Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → free will

Some feedback:

The biggest decision I think you have ahead of you at this point is whether you want to not support the government, or actually resist it in some fashion. Not supporting the government is, of course, much easier than resisting it. On the other hand, resisting the government may have much better results.

I thought it was important that before I begin considering whether to or how to resist the government that I start by withdrawing my support for it. I think many of the people who are out on the streets with their signs and chants are fooling themselves if they think they oppose the war — their chants don’t take a nickel from the bottom line of their actual support.

How to or whether to resist the government is another matter. I think that a compelling case for the need to resist the government can be made. Now, finally, I have the luxury of being able to weigh that case. Once I stop supporting the government, I can make the decision of whether to wash my hands of it or whether to actively oppose it.

Until I stopped supporting the government, my “opposition” to it was a matter of opinion and had pretty much as much weight as any other opinion does — less than nothing unless the weather is hot enough so that air exits my mouth at less than the ambient temperature.

So, what’s your goal? 20 years from now what would the “perfect” government look like? Given your knowledge of human nature, is such a government possible? Is it worth your individual effort for an extended period of time?

I don’t spend much time anymore thinking about what a good government would look like. I’ve come to disbelieve in government — not in the sense of disillusionment, but actual non-belief. I think that what we call government is really just people and places and buildings. The actions of “government” are really just the actions of people following certain rules and roles and norms.

Which isn’t to say that “government” isn’t a useful shorthand for referring to a set of institutions, employees, legal algorithms, etc. But this shortcut doesn’t in itself have an existence. The mistake is like saying that you want to refer to the creative, life-giving entropic momentum in the universe by the name “god” — (“okay,” says the skeptic) — then you start to personify “God” and give Him opinions and motives and eyes and a crown and such. Pretty soon, you’re not naming an abstraction so much as creating literature and living in a fantasy world.

So the question isn’t “what kind of government is good,” “what can a just government demand of its citizens,” etc. but “how should people behave towards each other, since the idea of an external government to which we must relinquish our consciences is a myth?”

It’s like asking an atheist to tell you what kind of god he thinks made the world, or what kind of responsibilities God has toward his creation, or what kind of responsibilities we should have towards God, or how God would have us live. The atheist would say none of those are meaningful questions, since there is no god.

The questions the atheist would ask are: “how should we live, given that we can’t rely on a god to tell us how to live?” “how was the universe created, if it wasn’t God who did it?” and so forth.

I think it’s important to awaken in people their own consciences and their sense of responsibility for their own choices. I think that’s more important than dreaming up some institutional or algorithmic structure designed to take these burdens off of our shoulders.

When a government agent steals from me, it is just a person stealing from me. When a police officer threatens to make me a hostage, it is just a person threatening me with kidnapping. That they use the excuse of having a job description or “government” that authorizes such behavior is their hallucination and their problem (though I certainly will take into account the threatening delusions of my well-armed fellow citizens), and I feel as helpless trying to reason with them as Elizabeth Smart must have felt in the clutches of her God-authorized child-snatcher. My feelings towards reform of government are much as my feelings towards any large criminal syndicate that threatens me: reduce the threat as much as possible, and keep my head down meanwhile.

Agreed. However, there is a reason we have abstractions, so we can work with more complex thought objects than the base atomic components (if there are such things) that exist at “lower” levels. By your standard, almost everything (if not everything) we talk about is a myth.

My problem isn’t with the use of abstractions or shorthand symbols but with the confusion this causes when people forget or deny that they’re using abstractions.

When people say that the reason they’re performing an action is because the government requires it, they’re using “government” as an excuse for their behavior in a way that is often dishonest. The problem with the shorthand version is that it covers too much ground — it’s ambiguous. It pretends to explain something, but actually leaves it unexplained.

The shorthand of “government” or “law” as an excuse for behavior hides behind it a jungle gym’s worth of evasions of personal responsibility.

It is, indeed, important to awaken in people their own conscience and sense of responsibility for their actions and decisions. But if you do it without other tools or some other structure in place, that re-awakened conscience will quickly fall victim to the same factors that caused the person to abdicate it in the first place, and you’ll be right back where you started.

My feeling is that people do not have the capability to abdicate their consciences. They can make trade-offs, they can decide to defer to the judgments of people they consider better-informed, or whatever — but in doing so they are exercising their consciences. If you make the wrong decision by following someone else’s judgment — you have made the wrong decision, not the someone else (who may also have made the wrong decision, but you know what I mean.)

And this is the problem that “government” (among other things) pretends to cure. “Government” says “I will make some of your decisions for you, and I will take all the blame if things go bad.” That’s snake oil. Can’t be done. It’s like a perpetual motion machine.

And, crucially, it killed almost two hundred million people in the last century. Which is to say, people killed almost two hundred million other people in the last century, shooting them in the back of the head, starving them to death, stuffing them into gas chambers, etc. thinking all the while that it wasn’t them who was doing these things but the “government.” (And that isn’t even counting the deaths when armies met on the battlefield).

If you decide to go along with the law or the majority or what have you because you’re not confident that your own judgment is any better — that’s a plausibly sensible heuristic and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But your decision and your action is ultimately yours, and you are responsible for the consequences. If it turns out to be a screw-up, the right thing to do is to consider alternative courses of action that won’t be so screwed up — the wrong thing to do is to passively hope that the law / majority / whatever will improve so that your moral laziness won’t have those consequences anymore.

It’s tempting to object to this by saying that the law is different, because it really is an implicit gun-to-your-head that eliminates your freedom of choice.

But even a gun to your head doesn’t eliminate your freedom of choice — it just adds to the set of consequences your choices may produce. It becomes a factor that you add up along with all of the other factors before making your decision. In the case of a gun to the head, it’s a pretty big consequence and a pretty overwhelming factor, but it doesn’t change the basic rules of the game.

My imaginary friend Ishmael Gradsdovic related an interesting story to me:

All your talk about existentialism and free will reminded me of a peculiar experience I had several years ago. I’d just gotten back from a summer trip to Alaska and I was about to start a semester at community college. While I’d been away, my vehicle registration had lapsed and I’d come home to a bunch of threatening mail and accumulated penalties.

I went to court to try to clear things up, figuring that since I hadn’t been driving the car during the time it wasn’t registered, there was no harm and therefore no foul. I hoped the judge would see it my way. While I was sitting in the courtroom, bored and waiting for my turn, a bailiff walked out the door and due to some air pressure quirk in the courthouse the door slammed hard behind him. I jumped from the startling noise, and then I exhaled, eased back into my seat and waited for the adrenaline to wear off.

I’m not absolutely sure that was the cause of what happened to me, but I began to notice it soon afterward. The slamming door is the only thing I can think of that might have given a sufficient shock to my system to be responsible for the temporary paralyzing of my will.

I don’t know if paralyzing is quite right, but on occasion, I’d decide to do something or say something, then take notice of that fact, maybe even verbalize it internally, and then, in spite of my decision, I’d do something else entirely or nothing at all. It was eerie, and frightening, like being caught in a bad dream.

I use “paralyzing” as a metaphor precisely because it was so terrifying — it reminded me of stories I’d heard about people undergoing surgery where the anesthesiologist had mistakenly used a paralytic agent instead of an anesthetic, so that the patient was awake but paralyzed throughout the surgery and could feel every slice and stitch but could not move or scream.

I don’t think anyone else noticed the change. My personality didn’t undergo any great transformation — I more or less acted like I always had. There were times where I willed myself to do something and then did it, and I thought the curse was over — but it turned out that my will was only coincidentally in parallel with the automatic inclinations of the zombie I was living in.

At first even I didn’t notice. I sat there on the bench in the courthouse, daydreaming, waiting for my case to be called. The bailiff came back in and asked me to move down the bench a bit so that a woman using crutches could sit down closer to the door, and so I did. Finally my case was called and I stood up and approached the judge to present my case.

And it was only then that I noticed what had happened. You know how it is when you have some sort of confrontation and after the fact you think of some witty or pointed comment you could have made but didn’t? When I was talking to the judge it happened to me. But the difference was that I was standing right there at the time, and I thought of the thing I should say before I didn’t say it.

I was inclined to think I was imagining things. When I failed to do what I decided to do or say what I meant to say, I made excuses after the fact — blaming mixed motives, uncertainty, or subconscious desire for what was plain and simple bodily disobedience. I’d say to myself that I’d really decided to do whatever it was I’d actually done, and come up with some plausible reasons why. Or I’d just deny after the fact that I had any choice at all in the matter, telling myself I’d only done what I had to do. I’m reminded of the split-brain and other such experiments in which patients do bizarre things due to their brain lesions or other disorders, and then they retrofit excuses and reasons to explain their behavior rationally.

Then I started to suspect myself — I acknowledged that my will was being disobeyed but decided that it must not really be my will after all but only some fantasy “Walter Mitty” will. This “will” tended to be bolder, braver, more creative and more iconoclastic than my actions — so perhaps (I thought) it was just my fantasy of how I would behave if only I weren’t so pragmatic and cowardly.

Eventually (and it didn’t take long) I started to withdraw from the world. I couldn’t react to what I saw around me, so I stopped looking out my eyes and instead started paying attention to daydreams I concocted in which I could exercise my will. If I did pay attention to the world, it was with passive television-eyes. When I encountered things that demanded a conscientious and willed response, I quickly retreated back into daydreams, trying not to notice for fear that I would be overwhelmed with guilt if my zombie response did not match what my conscience demanded.

At other times I would grow bored of these daydreams and try to reemerge, or the terror of my situation would strike me again and I would mentally wake up and thrash about like someone who’s fallen asleep in the bathtub and slipped under the water, or like someone who suddenly regrets suicide and grabs for the noose after having kicked the chair away.

I’m happy to report that after several weeks my condition went away, as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck. It left me with the sort of new appreciation for life that you see in people who have survived brushes with death — and also a bemusement toward philosophers who try to imagine away free will and who are only able to do so because they’ve never had to deal with having it yanked away from them.

Some short bits of interest from around the web:

• People are more likely to behave unethically if you tell them that they don’t have free will. This according to two recent experiments conducted by psychologists Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia.
• “Hawala is a money-transfer system based primarily in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, based on independent brokers who phone one another and say, ‘I’m holding so much money in such and such a currency, please transfer an equivalent sum in local funds to such and such a person.’ The settlements are based on the honor system, and by some accounts, the network has its origins in the Silk Road. The system functions even in places where the rule of law and other elements normally considered crucial to a a functional financial system have collapsed.”
• “The president moves about like Caesar Augustus, with a vast, graded court of civil and military aides, doctors, secretaries, valets, hairdressers, makeup artists, bodyguards, drivers, baggage handlers, cooks, food tasters, Praetorian guards, snipers, centurions, bulletproof limos, a portable hospital, and an armored rostrum. And that’s when he travels in the United States.” 250 secret service agents, 150 national security advisors, 15 sniffer dog teams, 200 representatives from other bureaucracies, 50 political aides, a personal chef and his team of four cooks all travel in three jets accompanied by two helicopters to be met by two identical motorcades of 20 armored vehicles including limousine, whenever the president of the U.S. wants to have his picture taken in some important district or other.

At Wendy McElroy’s suggestion I read William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. It is at times brilliant and ahead of its time, at times utterly daft and pedestrian. As a writer, Wollaston is much more straightforward and easy-to-read than many of his 18^th century contemporaries, and even when he goes astray he often does so in interesting ways.

His goal in the book is to try to discern ethical truths solely by combining observations about the natural world with rational deductions from these observations — to see if he can derive a sort of universal, baseline religion without the aid of divine revelation but merely by drawing logical conclusions from the available facts. What sort of religion might you come up with if you had no assistance from God or his prophets other than the light of reason, the evidence of the senses, and a steadfast regard for truth?

Religion, to Wollaston, is synonymous with ethics. The science of categorizing human acts into the categories of good, evil, or indifferent is the basis of religion. He acknowledges the many attempts to formulate a rational rule to govern this categorization, and that these attempts have failed, but he asserts that such a rule must exist, and, furthermore, that he has discovered it. The opening chapter of his book, probably the most interesting one, gives his rule and the reasoning behind it. It goes a little something like this:

1. All acts that can be categorized as good or evil must be acts of an intelligent and free agent, capable of choosing or not choosing the act.
2. Propositions are true if what they express conforms to how things actually are.
3. A true proposition may be denied either by words or by deeds. By deeds, I don’t just mean language-like gestures: sign language, pantomime, body language, and the like. “There are many acts of other kinds, such as constitute the character of a man’s conduct in life, which have in nature, and to imply some proposition, as plainly to be understood as if it was declared in words.” For example, if a company of soldiers attacks another company, they are by virtue of their attack stating the proposition that the other company is their enemies, which may be a true or false proposition. Or, if you promise to do A but instead do B, you are by the very act of doing B instead of A denying the truth of your earlier promise.
   
   This does not mean that only those actions that actually communicate something to someone else, or that are theoretically intelligible by someone else, are those that deny propositions. In the privacy of your home, when you reach for the salt-shaker, you are asserting the proposition: this food isn’t salty enough yet.
   
   Some act-statements, like speech-statements, may be conventional (for example, in some religions, putting on head covering is a sign of reverence; in others, taking off your hat means much the same thing). Other act-statements are more universal and can said to be natural in a way that words never can be because words are always particular to some language.
   
   “Whoever acts as if things were so, or not so, doth by his acts declare that they are so, or not so, as plainly as he could by words, and with more reality. And if things are otherwise, his acts contradict those propositions which assert them to be as they are.”
4. No act that contradicts a true proposition can be right.
   1. False propositions are wrong, so acts that assert them cannot be right.
   2. True propositions express the actual relationship between a subject and an attribute of that subject. An act that denies this relationship denies reality and is therefore wrong, against nature/reality.
   3. If there is an omnipotent Creator-God, then to deny what is actually true is to deny what God has deliberately called into being. This is not to say that we should be fatalistically blasé in the face of an evil act, for instance, but that in such a case we should acknowledge as being a true proposition that an evil act occurred.
   4. There are eternal truths that seem to be part of the Divine intention, like “every thing is what it is; that which is done cannot be undone,” and to deny any particular truth that fits this pattern is also to deny the eternal truth itself, which is in effect to deny God. To deny anything to be true that is in fact true, and that an omniscient God therefore knows to be true, is also to put yourself in opposition to God.
   5. To deny what is true in any instance is to embrace absurdity and to put truth and falsity, good and bad, and knowledge of any sort out of reach.
   6. To deny what is true is to transgress against reason, “the great law of our nature.”
5. Acts of omission as well as those of commission can be assertions or denials of propositions. This requires a bit more subtlety to deal with, but, for example, you do not necessarily deny that The Religion of Nature Delineated is an interesting book by not personally being interested enough to read it, but you do deny that everyone ought to read some Shakespeare if you don’t bother to read any yourself. If you don’t read anything at all, you deny that reading is valuable, or that the value it gives is important, or some proposition of the sort. Certain truths seem to imply certain actions: if I am rich, and there are poor, were I never to be charitable I would be in a way denying the truth of wealth and poverty by not taking the obvious step such things imply. If I neglect to help someone in dire need when I am the best or only person able to help, I am making an assertion about myself, that person, the straits that person is in, human nature, and so forth.
6. To judge rightly what a thing is, all of those attributes of the thing that are capable of being denied must be taken into account. For example, if a thief rides off on another man’s horse, the thief isn’t denying that it’s a horse by doing this, but that the horse was another man’s property. The thief’s actions imply certain assertions about the horse (I can do with it what I please, it’s a horse, it’s safe to ride) but don’t imply anything about others (it’s a filly, it’s mottled brown, it was born in Kentucky).
   
   Truths are always consistent with one another, so you won’t ever find yourself in a situation in which you must deny one truth in order to affirm another. What if you make a promise that you are later unable to keep because of some other obligation? “It is not in man’s power to promise absolutely. He can only promise as one who may be disabled by the weight and incombency of truths not then existing.”
7. When an act would be wrong, forbearing that act is right; when the omission of an act would be wrong, doing that act must be right.
8. Moral good and evil are coincident with right and wrong.
9. Acts of omission and of commission that have the effect of denying what is true are morally evil. Their opposites are good. Acts that have no propositional content are indifferent.
   
   Denying any truth is evil, but some such denials are worse than others. All sins are not equal. For instance, it is worse to deprive someone of an estate than of a book, even though in both cases you are denying the truth of ownership: the estate might be worth 10,000× the book, in which case the evil is also 10,000× greater. (He tries to justify this by saying that the owner’s valuation of the property is somehow part of the truth statement that the thief is denying, which I think is probably incorrect. The thief isn’t saying anything about the value of the property to the owner by stealing it, necessarily.) The quantity of evil/guilt involves “the importance and number of truth violated.” Good actions, that is, acts that serve as true propositions, are also good in degrees, by inverting the evil that would be the result of their omission (or, I suppose, their commission in the case of good deeds of omission, but that seems to lead into a thicket: aren’t I just about always failing to commit a near infinite number of possible sins?)
   
   Though some deny that there is any such thing as good and evil, indeed there is just as there is a difference between true and false. Indeed: they resolve to the same thing. There have been many attempts to find a criterion or rule for distinguishing good things from evil ones, or some ultimate end that serves as the criteria by which good and evil acts can be distinguished, but these have all either failed, or are incomplete, or are circular tautologies, or eventually just reduce in practice to this rule I have proposed. (Here he reviews several such attempts.)
10. The natural existence of good and evil implies natural religion. Religion is “nothing else but an obligation to do… what ought not to be omitted, and to forbear what ought not to be done.”
11. “[E]very intelligent, active, and free being should so behave himself, as by no act to contradict truth; or, that he should treat every thing as being what it is.”

From here, Wollaston answers some possible objections to his scheme, most of which are the result of misunderstandings of what he’s getting at. He slips up, I think, when he discusses the case of whether or not it would be a wrong denial-of-truth to refuse to tell an enraged murderer where his prospective victim is hiding. Among his answers here is that “no one can tell, in strict speaking, where another is, if he is not within his view. Therefore you may truly deny that you know where the man is.” This seems to subvert his scheme by hinting that you can behave deceptively while holding on to the truth verbally and legalistically and thereby stay on the straight and narrow. In general, his answer to this objection seems to rely less on the scheme he’s introduced and more on ordinary folk ethics, which seems odd to me, since I don’t think this objection is particularly threatening to his scheme.

Wollaston also says that some truth-denying sins are worse than others. Some are so minor as to be “evanescent or almost nothing.” Furthermore, it is only those truths that have some reference to other living things that we really must respect. If we don’t treat a television as a television but instead treat it as a target at a shooting range, we don’t commit a sin against the truth (as we would if we treat it as our television when it actually belongs to someone else). To me, this seems an important qualification tacked carelessly onto Wollaston’s scheme, and weakens the original justification for it, which was that a denial of truth as such was a denial of truth as an aspect of God and therefore a denial of God, without any regard for whether that truth had some relation to other living things.

That concludes the first chapter.

Chapter two concerns happiness. Wollaston agrees with Aristotle that happiness is best measured over the sum of a person’s life rather than in any particular time-slice. He also asserts that to make oneself happy is the duty of every intelligent being, and that we must take this truth about intelligent beings into account in our dealings with others.

Furthermore, nothing that denies truth can be productive of the true and ultimate happiness of any being; neither can the practice of truth make any being unhappy (in this life-wide sense of happiness). This bold assertion he bases on his understanding of the nature of God (which he’ll expand on later): nobody has the power to increase his happiness by setting his will above the evident will of God, and, also, it would be absurd to think that God would be so sadistic or defective as to punish people for conforming to His will. Because of this, our duty to make ourselves happy and our duty to conform in word and deed to the truth amount to the same thing, and this is our true religion.

Chapter three concerns reason and epistemology. If we cannot actually know the difference between true and false, or at least have some good heuristics, then all of Wollaston’s project is for naught. He starts by giving an interesting and sophisticated description of how sense qualia and certain ideas and relationships are both examples of immediate mental data. These ideas/qualia as such are irrefutable data that we can use as axioms. Wollaston also asserts, less rigorously, that reason can in fact obtain new truths for us (if not, what else is it for?).

The practice of reason is another term for what is also called conformity to truth or the pursuit of true happiness, that is, the true natural religion. Each person must be his own judge of truth: “to demand another man’s assent to any thing without conveying into his mind such reasons as may produce a sense of the truth of it, is to erect a tyranny over his understanding and to demand a tribute which it is not possible for him to pay.”

There are also things we can’t determine the truth of, but there may be various ways in which we can get a probable truth, and he discusses several such heuristics, for instance, which sorts of authorities to trust. In such cases, you’re as obligated to conform to the probability as in certain cases you are obligated to conform to the truth: you put your money down on the best odds, even though you can’t know how the dice will roll ahead of time.

Chapter four concerns the free will problem. Is it even possible for people to conform to the truth? Wollaston acknowledges that people are not completely in control of their actions, and that you can only be morally obligated to do what you are in fact capable of doing. You are obligated to conform with truth only so far as your faculties, powers, and opportunities allow, and to the extent that the truth is discernible by you. That said, don’t act like this is an available cop-out. You must endeavor “in earnest… heartily; not stifling [your] own conscience, not dissembling, suppressing, or neglecting [your] own powers.”

Wollaston thinks that the free will problem comes up in ethical philosophy as a sort of dodge by people who are hoping for some sort of excuse for not taking ethical problems seriously. If you were told that a great reward was waiting for you in the next room if you were just to go and retrieve it, you wouldn’t waste time discoursing about whether or not you had the free will necessary to undertake such a task — you’d just get up and go. But in the realm of ethics, people for some reason feel obligated to dive into the free-will labyrinth rather than just staying on the straight and narrow path to what they know is best.

In chapter five, Wollaston decides to prove the existence of God and describe His nature. It’s your standard first cause argument (every effect has a cause stretching back through time, but there must have been some original uncaused cause to set this all in motion) combined with the argument from design (isn’t the universe amazing and don’t we see evidence of God’s order and benevolence everywhere?).

Wollaston also shares some thoughts on the compatibility of the divine regulation of the universe and of divine omniscience with free will; whether petitioning an omniscient God with prayer makes any sense; what God might have had in mind by introducing free will into His creation; whether God might from time to time rescind our free will to set us on a particular course; why it is that God seems sometimes to reward the wicked and punish the good; and how it is that we have immaterial souls planted in us by God.

To the certain relief of his publisher, Wollaston discovers that the truths about God that any heathen could discover by diligently applying reason to those facts and relations immediately available to our minds conform remarkably well to contemporary Christian worship: we should feel gratitude to our creator, and express this in prayer; we should eschew idolatry; we should form into congregations and worship together; and so forth.

In chapter six things get interesting again, as Wollaston derives and maps out what in modern anarcho-libertarian popular writing is called the “non-aggression principle.”

1. People are distinct individuals, each with certain unique properties.
2. Each person has by nature the possession of certain things, such as his own life, limbs, labor, and the products thereof. That is to say that basic property rights are inherent in the state of nature and don’t require government or custom to come into being.
3. Whatever is inconsistent with the general peace & welfare of mankind is inconsistent with the laws of human nature and therefore wrong. The right laws for a society are those that produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
4. Reason respects cases, not persons, so something that would be true for person A with respect to person B would also be true for B with respect to A if the case were inverted.
5. In a state of nature, people are equal in terms of dominion (with the exception of the natural dominion parents have over their children). Power does not confer right — if it did, it could confer the right to anything, including denial of the truth, which we’ve already proven to be wrong.
6. “No man can have a right to begin to interrupt the happiness of another.”
7. However, you do have the right to defend yourself, to recover what is stolen from you, or to make reprisals against those who have aggressed against you (to recover the equivalent of whatever you have lost by the injustice). To have a right to anything means also that you have the right to defend your possession of that thing.
   
   Alas, his first justification for this is that each of us has a natural capability and instinct for self-preservation, and that it would be absurd for us to have such a thing and not be allowed to use it. It seems to me like this same logic could be used to justify aggression.
8. Initial property rights are established by first possession or by something being the product of one’s own labor, and last until they are voluntarily relinquished by the possessor. Stolen property, if it is never reclaimed, may eventually lose its taint as it is passed from hand to hand or generation to generation, so it is not necessary to be able to trace every possession back to a first legitimate owner.
9. A property right may be transferred by compact or donation. Among the rights a person has by virtue of ownership is the right to dispose of property in this way, and both the giver and the receiver are acting within their rights. Trade is mutually beneficial and commerce is a social good.
10. Therefore: property is founded in nature and truth.
11. If you don’t dispose of your property by compact or donation, it is yours until you die. If someone else uses your property without your consent, they are in effect denying the truth of your ownership, in violation of the principles of chapter 1.
12. If something is your property this means exactly that you have the sole right of using it and disposing of it.
13. If you use something or dispose of it, you are simultaneously declaring the proposition that it belongs to you. (Borrowing or renting something is a special case, in which you declare that the thing is yours for the time allowed without doing violence to the truth.)
14. Injustice means usurping or invading the property of another; justice means quietly permitting to everyone what is theirs.
15. To not do violence to the truth you must avoid injustice. Injustice is wrong and evil.
16. To carelessly cause suffering in others, or to delight in the suffering of others, is cruel. To be insensitive to the suffering of others is unmerciful. Mercy and humanity are the opposites of these.
17. Those who religiously regard truth and nature will, in addition to being just, also be merciful and humane, these things being right.
18. Let me reiterate that.
19. Therefore: murder or injury (not in self-defense), robbery, stealing, cheating, betraying, defamation, detraction, defiling the bed of another man, and so forth, as well as tendencies to these things, are heinous crimes (tendencies include things like envy, malice, and the like).
    
    The value of something (for instance, when calculating compensation for injury) is determined by how the rightful owner values it, not by some objective standard and certainly not by the standard of the person who behaves unjustly with respect to it. A crime done in secret (for instance, to sleep with a man’s wife behind his back) is still an injury and a violation of the truth.

Another interesting thing in this section is that Wollaston seems to anticipate Kant’s categorical imperative, for instance when he says that a person who breaks a promise “denies and sins against truth; does what it can never be for the good of the world should become an universal practice…” (Wollaston died the same year Kant was born.)

Most of what Wollaston concluded in this chapter would be simpatico with modern anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, though many would cringe at his attempts to find a utilitarian grounding for his scheme, and the objectivists would quibble at the altruism involved in Wollaston’s mandate of mercy.

But in the following chapter, Wollaston reintroduces and justifies government, though he does this along classical liberal lines that probably wouldn’t leave all of the modern fans of the previous chapter behind:

1. Man is a social animal. Even if there were not many advantages to living socially, as individuals we would inevitably come up against other people. Disputes are inevitable. There will be vicious and ambitious people who will strive to become more powerful and thereby more troublesome to the rest of us. It is natural, therefore, that good people will form local alliances of mutual support and defense.
2. The purpose of society is the common welfare of those in it.
3. People enter into society for that purpose, which implies certain rules or laws according to which they agree to be governed. This means that they must settle on certain areas of unanimous consent, certain methods for resolving disputes, a system of punishments and deterrents to discourage offenses, and on a method of protecting the alliance from outside attack.
4. Such laws must be consistent with natural justice in order to be in harmony with truth and thereby not evil. (Like Robert Nozick, Wollaston believes that a state can naturally emerge from anarchy without violating natural rights along the way.)
5. A society with laws implies a hierarchy, with governors and governed, judges, magistrates, and the like. This seems to rule out anarchy, though Wollaston says that “if the society has none [no executors of the law, or no laws, it’s not exactly clear what he means], it is indeed no society, or not such a one as is the subject of this proposition” so maybe he’s leaving open the possibility.
6. A person may relinquish some of his natural rights and put himself under the control of laws and governors in order to gain the protection of being in a law-governed society. This is a form of contractual exchange, in which a person gives up something and gets something the person feels is more valuable in exchange, and so this is no violation of the truth as laid out in the previous chapter. (Indeed it would be a violation of the truth not to make such an advantageous exchange.)
7. This exchange, says Wollaston, may either be explicit or implicit. If you take advantage of those privileges that are not your natural rights but are only available to you as a citizen of a commonwealth, you implicitly own allegiance to the laws that go along with it, even if you have not explicitly taken an oath or what have you. Merely accepting the protection of a state, or choosing to live within its borders, is an implicit acceptance of its laws.
   
   This does real damage to the scheme Wollaston set up in the previous chapter, in which he said that the value of something is set by the rightful possessor of it, and that only the rightful possessor has the right to use or dispose of it. This modification reminds me of the people who set up shop at road medians, who, when you’re stopped at a red light, wash your windshield without asking you if you want their service, and then act as though you owe them payment for a service you never requested.
8. Once you become a member of a society, you need to respect not only the natural rights of the people in it (as described in the previous chapter), but any conventional or legal rights that the society establishes: for instance, their titles to property, or the privilege of the state to resolve disputes (rather than individual initiative to seek redress), or subordination to legal authority.
9. When the law is silent, or impotent, people retain their natural rights, and should behave as described in the previous chapter. If the law is contrary to natural justice, “one of them must give way; and it is easy to discern, which ought to do it.”
10. Societies established like the ones described in this chapter have a right to defend themselves against other societies. “War may lawfully be waged in defense and for the security of a society, its members and territories, or for reparation of injuries.” This is deliberately parallel to his formulation of an individual right in the state of nature. Nations with respect to other nations are situated like individuals with respect to other individuals in the absence of a state (at least “so far as they have not limited themselves by leagues and alliances.”) Another way of looking at this is that a nation may defend collectively the agglomerated individual rights of its citizens against the unjust aggression of an outside individual or group of individuals under the very same principles that individuals in the state of nature can defend their rights against one another.

Chapter eight concerns families and kinship: the nature of marriage, the responsibility of parents for children, the authority of parents over children — “I have designedly forborn to mention that authority of a husband over his wife, which is usually given to him, not only by private writers, but even by laws; because I think it has been carried much too high. I would have them live so far upon the level, as (according to my constant lesson) to be governed both by reason” — the debt of gratitude and other duties children owe parents, and the justification for us not treating all men as brothers but actually treating our kin better than everyone else.

Absolute maxims about individual liberty favored by some libertarian and anarchist thinkers often seem to run aground on the parent/child relationship. By what right do I as a parent interfere with my child’s liberty to run out into traffic? Well, it’s not hard to come up with some good reasons, but it can be hard to shoehorn them in alongside certain confidently-asserted principles about liberty. So it’s a sign that Wollaston takes the subject seriously that he includes this chapter.

He also tries to guard against the monarchist gambit of sneaking tyranny in through this gap by analogizing the relationship of a king to subjects to that of a parent to children. Wollaston says this won’t fly for a number of reasons.

The final chapter concerns human nature. It reiterates our duty to devote ourselves to truth, reason, and virtue (three names for the same thing). Some of the self-facing virtues are prudence, temperance, chastity, and frugality, but Wollaston is quick to stress that these are not virtues of self-denial so much as of rational self-interest. Chastity, for instance, is not the avoidance of sex, or of the pleasure from sex, but it’s knowing how best to fit sexual pleasure into our lives in a way that is compatible with our long-term goals and with other virtues.

Virtue, says Wollaston, tends to lead to happiness; vice to unhappiness. It’s not as though “virtue can make a man happy upon a rack” or dissolve all the misfortunes we may encounter, but in any situation, the most advantageous act and the virtuous act coincide (vice can’t make you happy on a rack either).

Wollaston goes on at great length to speculate on the nature of the soul (which he describes at first in a way that we might use the term “mind” for). He rejects three monist hypotheses to resolve the mind-body problem: 1) that all matter thinks, 2) that certain configurations or motions of matter generate thought, 3) that thinking is an epiphenomenon of some sort that accompanies certain configurations of matter. Instead, he asserts that thinking is a property of some special, non-material substance that God attaches to some sort of diaphanous interface in our brains that allows it to receive impressions from the physical world and to direct our bodies.

This substance is the soul, and, it being non-material, we have no reason to expect that it expires when the body it is attached to dies. From here, Wollaston makes a number of ill-supported speculations about the nature of the soul. Worst, he reasons that there must be an afterlife because he has proven that there is a just and reasonable God, and yet on earth there is so much cruelty and injustice and disorder, that only a just and harmonious afterlife could possibly balance the scales and be compatible with God’s nature. Alas, the proof of God he relies on as one of the axioms of this argument itself proceeded from the observation that the universe was so orderly and benevolent that it must be the creation of a just and wise God. So Wollaston has to utterly contradict himself to try and prove his point.

In all, once he gets past some interesting and well-considered thoughts on the mind/body problem, the rest of this chapter in which he gives his speculations about the nature of God, the destiny of the soul, and so forth are pretty worthless: just his own opinion of how he would organize the universe were he a just, omniscient, and omnipotent creator. He even uses that most desperate gambit of saying that even if the immortality of the soul cannot be demonstrated, “yet it is certain the contrary cannot”! From which he slides into Pascal’s Wager. (His version is slightly improved by his assertion that a virtuous life that is to our advantage from the standpoint of eternity also happens to be to our advantage from the standpoint of our mortal lives.)

His concluding advice: “let our conversation in this world, so far as we are concerned, and able, be such as acknowledges every thing to be what it is (what it is in itself, and what with regard to us, to other beings, to causes, circumstances, consequences): that is, let us by no act deny any thing to be true, which is true: that is, let us act according to reason: and that is, let us act according to the law of our nature.”

In late 2016, The Religion of Nature Delineated was released as a free (as in speech, and as in beer) ebook, with a number of readability improvements for the benefit of today’s reader. You can download it from this link.

As I mentioned yesterday, a while back I tried to flesh out a variety of political philosophy that I whimsically dubbed “topianism.”

I meant the name to highlight the distinction between it and utopian political philosophies (meaning, most all of the rest of them, including the mainstream ones that pass for conventional wisdom) — that is to say that it’s not aiming at organizing society in some ideal way, but in understanding and navigating society as it is in the here-and-now (not in the outopos where it will never be, or the eutopos where we might ideally project it to be, but in this topos right here where we’re standing). I’m not crazy about the name “topianism,” but I need some sort of tag to attach to the idea while I look for a better one.

Topianism is almost more of an ethical code than a political philosophy, except that it has a component with profound political consequences: its claim that there is no second standard (or set of standards) by which to judge acts in the political sphere — instead, a single standard applies to everyone. Questions like “is she a citizen?” or “is he a defendant?” or “is she the queen?” or “is he licensed?” or “is that legal?” don’t play the same sort of decisive role in topian evaluation as they do in utopian philosophies.

Topianism bears a lot of resemblance to existentialism because of its emphasis on personal responsibility and on avoiding the temptation to deflect or deny this responsibility.

When you talk about responsibility, you sometimes end up getting into the tangle over free will. There’s a lot of philosophical debate over whether free will makes any sense at all, and if it does, how it must be structured so as to make sense and whether a free will so structured bears any resemblance to the more intuitive, common-sense version of the concept. And there’s a lot of psychological debate over the extent to which our conscious decision-making is actually a causal factor in our actions or is only an after-the-fact “just so story” we tell ourselves.

Be all that as it may, most of us feel that we inhabit a world in which we choose some actions and some things just happen to us and in which there is a big difference between the two. This is crucial to our sense of being living participants in existence and not just spectators along for the ride.

The existentialist tradition did a lot of work identifying some of the ways we conveniently pretend to be spectators instead of participants from time to time in order to try to cheat our way out of confronting our need to decide and our responsibility for the results of our decision-making.

Topianism emphasizes how this works (or rather doesn’t work) in the political sphere. It insists that you cannot displace an individual human decision onto an institution, a hierarchical order, a rule, or anything of the sort. In other words, you cannot say “I did it because it was the law,” or “I did it because it was my job,” or “I did it because it was an order,” or “I did it because it got more votes than the alternative” as a way of trying to mean “the choice I made to do it wasn’t really my choice.”

In its most uncompromising form, topianism won’t even let you foist your decisions off on rules of thumb, ethical principles, or topianism itself. You can refer to such things in the course of explaining your decision-making, but you can’t try to make such things bear any of the weight of your actual decision-making or shoulder any of the responsibility for your actions.

It is an anarchist philosophy, but not because it preaches that The State should be abolished, but because it asserts that The State, as an independent moral agent capable of making decisions and shouldering responsibility, does not exist. The attitude of a topian to The State is not like the attitude of an assassin to the Emperor but like the attitude of an atheist to God.

Topianism does not mandate pacifism, or the nonaggression principle, or aversion to coercion (though some, like Tolstoy in the quotes below and in what I quoted yesterday, blend the two ideas or find that they both derive from a common root). Indeed if it were to mandate such a thing, it would be self-undermining, as its practitioners would be pacifists or nonaggressive or noncoercive because of a rule rather than because of their choice.

A topian can throw a man in prison, but only by saying “it’s because I think they should be confined and I’m willing to take responsibility for confining them,” and not “I’m following the law and what the warrant says.” A topian can steal from his neighbor, but only by saying “I want his property and don’t respect his ownership of it,” never by saying “I have a legal seizure order” or “to each according to his need.” Topian decisions can be wise or unwise, good or bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy. The one thing they cannot be is foisted off on someone or something other than the person actually deciding.

A topian can never merely follow an order because it is an order or because the person who gave it holds a rank or position. But a topian may conclude that some other person has a better track record of wisdom and good judgment in some field and may follow his or her advice for that reason — though never losing track of the fact that the choice and the responsibility for the consequences lie with the person taking the advice, not the person giving it.

This may sound slippery, since it seems easy to just linguistically transform an improper delegation of responsibility into a reasonable one just by saying “I choose it.” Is there a meaningful difference between saying “I did it because of an order from my commander” and saying “I did it because I chose to follow the advice of that commander-guy who seemed to me to be well-informed and of good judgment”?

I think there is. In the latter case, you have to at least ostensibly own the responsibility for your choice and make a more-or-less honest claim of having thought it over and justified it — furthermore, your posture is obviously conditional on the good judgment of “that commander-guy” and not just an unconditional carte blanche of obedience. In the former case, none of that is true: you’re merely a tool in your commander’s hands. That said, it’s certainly possible to describe your decision in a way that formally looks proper but is really a dishonest dodge gussied up in the right package. You can’t just change your language in a “politically correct” fashion, you really do have to honestly change your attitude.

Here are some ways I’ve seen the topian creed, or something close to it, expressed:

Juanita Nelson:

“It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making. We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority. For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing. And then we share in the consequences of any such action. Are we doing more than trying to hide our nakedness with a fig leaf when we take the view expressed by a friend who belonged to a fundamental religious sect? At the time he wore the uniform of the United States Marines. ‘I’m not helping to murder,’ he said. ‘I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.’ I could never tell whether there was a bitter smile playing around his lips or if he was quite earnest. It is a rationalization commonly held and defended. It is a comforting presumption, but it still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me. It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.”

“Bernardo de la Paz” in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress:

“A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.”

Mary McCarthy:

“If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”

Hannah Arendt:

“[T]here is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child. ¶ Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’ … Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word ‘obedience’ from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.”

Vlasov, in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:

“For myself, I’ve decided one thing only. I’m going to tell the executioner: ‘You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren’t for you willing executioners, there would be no death sentences!’ So then let him kill me, the rat!”

Tolstoy:

“The men of our time complain of the evil current of life in our Christian world. This cannot be otherwise, when in our consciousness we have recognized not only the fundamental divine commandment, ‘Do not kill,’ which was proclaimed thousands of years ago, but also the law of the love and brotherhood of all men, and when, in spite of this, every man of our European world in reality renounces this fundamental divine law, which he recognizes, and at the command of a president, emperor, minister, a Nicholas, a William, puts on a fool’s costume, takes up instruments of murder, and says, ‘I am ready, — I will strike down, ruin, and kill whomsoever you command me to.’ ¶ What, then, can society be, which is composed of such men? It must be terrible, and, indeed, it is terrible.”

“[T]he chief evil from which men suffer has for a long time not consisted in this: that they do not know God’s true law; but in this: that men, to whom the knowledge and the execution of the true law is inconvenient, being unable to destroy or overthrow it, invent ‘precept upon precept and rule upon rule,’ as Isaiah says, and give them out as just as obligatory as, or even more obligatory than the true laws of God. And so, the only thing that now is needed for freeing men from their sufferings, is this: that they should free themselves from all the theological, governmental, and scientific reflections, which are proclaimed to be obligatory laws of life, and, having freed themselves, should naturally recognize as more binding upon them than all the other precepts and laws, that true, eternal law, which is already known to them, and gives, not only to a few, but to all men, the greatest possible good in social life.”

“ ‘What is to be done?’ ask both the rulers and the ruled, the revolutionists and those engaged in public life, always attaching to the words, ‘What is to be done?’ the meaning of, ‘How should men’s lives be organized?’ ¶ They all ask how to arrange men’s lives, that is to say, what to do with other people; but no one asks, ‘What must I do with myself?’ … ¶ [T]he chief cause of men’s stagnation in a form of life they already admit to be wrong, lies in the amazing superstition… that some men not only can, but have the right to, predetermine and forcibly organize the life of others. ¶ People need only free themselves from this common superstition and it would at once become clear to all that the life of every group of men gets arranged only in the same way that each individual arranges his own life. And if men — both those who arrange others’ lives, and those who submit to such arranging — would only understand that, it would become evident to all that nothing can justify any kind of violence between man and man; and that violence is not only a violation of love and even of justice, but of common sense.”

“Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our time — Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people — into committing the most abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt? There could be only one way: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization called ‘government service,’ allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banning thereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this ‘government service’ must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men would never fall on any one of them individually.”

Thoreau:

“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”

“There is but one obligation and that is the obligation to obey the highest dictate. — None can lay me under another which will supersede this. The Gods have given me these years without any incumbrance — society has no mortgage on them. If any man assist me in the way of the world, let him derive satisfaction from the deed itself — for I think I never shall have dissolved my prior obligations to God.”

“I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions. Does not his law reach as far as his light? The expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all.”

“The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions.”

“Consider the cloak that our employment or station is; how rarely men treat each other for what in their true and naked characters they are; how we use and tolerate pretension; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal, perchance, with shame or impudence which no more belong to him. It does not matter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. Change the coat; put the judge in the criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men.”

“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you? Is it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding? I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

“A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences… They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments… ¶ The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.”

“My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel, — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action.”

“If… a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?”

Walter Raleigh:

“[N]o senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons; for politic members meet with neither encouragement nor reproaches for what was the effect of number only. For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. Hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single Roman would do.”