Liberty’s Accessibility

What does it mean to have access to a liberty that is beyond your means to access? Everyone has the liberty to walk in a public space, but what if you are wheelchair bound? Say government stops taxing and you gain complete liberty over your income, but what if you were unemployed to start with?

Whether your social welfare criterion is utilitarian, Rawlsian or somewhere in between, an increase in accessible liberty rather than an increase in liberty itself may be a better policy measure for classical liberals. Maybe then, Government does have a place in intervening to improve liberty’s accessibility.

History is More than a Relativist Construct

Can an historian be truly objective?

 There is a strand of fashionable postmodern thought that argues it is impossible for the historian to merely be an objective chronicler of the past. The historian is bound by his context, his judgement of past events is stained because he is looking into the past through the prism of his present value-system. It is impossible for him to detract from this context.
 Not to mention that he is also a prisoner of language. Any comment he makes, beyond that a certain event happened on a certain date, is a comment that is burdened by his choice of words. Language creates reality, not facts. And language is infinitely diffuse, so infinite truths about the past can be created.
That is, history is nothing more than a fiction (see Foucalt, Hayden White, Derrida).

 But the denial of a true history plays into the hands of those with vested interests in a denial of their own—eg the Holocaust never happened. Relativism legitimises Holocaust deniers and savages those who oppose them to appeal to the ‘truth.’

 Objectivity is, I think, the awareness of the difficulties of being objective. If you take these difficulties into account, then something at least achieving objectivity is possible. The historian needs to be aware of such things as his own biases creeping into the construction of text and the subjectivity of primary sources themselves. While it is true, I think, that the past can only be recreated in the mind, it is possible for the shape of the past to not be a product of the mind, but rather a product of sources and source evaluation.

The Price of Freedom: Reconciling Liberty and Utilitarianism

 Liberty:- Freedom to do as one wishes, so long as their actions do not diminish another self’s access and enjoyment of their own private sphere of influence. A person’s private sphere includes the self, and all fruits of the self’s labour, including their belongings and property (JS Mill On Liberty).

 Aside:

There are two well known implications that cascade from this argument:

 1. Intervention by a higher authority is morally justifiable only to stop a self impacting on another self’s private sphere, without the latters permission. Victimless crimes such as recreational drug use cannot be made morally punishable by law.

 2. Slavery is untenable. If every self owns themselves, a self cannot by definition be owned by another.

 

Utilitarianism:- The goal of public policy is to achieve the “greatest happiness for the most.” If we could tally every individual’s utility and aggregate it to form a measure of societal utility, the goal of public policy is to maximize this. (JS Mill Utilitarianism).

 This question is sometimes posed:

Can Liberty exist in a Utilitarian world?

Isn’t it utility maximizing to outlaw recreational drug use, so that a person won’t kill himself from a heroin addiction?

The answer is that Utility can only be maximized by having Liberty. The drug addicts utility is maximized with sustained substance abuse even if death results. Another example is seatbelts in cars. By respecting Liberty, legislating compulsory seatbelt use is morally indefensible, but even if death of a risktaking motorist results from not having such a law, their utility has still been maximized.

 Sometimes the mixture of Liberty and Utility necessitates suicide, such as the heroin addict or the risk-taking motorist. It’s the price we have to be prepared to pay to be truly free.

Friendship

In an undistorted world, friendship is utilitarian. You get something out of it, and I get something back: Company, security & protection when necessary. It is a reciprocal relationship of necessity. This tension of self-interest between the two parties keeps the friendship going, and if the equilibrium is broken, the friendship becomes untenable.

Put in another light, the utility in friendship is implicit, if it ever became explicit, the relationship becomes a power struggle and difficult, if not definitionally impossible, to continue as a friendship.

So there has to be in friendship, a certain kind of indirection of motivation or intention. A person acts in kindness towards his friend, with an expectation it will be remembered and reciprocated.

The aggregation of these individual friendships driven by self-interest results in a sort of harmonious broader societal love. This societal love is broken for the same reason as friendships break down: an imbalance of self-interest towards one party, and the threat of resulting retribution from the offended party.

Is there any way to keep friendships in an eternal equilibrium so that peace at large can be retained? One way achieve this might be to increase people’s tolerance levels towards their friends and, by extension, others. Are there ways of intervening with distortions to induce people to tolerate their friends even when their friends shift the power balance towards themselves.

(By the way, shifting the power balance toward oneself in a friendship will be easy because there is an inherent trust by parties involved in a friendship that you won’t do this, and thus you will not be guarding yourself where you otherwise might, from say an enemy.)

Some philosophical training as part of a young person’s education may be useful to this end (of increasing tolerance levels at large). But I would argue it is impossible to increase tolerance levels to the required amounts to retain a peaceful equilibrium. Take an extreme example: What if your friend runs off with your wife? What if your friend abuses your sister? When the expected tolerance levels are unbearable, surely a commensurately violent response is part of the human condition.

Suffering-An irreligious view

(Imagine a world without suffering-not just human inflicted suffering. Imagine a world without tsunamis, childhood cancers and such.)
Question: Would you want to live in such a world?

Answer: First, go back and ask what is the good life’s purpose. There are bigger purposes than enjoying good food and watching movies and so on.

The most worthwhile & rewarding things people do are often when they’re involved with other people, helping other people (your friends) towards enjoyment. Take this as your purpose.
And if you are ready to involve yourself with somebody else, imbue them with your empathy, the way things go with that somebody else is very much up to you.
In this ‘friendship’ relationship with someone else, what responsibilities do you have?

You have responsibility for how things go for that person, good or bad. And you can’t live up to that responsibility:
-unless bad things happen to you to a certain extent
-unless you are hurt and you suffer sometimes – and that gives you the opportunity to be courageous or alternatively feel sorry for yourself;
-unless you have the opportunity to see that other people (your friends) are suffering and you can choose to either help them or not help them.

It is only in a world where there is suffering, of a limited duration and kind, that people are really responsible for things, that the rich extent of human empathy can be accessed. When there is suffering, people have the opportunities to learn to cope with them – for example..
- the individual himself may have to cope with his suffering
- helping others to cope with their suffering;
-helping forward scientific research so that it doesn’t happen again.

In this sort of world, people are really responsible for others (and yourself), and if we didn’t have this opportunity to shoulder such responsibility, we wouldn’t be accessing the extent of the human condition. It wouldn’t be a rich life at all.

This argument is often made by religious people as a justification for human suffering in the face of a seemingly apathetic God. Note how I followed the same trail of thought without any reference to an omnipotent being.

Christopher Hitchens offers this challenge: Name a moral standard stemming from religion to which is there no equivalent moral standard available to a secular person? Indeed, Hitchens says he has not yet found any such exclusive moral claim by religion.
The corollary question: To which heinous statement or act made by a religious person, is there no equivalent statement or act available to a secular person.
You’d only need a second to start listing here.

Empathy and Imagination-A Smithian Idea

Empathy- A Smithian Idea

Where do we get our sense of right and wrong?
Adam Smith argued that sympathy (and empathy) is the starting point. All other societal constructs can be derived from our capacity to express sympathy and empathy-our ability to view the world from another person’s shoes.

But it’s not enough just to have empathy in isolation. In fact animals show empathy as well:- it’s the reason we (and animals) care for our offspring. What sets us apart from animals, however, is our ability to access empathy by way of the activities of our imagination.

Imagination is a capacity to think abstractly, to think about problems which are not in front of us, or not in the present. It’s our capacity to go beyond our instincts of being nice to others and be able to abstract that. For example, we have a capacity to imagine what our loved one would feel if we cheated them, or to take it further, we have a capacity to think about best way to organize our society and its institutions.

To use imagination to arrive at a moral life, however, requires collective action-its not something you can do alone.  It’s something that society does together, and Smith’s perfect example was society’s attitude towards slavery.

People began realising at some early point in early AD that humans are in some way equal, and so the notion that slavery is wrong develops. But then, it takes 2000 years since the idea first troubled intellectuals, for people-at-large to realise that slavery is wrong-it’s a collective enterprise.
And finally we arrive at a point, where you will be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t a little bit bothered by the idea of slavery. So, collective imagination is a prescient prerequisite for societal progress.
This progress can be fast tracked by individuals, great leaders, like Lincoln on slavery, who convinced a society to extend their imagination, to convince masses to share with his vision on this issue. The art of politics then, is to appeal for people to see an issue through the universally accessible prism of empathy, and to access this empathy by capturing their imagination.

There are dangers to imagination as well. Imagination can lead to an obsession with self. We are capable of imagining things for ourselves like fame and fortune, or the lure of infidelity. Being able to imagine these things can trap us into a lifetime of disappointment, a purposeless existence. On the other hand, if one is successful in achieving these things, they are likely to suffer the hollow life.