In two of the pieces collected in this latest FREEMAN anthology, Essays on Liberty, Volume VI (Foundation for Economic Education, 448 pp., clothbound $3.00, paperbound $2.00), Leonard E. Read deals with some of the prevalent criticisms of the work being done by FEE in general and THE FREEMAN in particular. To those who contend that the state of the nation cannot wait on leisurely processes of education, and that political action is needed right now, Mr. Read makes the pertinent observation that politicians are usually nothing more than the echoes of their supporting publics. If these publics are prevailingly interventionist in their thoughts and emotions, then any political action they encourage is bound to be deleterious.
The job, then, is to change the intellectual climate so that political “leadership” will act on libertarian clues. Does this mean that whole “masses” must be converted at once? To this question Mr. Read gives a firm “no.” It is influential people who must be reached—i.e., people who have depth of understanding, strength of conviction, and the power of attractive exposition. Such people, as Mr. Read well knows, are not to be converted by easy blandishments or by the bulldozing tactics of the sloganeer. They respond best to the attraction of minds that work to promote a spirit of inquiry. In other words, the libertarian who is visibly working at his task of perfecting his own understanding of basic principles makes the best “reformer” of others. And he does his “reforming,” not by shouting or buttonholing or trying to sneak things over, but by the quiet force of his own example.
This, as Mr. Read notes, is not being “practical” as the modern world tends to interpret “practicality.” To be “practical” in the contemporary intellectual climate is to evince a willingness to meet socialists half-way. Such “practicality,” approaching collectivism as a limit, must end by reducing the amount of freedom in society to a mere chemical trace as more and more “compromises” are reached. “Practicality,” so accepted, is a Trojan horse. Mr. Read is not out to “sell” anyone on this idea of the futility of political “practicality.” He wishes only to make it plain. The only antidote to political authoritarianism, he says, is “a project in learning, not selling.”
Surprises
As a project in learning, the essays collected in this volume are full of surprises. Taken as a whole, they utterly confute the charge that THE FREEMAN is edited by true believers who merely serve up to other true believers a doctrine on which they have been pre-sold in advance, which is one criticism of FEE which Mr. Read does not tackle. The FREEMAN-type essay is normally built step by step—and it must take blind men to ignore conclusions that are so firmly grounded in factual evidence and in logical lucidity.
Take William Alvadore Buck’s “Emancipation by Machine: The Myth of Mass-Production Slavery,” for example. Most defenders of modern capitalism have been willing to concede that a certain amount of “robotization” is inseparable from the factory system.
They have usually been willing to settle for the argument that some boredom in work is worth-while because of the productivity which repetitive processes unleash. This sort of “defense” of the machine, however, seemed to Mr. Buck to constitute a pretty feeble answer to those who have alleged that modern life is far less “creative” than life in pre-machine times. So Mr. Buck set himself a question: How many Americans actually work at simple repetitive operations?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics supplied some clues. In a recent year some thirteen million “production” workers were employed in the land. From this thirteen million Mr. Buck subtracted the figures for industries, such as lumbering, where narrowly repetitive operations do not exist. A tool plant inspection turned up the information that only one out of six toolmakers worked at “robot” jobs. Even in automobile assembly plants only five out of nine workers were actually employed on the line. Mr. Buck’s mathematical foray ended by reducing the total number of “robot” workers in the
Repetitive boredom, then, affiicts only from one-twentieth to one-thirtieth of the working force of the most advanced mass production nation in the world. In comparison to the 2.5-to-3 million that work on repetitive tasks the Bureau of Labor Statistics lists 8.8 million people who are “craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers,” and 6.4 million who are “professional, technical, and artistic workers.” “Managers, officials, and proprietors” number another 6.6 million. Why, then, not call us a nation of individualists if the non-repetitive type of industrial job outnumbers the robot type job by as much as seven to one?
Moreover, the “robots” do not necessarily cry to be separated from the assembly line. Some people, as Mr. Buck discovered by asking a few questions, actually prefer repetitive tasks. There may be a genuine problem of how to make such people happy once “automation” has released them for more individualistic and enterprising work.
Mr. Buck’s step-by-step refutation of clichés is a good illustration of THE FREEMAN approach to its work, which is not propagandistic within the modern drill-it in-by-rote connotation of the term. The genuine surprises in this volume mount up as one reads Rose Grieco’s “A Child’s Diary” (an imaginative piece by a PTA-employed dance teacher which suggests that children would be better off if the PTA would sponsor fewer rather than more extra-curricular activities for after-school hours). To continue in this vein, it was a complete surprise to me to learn, from George Winder, that it was the sixteenth-century Africa Company, a private trading organization, which effectively put
More Surprises
Another of the surprises in this volume is Oscar Cooley’s “Why Not Pay Cash?” This piece refutes the popularly held idea that it is possible, through borrowing against the future, to shift the full burden of contemporary wars or depressions to one’s grandchildren. As Mr. Cooley makes plain, anything wasted or shot away in the present has to be taken from current stocks—and if those stocks are paid for by debt rather than by taxation the present generation must take the material consequences of the resulting inflation. (True enough, the social effects of the inflation will live on to plague our grandchildren. It will not seem right that some of them must be taxed to redeem the bonds held by others. But the eventual settlement of the debt on the government’s books will merely involve a transfer of existing wealth. The original loss of wealth will have been paid for in grandfather’s time. And for the sake of nonbondowning grandchildren it had better been paid in cash.
The surprise in Harold Bray-man’s “Rich Man’s Tax—Poor Man’s Burden” is the suggestion that the American standard of life might be two or three times higher than it now is if “progressive taxation” had never been legislated. The higher one’s income tax bracket, the less the incentive to employ one’s funds in risky adventures. Just how many job-creating enterprises have been “birth-controlled” out of the very possibility of existing is, of course, impossible to compute. But Mr. Bray-man’s logic cannot be assailed. How else explain the fact that industry has had to find ways of negating the progressive income tax in order to assemble capital for expansion? The oil industry has managed to do this by way of the depletion allowance; in other industries, the trick has been accomplished by the device of retaining a good portion of corporate earnings for an investment which may eventually bless the stockholder as capital gains. “Progressive taxation” doesn’t keep existing industries from growing. But it must have a depressing effect on the birth statistics of new companies. In other words, the progressive tax is a force for monopoly and, concomitantly, a lower standard of living.
The surprises in this anthology of fifty pieces might be multiplied almost indefinitely. Patrick Boar-man’s “Value Judgments in the Classroom” suggests that marginal utility cannot be taught as an economic concept without a prior commitment to the philosophic value of free choice. Sylvester Petro suggests that union leadership must always tend toward corruption as long as union membership is socially or legally compelled. Edmund Opitz suggests that the majoritarian principle in the Declaration of Independence is incompatible with the doctrine of inalienable rights once religious sanctions have ceased to check majority appetites.
And so it goes, surprise after surprise—but always within the framework provided by coordinates of fact and logic.
A Study in Ethical Theory By D. M. Mackinnon.
Ethics and the Moral Life By Bernard Mayo.
The integrity of moral philosophy is under fire from several directions. It has to defend itself against the so-called “emotive” theory of the logical positivists, against the existentialist challenge, and it must maintain the reality of human freedom as against the determinists who deny it. Our authors are professors of philosophy in
The so-called “emotive” theory of ethics maintains that moral evaluations or moral judgments are just a matter of expressing one’s likes or dislikes. People are just emoting when they say, for example, “Stealing is wrong.” They might, with equal meaning, say “Stealing, ugh!” Now if anyone says “Ice cream tastes good,” he is describing his feelings about ice cream, but he is neither describing ice cream nor purporting to do so. Such an assertion may be translated accurately as “Ice cream, yum yum!” This is truly an emotive utterance and, as such, is not within the range of rational discussion. Someone else might say “Ice cream, ugh!” In using sounds like “ugh” and “yum” we may influence other people’s feelings but it can’t be said that we are engaged in rational discourse.
The proponents of the “emotive” theory take an unwarranted leap from the obvious fact that some personal judgments are merely “emotive” to the false conclusion that all moral judgments are necessarily “emotive,” that is, reducible to a matter of taste which is not rationally discussable.
Both Mackinnon and Mayo reject that subjectivistic interpretation of moral values and judgments. Mayo points out that in discourse generally, when I say “This is a good fishing rod,” the word “good” has an objective reference. By “This fishing rod is good” I mean that anyone competent to judge fishing rods would agree with me, and I could engage in rational discussion about the features good fishing rods have that make them better than bad ones. Similarly, in ethical discourse—when “good” is used as a moral epithet, that word is objectively evaluative and not just an expression of liking.
Again, when I say “Stealing is wrong,” I am not merely giving vent to my private feelings nor just expressing my disapproval of stealing. I mean it is morally wrong to steal. I could conceivably find myself in a situation where I might have a strong inclination to steal, but in holding that stealing is morally wrong, I am committing myself against stealing wherever it occurs, whatever my feelings in a particular situation. I am saying that stealing should always be disapproved and be disapproved by everyone. Evidently then, ethical judgments are more than mere emotings. About ethical judgments there is something rationally universalizable.
Existentialism Invalidated
Our two philosophers also agree in invalidating existentialism. The existentialists make much of the fact that every situation in which a person must come to a moral decision is a unique one involving unique persons. Mayo accepts this fact, but he considers it completely false to think that such uniqueness is relevant to the making of a moral decision. In order to think in moral terms at all one must view the unique aspects of a situation in terms of a general principle, just as a scientist in thinking scientifically has to think in terms of the characteristics that certain events have in common. I would not be thinking morally at all if I took my predicament as so “unutterably particular” that I could not view it in the light of general moral principles.
Mackinnon’s complaint against the existentialists is that they fall in love with the tragic for its own sake, accepting the hardness of our human lot, and the intractability of the world around us to our aspirations, with an almost masochistic delight. Giving oneself up to a sort of self-indulgent wallowing in the beastliness of things is a poor substitute for tackling the next job at hand.
A third question, and one of perennial interest in ethics, is that of human freedom. Both Mackinnon and Mayo make use of Kant’s statement, “Ought implies can.” It would be senseless for me to say I ought to have done something I didn’t do unless I was able (or free) to have done it. Mackinnon bases his argument for human freedom largely upon our immediate consciousness, our direct awareness of the fact that we could have done something we didn’t do, while Mayo discusses human freedom largely in relation to scientific predictability and determinism. He does not claim to find human free-will in the indeterminism of electron jumps. He maintains that even if determinism were universal, since prediction is a function of language, and language cannot describe everything without limit, there would still be ample room for scientific unpredictability and for moral freedom in human action.
Finally, both these philosophers would resist the effort to reduce what is right to the question of what is customary or legal or conventional. “Moral maturity,” writes Mayo, “is the achievement of moral autonomy.” (p. 176) No man is really moral unless he is guided by principles he has made his own. If conscience were a conditioned reflex, an unreflective imitation of the ways of others, there would be no such thing as conscience—the word could never have been invented. The whole idea of moral education is to internalize authority, to pass from doing what we do because others say it is right to a condition in which we bring moral principles to the test of rational reflection and make our own decisions.
—ROWLAND GRAY-SMITH
