barons to sign the Magna Carta – this was before the acceptance of the longbow as a military weapon there, but important in its own right, laying down as a legal reality that the King was subject to the law, not superior to it. More importantly, the text of the Magna Carta was printed, distributed, and read aloud throughout England so that all English subjects could hear it. The information technology of the day was used to spread information so that those who could reason would think on it. And think they did.

In 1415 at Agincourt a small, weary, disease-ridden English army consisting of 5,000 archers and 900 men-at-arms – many of whom were suffering from dysentery – faced a French army of over 20,000 – about 10% heavy cavalry. A lot of strategic and tactical factors were involved in the English victory, but the fact remains that 5,000 longbowmen – commoners – decimated the flower of French chivalry that day. This lesson was not lost on the English people.

In 1642, after King Charles I proved himself to be a total disaster, the English people supported a revolt against him, and the English Civil War resulted in the execution of Charles – a rather shocking act to the nobility around the rest of the world. More to the point, a man barely more than a commoner himself rose to power through merit rather than heredity. Things were changing.

The English longbow had a significant political impact on both the nobility and the peasantry, increasing the power of the latter at the expense of the former. I believe that the longbow and the tactics of its use are responsible for the beginnings of the Western philosophy of Rand’s one, fundamental right – the right to one’s own life. But the longbow was not to last. It was superceded by the application of gunpowder to war, a technology that I believe was responsible for the true rise of a philosophy of individual rights.

For longbows to be effective in battle a massed concentration of bowmen was necessary, and those bowmen had to train from childhood. The advent of effective mobile artillery spelled the end of the longbowman, as cannon could decimate any formation of archers from extended range, and it could do the same to armored knights. The invention of the harquebus also spelled the end of the archer, for while the archer was able to kill or wound accurately out to over 200 yards, the arquebusier didn’t require years of training – any poor peon could be conscripted and taught to fire an arquebus in a few days, and then kill nobles and skilled mercenaries with it. The matchlock firearm was introduced early in the 15th Century and didn’t supplant the archer until the mid to late part of the century, but the firearm spelled the end of the armored knight. Wearable armor capable of stopping an arrow could be made, but no functional armor could be made to stop a bullet.

During that time the power of the firearm and its (relative) ease of use was taken advantage of, as the European nations, when not fighting and killing each other, used the new technologies of transport – the compass, the sextant, good maps, the lanteen sail – to explore and exploit the rest of the world. Firearms technology slowly advanced: the wheellock, the snaphaunce, the flintlock, the rifled barrel, improvements in gunpowder and projectile production. Functional useable handguns were developed, and lighter, more accurate long guns. Each of these developments made firearms more reliable, easier to use, and subsequently of greater lethality.

Where before war had been the playground of the ruling class and trained mercenaries, more and more commoners were conscripted into militaries to feed the grinder of war, and the exploitation of the New World and the East. Over the same period – the 15th through 17th Centuries, the study of philosophy was rekindled. Ancient Greek and Roman texts were published on the new printing presses and sold and discussed throughout Europe. Schisms evolved in the Catholic Church with Luther and Calvin. Protestants and Catholics went to war. Now, instead of battling over territory and resources, vast armies battled over Christianity. Plagues spread through Europe, brought by trade and exploration and spread by populations displaced by endless war, decimating those populations, and making the labor of the survivors more valuable to the (surviving) nobility.

Note, the firearm didn’t make war worse than it had been. Soldiers died on the battlefield as they always had. Death by gunshot is hardly more horrible than by sword, mace, spear or lance wound. People still died, in droves, from disease, from famine, and from being in the wrong place when the armies moved through. The difference now, largely, was that the armies were more and more made up of the people who in the not so distant past had merely been the spectators to (and victims of) the wars – conscripted and trained to operate the new technologies that could be learned in a few weeks, rather than over a lifetime.

And those who came home retained that knowledge, and spread it. The knowledge of how to be a pikeman in a pike square isn’t very useful to a farmer. The knowledge of how to load and fire a musket can be.

They had fought in religious wars. They had seen the merciless death of war and of starvation and disease. They had heard the spreading humanist ideas of the Greeks and Romans, and seen corruption in their Church and in their supposed nobility, and many of them had, quite simply, had enough. The New World offered an escape, the chance to go somewhere where they could have a right to their own lives, and many took it. They took with them the means with which to defend that right: the firearm. And they had much occasion to use it. The European wars followed them. The native locals were none too happy about their arrival in many cases, either. But over time the pressures of colonization abated, and time became available to tinker with inventions and ideas and philosophy.

The printing press as of 1750 was 300 years old, and much knowledge was available to those with the time and the wealth and the inclination to seek it out. Texts such as: The Ordinance of William the Conqueror, establishing the first modern separation of Church and State; the Magna Carta noted above; the Declaration of Arbroath wherein Scotland in 1320 claimed independence from England; Machiavelli’s The Prince – a cold-blooded and calculating look at how to rule effectively; the various works of Martin Luther and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and many more. There was time to reason, the ability to exchange ideas, and the means with which to defend ones person and property – and all of these were necessary to the rise of the power of the individual against the oppressive State. When England in fact became a force of oppression against the American colonies, this tripod became the support under which a people stood up and said “NO!” – and made it stick.

The firearm is the tool that makes any man or woman physically dangerous to the trained soldier. (Ask any Revolutionary-era Redcoat. Ask any soldier today in Iraq.) No other weapon is as effective at force-equalization. There is more than a little truth in the sales slogan, “God made man. Sam Colt made them equal.” Combine that lethality with rigorous training and formidable armies can be created. Instill in those armies an aberrant philosophical grounding – a coercive religion, a need for “living space,” a belief in racial superiority – and aggressive and immoral war will result. A fundamental belief in individual liberty, however, will produce government that fights only when it must, and quits when it believes itself safe. And it will produce an army that will fight with both ferocity and morality – as moral as war allows, at any rate. (Read The Jacksonian Tradition by Walter Russell Mead for more on this topic.) Further, a population that believes in individual liberty, and is armed to defend it, offers a formidable challenge to either invasion or internal usurpation.

Individual, private possession of firearms isn’t the only thing that permits individual liberty, but it is one of the essential components in a society that intends to stay free. An armed, informed, reasoning people cannot be subjugated.

So what do you do if you want to fetter a free people?

1) Remove their ability to reason.

2) Constrain their ability to access and exchange information.

3) Relieve them of the means with which to defend themselves and their property.

Which of these seems easiest, and how would it be best accomplished? And best resisted?

UPDATE:  Original JSKit/Echo comment thread available here, thanks to the efforts of reader John Hardin.