#45: "And Everybody Hates the Jews"

One of the stanzas in Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” has the following lines:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,

And the Catholics hate the Protestants,

And the Hindus hate the Muslims,

And everybody hates the Jews.

Ah, too true. But periodically someone feels compelled to ask, Why is it that everyone hates the Jews? And many intriguing and ingenious explanations have been offered, some more attractive than others. I confess that I don’t have a new one, just a suggestion on dealing with causal explanations.

There seems to be a compulsion in this as in many other phenomena to look for a single cause, and this is often an unwarranted and premature methodological assumption. It really seems to be so in the case of anti-Semitism. Let’s just take the case of European anti-Semitism for starters. We will see that there are many, many converging causes, rather than just one.

There seems little doubt that one part of this hatred has both its origins and its historical support in the Christian churches, first in the Roman church and later in the Protestant churches (Luther, for example, was an enthusiastic and vigorous anti-Semite). Of course, there are a number of sub-explanations as to why the churches should have gone down this path, but that’s not on the agenda right now.

But Christianity has yielded to secularism in Europe to a surprising extent, and the Churches have backed away from rabid, frothing, fulminating public anti-Semitism. They have managed to replace that honest, explicit up-front in-your-face Jew-hatred with the far more acceptable stealth hatred of moral outrage in the face of Israeli self-defense. The churches tell us over and over again that they “have nothing against the Jews,” it’s the horrible Israeli Nazi-like “oppression” of the poor Palestinian victimized people that they simply cannot stand by and tolerate.

Oddly, they have had no trouble tolerating the extermination of six-million Jews. And they now have no trouble tolerating the human rights abuses in each and every Arab state. They have no trouble tolerating the human rights abuses of the Chinese or of the Indonesians or of the North Koreans, not to mention the Socialists of South America or of Cuba. But that aside, the notable fact is that anti-Semitism is alive and well in Western Europe, even as there are virtually no Jews living there any more at all. Hitler vowed to make Europe Judenrein and he succeeded to a large degree. What this means is that we really must look for more causes than the traditional Christian weekly dose of pulpit venom.

It’s not difficult to find additional causes, especially when the end effects harmonize with the historical Christian cultural inheritance.

First, the assimilated Jews in Poland and in Germany were the objects of envy by the gentile populations, and the reason is simply that by and large they tended to do better. Whatever the socio-economic reasons, where they were allowed to compete, they did better. Many of them entered the professions, many of them succeeded very well in business and finance. Another reason to hate.

Second, where they were an immigrant population, as they were in Austria, coming there from the shtetls of Russia and other points east, they posed the same sort of ghetto problems (absent violent crime) that poor immigrant populations do everywhere. Yet another reason to hate.

Third, the Europeans between the wars suffered the most devastating depression ever witnessed. Politicians took advantage of the already existing, Church supported anti-Semitism to find scapegoats as a distraction. We immediately think of Hitler in this regard, but the strategy was a time-honored one. The cynical Karl Lueger (der schone Karl – “beautiful Karl”), also an Austrian, famous mayor of Vienna at the turn of the century had already used it effectively. Still another reason to hate.

In the post-war more recent history, more reasons still emerge.

The Europeans hate the U.S.A.. There are a number of reasons, but primarily because they are protectorates of the U.S.. The U.S. has proven to be richer, stronger, and more productive on every meaningful measure. The U.S. was further the rescuer of Europe during both the world wars, and was responsible for the economic recoveries of both France and Germany after WW II. No good deed goes unpunished. Given that the Europeans, particularly the French, have such a fragile amour-propre, it should come as no surprise that it has sent an endless barrage of impotent invective towards the new world. The poor French have had nothing to brag about since Napoleon and even he disappointed in the end. In recent years, their only export has been the characteristically empty bloviated rubbish of “post-modernism,” most of which originated with the Czech writer, Friedrich Nietzsche (the Germans claim him, but he himself insisted that he was not German, but descended from Czech aristocracy). Sure, I know, they also have cheese and wine.

And if the Euros hate the U.S., they feel compelled to hate Israel, since the U.S. is Israel’s only supporter. Of course, this is not a difficult job for the Euros, since they already hate Jews – all they have to do now is cloak their anti-Semitism under a veneer of outraged moral sensibility. Hardly a reach for a population trained in sanctimony by a church in which it no longer believes.

If one adds to this the megalomanic machinations of Chirac, close friend and under-the-counter beneficiary of Saddam Hussein, one sees the Euros waging a proxy war against the U.S. by undermining their ally, Israel, in the middle east, while at the same time currying favor with their energy suppliers, the oil rich Arab potentates of the middle east.

Europe has had a kind of festering love-affair with the Arab middle east since the mid nineteenth century, when they thought of them as “Orientals.” The Arab middle east was one of their favorite holiday tourism destinations and “Orientalism” was an extremely popular style in art (my own favorite painter of the genre is Jean-Leon Gerome) and decoration. In particular, they found a “romance” in the “primitivism” of their middle-eastern neighbors. This sensibility is clearly evident in the writings of T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” but it can even be found in the U.S. in the 20^th C ex-patriate writer Paul Bowles.

But if one adds to this erotic fascination the fact of Arab oil; and if one keeps in mind the endemic Christian anti-Semitism, the Arab hatred of the Jews is just one more excellent reason for contemporary European to (once again) hate the Jews.

Are there more reasons? Of course, there are.

As Europe’s faith in a Christian God became increasingly pro-forma, the appetite for religion found its sustenance in socialism. Socialism is intrinsically both atheistic (in the supernatural sense) and international. Israel, on the other hand, was ab initio a religious state and intensely nationalistic. Two more reasons why the Euros hate the Jews.

The fact that Israel’s founders were by and large themselves socialists and the fact that they actually attempted to create a democratic socialist state would suggest that the Euros should think of them as poster-children for socialism. Not so.

While many Jews were involved in the initial stages of 20th C European socialism, they soon found out that their co-conspirators would soon be only too happy to collude in their murders. Russia, while not Europe, captures the socialist-communist attitude towards Jews: few were more rabid Jew-murderers than Stalin. And, after all, Hitler was a socialist, albeit a national one, and look how friendly he was to the Jews.

And, finally, while Israel began as socialist experiment, it has found, as has every other socialist trial, that socialism simply does not work. The kibbutzes are increasingly disappearing or being converted into for-profit cooperatives. Rather than being the poster-child for socialism, Israel is a poster-child for the failure of socialism.

In brief, there are many, many reasons why the Euros hate the Jews. And to this we could probably add more, for why, say, the British hate the Jews, why South Americans hate the Jews, and so forth. Interestingly, there seems to be very little Asian anti-semitism.

An anti-Semite would say: that’s because they don’t know them yet!

#44: Absolute Values (Again)

A couple of my friends have expressed discomfort with my insistence that morality is no more than preference. While I have addressed this issue already in prior posts, it seems important enough to take one more run at it. Let me approach it this time by way of a couple of purely logical points.

I

Many years ago, a philosopher named Antony Flew identified what he called a logical “misdemeanor.” He didn’t give the misdemeanor a name, but he described it in a couple of paragraphs. I have always felt that this misuse of logic deserved much greater emphasis than it has received, and for this reason I have given it a name of its own. I call it, for reasons that will become apparent, the “No-True-Briton-Move” (NTBM).

The NTBM capitalizes on a logical ambiguity present in ordinary language. The syntax of a declarative sentence does not by itself reveal whether the sentence is being intended as an empirical truth or as a stipulative definition. For example, the sentence “All Britons drink tea” could be an empirical generalization, on the one hand, or a stipulation with regard to the meaning of “Briton,” on the other. This ambiguity can be used in a deceptive manner, hence Flew’s referring to it as a “misdemeanor.” We can see the misdemeanor at play in the following elaboration.

Let us imagine an ambitious young “social scientist” who has designed a study on the tea-drinking habits of Britons (supported lavishly, of course, by the public purse!). His working hypothesis is: All Britons drink tea. His methodology is simple; he has defined “Briton” by the possession of a valid British passport and has accumulated a small army of undergraduates to travel out into Britain everywhere, even into the remotest regions, knocking on doors, and interviewing the inhabitants. “Do you possess a British passport,” they ask, and if the answer is yes, they follow up by asking whether the person drinks tea, and recording the response.

Imagine further that the study is completed, all the responses tabulated, compiled, and statistically analyzed, AND, to the delight of the International Tea Cartel, it turns out that all the interviewed Britons do drink tea! Our social scientist concludes that his empirical hypothesis has been confirmed, his promotion assured, his career guaranteed, and his grant acquiring ability significantly enhanced. He expects, not without reason, that he will soon be invited to pledge for the man-made global warming fraternity.

Imagine finally, however, that just as our ambitious social scientist is happily about to board his plane bound for home at Harvard, a lone figure comes running after him waving a valid British passport and screaming “I drink COFFEE!” At which point, our social scientist replies coolly, “Then, you’re no true Briton,” and flies off into the happy skies. This should be very puzzling, since an empirical generalization is in principle falsifiable by even one contrary case!

What happened? Our social scientist converted what was his hypothesis from an empirical generalization into a stipulation. This meant that he abandoned his initial experimental criterion for being British (the passport) and replaced it with drinking tea. He was able to do this, because the English sentence “All Britons drink tea” has no syntactical indicator showing which of the two it is intended to be (though the presence of the word "true" in his response should certainly raise a flag). His shift allowed him to ignore the contrary case and to make his generalization immune to any further evidence. This is cheating.

That’s our first logical point. I will apply it to “morality” in due time, but for the moment, please be patient as I deal with the second logical point.

II

This point is famously due to David Hume and in philspeak it is summarized as “Y’ can’t get an ought from an is.”

The point is both terribly simple and terribly effective.

When we have an empirical claim, a claim about the actual world, that needs justification, we have two and only two expedients at our disposal: we can use deduction or we can use induction. That’s all there is. And, in addition, the best we can hope for from our justification is an increase in the probability of the claim in question.

But Hume adds a further clarification to the process of justification, namely, that the proposition being justified be of the same kind as the propositions doing the justifying.

The propositions doing the justifying are limited to being ones stating facts. Only facts can be used to justify. “Facts” are existing states of affairs. Thus, “Herbert (the Briton) drinks tea,” states a fact if and only if that sentence is true.

BUT, “Everyone ought to honor his mother and his father” does NOT state a fact about the world in any way at all!

This is signaled by the substitution of the word “ought” for the word “is.”

And what this means is that the justification of moral sentences is impossible.

Repeating why this is: 1) only facts can be used to justify, 2) the justified must be of the same kind as the justifying, and 3) moral sentences are not statements of fact. Therefore, 4) moral sentences cannot be justified.

To be completely fair, moral sentences can be justified by appeal to other moral sentences. The problem is that such justification can never be linked in any persuasive way to the actual world, the world of facts. In brief, such justification is ultimately either without any foundation or merely circular.

III

Now we can apply point one to morality.

Both in nature (the world of facts) and in morality (the world that “ought” to be) we find generalizations. In nature, our best generalizations are what we call “laws of nature” (of which the law of gravity is a paradigm example). In morality, we have our paradigm examples in the ten commandments (“Thou shallt not …”). Please note that the “shallt nots” are simply archaic versions of moral generalizations: “No one ought to do …”

Notice first that there seems to be a similarity in the ways we come to the generalizations in each area. In the case of nature, say gravity in particular, we measure the rate of fall in different places and under different conditions and then generalize the result: a freely falling body accelerates at a rate of 32’ per second for every second that it falls. This is called an inductive generalization, and the most important thing to notice is that such a generalization remains vulnerable to even a single counter-example. This means that all it would take to invalidate the law of gravity would be one single instance of a freely falling body accelerating at some speed other than 32’ per second.

Our moral generalizations also begin with observations. We note that most if not all people are against generalized coveting of neighbors’ wives; hence we generalize “Thou shallt not…thy neighbor’s wife.”

BUT, and this is a BIG but, there is a difference between the empirical and moral generalizations. This difference is that while the first are always still vulnerable to counter-example, the latter are treated as if they are not.

IF moral generalizations were treated like empirical generalizations, they should FALL as soon as one of us says, as Satan said to God, “thanks, but no thanks.” Instead of that, what happens is that the moral generalizations are treated as immune to counter-example. How is this done? Why is it done?

The how is easy to answer: the NTBM! A logical misdemeanor that capitalizes on the ambiguity of modal intent in the declarative sentence.

Why is it done? So that the generalization can be used to bludgeon people into what a majority thinks is the proper way to behave.

Once the NTBM has been implemented, generalizations that were empirical become what the moralists like to call “absolute.”

“Absolute” generalizations are the moral equivalent of stipulative generalizations: these generalizations cannot be rejected because we say they can’t!

IV

And so, my friends, this is why there are no “absolute” moral principles, rules, values, commandments, etc..

Addendum

Very briefly, just a review of why God’s existing would make no difference to the moral picture at all.

If, indeed, God did exist, then this would be no more than one more fact about the world. If God were a natural entity, then it would be an additional natural fact; if God were a supernatural entity, then it would be a supernatural fact. Each of these possibilities carries with it insurmountable difficulties, in particular that I doubt any sense can be made of the notion of a “fact” outside of nature.

All the terrible conceptual difficulties in these notions aside, however, this one final point suffices: as long as we are considered free, God’s existence would be irrelevant to our moral issues and dilemmas.

The reason is that we can freely choose to do what God and others consider evil. When we do so, God’s only recourse is power. God can punish us. But this just makes God a very powerful, perhaps infinitely powerful, enemy of the free man.

This surely cannot be what the devout have in mind, eh?

#43: Persuasion and Justification

The psychology of titling is such, I think, that when one constructs a conjunctive title, one tends to put the “more important” conjunct first. Thus you might expect that I would have entitled this piece rather “Justification and persuasion.” But that would be because you begin with an automatic bias in favor of justification inherited from an ancient invidious comparison between the two.

The rot began among the Socratic Greeks, and probably within the writings of Plato himself, who distinguished between philosophers, the good guys, and the sophists, the bad guys. The sophists were itinerant teachers and lecturers who taught the skills of rhetoric for pay. “Real” philosophers contemptuously dismissed them for teaching not “the Truth,” but the skill of “making the worse argument appear the better.” Nonetheless, some of the sophists were very sophisticated indeed and commanded even Plato’s attention and respect. The distinction between “mere cleverness” and “truth” has persisted, however, through the millennia, as has the distinction between persuasion and justification.

Since justification plays such an important role in science, both in the form of induction and deduction, and since science was extended to social, political, and moral issues in the exuberant “scientistic” enthusiasm of the 18^th century, we have come to expect justification in arenas where it simply does not apply.

Conservatives have foolishly accepted the justification challenge in the form laid down by progressives, a challenge they were doomed to lose from the outset. Progressives, on the other hand, derived an equally foolish consequence from the conservative inability to justify. Progressives believed (and still believe) that the inability to justify entails an absence of a “right” to defend!

They reason in this way: You have a right to defend your values or way of life only if you can justify your “belief” that it is better than your opponents. Of course, there is shrewd calculation in this foolishness, since it is the intention of the progressives to paralyze the conservative.

The tacit assumption of both sides is the same as that of the 18^th century “enlightenment” scientism, namely that all of human issues are susceptible of “rational” determination.

As I have written earlier, this is simply false. Values are no more than personal preferences, no different in kind from culinary preferences. They are not susceptible to rational determination because they are not strictly speaking beliefs at all. They are rather emotive and behavioral dispositions. In ordinary language, we call these dispositions “preferences,” and that is how I will refer to them. Any attempt to derive either a general principle or a particular prediction is always subject to rejection.

The progressive would like to be able to generalize from individual human judgments, beliefs, and actions, and then to force regularity on people by means of those generalizations. The problem is that the respondent is clearly entitled to say no. Perhaps the case in question is slightly different or perhaps he has just changed his inclination. He doesn't have to defend his response! De gustibus non est disputandum. I’ll adapt this to read: “there’s no disputing preferences.”

This is truly a Solomonic resolution of the impasse between conservatives and progressives: they both gain something and both lose something. The conservative loses the claim that his preferences have absolute justification (say “divine”), which is welcomed by the progressive; the progressive, on the other hand, loses any basis for demanding it of him, which is welcomed by the conservative.

There are three basic reasons why the demand for justification continues to be so readily tolerated where it does not belong.

The first reason is the one already mentioned, namely that our enlightenment tradition has promoted “reason” (in some counterfeit of “science”) as the self-evident panacea for all human ailments. We still suffer the side effects of this panacea, which belongs rather in the pharmacopeia of the naturopath, than in the resources of a genuine social physician.

The second reason is justification does have a legitimate role within the context of purely legal decision making, this being so because the context supplies the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one outcome is “right” and another “wrong.” In this respect, justification, like law and like logic, have game-like qualities. Progression towards a destination in each of these is governed by rules accepted by the participants.

The third reason brings the discussion to full circle. The third reason is that both induction and deduction are frequently used within the context of persuasion.

If I wish to move you over to my side of an issue, there seem to be at least two ways in which I can approach the process. I call the first one the utopian one, and in its finest form (say the Spinozistic one), it attempts to take you from utterly unassailable axioms through deductive steps to an unavoidable conclusion. This is axiomatic wisdom and ethics. It doesn’t work as persuasion, if only because it is always possible for the respondent to have recourse to Moore’s device if he doesn’t like the theorem reached by this method.

The other, and most common method, is that of seeking assumptions, beliefs, and preferences in the respondent’s warehouse of attitudes, not even necessarily ones that one shares, which have the salutary effect of either indicating inductively or entailing deductively the proposition one is marketing. This the pragmatic approach to persuasion which is not inherently rational, but which might use rational as well as non-rational devices for a strictly causal objective: giving a person a disposition to go our way. In the utopian method, an error of inference disqualifies the result; in the pragmatic method, errors of inference are easily dismissed.

But more to the point, persuasion is the real-world method of managing human relations, not Socratic dialectic. In the real world, when faced with counter-intuitive argumentation, non-brainwashed respondents dismiss the results whether or not they can see clearly where the fallacy lies. Intuition trumps argumentation. As Hume put it so beautifully in his footnote on Berkeley, “all his arguments, … admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause … momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion…”.

The so-called progressive hopes to change the population in such a way that this survival adaptive mechanism in the human animal is neutralized and he becomes easy prey for the specious argument and counter-intuitive conclusions. The progressive wants to create a world in which “justification” determines belief, not persuasion.

Let’s reverse the nasty trend that originated in that much over-rated and mis-named century, the “Enlightenment,” and encourage those around us to return to their natural and spontaneous preferences, letting them know that these need no defense.

#42: "Natural" Rights, Again

What are Natural Rights?

I

This is a subject I have not researched at all, though it must have an enormous literature. Not knowing this literature, however, may actually be an advantage, since so much of that literature must inevitably consist of self-important bafflegab. The reason I say this lies in my “naturalism.” The familiar meaning of “naturalist” is that of a person devoted to the scientific study of nature. I’m clearly not one of those. The second, rarer, use of the term is for a philosopher who believes that there exists nothing beyond nature. I am one of those. So, what, in particular, does this metaphysical view entail.

The first and obvious entailment is that there are no “super”-natural entities, and this, sadly, includes God. I’m not sure, though, that faith in the form of non-rational belief does not still allow God to be non-rationally believed in. This is a difficult question and requires much time and reflection. The genuine benefits of civilized God-belief to an evolved culture make me wish quite fervently that room can be made within the modern “first” world for a benevolent God (which, to make my biases clear, I take the Judaeo-Christian one to be). Is it possible that only bad faith can allow both rational and non-rational belief to exist within the same person? I suppose so, but in all honesty I’m simply not sure. Thus, following the Cartesian principle, I choose to suspend both rational and non-rational belief on this question, at least for the moment.

The second, and possibly more important, entailment is that there are no non-natural moral properties!

That there are such properties has been held by philosophers as eminent as G.E. Moore and the German Nicolai Hartmann. The view is usually called “Moral Intuitionism” because it necessarily holds that since there are “non-natural” properties, human beings must be endowed with a special faculty (“Moral Intuition”) for perceiving them. On this doctrine, human actions have characteristics or properties not accessible to our commonly agreed-upon sense-organs, but do, however, possess, in addition to those sense-organs, the ability to perceive the (non-natural) properties of “goodness” and “badness.”

Our ordinary language seems to support such a view. We do, for example, speak of a “sense” of humor and it is true that like color or smell it is impossible to explain to a person without the requisite sense what the property in question is like. It isn’t a long reach to making a similar argument for special moral qualities (and special associated “sense”) or aesthetic qualities or, for that matter, religious ones.

Notwithstanding, I’m not convinced that these facts force us to conclude that there are “qualities” in actions which are not a part of nature. What, you might well ask, does it take to be a “natural” quality?

I suggest that that it means that a quality is causally linked to the entire system of objects and properties a large part of which human beings share perceptually. Perceived “redness,” for example, is a “natural” property because it has a physically definable correlate in the form of wavelengths of light between 5000 and 7000 angstroms, and those wavelengths of lights are capable of being affected by other physical existents. “Redness,” thus, is a member in good standing of the community of causally linked natural existents. “Goodness,” in contrast, has no physically definable correlate, and is thus not a “natural” property.

We can conclude from this one of two things: either 1) there are more things in heaven and earth (or at least earth) than we literally perceive, or 2) that while we speak as if there are, this is at most metaphorical speech. I lean to the latter option, thinking that what is actually occurring here is no more than an expression of some common human psychological traits rooted within a tiny disposition towards benevolence. I follow Hume on this matter. It is in this sense that I am a “naturalist.”

II

It also follows from this position that there are no “natural rights.”

The reason is that “rights” are not matters of fact, they pertain to the world of obligations. We usually express this in classes on ethical theory as a distinction between “is” (fact) and “ought” (obligation). Facts are said to be “objective,” i.e. they “hold” independently of human perception or judgment, while obligations are, at the very least, undecided as to status. Being a “naturalist,” I hold that they are not objective in the above sense, that they are fictions, often useful fictions, but fictions nonetheless. They are objective, of course, as fact about what human do in their societies, but this does not make them objective as facts that contain our obligations (outside the scope of a society).

So, what is a right?

To the best of my ability to define, a right seems to be no more than a contractually based promise of service from a society to individuals, whether citizens or others. It resembles, to some extent, the promise that is made by an Insurance company when, for example, one purchases automobile insurance. The company pledges to do something specified in the contract should something else specified in the contract happen to one’s car. Insurance is a promise to perform under certain circumstances; rights are promises to perform under certain circumstances. Understood as promises, rights necessarily involve a promissor and a promissee.

“Rights” are conferred on individuals, the promissees, by a state, the promissor. While the State is not a person and there might be a cavil about a non-person making a promise, we need only remember Louis XIV’s famous remark, l’etat c’est moi. In at least that case, the state was personified in a single person, and it would appear there was no problem with the State promising.

In the most common cases, rights are conferred only on adult citizens, but there is no reason in principle why a state should not confer rights on non-adults or non-citizens as well. Not long ago, children were extended the right to sue and, indeed, Left-wing loons have been recently suggested that rights be conferred on non-humans as well as humans. The animal rights people have been suggesting that animals also be given the right to sue. I don’t know whether they intend the right to extend to insects and/or microbes. Time will tell.

Rights as such seem to emerge directly from social contract theory, the idea that societies gain their cohesion and legitimacy from a contract made within a long forgotten “state of nature” in which every man’s hand was against every man, and “the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The original “deal” is thought as having been an agreement to give up individual clubs and pointy sticks in exchange for centralized protection. I guess that’s where the cosa nostra got the idea of selling protection.

Most people are pretty sure that that fabled meeting never actually took place, though I do imagine it vividly as happening in a sun-dappled, wooded clearing, with neanderthally looking people emerging slowly and suspiciously from the surrounding shadows, clutching their pointy sticks. If it didn’t happen, it sure should have. It would make a great movie, and I have some great suggestions for the casting (for another time).

The point, however, is that that protection deal (whether it happened or not) is, as it were, the first right: You have a right not to be poked with a sharp stick or bludgeoned by another. WE, the State, promise you this!

But in that beginning there was another promise made as well, more important than the non-poking promise, and that was the promise that promises would be kept: You have a right to receive whatever another promises to deliver to you. WE, the State, promise you this. Without this promise, no one would have had a reason to believe the protection promise.

The more perceptive among you will notice a bit of circularity here, but fortunately for history, the original assembly of founders in the forest did not include a logician and the deal still went through. The circularity is that the State's guarantee of promises is only as good as the State's own promise.

Now, in marketing the rights that were initially granted someone thought it important to claim on their behalf that they “really existed,” that they were there in the woods the whole time, and that they just needed a deal, a social contract, in order to be “activated.” The PR advisor of the time seemed to think that it would be harder to sell the whole thing if all that could be said for the initial rights was that they were the best that the lawyers could think of. So they claimed that those rights were “natural,” which entailed that they had been “discovered,” not invented.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What could be meant by claiming that these are rights that would exist even in the state of nature?

When Oooog jabs his pointy stick into Mooog and kills him, taking LaaLa for his very own, was Mooog’s natural right to life violated (not to mention his natural right to LaaLa)? Perhaps, but no more so than his right to be a lot handsomer than he was, a homo sapiens rather than a Neanderthal, and to be living on a yacht moored off Corfu with a Swiss account of 800 million euros at his disposal.

III

In conclusion, one can say that just about anything exists, but, as we used to say in the East Bronx, just saying so, don’t make it so.

#41: The Fantasy of "Natural" Rights

The battle for personal freedom is often stated to be a battle for individual rights. This, it seems to me, is as misleading as the Left’s cry for “social justice.” In neither case are we dealing with anything objective in any sense. “Social justice” is just another name for the socialist enterprise of stealing money from the well-off to pad the pockets of the apparatchiks and to distribute for votes among the poor. But, at the same time, there really aren’t any individual “rights” either. Neither are there any “natural” rights.

The most that “rights” can be are legislated abstract entitlements. This means that “rights” are legal fictions whose only existence is within some existing social and legal framework. Thus, we can, on the one hand, demand new “rights,” or, on the other, we can demand that ones already ours be respected. The arguments for new rights, however, are extremely difficult to make, since (and here’s the point) there is no such thing as a “right” to a right. Such a special “right” would have to be a “super-right” or a “meta-right,” a right that exists independently of social-cultural entities.

What I mean is that an argument for a new right would require appeal to a reason why a state ought to confer a new entitlement on its population or part of its population. But “oughts” only make sense in terms of “rights”, and thus an argument for a new right has to appeal to a such a “super-right” whose function it is to justify demands for ordinary, garden-variety rights.

For example, as a member of minority group X, I demand a new right: the right to preferential treatment in government hiring.

Why should we confer this new right on your group, ask the legislators.

Because, say the representatives of X, we have a right to this new right.

When this kind of argument is made, the super-right appealed to is “super” because it is actually treated as a right that would exist even if there were no societies or nations: it is a right embedded in nature. It is a “natural” right.

But quite apart from the fantasy worlds of philosophers and academic scribblers, where are such “rights” to be found in nature? Can our chemists find them? Can our physicists find them? These rights are no more than the hallucinations of over-wrought philosophers and so-called political “scientists.”

Ultimately, these rights come into existence within societies not because they are “discovered,” but because they are invented by sub-populations large enough to work their will on the whole.

When gays acquire more rights, it will not be because these rights will have been discovered, it will not be because this will have been found to be “just,” it will not be because gays have been found to “deserve” them; it will be because there will be enough people in the society who want them to have these entitlements. Period.

We can see this if we compare the social situation of gays with, say, the social situation of necrophiles. There aren’t many necrophiles, as far as I know, but, then, we didn’t really know how many gays there were until they started coming out of the closet. Right now, most people in the West would really prefer not having a necrophile living next door. If asked why, they would probably say that it “creeps them out.” Some might even say that they find it “disgusting.” But what if hundreds of thousands of necrophiles began to emerge from the closet like endless clowns out of a volkswagen?

It would take a few years, but ultimately we would begin to be taught that necrophiles are “just like us” and entitled to all the same benefits offered by the society to people who prefer their boinking partners to be alive.

The same would hold true for the polygamists, but also for the coprophiles, the people who prefer sheep, and so forth.

It’s just a matter of numbers.

And the rights derive from the preferences of the largest, noisiest group.

The implications of this are both broad and deep.

One implication is that most of the “arguments” for “rights” are beside the point; the point is only 1) how many of them are there, and 2) do they have enough votes?

Another is that our own preferences do not need “justification” (except in a court of law, where societal/cultures rules are made explicit).

Many might take this to be an argument in favor of Leftist-style moral relativism, but the argument is neutral, I think, in this respect.

While a person preferring a Judaeo-Christian society can no longer claim to “defend” his position by appeal to absolute values embedded in the very matter of the universe, it is equally true that he no longer needs this or any other defense of his preference. The same applies to the person on the Left.

And so, the bottom line is this: does each one of us have a “natural right” to what they have earned or made? No. Does anyone else have a “natural right” to it? No. But the good news is that societies can enshrine certain rights in their laws that reflect the preferences of their populations.

My own preference is to live in a society in which the powers of government are quite limited, in which the government must respect personal property, where the government’s ability to tax is controlled by law, where size of government is limited by law, where the personal finances of elected officials are subject to regular independent scrutiny, and where elected officials can be booted out of office by a democratic consensus. I have more preferences on these matters, but these will do for the moment.

I don’t claim that my preferences are given by God or by Nature, the most that I do is ask if there are others who share them and that they, like me, continue to speak and vote for a society like that.