"I am sure that John Holbo would quarrel with some of these principles. But on the broad package that he thinks leads to national health care, we're probably in rough agreement. ... Yet I do not think that they lead to national health care!"This is a better argument technique because it takes the thunder out of the opponent's sails; even if now she can't score as many ideological points for her identity (she herself calls the libertarian position a "boring" one; one that only arise after her assessment of the way the world has ended up to be rather than provides the foundations for incontestable ahistorical value and truth).
Taxation should strive to equalize the personal cost of taxation among all members of society, not the dollar amount or the percentage of income. That is, it is appropriate for Warren Buffet to pay a higher percentage of his income in taxes for shared public goods than I do, because the personal cost of taking 25% of his income is much lower than the personal cost of taking 25% of mine.Perhaps the problem with the humanities/humanistic academia is that we are so invested in our discussion about first principles (and, like all people, we want to emphasize and discuss what we have expertise on) that we sometimes forget to do the grunt work of tracking down the economics, the nature of the world as it really is. Thus, while we may get our first principles right, half the time, we don't take the time to get an inadequate model of the world, and thus end up recommending programs (e.g., some marxist inspired tomfoolery) that don't work (of course, this would be more of a problem if people took us more seriously than they do). That's why teaching people to critically think for themselves is always going to be the most important thing we do in the humanities. We're better at getting cultural questions than economic questions right.
Societies should strive to organize themselves so that everyone in the society can, if they desire, acquire the means to provide their basic needs.
Societies have a right to organize themselves to improve the justice of their income distribution. That organization may include taxation. It may also include property rights, or outlawing behavior like blackmail.
Just income distribution is not just a matter of relative position, but also of how the income is acquired, and absolute need. I do not have any moral claim whatsoever on a dime of Warren Buffett's fortune, because I have a perfectly adequate lifestyle. I still wouldn't have any claim on his fortune if he suddenly got 100 times richer, provided that he acquired that money through means that we regard as licit.
People have no obligation to perform labor for others. I may not force a surgeon to save my mother at gunpoint. (To be sure, I might. But society would justly punish me for doing so.)This, in my view, should not really be a first principle, but, as Megan aptly states elsewhere simply a "contingent, evolving arrangements that happen to work really, really well for encouraging many sorts of beneficial ...activity." The reason that people don't have an obligation to perform labor (if that is true) for others would only be because that arrangement more often, given the way that government works in the real world, leads to more aggregate happiness for the parties concerned. I would in principle, be certainly fine with forcing a surgeon at gunpoint to save my mother if I could not get him/her to agree through any other means. The only problem with this principle is its real-world application in practice (allowing people with guns to force doctors to do things would probably end up being a bad deal on the whole, thus the government prudently, though not "rightly" or "justly," limits the practice).
God is supposed to be infinitely perfect and lacking in nothing. But, suppose that I (or anything else) exist apart from God. If so, God is lacking all that I am. In other words, my existence apart from God diminishes what He has and thus entails He is less than infinitely perfect. However, if I (and everything else) am part of God, then this would lead to pantheism. Pantheism, to be properly technical, seems completely nuts. So, it would seem that if I exist apart from God, then God (assuming He exists) would not be perfect.Here's what I've never understood about pantheism: if everything is God, then why does the concept matter? Given pantheism, can't we just speak of the
...the devout are not exactly holding their collective breath. For the most part, they do not believe that God exists on the basis of any argument. How they know that God exists, if they do, is itself unknown—the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place.Indeed many devout will tell you that arguments aren't needed, and that the existence of God is self-evident. Andrew himself says this in his dialogue with Sam Harris. Arguments only exist in order to try and convince infidels, and becoming devout never entails a rational epiphany based on a valid logical argument or testable evidence.
Pittacus: "Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him."Major world religions have similar sayings.
Thales: "Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing."
Sextus the Pythagorean: "What you wish your neighbors to be to you, such be also to them."
Isocrates: "Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others."
Epictetus: "What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others."
Epicurus: "It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, agreeing 'neither to harm nor be harmed'."
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.Building on the above ideas, J.D. Tuccille writes:
Until pot-smokers and gun owners and low-taxers and sexual minorities recognize that liberty is indivisible and that we're all in this together, we're going to be picked off piecemeal by government officials all too happy to exploit our mutual antagonisms.
It comes down to the same thing: When liberty is under attack, everybody is at risk. But that's not what the politicians and inspectors and tax collectors and police officers say, of course. No, they're all too happy to tell you that the queers next door are a threat to your way of life, or that the gun nuts are a public danger, or that the tax dodgers are greedy and not doing their fair share, or the store keepers are running amuck without entangling red tape, or that the pot heads are lazy parasites who will corrupt your kids.
But once the politicians and inspectors and tax collectors and police officers are done with the queers, they'll happily shift their sights to the gun nuts, then to the tax dodgers, the store keepers, and then the pot heads, and ...
Where were you planning to hide? Forget about it. Because you're some kind of menace, too, and you'll be fresh out of allies if you don't realize that the freedom of people you don't care very much about is just as important as your own.
The sort of people who make up the political class -- the control freaks of the world -- are experts at divide and conquer. They have all sorts of reasons why you should be glad that somebody else is being hemmed in by laws and threatened with prison. Those people are bad -- until it's you who's so bad. What the control freaks will never tell you is that they'd be entirely unable to impose those draconian laws and threats if you'd ally yourselves with those different folks and their peculiar interests to protect their liberty and your own at the same time.
You don't care about your neighbor's gun collection and he doesn't give a damn about your pot farm? So what? If you help each other out, everybody wins. If you don't, you'll both end up losing something you want, or else hiding it in the shadows and hoping for the best.
Keep that in mind the next time a politician promises to protect you from bogeymen who look an awful lot like the pleasant couple who live down the street. Maybe it's time to knock on their door and talk about an alliance of convenience.
Because you're not going to stay free if the only liberty you care about is your own.
It is a hard thing, being right about everything all the time. Nobody likes a know-it-all, and we wait for the moment when the know-it-all is wrong to insist that he never really knew anything in the first place. The know-it-all, far from living in smug superiority, has the burden of being right the next time, too. Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography by the British journalist Richard Reeves, “John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand." The book’s subtitle, meant to be excitingly commercial, is ill chosen; a firebrand should flame and then die out, while Mill burned for half a century with a steady heat so well regulated that it continues to warm his causes today—“Victorian Low-Simmering Hot Plate” might be closer to it.The whole thing is worth reading.
Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind. He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of terrorism; argued for teaching Arabic, in order not to alienate potential native radicals; and opposed adulterating Anglo-American liberalism with too much systematic French theory—all this along with an intelligent acceptance of the free market as an engine of prosperity and a desire to see its excesses and inequalities curbed. He was right about nearly everything, even when contemplating what was wrong: open-minded and magnanimous to a fault, he saw through Thomas Carlyle’s reactionary politics to his genius, and his essay on Coleridge, a leading conservative of the previous generation, is a model appreciation of a writer whose views are all wrong but whose writing is still wonderful. Mill was an enemy of religious bigotry and superstition, and a friend of toleration and free thought, without overdoing either. (No one has ever been more eloquent about the ethical virtues of Jesus of Nazareth.)
All of which makes trouble for a biographer. Every time we turn a corner, there is Mill, smiling just a touch too complacently at having got there first. Admiration for intelligence and truth easily turns into resentment at the person who has them; Aristides the Just was banished from Athens because people were fed up with hearing him called Aristides the Just.
Well, with all due respect while Mill was in many ways the greatest of liberals, there was quite a bit he wasn't right about. He was, for one thing, a supporter of imperialism and the civilizing mission of Europeans in Asia and Africa. And it's not quite accurate to say that he believed in "votes for the working class". The fact is he wanted to dilute the expansion of the francise by giving the economic and political elite extra votes: if your smart or rich, he thought, you should have more votes than the average person. So, a great man, but not right about everything.
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