Toward a Paradigm
for a Free Society
Dr. Edward W. Younkins
Issue CI - May 18, 2007
|
-----------------------------------
Principal Index
-----------------------------------
Old
Superstructure
-----------------------------------
Old Master Index
-----------------------------------
Contributors
-----------------------------------
The Rational Business Journal
-----------------------------------
Forum
-----------------------------------
Yahoo! Group
-----------------------------------
Gallery of Rational
Art
-----------------------------------
Online
Store
-----------------------------------
Henry Ford Award
-----------------------------------
Johannes
Gutenberg Award
-----------------------------------
CMFF:
Fight Death
-----------------------------------
Eden against the
Colossus
-----------------------------------
A
Rational Cosmology
-----------------------------------
Links
-----------------------------------
Mr.
Stolyarov's Articles on Helium.com
-----------------------------------
Mr. Stolyarov's Articles on Associated Content
-----------------------------------
Mr.
Stolyarov's Articles on GrasstopsUSA.com
-----------------------------------
Submit/Contact
-----------------------------------
Statement of Policy
-----------------------------------
|
What can we learn from a survey of political and
economic philosophies throughout history? Can we
put them together by drawing from many or all of
them to construct a powerful emergent
libertarian synthesis that is a true reflection
of the nature of man and the world properly
understood? Is it possible to reframe the
argument for a free society into a consistent
reality-based whole? Are we able to attain an
overarching theoretical perspective and to
construct a sound truth-based paradigm with
internally-consistent components? |
Because ultimately the truth is one, there is an
essential interconnection between objective ideas.
It is thus possible to integrate truths gleaned from
thinkers of the various periods of time. We could
say that the universe of all true knowledge in all
of its diversity has a unity whereby its different
parts illuminate each other. It follows that
political and economic thought draws upon nearly
every phase of human knowledge. Some political and
economic ideas have changed and developed over time
and many have stayed essentially the same. There has
been a rich tradition of political and economic
discourse with respect to the nature and fundamental
properties of reality and regarding the political
arrangements that are indispensable to attain a free
society. A wide variety of political and economic
philosophies can be found to be related, mutually
illuminating, and mutually relevant. Each thinker
has basic assumptions and beliefs regarding the
nature of man and there is a close connection
between one's concept of the nature of man and his
political and economic philosophy.
During the long course of western
political thought several basic ideas have played an
important role. These include, but are not limited
to, the existence of natural moral law and natural
rights, the moral and rational character of man, the
limited nature of the state, the superiority of
democratic rule and constitutional government, and
the desirability of subsidiarity. Such ideas
emphasize a certain unity in political and economic
thought which connects us with ancient times.
A paradigm that appeals to and reflects
reality as an independent ontological order will
help people to understand the world and to survive
and flourish in it. A proper political and economic
philosophy must be based on the nature of man and
the universe. Once this knowledge is gained, then we
can ascertain the role the state should have.
Necessary prescriptions are embedded in the nature
of things and they are discoverable through
observation, logic, and a rational epistemology.
What is required is philosophical realism in the
natural law tradition. Natural law can provide man
with general and universal principles. This will
permit the construction of the best political regime
based on the framework of the naturality of human
society. Our goal is to have a paradigm in which the
views of reality, human nature, knowledge, values,
action, and society make up an integrated whole.
A proper political and economic philosophy
demands an account of man's nature as determined by
reason. Man is a rational agent with a free and
self-determinative will who is capable of
deliberation and choice. A human being has
metaphysical liberty and can therefore initiate, by
his mental activity, much of what he does in life.
Thinking is not automatic, but human beings can use
their free will to focus, to think, and to initiate.
If follows that human beings can make choices about
right and wrong, that they are self-responsible to
do the right thing, and that they require a private
domain that others must respect. The idea of
metaphysical freedom is connected to responsibility
and with the related notions of virtues, vices, and
human flourishing. It follows that mutual
non-interference is primary regarding both freedom
and the demands of moral virtues. Mutual
non-interference is a required condition for both a
free society and for a virtuous society.
Natural rights are metanormative
principles that regulate the conditions under which
moral conduct and human flourishing can take place.
The individual right to liberty secures the
possibility of self-direction in a social context.
To secure individuals' natural rights, men must seek
to establish the structural political conditions
that protect that possibility. Each person must be
accorded a secure moral space over which he has
freedom to act and to pursue his personal
flourishing. Individual human flourishing is the
standard underpinning the assessment that a goal is
rational and should be sought. People are moral
agents whose project it is to excel at being the
particular human being that one is.
Human flourishing must be achieved through
a person's own efforts. Each person has reason and
free will and the capacity to initiate conduct that
will enhance or inhibit his flourishing.
Rationality, the cardinal virtue for human
flourishing, can only gain expression which a man
has responsibility for his own choices. A person's
flourishing depends upon his cognition at a
conceptual level. Individuals must be free to
discern, select, and pursue their own goals and to
form their own groups and associations. Each person
must be free to choose to initiate the mental
processes of focusing and thinking on becoming the
best person he can be as the context of his own
existence.
Natural rights are universal, are good for
human beings in general, and are based on the common
attributes of human beings. As political principles,
they are general and uniform and establish proper
rules of social interaction. Once they are secured,
what is good for the life of each man in his
individual instantiation becomes a possibility the
notions of morality and human flourishing apply only
to individual human beings whose telos it is
to develop their virtues and potentialities in
accordance with their facticity.
A proper political and legal system is not
totally separated from the realm of ethics based on
the nature of man and the world. However, ethics are
not all of one kind nor at the same level. Some
directly prescribe moral conduct and others regulate
the conditions under which moral conduct may occur.
A political and legal system regulates such
conditions and should be concerned only with rights
as universal metanormative principles and not with
the promotion of personal virtue, morality, or
flourishing. Political life is properly concerned
solely with peace and security. Such a distinction
between politics and morality makes great sense. It
follows that the minimal state is only concerned
with justice in a metanormative sense not as a
personal virtue.
Ayn Rand has demonstrated that metaphysics
and epistemology are inextricably connected. She
explains that knowledge is based on the observation
of reality and that, to gain objective knowledge, a
person must use the methods of induction, deduction,
and integration. Induction and deduction are
complementary and go hand-in-hand. Because concepts
refer to facts, knowledge has a base in reality and
it is possible to derive valid concepts using the
rules of logic a person is able to define
objective principles to guide his cognitive
processes. It follows that conclusions reached
through the proper application of reason are
objective. Rand maintains that it is possible to
gain objective knowledge of both facts and values.
People have the capacity to determine what is in
their own best interest and to act on such
determination. Thinking is self-produced and human
beings can will and initiate behavior.
Human beings can think but thinking is not
automatic. A person must use his free will to focus
and to use his rational consciousness. A man knows
he has volition through the act of introspection
he can introspectively observe that he can choose to
focus his consciousness or not. A man's
distinctiveness from other living species in his
ability to initiate an act of consciousness. Free
will is critical to human existence and human
flourishing.
People value because they have needs as living,
conditional entities. The predominant value theory
among Austrian thinkers is Ludwig von Mises'
subjectivist approach. This approach takes personal
values as given and assumes that individuals have
different motivations and prefer different things.
By contrast, some Austrians follow Carl Menger, the
father of Austrian economics, in agreeing with Ayn
Rand that the ultimate standard of value is the life
of the valuer and that objective values support
man's life and originate in a relationship between
man and his survival requirements. This approach
sees value as a relational and objective quality
dependent on the subject, the object, and the
context involved. Objective values depend upon both
a person's humanity and his individuality. Each
person has the potential to use his unique
attributes and talents in his efforts to do well at
living his own individual life. It is possible for a
person to pursue objective values that are consonant
with his own rational self-interest.
Production, the means to gaining one's
material values, metaphysically precedes their
distribution, exchange, and consumption. To survive
and flourish, people must produce what is required
for their existence. Goods must be produced before
they can be consumed. Consumption follows production
and production (i.e., supply) is the source of
consumption (i.e., demand). Productiveness is a
virtue individuals tend to be productive and to
flourish when they practice the related virtues of
rationality and self-interest.
Austrian praxeological economics (i.e.,
the study of human action has been used to make a
value-free case for liberty. This economic science
deals with abstract principles and general rules
that must be applied if a society is to have optimal
production and economic well-being. Misesian
praxeology consists of a body of logically deduced,
inexorable laws of economics beginning with the
axiom that each person acts purposefully. Mises was
off base with his neo-Kantian epistemology which
views human action as a category of the human mind.
Fortunately, Murray Rothbard demonstrated how the
action axiom could be derived using induction and a
natural law approach.
Although Misesian economists hold that
values are subjective and Objectivists argue that
values are objective, these claims are not
incompatible because they are not really claims
about the same things they exist at different
levels or spheres of analysis. The
value-subjectivity of the Austrians complements the
Randian sense of objectivity.
Austrian Economics is an excellent way of
looking at methodological economics with respect to
the appraisal of means but not of ends. Misesian
praxeology therefore must be augmented. Its
value-free economics is not sufficient to establish
a total case for liberty. A systematic,
reality-based ethical system must be discovered to
firmly establish the argument for individual
liberty. Natural law provides the groundwork for
such a theory and both Objectivism and the
Aristotelian idea of human flourishing are based on
natural law ideas.
An ethical system must be developed and
defended in order to establish the case for a free
society. An Aristotelian ethics of naturalism states
that moral matters are matters of fact and that
morally good conduct is that which enables the
individual agent to make the best possible progress
toward achieving his self-perfection and happiness.
According to Rand, happiness relates to a person's
success as a unique, rational human being possessing
free will. We have free choice and the capacity to
initiate our own conduct that enhances or hinders
our flourishing as human beings.
A human being's flourishing requires the
rational use of his individual human potentialities,
including his talents, abilities, and virtues in the
pursuit of his freely and rationally chosen values
and goals. An action is considered to be proper if
it leads to the flourishing of the person performing
the action. A person's flourishing leads to his
happiness. Each person is responsible for
voluntarily choosing, creating, and entering
relationships in civil society that contribute
toward his flourishing. Civil society, a spontaneous
order, is based on voluntary participation and is
made up of natural and voluntary associations such
as families, private business, voluntary unions,
churches, clubs, charities, and so on. The related
notions of subsidiarity and of a pluralistic society
spring from the reality of human nature.
Virtues are the means to values and the
virtues and values together enable human beings to
attain their flourishing and happiness. Virtues must
be applied, although differentially, by each
individual in his task of human flourishing. The
pursuit of one's flourishing is driven by reason and
reason requires the consistent practice of the
virtues. Such a "virtue ethics" is agent-centered,
agent-based, agent-relative, and contextual.
Choosing and making the proper response in
particular concrete circumstances is the concern of
moral living. A person must identify and abide by
rational principles if he is to flourish. The major
virtues provide these rational principles.
Both economics and ethics are concerned
with human choice and human action. Human action,
the subject of both economics and morality, is the
common denominator and the link between economic
principles and moral principles. Both economic law
and moral law are derived from natural law. Because
truth is consistent, it follows that economics and
morality are inextricably related parts of one
indivisible body of knowledge. Because natural law
regulates the affairs of men, it is the task of both
economists and philosophers to discover the natural
order and to adhere to it. There is an intimate
connection between economic science and an
objective, normative framework for understanding
human life.
It follows that all of the disciplines of
human action are interrelated and can be integrated
into a paradigm of individual liberty based on the
nature of man and the world. A study of human action
grounded as a true anthropology of the human person
provides insights into both economics and moral
truths. Economic and moral principles are part of
one inseparable body of thought.
It should not be surprising to find that
the discoveries of a truth-based economics and of a
moral philosophy based on the nature of man and the
world are consistent with one another. There is one
universe in which everything is interconnected
metaphysically through the inescapable laws of cause
and effect. True knowledge must also be a total in
which every item of knowledge is interconnected. All
objective knowledge is interrelated in some way thus
reflecting the totality that is the universe.
Because no field is totally independent of
any other field, there are really no discrete
branches of knowledge. There is only cognition in
which subjects are separated out for purpose of
study. That is fine for purposes of specialization,
but, in the end, we need to reintegrate by
connecting one's specialized knowledge back into the
total knowledge of reality. We need to think
systemically, look for the relationships and
connections between components of knowledge, and
aspire to understand the nature of knowledge and its
unity. Ultimately, the truth is one. There is an
essential interconnection between objective ideas.
It follows that academicians should pay more
attention to systems building rather than to the
extreme specialization within a discipline.
Philosophy provides the conceptual
framework necessary to understand man's behavior. To
survive a person must perceive the world, comprehend
it, and act upon it. To survive and flourish, a man
must recognize that nature has its own imperatives.
He needs to have viable, sound, and proper
conceptions of man's nature, knowledge, values, and
action. He must recognize that there is a natural
law that derives from the nature of man and the
world and that is discoverable through the use of
reason.
A sound paradigm requires internal
consistency among its components. By properly
integrating insights gleaned throughout history we
have the potential to reframe the argument for a
free society and elucidate a theory of the best
political regime on the basis of man, human action,
and society. This natural-law-based paradigm would
uphold each man's sovereignty, moral space, and
natural rights and accords each person a moral
space, and natural rights. It would hold that men
require a social and political structure that
recognizes natural rights and accords each person a
moral space over which he has freedom to act and
pursue his personal flourishing. See the enclosed
exhibit for an example diagram of what such a
paradigm might look like. Specifically, it would
consist of (1) an objective, realistic,
natural-law-oriented metaphysics; (2) a natural
rights theory based on the nature of man and the
world; (3) an objective epistemology which describes
essences or concepts as epistemologically contextual
and relational rather than as metaphysical; (4) a
biocentric theory of value; (5) praxeology as a tool
for understanding how people cooperate and compete
and for deducing universal principles of economics;
and (6) an ethic of human flourishing based on
reason, free will, and individuality.
A Paradigm
for a Free Society |
Dr. Edward W. Younkins is Professor of Accountancy
at Wheeling Jesuit University. He is the author of
Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations
of Free Enterprise [Lexington Books, 2002].
Many of Dr. Younkins's essays can be found online at
his personal web page at
www.quebecoislibre.org.
You can contact Dr. Younkins at
younkins@wju.edu.
This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with
TRAs
Statement of Policy.
Click here to return
to TRA's Issue CI Index.
Learn about Mr.
Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus,
here..
Read
Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise,
A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms
as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light,
life, consciousness, and volition, at
http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/rc.html..
|