December 2, 2006
GOD OR NONE:
Clemson University Establishes a Think Tank Devoted to Studying the Moral Basis of Capitalism (GARY SHAPIRO, September 25, 2006, NY Sun)
In what surely would have brought a smile to Adam Smith, Clemson University has launched an institute to study the moral foundations of capitalism.The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism is "the only university-related think tank in the country devoted to exploring the moral foundations of capitalism," the institute's executive director, C. Bradley Thompson, told The New York Sun. "We hope to be the beginning of a new trend in higher education."
The South Carolina school's board of trustees approved the establishment of the institute in October 2005, and it was launched with a donation of $1.4 million from the Branch Banking & Trust, the eighth-largest bank in the country.
A number of think tanks argue that capitalism is best because it is the most efficient and productive, Mr. Thompson said. "Most conservative intellectuals argue that capitalism is good because it works. We think capitalism works because it's moral and just," he said.
"We're going to foster the world's best conversation on capitalism and to that end, we're going to bring different viewpoints to the table," Mr. Thompson, who is also a professor of political science at Clemson, told the Sun.
Mr. Thompson has assembled an academic advisory council and an advisory board for the institute, which has a promotional brochure that features pictures of John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, among others. The academic advisory council includes the Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker of the University of Chicago and Vernon Smith of George Mason University, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood of Brown University and a Harvard professor, Harvey Mansfield.
Which would all be well and good, except that Mr. Thompson doesn't seem to understand morality or America very well, The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism (C. Bradley Thompson, Fall 2006, Objective Intellectual)
To stand on principle, to offer a moral argument in support of capitalism, is now considered by conservatives to be impractical and imprudent. But capitalism simply cannot be defended without a moral argument—a moral argument in support of individual rights and against their violation—which means: in support of self-interest and against self-sacrifice. What aspiring advocates of capitalism need is a philosophy that identifies and defends the moral core of individualism—the ethics of rational egoism.Conservatives have always run at a full gallop from having their philosophy identified with a morality of “selfishness.†But self-interest is and always has been, to use Irving Kristol’s language, in “the American grain.†It is the ideal that animates the Declaration of Independence; it is the reason why man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness matter.
Rational egoism holds that each individual should pursue his own welfare or self-interest—and that no one has a right to force anyone to act against his own judgment or to sacrifice himself for the “sake†of others. It is the idea that each individual owns himself and has both a right and a responsibility to pursue his own interests according to his own judgment while respecting the rights of others to do the same. What validates this principle? The same thing that validates all objective moral principles: the fact that man’s life depends on it.
Man’s metaphysical condition is that he is a rational, volitional being with no pre-programmed or automatic code of values. It is precisely because man has free will that he requires a moral code—a moral code that will help identify the long-range material and spiritual requirements of his life.
Man is a being of self-made soul, which means that he has the power to pursue life-serving goals and happiness or not. He must choose on a daily basis whether to be rational or irrational, hardworking or lazy, independent or dependent, honest or dishonest, just or unjust. It is in man’s self-interest and it is his fundamental right to pursue a life of happiness—which means, to pursue a rewarding career, financial security, recreational activities, travel, art, romance, friendships, and so forth. This is why man needs a consistent, integrated moral code: to guide him in the pursuit of such life-serving goals.
The proper moral purpose of every individual’s life is to pursue his life-sustaining, life-enhancing values; the proper moral purpose of government is to protect his right to do so.
Rational egoism is the only moral philosophy (and capitalism is the only social system) that recognizes each individual as an end in himself and as the proper beneficiary of his own productive actions. It is the only moral code that entails and supports the principle of individual rights; thus it is the only moral code that can support capitalism. Any attempt to ground capitalism on, or to reconcile it with, a moral teaching that forces men to sacrifice their interests for the alleged sake of others is doomed to failure.
Americans must remember what conservatives have forgotten (or never fully understood): that the United States was founded on the idea that individuals have unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are valid only if individuals morally own themselves and are the proper beneficiaries of their own efforts. Each man is a morally sovereign entity. This is why no person is legitimately the master or the slave of another. But this principle, the principle of man’s rights, is the morality of egoism applied to a social-political context. Those who refuse to recognize and embrace egoism refuse to recognize and embrace man’s rights.
As always with libertarians, he offers a subjective philosophy rather than an objective set of standards for behavior, which is what morality requires and is why morality is dependent on God. We can see in his argument why libertarians are a better fit for the secular rationalist Democrats than for the Republican Party. Likewise, we can see why libertarianism is, literally, unAmerican. Note merely the following points:
* Mr. Thompson argues that the rights to life, liberty, etc., matter because self-interest is the American ideal. The Declaration, however, states quite clearly that they matter because the Creator endowed us with them. Similarly, when it came time to institutionalize the genuine American ideals, the Founders not only made no mention of self-interest but were quite forthright about their purposes being social, rather than individualist: "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty, to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Their concern is general welfare, common defense, etc, not your own welfare or your own defense or other narrow and selfish aims.
* Note too that one of the sleights of hand that those who don't have much truck with the actual motives of the Founders tend to engage in is removing the purposeful upper-case letters from their texts. There is, for instance, an obvious religious connotation to Blessings, that can be limited somewhat if you make it blessings, though, semantically, the areligious can not offer any coherent argument that disconnects the word blessing from religion.
* One other oddity we ought to mention in passing is that the ill-named libertarians advocate freedom and oppose liberty, particularly the republican liberty that the Founders sought to secure. We've discussed that distinction in the review of Maurizio Viroli's Republicanism.
* That bit about man's "self-made soul" is not only ludicrous in the context of the 18th century Founding but remains so today, when 8 or 9 in 10 Americans still have faith in God and just 13% believe in the materialist faith of Darwinism. Such numbers are hardly surprising when we consider America's primacy among the nations and the extent to which liberal democracy needs God. Nor is it surprising that the nations of Europe, which succumbed to that "self-made" nonsense, are dying off before our very eyes.
* Most dangerous here is the idea that the self alone can be a moral end. Animals have themselves as ultimate ends, therefore we can understand anything they do to preserve themselves. It would be inane to argue that a starving dog that ate its own puppy had acted immorally. Self-preservation is, indeed, sufficient purpose for most creatures. A starving man though will be heaped with moral opprobrium for simply stealing bread. God holds us to standards that transcend the mere self. It is this that makes us persons rather than individuals and it is the relationship with God that is our ultimate end and the source of the human dignity that God requires we recognize in one another.
For all his talk of conservatism, there is nothing of America or its Judeo-Christian/Western inheritance that his egoism would conserve. This kind of extreme selfishness is the rot that has destroyed the rest of the West and conservatives do well not just to reject it but to fight against it tooth and nail.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2006 9:22 AMAnd yet some nutter snuck the amoral Rand in there.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at December 2, 2006 10:10 AMWhy "fight against it tooth and nail" when all one really needs to do is make our libertarian bretheren conscious of the distinctions you raise.
Most (not all) acquiesce to your construction, and understand its necessity.
I just interviewed Ryan Sager (The Elephant in the Room) yesterday, and off the air we commented on the silliness of the Religious right wanting to throw the "Western libertarian wing" off the bus, and the Western libertarians wanting to throw the Religious right off the bus.
Politics is about addition, not subtraction.
Posted by: Bruno at December 2, 2006 10:47 AMThere is no place in conservatism for libertarians. As amoralists they belong with the Left, as Latinos and other religious constituencies belong in the GOP.
Posted by: oj at December 2, 2006 10:53 AMSome libertarians are amoralists, some base their morals upon foundations of sand (secular humanism) and some are "pre-religious" in their foundations.
I find persuasion is better than a priori excommunication. In a world where the Republicans have biffed it so utterly, we will need all the votes we can get to forestall the march of the left/collectivist movement.
History isn't over by a long shot.
Posted by: Bruno at December 2, 2006 1:10 PMBruno: Hear, hear. OJ has a bizarre definition of "conservatism" that would have excluded Goldwater, Milton Friedman, Hayek and Mises, not to mention millions of old-fashioned "mind your own business" Americans.
Posted by: PapayaSF at December 2, 2006 2:58 PMJim:
I wonder if there is a picture of Reagan, Buckley, or even Arthur Laffer in the brochure. Or Phil Gramm? George Gilder?
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 2, 2006 2:59 PMBruno, was it not right then, by your logic, to excommunicate the Birchers?
Big tent is one thing, but there are people who simply don't belong. Randians have nothing to do with conservatism for all the reasons oj's laid out. In addition, just like the Birchers, they give the rest of us and bad name.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at December 2, 2006 3:15 PMTossing out Birchers, fine: large parties shouldn't tolerate substantial factions of nutcase zealots. But I don't see Randians in the same category: belief in free enterprise and limited government and self-reliance are core conservative virtues, and I just don't see Randians as dangerous in the way Birchers were.
Posted by: PapayaSF at December 2, 2006 3:52 PMBirchers are fine--in fact, everything they espoused is rather mainstream now. Randroids are evil.
Posted by: oj at December 2, 2006 7:28 PM"Pre-religious" works for moi. Thompson's belief in Tabula Rasa Man is fatuous.
Posted by: ghostcat at December 2, 2006 7:30 PMI love it that OJ, speaking for the immense prohibitionist/witch-burning/anti-automobile/pro-Hezbollah wing of the conservative movement, wants to excommunicate the believers in limited government because they aren't mainstream. Next: New Hampshire threatens to kick the other 49 states out of the Union.
Posted by: PapayaSF at December 3, 2006 12:10 AMWe have Prohibition and we liberated the Shi'a while the Party steadfastly fights against every libertarian measure from gay rights to drug legalization to lowering the age of consent to abortion. There are no libertarians to excommunicate. Thus the uniform headlines from the libertarians that the midterm was "a loss for Republicans not for conservatism." They're too self-absorbed to be in a political party.
Posted by: oj at December 3, 2006 10:12 AMTo intelligently critique someone, it is good to actually understand what they advocate, and TOS explicitly rejects libertarianism.
From their freely-available first-issue piece, "Introducing The Objective Standard": "we emphatically oppose the politics of libertarianism—the anti-intellectual movement that claims to advocate “liberty,†while flagrantly ignoring or denying the moral and philosophical foundations on which liberty depends. Liberty cannot even be defined, let alone defended, apart from answers to questions such as: What is the nature of reality? What is man’s means of knowledge? What is the nature of the good? What are rights, and where do they come from? To say, as libertarians do, that the “non-initiation-of-force principle†is an “axiom†or that liberty can be defended on any old philosophical base—whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, altruist, egoistic, subjectivist, relativist, postmodernist—or on no base at all—is simply absurd."
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006-spring/introducing-the-objective-standard.asp
Objectivism is libertarianism, just more cultish.
Posted by: oj at December 4, 2006 8:23 PMHuh? As seen above, Objectivists explicitly reject libertarianism. So on what basis do you claim Objectivism *is* libertarianism? I tend to grant people some authority in reporting what they themselves think and don't think.
And how is Objectivism "cultish?"
Posted by: TOS Reader at December 5, 2006 12:38 PMIt's just Randism and part of the cult is pretending it's not just libertarianism.
Posted by: oj at December 5, 2006 2:34 PMWhat's all this about throwing Objectivists off the Conservative bus? As an Objectivist, tell me which conservative bus my brethren are climbing aboard and I'll come ask them to get off myself. Major Objectivist intellectuals have argued that voting for Democrats is the best option for Objectivists.
Posted by: SoftwareNerd at December 7, 2006 3:37 PMExactly. It's obviously the best option for the amoral.
Posted by: oj at December 7, 2006 3:39 PMAmoral? Yes, that's the common view that religious folk have of non-religious folk. The underlying idea is one on which the very religious and the extreme nihilists actually agree: i.e. the idea that morals either come from God or nowhere, i.e. the idea that reality does not show us any moral principles, i.e. the idea that one cannot go from "is" to "ought" except by having God.
As for parties, there was a time when many Objectivists voted Republican, but only as the lesser evil. That was before the Christian extremists took over the party and started publishing falsehoods like the idea that the U.S. political system is based on Judeo-Christian ideas. Wrong! The Judeo-Chritian political system is the one that Galileo feared. Because the Republicans want to go back there, many Objectivists have decided to move their votes to the Democrats, whom they also dislike, but... it's simply a question of choosing the lesser poison.
Posted by: SoftwareNerd at December 8, 2006 12:10 AMThat's not an idea, but a truism. Morality can only come from an objective authority beyond Man. Philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to ground morality in reason and have failed.
Likewise your second point. Libertarianism being primarily about license, only a secular and amoral political party is suitable for the Objectivists.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 7:24 AMOJ,
You're absolutely correct, morality can only come from an objective authority beyond man. That "authority" is called reality. The realities of not only the world at large, but of man himself. Meaning it cannot be changed, not even by a god.
It's the liberals that believe that morality is at the mercy of whatever it's authority decides it to be. The only difference between conservatives and liberals then is who that authority is - man or god.
Posted by: Grant at December 8, 2006 8:39 AMReality offers sanction for every behavior. Men murder so in reality there's nothing wrong with murder. The difference is the whole shebang. If there is no God then nothing men do can matter.
America is Founded on the faith that God Created Man with certain unalienable rights. Liberal/rationalism is the belief that the only "rights" that exist are those that men grant each other. America works. Secular states don't.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 9:31 AMOJ, You say "reality offers sanction for any kind of behavior". This is not true; the fact is that one can go from "is" to "ought".
Nevertheless, it is a weak argument to say that since reality does not offer a solution, one is going with the imaginary.
Posted by: softwareNerd at December 8, 2006 9:54 AMContrary to a previous post, it is not "extreme selfishness" that has caused the "rot" in the world but precisely the absence of the "self" - resulting in blind obedience to self appointed mystics, murderous acts of self sacrifice against innocents, people asserting their "superiority" through their race, class or ethnicity, addicts craving fame or admiration, bullies needing to dominate or be feared by others and sluts seeking self-esteem through sexual conquests etc. These are not acts of "selfishness" but are a result of placing others above self.
The religionists in the Republican party also evade the fact that they share the same basic non-objective principles of faith, sacrifice, obedience, duty and service to God as America's Islamic fundamentalist enemies. Indeed, secular Syria, North Korea and Cuba also share these "values" but replace "God" with "The State".
If America, the last bastion of freedom, fails to grasp the Aristotelian principles of individual life, liberty, (property) and the pursuit of happiness, at the heart of its constitution, then I fear that the world is heading toward a new dark ages.
Posted by: Dominic at December 8, 2006 9:57 AMThe denial that is and ought are the same thing is the denial that reality can be a guide to morality. It's the classic problem that atheist/rationalists run up against. There is God or there is no basis for morality. Americans believe the former. Libertarians the latter. You are to be congratulted though for having the decency and insight to accidentally acknowledge the failure of your ideology. As you grow up you'll grow out of libertarianism.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 9:59 AMDominic:
The only reason to place others above self is because God requires it of us. There is no rational basis for doing so.
Of course Islam affords a basis for morality, that's why the decline of secular Europe and its replacement by an Islamic Europe is a consumation to be welcomed.
Ever read the Declaration? Try it. You'll find God, not a Greek.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 10:02 AMFunny that both leftists and conservatives classify Objectivists with their opposition. They fall all over themselves trying to disassociate themselves from egoism, and attributing it to their enemy. "Big business greed" and "blood for oil" versus "atheistic hedonism." Since the days of Whittaker Chamber's review, no smear or absurdity has been held back in their desperation to evade the possibility of rational selfishness.
Posted by: DandyLife at December 8, 2006 11:46 AMThat's because most Americans find the Randroids' mindless pursuit of the "Virtue of Selfishness" to be about as acceptable as government-sanctioned cannibalism.
Face it: Americans of almost any political stripe loathe your ideology. It's probably one of the few things that continue to unite us as a people.
Last I checked, no one advocating cannibalism wrote the "second most influential book for American after the Bible" (Library of Congress survey), or sold over 3 million copies of _Atlas Shrugged_ in 2006 alone, 24 years after Ayn Rand's death. There's also that whole "pursuit of happiness" thing in the Declaration of Independence.
Your vicious attack is just more evidence of fundamentalist's evasions of reason.
Posted by: DandyLife at December 8, 2006 1:13 PMDandy;
Ah, a cultist. Objectivists: people who wish there were fewer Commandments and more of Atlas Shrugged....
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 3:25 PMConservatives oppose libertarians because the latter deny morality, liberals because libertarians theoretically oppose statism. However, the atomization that libertarian denial of morality causes is necessary to effective statism, so libertarians and liberals are de facto allies.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 3:28 PMDandy does though get to the crux of the matter at the end there: the Anglo-American model is based on the rejection of Reason, which Hume had shown to be naught but a self-contradictory exercise in futility. The French model imagines that Man via Reason can create Utopia. It's that essential unAmericanism that makes libertarianism simply a fetish for young white geeky males who like to think they're ubermenschen. They grow out of it.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 3:34 PMBryan:
Naturally in a country were 95% believe in God and just 13% in Darwinism the cult of the individual is held in contempt. Doesn't help that they're all the guys from AV club who think its cool that they can speak Klingon....
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2006 3:36 PMBased on the quality of argumentation shown in these comments, the Objectivist ideas look to be the ones most worth learning more about.
Posted by: A Commenter at December 9, 2006 3:19 AMThey are if you're a young white male between the onset of puberty and college girls kissing you back.
Posted by: oj at December 9, 2006 7:30 AMOJ,
You're correct that Libertarians deny any basis for morality - rational or mystical. And you're correct that it's a dogmatic belief in "freedom" that paves the way for liberal statism. But merely because the libertarians and the liberals both explicitly denounce religious mysticism does not make their "justifications" any less mystical. It's no concidence that today's would-be communist dictators rally under the banner of "liberalism" - which itself used to be a movement in support of freedom.
That's precisely the problem with not having a rational basis for one's advocacy of individual liberty. The reason why the Republicans betrayed individual liberty long ago is the same reason why the Democrats did. It's also the same reason why the Libertarians, if they stick around and grow, will eventually as well. None of these movements have a logically consistent argument for why freedom (if they even understand the term correctly) should be a political aim.
This is why Obectivism not only opposes conservatism and liberalism, but also libertarianism. So I don't know why you keep on conflating Objectivists and libertarians.
Posted by: Grant at December 9, 2006 12:03 PMObjectivism is just libertarianism with a cult. It takes the original silliness and adds to it a prophetess and a few holy texts.
There's no such thing as individual liberty, by definition. Individual freedom is the opposite of morality and liberty. It's perfectly rational, but Reason is the enemy.
Posted by: oj at December 9, 2006 1:30 PMSo I suppose that Christianity, before it added millions of adhearants, qualified as a cult aswell?
Does the content of the messages, regardless of who says them or in what manner, count for anything? Oh wait, that would demand objectivity.
As for your weird take on individual liberty; if liberty is not the domain of the individual, what is it? The best interests of a group of people who hold the same beliefs? Unless you support the forcible implementation of a particular religious creed down to every last detail upon the entire population, how do you propose to promote your relgious - and moral - beliefs if not by persuasion? And of course, as is obvious, persuasion requires the voluntary agreement of the person being persuaded. That's what I define as individual liberty.
Posted by: Grant at December 10, 2006 1:26 AMOnly God is objective.
While your historical ignorance of liberty is hardly unusual it is part and parcel of why no one takes libertarians/objectivists seriously:
www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1385/
Posted by: oj at December 10, 2006 8:27 AMOJ,
You might want to critique, Objectivist John Lewis's "open letter" to Republicans. http://theobjectivestandard.com/blog/2006/12/open-letter-to-republicans.asp
Posted by: softwareNerd at December 12, 2006 9:59 AMit's the same thing. He just confuses freedom, which is anti-American, with liberty, which is the basis of the Republic. that's the nice thing about Objectivists/Libertarians, they just write the same thing over and over again.
Posted by: oj at December 12, 2006 10:08 AM