Rawls in Eden

John Rawl's postulation of an 'original position,' is a brilliant, but once made, startlingly obvious philosophical move. As I understand it, the 'original position' begins with a thought experiment -- that is to say, imagine a group of rational people trying to devise a government, or perhaps more precisely, to negotiate a contract which forms 'a more perfect union.' The trick, however, is this: those deliberating are kept behind a 'veil of ignorance.' They are devising a government, and they will be subject to all the legal and social and economic implicature that follow from just that government, but they do not know, during the process of deliberation, just how they will be subject. When they have finished their deliberations, so to speak, each will be more or less randomly assigned a place within the resulting society, and because they do not know their status in advance, we can make reasonable assumptions that reasonable people will make certain sorts of decisions (and not others). A system of slavery would be unlikely because, not knowing a priori whether one would be placed as master or slave, it would be contrary to the individual self-interest of each member of the group (and thereby irrational) to risk being assigned as a slave.
As a thought experiment, there is something very American about Rawl's 'original position' -- not only that it seems, inevitably, to result in a constitutional democracy similar to that found in the United States, but in its marriage of the wholly practical (despite Sen's assertions to the contrary) with the wholly speculative in a point of origin. The group is gathered together, not to theorize ideal justice, but to write the contract for a government that will subsequently shape the lives of people not unlike thee and me in a world not unlike our own. Within the 'original position,' the deliberations are contingent upon rationality, but it is, in the end, a rather mundane form of rationality, predicated on little more than a consciousness of self-interest and causal inference of the 'common-sensical' sort. It is, however, a self-interest divested of contingency, and therein lies the crux of the difficulty (and the core of Sen's objection). We are not at a pure point of origin. We have come belatedly into a world fraught with self-interest, and self-interested calculation, but it is a self-interest already implicated within the world such as it is. It is self-interest from a particular vantage relative to a world with an already determined history. Our progenitor's labor, that is, brings us forth into a world long since fallen from grace. Nevertheless, in part because postulates little of reason beyond an instrumental self-interest capable of getting by in the world, and in part because it has purified that same self-interest of contingency (postulates a self-interest sublimated within a social activity where 'selfishness,' seeking personal advantage of one sort or another, has lost its utility) the 'original position' is, in Kantian terms, the 'adequate to furnish categorical imperatives' that is to say, practical laws sufficient to serve as 'a principle of morality,' both in criticizing extant social contracts, but also as a 'point of departure' within which the human endeavor to form 'more perfect unions' might reasonably be situated.
Again, as a thought experiment, there is something very American about Rawls' 'original position.' It insists upon means, not ends, and in doing so reveals an almost visceral distrust of what he calls 'comprehensive doctrines,' those religious or political doctrines that rationalize themselves against a utopian eschatology. The result, as I've suggested above, will inevitably be something that resembles American constitutional democracy in its Manichaean struggle to maximize and reconcile two competing values -- liberty and justice. That liberty and justice are competing, not complementary, values, I and others have argued elsewhere, and I will not repeat the argument here, except to say that, in almost all respects, I think Rawls is correct too in assigning 'freedom' primacy -- that is to say, for those deliberating within the original position, if in doubt, choose freedom over justice. I and others have also argued elsewhere that liberty and justice are self-defeating values considered in isolation each from the other. Absolute freedom for all, without the mitigating effects of justice, ends in absolute freedom for one, the Promethean uber-mensch that makes best use of his freedom to secure from thee and me at our expense the means necessary to his freedom. It ends, that is, in the violence of totalitarianism. Absolute justice for all, on the other hand, ends in what Kant called 'mechanism,' the complete subordination of human agency and the human will to a redistributive system that would make demands on and subsequently act on behalf of all equally. It ends, that is, in the denial of our individual human agency as moral and ethical beings. If the former is the teleological failure of unfettered 'capitalism,' with the corporate CEO as promethean hero, the latter represents the teleological failure of unfettered 'socialism,' with the state bureaucracy functioning as moral agent, and between competing ends, the Manichaean conflict, the world-historical dialectic of the late 19th and 20th century played itself out to the apparent triumph of the former over the latter, although it should be little cause for celebration. As Judt reminds us:
the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation -- at home but especially abroad. And thus, as we lose sight of Communism ... the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.
Twentieth century Communism, as it played out across Russia and central Europe, clearly had its many abuses horrors, and as Judt implies, neither would it do well for us to 'forget' that the Marxist teleology was compelling for so many, despite the horrors of its state bureaucracy and the gulag, because it gave a philosophical structure and vocabulary to our altogether human concerns with justice.
The fundamental question before us, one that has perhaps always been before us, is this: if not within some form of refurbished Marxism, how then do we speak of justice? A number of things should be clear enough. There is a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and insofar as wealth translates easily enough into the more efficacious forms of political influence, I suspect the recent quibbling over the terms of trade between the US and China, although reminiscent of the cold-war ideological struggles, is at fundament a struggle between competing oligarchies. That it is reminiscent of ideological struggles past, however, might serve to remind us on the one hand, that there is no necessary connection between capitalism, as such, and the sorts of distracted and placated representative democracies we have in the West, and on the other hand, that the sand castle of the nation-state has not completely dissolved under the rising tide of globalism. On the one hand, although we taut our form representative democracy for its protection of freedom, those most vociferously on the side of unfettered freedom are those who possess the greatest capability for efficacious action. It is the oligarch's (not the people's) freedom that must be protected, and the recent demise of Mubarik in Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale. It is less a tale about freedom, per se, more a tale about the oligarth's one compelling obligation -- to keep the people distracted and placated -- if not bread and circuses proper, then McDonald's and iPads, both of which are, in the end, anodyne sources of profit. On the other hand, I suspect Mubarik's real mistake, his structural mistake, was the conflation of the oligarchy with the nation state in a single person, in a kleptocracy. Increasingly the role of the national government is to protect the oligarch, and our own government's hesitancy to embrace the popular uprising against autocracy might also serve as a cautionary tale. It is less a tale about ideological alignment with an emergent 'free government,' per se, more a tale about role confusion.
Sen is perhaps correct when he asserts hat famine is less possible in representative democracies, insofar as the people must be violently repressed to tolerate a famine, particularly when free speech rights make it clear top the broader populace that the famine is merely a matter of food distribution. And there are, after a tipping point of difference, all sorts of relative famine as the 'visible disparities in wealth increase,' providing what Veblen called the invidious comparison. And it is perhaps the invidious comparison that toppled Mubarek, not a yearning to be free, as such, but a clear apprehension of having 'less' and wanting 'more' -- not an endorsement of western style capitalism, much less an endorsement of American style capitalism, as such, but a demand for 'justice,' a more equitable redistribution of wealth. Our own government was torn between its obligation to support what was, to all appearances, a popular uprising demanding the sorts of human rights implicit to western democracy and its competing obligation to protect what might be called an accumulated capability, the actual freedom of the oligarch captured in the rights to property. It was as though the hissing serpent of redistributive justice had raised its head to beguile us with the stuff of capitalist dogma, its reflexive defense of freedom for all, which in actuality is freedom for the few, those with the accumulated means, the accumulated capability, to act with some assurance in the world. It was heresy against one of the deepest and most formative of American mythologies It was heresy because the party so reflexively attuned to American freedom has also been the party of choice for our most fundamentalist Christianity mythology and the revolution at hand, of course, is a Muslim revolution. When ideologies fail, mythologies fill the vacuum left behind, and it is perhaps not surprising, with the lapsing of the great ideological conflicts between Marxism and Capital, that the intramural and extramural conflicts within our politics have taken on a mythological tone. The connection between 'free marketers' and the religious right is perhaps less abstruse than it might at first appear. One can suffer any number of indignities, one can lose one's job, one's home, one's possibility of support into a comforted old age, all of which reveal one's political and economic haplessness in this world, such as it is, with the rejoinder, 'well at least I know I'm free.'
Our most fundamental (and fundamentalist Christian) American mythology is centered in Eden. All are, or so I would hope, familiar with the narrative arch of the Christian creation tale, so I need not repeat it here, but there are a few features of the story that bear pointing out. First, and perhaps foremost, it is contingent upon choice, free choice. The tale would have been meaningless had God simply created the world, placed Adam and Eve in paradise, and kept the tree of the knowledge of good and evil well outside the gates of Eden. Second, along that line, the moral imperative -- to avoid knowledge of good and evil -- to maintain innocence -- does not emerge from or within choice, but exists prior to choice and is the imposition of of the divine. One can, that is, choose obedience or disobedience, but one cannot chose the moral imperative itself. Third, the enjoined choice is negative. One must say, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not,' but unlike Bartleby, it is not a preference emergent from experiential knowledge, but for Adam and Eve a preference that must be maintained behind a veil of ignorance that, of innocence that, once lost, is lost forever. Most undergraduates recognize that the innocence of ignorance is a poor defense against the importunities of Satan. Implicit to the narrative arch is a sense of post-lapsarian resentment for those choices, not necessarily one's own, that have precipitated the fall from grace the obverse side of which is an sense of nostalgia for more innocent times. Here again, choice is crucial to the possibility of salvation. One must choose the mediating grace of Christ -- a choice at once positive and negative. It is positive insofar as one chooses to accept (or not) God's grace, negative insofar as the choice itself entails conformity within a form of life, one that would have been puzzling to the historical Christ, but one that that is deeply American in the redeeming value of the punishment levied upon Adam and Eve for their original disobedience -- that is to say, the redeeming value ascribed to labor and the rewards of the same.
I should probably point out that there is nothing of the ideological in what I am describing, nor is there much of the theological, if by ideological or theological we mean the rhetorical appeal to a consistent set of reasoned ideas. Indeed, at least some of the contentiousness of contemporary political discourse emerges from the liberal appeal to logos -- if not a 'refurbished version of Marxism,' then at least 'the moral appeal' of a pragmatic ideology consistent with those failed ideologies of the recent past that aimed at something resembling ideal justice -- while the conservatives appeal to a mythos and a form of life more consistent with a post-modernist, a post-structuralist, post-ideological world. Timothy Beal, writing on Jon Shields in a summary article on American evangelical churches, notes, for example, that the Christian right leaders
have successfully mobilized conservative evangelical Christians not by appealing to a commonly shared ideology but by inculcating the very 'deliberative norms' that are idealized by political activists across the spectrum, including the New Left. Those norms, which include the practice of civility, the cultivation of dialogue, the use of moral reasoning, and the rejection of appeals to theology, enable the Christian right movement to maintain a degree of effective unity despite the many theological and political differences among its adherents.
Here we might note, however, that the practice of civility reserved for those who have made the 'right' choice and subordinated their moral authority to what I called in passing 'a form of life.' I use Wittgenstein's locution with some trepidation, in part because Wittgenstein was not explicitly concerned with ethical philosophy, nor the questions that trouble me here, and in part because, as I would understand it, a 'form of life' is not merely conventional, but exists before convention and organizes convention. A 'form of life' provides an ethical core, what it means to be a human being of a certain sort, of the right sort, and while a form of life can be learned, and demands that its attitudinal conventions be accepted (attitudes relative to the so called litmus test issues, like abortion,among them) it cannot be learned solely through the conventions, but is more akin to being accepted into a tribe. Free choice remains central to the moral being, but in as much as moral authority already resides within the 'form of life,' the choice is neatly divided between conformity and apostasy. Moreover, it is a choice that must be reaffirmed. The cultivation of dialogue is important as a means of reinforcing forms of life, playing down ideological differences and, as Beal also remarks, fencing 'the table, so to speak, from those who could not conform,' or more to my point, fencing Eden from the apostates. Dialogue is not dialectic, however, and the use of moral reasoning strikes an academic more as moral rationalization precisely because it lacks a frame of reference, a theory or ideology, that makes it cohere into a consistent 'moral view' or 'world view' against which one aligns instrumental means against predetermined moral and ethical ends. Dialogue is rather an idealized process, 'deliberative norms' within which one affirms and reaffirms one's moral autonomy and authority to make the 'right' choices, and the pun on 'right' is more or less deliberate.
In this context, the leap to the political is not particularly difficult, and it is perhaps useful to differentiate mainstream from more militant or eccentric strains of Evangelical Christianity. The latter, insofar as they derive their moral authority from a single issue (abortion or racial supremacy) or a single charismatic leader (Jonestown or Waco) are not easily assimilated to what has become the formative elements in the evangelical form of life, the moral authority residing in an idealized nostalgia for the middle-class suburban nuclear family. It is not Revolutionary Road, but Happy Days, though the unmasking of the psycho-sexual stress implicit in maintaining the pretensions of the idealized suburban life, the lapses of faith that result in alienation from one's work and the distractions of alcoholism and adultery that one finds in Revolutionary Road in its way simply affirms the moral authority of the prevailing form of life. Though the film would send an alternative message, it is clear enough that much of the protagonists' misery, the couples disaffection each with the other and their internal expulsion from their Edenic suburban surround, stems from their their loss of faith, their indulgence in a much more sophisticated view of life, but ultimately an indulgence less conducive to the happiness then the Cunningham's Happy Days as an embodiment of American Christian virtue in all its good humored and nostalgic innocence. Although no doubt not exactly what Jefferson had in mind when he set out 'the pursuit of happiness' as an inalienable right, yet the happiness of Happy Days is the vision of happiness that ought to be pursued, and the vision of happiness that the body politic ought to facilitate against the beguiling but antagonistic pressures of contemporary life.
Insofar as the democratic process resembles the practice of affirmation and reaffirmation of norms through deliberation, and insofar as one can maintain the undergirding assumption that the US was founded as a Christian nation, the constitution and the constitutionally guaranteed rights are afforded the same status as the Bible. If the left, however, values 'deliberative norms' as the occasion for an analytic -- and by analytic one means a deeper understanding of or a more thorough-going knowledge of the formal elements in a form of life, not for its affirmation, but its amendment relative to a vision of greater 'justice for all' -- the right values 'deliberative norms' as the occasion for sponsorship -- and by sponsorship one means affirmation and reaffirmation of the formative elements in the form of life already afforded moral authority, not for a greater understanding, but to support and prevent one from slipping into one or another of the forms of apostasy. The implied analogy to the alcoholics anonymous sponsor is intended, and reflects a post-lapsarian vision of collective and individual human nature that is already addicted to its own self-destructive behavior, to the various forms of governmental largess that undermine the redemptive engagement in labor, and the body politic, if it is functioning as it should, acts as in loco parentis, not to make choices for individuals and divest them of moral autonomy and authority, nor to protect individuals from the debilitating consequence of bad choices should they pursue their addictions individually or collectively, but to affirm and reaffirm the redemptive value of labor (both reproductive and economic) within a form of life that embodies an edenic vision of Christian virtue without the complicating and conflicting need for either the textual ideologies that emerge from careful Biblical exegesis or the coherent understanding of 'church' and its role in the body politic as the embodiment of a particular theology, a form of life that is uniquely American.
Labor is god's retribution. Acquiescence to the conditions of labor is the path to redemption. The recovery of a pre-lapsarian paradise, or a version of it both spiritually and materially, if one accepts the condition of guilt and the expiation of guilt in labor. One wants to argue the difference between redemption and reward, particularly economic reward, but conflation is a hallmark of conservative evangelical thinking. As Weber and others have long noted, the rewards one reaps, particularly the economic rewards, signal the depth and breadth of god's redemptive grace. It is, perhaps, important to note that the mythos of redemption and reward is, first and foremost, individual and familial, not social in the proper sense of the sense of the word -- that is to say, I work hard for myself and my family, and if you work hard for yourself and your family, the social will, as it were, take care of itself. The difficulty, of course, in pragmatic terms, is that labor is not equally available, nor is it equally "redemptive" when it is available. Bob Herbert captures the sentiment in a recent Times editorial (2.22.11) when he quotes the wife of an unemployed contractor -- "all we want to do is work hard and pay our bills. We're not sure that part of the American Dream is still possible anymore." From a conservative evangelical perspective, centered on the moral autonomy and consequent culpability of the individual, there is something wrong with the man if he finds himself "now suddenly thrust into the lower middle class." Attitudinally, that "something wrong" justifies not only continued exclusion from the sorts of social safety net benefits that go to encourage moral turpitude, but even the possibility of future employment. Herbert goes on to note that,
according to the National Employment Law Project, a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available. Among examples offered by the project were a phone manufacturer that posted a job announcement with the message: 'No Unemployed Candidate Will Be Considered At All" and a Texas electronics company that announced online that it would 'not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.'
While it might be a bit glib to suggest the parallel between the populist uprisings in the Middle East and the union protests in the Mid West -- there are, after all, many differences that would need to be taken fully into account -- the basic structural dissatisfactions are the same, the on-going appropriation of wealth from the many to the few and the growing sense of betrayal and alienation of those who see their position within the social compact eroded. Both Bush and Obama are a ways from the comic book villains of a Mubarek or a Quadaffi. While we might disagree, even vehemently, with their public agendas, it is not quite clear that their over-throw would have much appreciable effect. One difference is the political process itself, and the practiced art of "orderly overthrow" that we have mastered within our electoral process, one that insists we focus on "issues" and the abstraction of villains. The unions have been the traditional voice of equity between labor and its redemptive rewards, a check to the balance sheets of the corporate giants, but "collective bargaining" has long since lost any moral authority, in part because they have succumbed to their own forms of corruption, but also in part because they are "collective" and coercively so. In their constitution, and in their protection of individuals with little regard to their contribution or culpability, they violate individual autonomy and moral accountability -- justice conceived as "rendering to each his due." The emergent voice of conservative evangelicalism in secular guise, the so-called tea party, with its anti-union, anti-regulatory, and anti-taxation message, a visceral reaction against government appropriation of the redemptive reward due their labor and its distribution to others, is the voice of individual autonomy and moral authority. Unfortunately, they are also the voice of corporate autonomy and moral authority, insofar as those collective business entities are defined under the law as "individuals." Although corporate autonomy is unlikely to be what the tea-party has in mind -- thinking perhaps of individuals as individual human actors -- don't tread on me and my family -- it is most likely the reason those same corporate individuals are funneling money through non-profits to those political candidates channeling their message. They will contribute in their own way to the transfer of wealth, not through appropriation and redistribution, but through the steady erosion of their labor's value. It has bought, and will buy, less and less redemption.
I am suggesting that the ideological conflicts that shaped the twentieth century -- those pitting free market capitalism against the left and right hand versions of the totalitarian state, with the apparent triumph of the former, a triumph repeating itself belatedly in the middle east as I write -- did not portend the end of history as some suggested. In Rawls' terms, it settled only one issue -- the primacy of individual freedom -- though not exactly as Rawls himself might have conceptualized individual freedom. It has not so much signaled the triumph of the individual human actor as moral agent, but the corporate individual. Here too, we should be cautious not to mistake the corporate individual for what our 18th century forebears might have called "we the people" acting concertedly as moral agents within a rational -- that is to say, self-consciously articulated -- social compact that serves to promulgate justice within the state. The corporate individual exists, for the most part, outside the state. The rebellions throughout the middle east mimic our own American Revolution, popular uprisings against corrupt and confiscatory states, but they will differ in two respects. First, however successful they might be in creating a new state in Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, they have left largely unscathed those "corporate individuals" that exist outside and above the state. They are no longer colonized by one or another European state, but they continue to be colonized by the interests of corporate oil, individual players in the panoply of individual corporate players. If the individual human being, acting as an autonomous moral agent, acts in deference to other individual human beings -- that is to say, behaves justly -- the corporate individual, acting as an autonomous moral agent, acts in deference to other corporate individuals. The genius of Rawls' formulation of the "original position," its persuasiveness, lies not only in its theoretical simplicity, but the way in which it positions autonomous self-interest as deference to others, establishes justice within deliberative norms without a necessary appeal to an a priori (and arbitrary) ideological or theological moral authority. Nevertheless, and this brings me to the second difference. Rawls' formulation is persuasive in part because it appeals to a particularly protestant, and a particularly American mythos. It conflates a version of our constitutional congress with an idealized (and unrealized) version of its result, suggesting that we can, to one degree or another, recapture an American Eden of justice for all. Although I find Sen's critique more or less irrelevant to Rawls' motivating concerns, his insistence on the pragmatic difficulties of creating justice in the world we know does point hint at a concern. Even setting aside the idealism of the 'original position,' it is easy enough to imagine how autonomous human individuals might act in deference to others, and it is also easy enough to imagine how the autonomous corporate individuals might act in deference to one another, it is much more difficult to imagine how the former can be aligned with the latter, and that disjuncture may well be the 'original sin' of the emergent American future. The difficulties are post-lapsarian. It is easy enough to imagine how autonomous human individuals might submit to and achieve redemption through labor, how one might make the right choices to "work hard and pay one's bills," somewhat more difficult to imagine how autonomous corporate individuals might submit to and achieve redemption through labor, but virtually impossible to imagine how one might achieve equity between the former and the latter.

An Aside on Truth and Rhetoric

It is altogether too easy to accuse politicians, as a class, of mendacity. A few moments on FactCheck.org will go a long way toward dispelling any illusions one might have of either party. A few minutes ought to dispel any illusions that the Supreme Court's recent decision, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, would have little or no effect on electoral politics, or that the decision would be neutral, or fair, with both the democratic and republican parties having, as it were, equal access to the biggest bucks of corporate sponsorship -- not that it really mattered. Both parties used what money they had on ads mimicking the Old Spice Guy and making extended analogies between the mess on Wall Street and the dog feces in a back yard. The real difficulty, if one wants to insist on some modicum of truth in advertising, if not in politics itself, may not be the politicians themselves. They are simply succumbing to the temptations of a process that virtually demands mendacity. Ideally, of course, elections select out the "better" of two candidates, and in a perverse way perhaps they do. The positive vote, for those who can be bothered to vote, signifies little more than "better you than the other." Insofar as the actual issues at hand -- the sorts of actual technical expertise it would take to actually govern the nation, to make informed economic or foreign policy decisions -- are well beyond the purview of the vast majority of the electorate, the whole matter of electoral politics becomes a contest of perceived character, a side show of sanctimonious pretense and lurid aspersions, of team loyalty, and the more money invested in the various ads, the greater their production value and importantly the greater their frequency, the more likely their viral messages will infect the minds of the masses.
And the elections are a side-show. What really matters is governing, and government, and those in office may well be the Vichy puppets of puppeteers well behind the scenes and screened in anonymity. In this sense, Hacker and Pierson have it right, and their book, Winner Take All Politics, is essentially correct in its analysis. After the yard signs (along with, one hopes, the feces of the aspirant Senator's dog) have been cleared away, those elected are left to govern, and government over the last quarter century has favored the riches of the rich over the remainder of the population, concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people that are well known, but not to the American public as such. The trend shows amazing resilience, surviving both republican and democratic adminstrations, and it continues more or less unabated today. It's not that elections don't matter. They do. The recent republican victories in the House have all but eliminated the possibility of any real movement toward redistributive justice in the US, and the recent compromise tax bill, which continues the Bush era tax cuts not only for the diminishing middle class, but for the wealthiest of Americans, represents a case in point. If the elections didn't matter, neither the AFL-CIO nor American Crossroads, neither the AFSCME nor the Tea Party Express, et cetera, would invest their solicited funds in electoral politics, and it is clear that Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision, has opened the flood gates to Citizens United, a lobby group dedicated, ostensibly, or so its web site informs us, to "restoring the founding father's vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense and good will of its citizens."
There is a good deal of room for quibbling in the Citizens United mission statement. What exactly, for example, is a 'free nation,' much less one that accords with the 'founding father's vision of a free nation?' One must accept such statements more or less at face value, without much in the way of inquiry, or they elicit much confusion, and little relief. To push it just a bit, by 'freedom,' generally speaking, we mean one or another form of agency or instrumental 'freedom' -- that is, I am free from physical, legal, regulatory, or other restrictions that might limit my freedom to do the things that I might have reason to value -- relative to the topic at hand, free from those constraints that might limit my freedom to speak my mind on matters of importance to me and others. Insofar as there is no social order with perfect agency or instrumental freedom, we feel the latter underwrites the former. I may not get my way within the social consensus, but at least I have had my say in the formative stages of building that consensus. Amartya Sen is perhaps the latest and most cogent defender of open discourse within democratic contexts, where one's say is operative not only within those processes leading to a decision, but within the examination and weighing of those issues leading to the decision. The electoral process is a case in point. One has one's say in the vote one casts and it is weighted no more no less than any other's vote. One also has one's say, or at least has the opportunity to hear and weigh what the candidates, the pundits, and one's neighbors have to say, in the campaign leading to the decision. Free and open discourse, having one's say, is in Sen's view a necessary condition, if not for 'public reason,' per se, then at least the public justification for those governing acts, those decisions, that affect our lives. Within the public domain, so to speak, some acts or restrictions are simply unjustifiable -- public policy that leads to mass starvation -- and he poignantly observes that no 'free nation,' where people have an operative say, has experienced a famine in modern history. Other acts or restrictions are more 'justifiable,' in two senses of the word 'justifiable' -- at one level, justifiable in the sense of 'aligning' those acts or restrictions that I might value with those that you might value and in the process developing a social consensus -- at another level, related to the first, justifiable in the sense that one can articulate 'reasons for' and 'rationalize' the value one applies to certain acts or restrictions, the sorts of predicative ends that come in response to the question, 'why?'
Open, free discourse, of course, is necessary to this two-fold and largely rhetorical process of 'justification,' but successful justification does not necessarily imply that we have achieved 'justice.' We are, as it turns out, quite adept at rationalizing our actions, and even the most persuasive justification may not be 'true once and for all,' and from the time of Socrates on, it is this 'true once and for all' that matters most. In most contexts, we have a rather settled view of 'truth,' a common-sensical view of the world. When we promise, with all the gravitas of the courtroom drama, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are, in effect, promising to stick closely to 'the facts of the matter,' the sorts of observable (and verifiable) datum of our common experience. The invocation of the court room is not egregious. We all implicitly understand the importance of 'the truth,' the facts, in the adversarial context of legal wrangling. One does not need the philosophical exercise of the Rawlsian 'original position' to derive the ethical imperative to honesty, to know that one might, through unfortunate circumstance, be falsely accused of a crime. We want to protect the innocent and punish the guilty, but we have, for the most part, wisely given precedence to the former over the latter within our courts, a precedence that relies often on the judges insistence on the so-called technicalities of legal argumentation, some of which seem counter-intuitive to our settled judgments. The courtroom, however, plays out the drama of 'open' discourse, even if it is not entirely 'free' discourse -- that is to say, even if that discourse is bound by 'rules,' not all of which are common-sensical, but 'the technicalities' of which are designed to protect the accused from mighty leaps of bad logic to spurious conclusions, particularly in those circumstances when it might not be wise to trust too fully in the 'good will' of our neighbors.
Nevertheless, our common-sensical appreciation of the world serves us rather well. Even the most cynical, obfuscatory, and sceptical of philosophers is unlikely to step in front of a moving Metra train, nor is anyone else, and for the same reasons. As a philosopher, I might mount intricate, technical arguments for the incommensurability of my pain, your pain, and perhaps even argue for the incommensurable cultural differences between an American experience of pain and a Balinese experience of pain, but I suspect that philosophers as a class would not step in front of a moving Metra train because our common sense tells us that doing so would be painful and most likely fatal, and few of us are willing to experiment with the former on the way to the latter. For the most part, we don't need to experiment, because those inattentive or inconsolable enough to step in front of a moving Metra train have provided us with sufficient evidence of 'what happens.' Even if we have not witnessed the event personally, there are newspaper and other credible accounts, and they are credible because they accord with our own experience. We have a developed understanding of the world, a developed theory of reality, that allows us to predict with some accuracy 'what would happen if' on the one hand and on the other allows us to predicate prudential ethical imperatives of the 'look-both-ways' sort. As I tell my students, you can come to an understanding of Newton's laws of thermodynamics, and you can do so whether or not you have ever heard of Newton's laws, whether or not you fully understand the mathematics of angular momentum, and it is probably a good thing that they can come to such an understanding. I would hate to think that my impulse to avoid rushing trains depended upon their understanding of calculus. Were that the case, the carnage at Metra stations would be incalculable. For the most part, that is, we live our lives quite successfully within our well developed, but common-sensical understanding of the world and how it operates, and we hold those theories of 'reality' to be virtually, if not entirely, self-evident in their truth.
Regardless, I am writing philosophy, and I am going to split one hair -- the difference between 'fact' and 'theory.' On the side of 'fact,' we have the observable (and verifiable) datum of our experience. If I see an angel sitting on my living room sofa sipping tea, there is little doubt that I see what I see, but considerable doubt that it forms a part of 'reality.' Because I am not generally accustomed to seeing angels, my impulse is to verification, fetching my wife and asking, "do you see that?" If her answer is "yes," then we are witness to a rare, but verifiable visitation. If her answer, however, is "no," as is more likely the case, then my doubts, not my vision, are confirmed. On the side of theory, given the fact that I am seeing an angel, if the vision persists, and the angel engages me in conversation, there are a couple (actually many) explanations as to why this might be the case. First, of course, is the assumption that angels only appear to the 'elect,' to those who, within the unfolding dynamic of god's plan, have been selected to play a special part. Second, of course, is the assumption that angles only appear to the 'ill,' to those who have experienced a stroke, or have succumbed to the onset of schizophrenia. There is, perhaps, some room for dispute about which 'theory,' which explanation, is the better. If I am the one actually seeing the angel, and if her conversation is engaging, I might actually accept the first theory, but if it is the person next to me at the Metra station insists upon seeing an angel, and he insists upon sharing the angel's message -- to avoid the consumption of deep fried pork rinds as the devil's food -- I am more likely to accept the second explanation and find a seat at some distance from him when the train does arrive, even though his angel's advice makes good sense on any number of levels.
Rhetorically, we are likely to find an argument unconvincing if it does not align well with our common-sense theories of reality, and more or less irrelevant if it does. Imagine a parent arguing passionately at a PTA meeting that the public school teachers have no right, no right whatsoever, to insist that young children 'stop and look both ways' at a Metra crossing because it inhibits their freedom to choose when, where and how they might cross. Likewise imagine a parent arguing passionately that public school teachers should insist that young children should 'stop and look both ways' at a Metra crossing. The former would be met with incredulity, the latter with impatience, and both arguments are, well, pointless. The former argument because it begs the question, 'what world does she inhabit?" The argument does not align well, at a fundamental level, with what we know about Metra trains, what we know about the uninhibited behavior of children, what we know about parents and their need to protect their children, regardless how we might feel in other contexts about freedom. The latter argument because it elicits the 'well duh!' response. My point in eliciting these pointless arguments is this: wouldn't it be great if we could, as Citizens United suggests, rely on the 'good will' and 'common sense' of the people in all matters of importance?
The difficulty, of course, is manifest. We find plenty to argue about, and most of our argumentation arises from ignorance. It is a rather common observation that the contemporary world requires a sort of specialized knowledge that is beyond the ken, if not the ability, of the non-specialist. This is particularly true within the realm of science and technology. The distinction between 'fact' and 'theory' is especially important in this regard because it not only under-girds our common sense understanding of the world, but also our more (our most) sophisticated understanding of the world within what I'll call, for convenience, the inductive/deductive cycle. We are given facts -- this object and that object and many other objects fell when released from a height -- from which we inductively form theories -- all objects fall when released from a height. The universal nature of the theory is important to note -- 'all objects fall.' The universality is important to the truth of the theory, and its universality allows us to make deductions of a pragmatic sort -- if all objects fall, then I will not put myself in a position to fall from a great height because I will plummet to earth and injure myself. Its universality also allows us to justify imperatives of an ethical sort -- buildings with high balconies must have a guard rail to prevent people from plummeting to earth and injuring themselves. There are, however, those instances where our deductions prove false. The balloon filled with helium does not fall, but rises. When faced with evidence to the contrary, we have two alternatives. We could toss the theory, or its universality and make it contingent, or find other plausible explanations for the exception. One might suggest, for example, that the rising helium balloon seems akin to the bubbles rising in a liquid, our salad oil separating from the vinegar, but an alternative explanation, and not just a catalog of exceptions to the rule of gravity, requires a level of sophistication that I wonder how many of our fellow citizens actually possess. There is no limit to the degree of sophistication. Though I believe I have a grasp of the basic principles in operation, one might imagine that a professor of physics would have a better grasp of those same principles, or at least a much more detailed, a much more sophisticated explanation. The extent to which the professor's sophistication improves upon our pragmatic deductions or our justification of the ethical imperatives that follow is questionable, but a real question none the less.
In the balloon example above, to split the hair one more time, one should note that facts falsify theory, not the other way around. This notion of falsification, derived from Popper and from Kuhn, is also important, and marks the boundary of what might properly be called scientific from the dogmatic within the inductive/deductive cycle. The two approaches, the scientific and the dogmatic, are irreconcilable, and attempts to reconcile them have led to the worst sorts of sophistry, but it is, ultimately, a question of what is irrefutably -- that is to say, universally -- true. The set of facts credited by the scientific/pragmatic world view are, of course, experiential, and for the most part material. Observation, particularly verifiable observation, provides the base-line truth. If I see it, you see it, then it must be 'true,' and any theory of our shared reality must accommodate all (not just some, but all) the observed facts. If a theory -- at least one which aspires to universal Truth -- does not accommodate all the observed facts, then it is partial, or tentative, and we await a 'better' theory, one that accommodates those facts, those observations, not yet accommodated. Induction leads to theory, and the value of theory is, of course, that it provides the basis for the prediction, for the deduction, of future observations. If I toss a rock into the air three times, and each time it falls to the earth, I can predict with very high likelihood that it will fall to the earth the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh times. Having said this, no one needs an argument for falling stones. It is only within those domains where theory fails to accommodate all the 'facts' that we need argument proper -- that we need to settle the question "how best to accommodate all the facts given to observation?" As a science progresses, as one might imagine, the answers to those questions become more and more "specialized," more and more "technical" in nature, and to understand the answer requires an "expertise" that belongs to a smaller and smaller cadre of specialists, most of whom operate beyond the purview and beyond the comprehension of the general public. When the conservative activists -- the Tea Party being just the latest version of the same -- complain about the "elites," I strongly suspect it is the visceral reaction if not to the arrogance of "expertise," then to its implied paternalism, its implicit and patronizing assertion of "we know better, trust us."
There is considerable reason for concern. The first is the degree to which "specialized knowledge" has become proprietary, and consequently a source of economic and political power. The second, related to the first, is the degree to which the scientific/pragmatic comes to resemble its opposite, the dogmatic/religious. For those excluded from real argumentation over the validity of scientific/pragmatic claims, whether by education or by the unavailability of proprietary information (e.g. the actual test results on a new drug, for which the greater public may only vaguely understand the significance of those results, much less the validity of the test procedures, an understanding that assumes the pharmaceutical, who holds patent on the drug, hasn't withheld complete results on the clinical trials to protect the potential profitability of their investment) the whole matter must be accepted on a faith guided, as Citizens United again puts it, "by the honesty, common sense and good will of its citizens." One might assume, of course, that the "citizens" in question are thee and me, those who have neither specialized training nor access, but common sense and good will only take us so far in understanding what is really at stake in the clinical trials of a new drug. For the most part, it will take us nowhere, and the citizens in whom faith is placed is neither thee nor me, but the big pharmaceuticals. We place our faith in the uncommon sense and good will of fellow citizens Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Roche, and GlaxoSmithKline, and we have little opportunity to do otherwise -- the drug is safe, trust us.
The day of the Victorian scientific polymath has, alas, passed and it is not surprising, perhaps, that we are entering another great awakening to "faith." The dogmatic/religious world view has a long and venerable history, and to put that venerable history in a secular context, let me begin with Plato:
The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution, she beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute.
While the divine intelligence can coexist with the day-to-day pragmatic scepticism accessible to "common sense and good will," it has reclaimed (or is reclaiming) its ascendancy with the greater populace on the converging fronts of evangelical religion and politics. It is fundamentalist and egalitarian in a characteristic American way. The divine intelligence, the real reality, the universal truth has been revealed, once and for all, and so it is not surprising, perhaps, that the biblical fundamentalism finds its counterpart within the constitutional fundamentalism of the Tea Party. If the former places ultimate authority in the biblical account to free us from the apostasy that has crept into religion, returning it to what Christ demands of his followers, the latter places penultimate authority in the constitutional account to free us from the various forms of socialist apostasy that have crept into politics, "restoring the founding father's vision of a free nation."
Here, as elsewhere, the word "free" is highly nuanced, and predicated on what, for lack of a better term, I want to call individual exceptionalism. No one person believes, for him or herself, that he or she is anything less than an end unto themselves. In this regard, one must be free to choose, not simply to pursue what one believes is of value, one's own personal vision of happiness, but in that pursuit to reveal one's values and one's value. The dogmatist must concede "free" choice, but before the first bite of the apple, the individual has ultimate value only insofar as he or she is a potential convert to the faith, after which the individual has value only insofar as he or she has chosen correctly, chooses sincerely and authentically to profess faith in the revealed doctrine. Truth, "knowledge absolute in existence absolute," is transformative. It transcends and frees us (or will free us) from the work-a-day reality, the world we inhabit and call existence. While evangelicals may differ in their theology, and there is considerable variety in the religious experience, the conversion narrative remains central, and those who refuse or fail to make the transformative decision forfeit their value as human beings. Having said this, however, while most dogmatists believe that the Truth has been revealed "once," most really do not believe it has been revealed "for all." Just as the dogma has been revealed by God (or the secular version of the political prophet -- Marx revealing the ineluctable path of history -- the founding fathers revealing the transcendent powers of the free market) it is revealed to an elect, the individual exceptions and the exceptional individuals, those not only predisposed to hear it, but those capable of receiving it, and here too one can cite Plato as a sort of precursor:
Therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect.
It is not merely a matter of the Truth, per se, but also, and crucially, a matter of just who does (and who does not) possess and profess the Truth, and perhaps not surprisingly the philosophers within Plato's world, the elect within American fundamentalism, those who have "intelligence of the universals," all tend to share in cultural, racial, class or other ineluctable markers that make differentiation of the elect (from all others) a relatively easy matter.
What has this to do with rhetoric? As Plato recognized if rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is to be anything other than the practiced and perfected skill at deception, a nuanced skill at winning over the hearts and minds of other to one's own political or economic advantage, it must persuade with truth, and not just any truth, but with the Truth. The difficulty, of course, is that we have competing visions of the truth. Both visions are comprehensive, to use John Rawl's term -- that is to say, each vision, when pressed, excludes the other. It is easy enough to tsk-tsk over the exclusions of the dogmatic/religious vision, particularly over what appear to be the wilful exclusions of enforced ignorance. Not all ignorance is enforced ignorance, and it is easy enough to tsk-tsk over the exclusions of the scientific/pragmatic vision, the hyper-specialization into mysteries that are, if not perfect, then perfectly incomprehensible to the uninitiated lay public. The scientific/pragmatic cannot brook received doctrine, even its own doctrine, and seems hell bent on undermining any universal truth, particularly when the observed facts of the matter contradict that doctrine in fundamental ways. It is an ideal of free public discourse that the "truth will prevail," and free public discourse has long been recognized as crucial to democratic processes. Ronald Dworkin recognizes both in the affirmative answer to his titular question, Is Democracy Possible Here? and he would set out, as he would set out "principles for a new political debate." The same question was addressed, perhaps more fundamentally, in John Rawl's Political Liberalism -- that is to say, how can irreconcilable comprehensive visions co-exist within a single political system? In the end, they probably cannot, and not because we have not, as Dworkin might insist, we have not articulated principles that "both sides" could readily accept. Neither the scientific/pragmatic nor the dogmatic/religious can be reduced one to the other, nor can either be reduced to a set of principles independent of either. While most would accept, as I have pointed out above, "that every human life is of intrinsic potential value and that everyone has a responsibility for realizing that value in his own life," the dogmatist predicates that potential value against acceptance of the dogma. To choose otherwise is to forfeit one's value in the failure to fully realize that value in one's own life. Than too, they probably cannot forever co-exist, and not because our system of civil liberties cannot accommodate both positions. Strictly speaking, to date, they have.
The difficulty, however, is deeper. American style civil liberties are more or less predicated on the scientific/pragmatic vision, where observable and independently verifiable facts trump theory or, in the political sphere, public policy declarations. Suppose, for example, the goal is to reduce teenage pregnancy, along with the devastating social and economic consequences to both mother and child. It is not difficult imagining a social consensus around the end of reducing teenage pregnancy, with adherents from both the liberal and conservative camps, though clearly both would articulate different reasons for their adherence. My own concern with social and economic consequences betrays a liberal bias, one that sets aside any concern with moral precepts and focuses on pragmatic consequences. My conservative counterpart is likely to support a reduction in teenage pregnancy, not because it has consequences, but it is itself a consequence of moral failure, having made the wrong initial choice, succumbing to the temptations of the moment. The consequences of the pregnancy itself are not inconsequential, but deserved as retribution for the indiscretion. It is not surprising then that the conservative wing of our political life would favor an 'abstinence only' policy declaration, as the means to the end of reducing teenage pregnancy. If, however, 'abstinence only' has no discernable effect on teenage pregnancy, and the 'no questions asked' distribution of condoms does, and the observable, verifiable facts (i.e. the sheer number of teenage pregnancies) bear out the difference, then wouldn't it 'make sense' to distribute condoms in the public high schools? One might balk at the notion for other reasons -- e.g. that the distribution of condoms encourages premature promiscuity -- but that too is a question that would seem to have an answer. Does condom distribution increase teenage sexual activity? There would remain considerable room for argument about the credibility or the reliability of the data, but here again, if one has doubts, then it would 'make sense' to run independent tests to validate the data, There would also remain considerable room for argument about the availability of other, potentially more effective means to the end, condom distribution vs other forms of birth control, and its congruence with other goals (e.g. reductions in the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases among adolescents) but at least in principle there seem to be 'answers' to such questions, and it is this principle that should guide anything that might resemble a good and a true public policy decision.
Little of which would carry weight with the dogmatic/religious who would consider the whole discussion able, if not immoral, then amoral. The familiar bromide -- ends, however laudable, do not justify the means -- would be cited in defense of an "abstinence only" policy and that would be that. The difficulty, however, goes deeper to the connect between freedom and morality. To invoke Kant, who told us in his critique of practical reason, that morality "first discovers to us the notion of freedom," and illustrated the point with an example not unlike the one above. While prophylactic measures may indeed be the most effective means of preventing teenage pregnancy as it is perhaps the most effective means of preventing any pregnancy, effectiveness is not morality. We can, that is, choose other means to the end, means less efficacious perhaps, but nevertheless more "moral" and we demonstrate our status as moral beings in precisely this free choice. The scientific/pragmatic argument, relies on physical causality and the physical mechanisms of conception. For the scientific/pragmatic "nothing in phenomena can be explained by the concept of freedom," and it consigns to irrelevancy any discussion of free choice. While it may be true that teenagers choose (or choose not) to engage in sexual activity, for example, that discussion is irrelevant to the goal, preventing pregnancy. The best way to prevent pregnancy is to mechanically prevent conception. If we shift the goal and declare our purpose to be the prevention of teenage sexual activity, then we would again search for "causal factors" -- perhaps the influx of hormones, which might be "prevented" with a drug therapy that neutralizes or eliminates the "sexual urge." There is, as it were, a technical/mechanical solution, if not now, then certainly just over the visible horizon.
There is no end to how far back we can push our search for the cause of a cause of an effect, and the deeper objection to the scientific/pragmatic vision is teleological -- that is to say, at its teleological extreme, it aims at the utopia of the machine, where all is reduced to effective control of causal relations and "no one would ever be so rash," in Kant's phrase, "as to introduce freedom into [the] science" that so effectively produces some version of happiness. In practice, however, the scientific/pragmatic vision is a-teleological, and free choice inserts itself, and experience, again in Kant's phrase, "confirms this order of notions." While the scientific/pragmatic vision would ultimately frees us, more and more, from the burden and consequence of choice, the dogmatic/religious vision draws the line, and one can imagine the hundred versions of dystopia, each of which ultimately affirms our status as moral beings -- that we "can do a certain thing because [we are] conscious that [we] ought, and [we] recognize that [we] are free -- a fact which but for the moral law [we] would never have known." The initiating choice -- to have (or not to have) sex -- to be (or not to be) -- is all, and the choice itself is meaningful only if it is predicated against "moral law" that establishes the "ought," its deontological significance.
This is a central question, and one I will not pretend to answer here -- whether, at the end of the day, we are "stuck with" or "blessed with" choice -- but there have been no satisfactory accounts that reduce "ought" to "is." It is perhaps to Kant's point that, at least once or twice a decade, someone will publish an account of human morality that attempts to reduce it to the material conditions of our existence, to reduce the "ought" of morality to the "is" of mechanistic-causal relationships, one of the more recent being Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. Most such accounts come back to the central insights of the Buddha, as they have been elaborated over the course of the two intervening millenia -- that is to say, the fact of "suffering," and that which causes suffering and its alleviation through the successive elimination of its causes. There is, in other words, a streak of utilitarianism in Buddhist thought, finding the expedient means to the elimination of suffering as the moral end. It escapes any simple pleasure-pain calculus, however, in the simple observation that while consumptive pleasures may effectively end suffering, they do so only for the moment, and the suffering returns. Sam Harris makes a similar observation, arguing that "questions about values -- about meaning, morality, and life's larger purpose -- are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures" and that values, "therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood" and "the most important of these facts are bound to transcend culture, just as facts about physical and mental health do." The difficulty of Harris' account, along with most such accounts, is likewise teleological. While there is perhaps a great deal of consensus around just what constitutes rudimentary physical well-being, I suspect the consensus quickly evaporates when we attempt to push the consensus beyond the rudimentary. Just what constitutes the "well-being" of "conscious creatures?" It is perhaps to the point that, in nearly every dystopian fiction, the central character rebells against a predicated state of perfect "well-being," not because it improves his or her well-being in any physical or mental way, but simply because they can -- and the fulfillment of their potential for willful perversity, willful acts against their own others well-being, in and of itself becomes the moral imperative. In the end, our capacity for willful perversity, the act against our own well being, is precisely what makes us most human. Again the initiating choice -- to rebell (or not to rebell) -- is all, and as has been observed repeatedly, we root for Satan in Paradise Lost, that first and perhaps best dystopian fiction, because he reveals himself, in his rebellion, as a more fully human, a more fully moral being. In short, in the end, any state of well-being, whether heaven or Eden, is predicated on a limitation of human potential, an incompleteness. If Emerson is correct, if the only sin is limitation, then the original sin is not Eve's falling to Satan's persuasion, nor Adam's falling to Eve's persuasion, but the divine imperative that made his rhetoric possible in the first place.
In the end, Socrates famously distrusted rhetoric, the art of persuasion, and particularly those written forms of rhetoric, because, as he put it, "he who would be a skillful rhetorician has no need of truth." Too many politicians of both parties provide sufficient evidence of just how effective vicious mendacity can be in the courts of public opinion. His distrust, however, went deeper. He distrusted any articulation of a final, an ultimate Truth, once and for all, in part because he suspected its incompleteness. Any truth, all truth, should meet the test of the oppositional mind, the wilful perversity of the satanic mind, and in that sense all truth is, if not actually, then potentially penultimate and open to dialectic. If Socrates failed, it is in supposing that a final truth might eventually become available, if not to all men, then to the philosopher. If Plato, his pupil, compounded that failure, it is in supposing that, as a philosopher, he had apprehended, if not the whole of truth, then enough of truth to set out an more perfect state. In the end, all ends are incomplete. From the vantage point of several centuries hence, one suspects (I suspect) that the 20th century, and the various experiments with totalitarian governments, will be viewed as the world historical failure of 19th century optimism for the scientific/pragmatic vision. As Judt has observed, writing on Arendt's intuition, both the marxist and fascist experiments were essentially of the same ilk and both failed because they imposed an incomplete morality. They failed because they took the Kantian categorical imperative to heart, and both acted as though, to paraphrase, the maxim of their will, whether that will derived from an apotheosis of history properly apprehended or from an apotheosis of the creative genius in a romantic Prometheus, a Nietzschian ubermensch -- that is to say, both acted as though the apotheosis of their will could always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation. The difficulty with any categorical imperative lies less with the imperative, more with the categorical, which by its very nature is incomplete. From the vantage point of several centuries hence, one suspects (I suspect) that the 21st century will be viewed as the world historical failure of a resurgent medieval optimism for the dogmatic/religious vision, the postulation of a theocentric state as the final state, if not the catholic utopia of Thomas More, then perhaps a corporate protestantism to the west or perhaps a mullah's prophetic genius to the east. It will end in a familiar violence, because tolerance, the refusal to make a choice is an initiating choice that leaves one outside the categorical boundary of the categorical imperative, outside the faith, in violation of the universal legislation and subject to the penalty of the law.

More on Justice

I have suggested that liberty and justice are in opposition, one to the other, but this opposition does not so much imply an either or choice of liberty over justice or justice over liberty. Implicit in my previous discussions of liberty are a number of axiomatic statements that I may as well make explicit, first and perhaps foremost, the notion that “one is never not free.” There is some impulse to deny that we, as sentient beings, possess “free will,” as exemplified by Sam Harris’ recent book on The Moral Landscape. On the assumption that our mental states, to include our sense of self and our sense of the self’s agency, have their causal origins within physical states of the brain, he writes, “The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will,” and that “our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.” We are, each of us, “like a phenomenological glockenspiel played by an unseen hand. From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.” There is much that could be said about this line of thinking, but I will restrain myself and simply say that free will may ultimately be an illusion, but it is the illusion that makes us human, and it is bottomless. One can get behind the causal factors influencing a certain behavioral pattern (e.g. hunger or depression) and design a variety of causal responses to it (e.g. cooking up a nice kale-goat cheese frittata to stem our appetite or taking Prozac to alter the brain chemistry that gives rise to depression), but the creation and use of those responses in and of itself reveals intentionality, the enactment of a desire to better shape one’s instrumental responses to the world.

Second, and perhaps more important, “our freedom is wholly contingent.” We are always “right here, right now,” and it is this evanescent present and our inescapable presence within it that defines both memory and desire, history and futurity. I am, perhaps, too fond of science fiction, in part because I am an optimist and believe the future will in many respects be better than the past, but also in part because it reveals its contingency so clearly. While we tend to focus on the perspicuity of past science fictions, their contingency is perhaps more to the point. None really have painted an accurate portrait of their future. All seem quaint in comparison to actual developments. I am never not free to act, to include the creation of a wholly imagined future, but I am free to act only “right here, right now,” and for most this contingency feels like a partly visible (partly invisible) constraint on our actions. I may well be hungry, but not have access to the food that would stem it. I may well be depressed, but may not have the access to the medical insurance that would supply me with Prozac. It is perhaps an evolutionary quirk that we feel the constraint more forcefully than our more unfettered acts -- that is to say, generally speaking our “free will” is revealed to us most forcefully when it is thwarted. I do not normally think about my breathing too often, except when it is difficult or impossible, and it suddenly becomes an imperative.

Finally, “the freedom to do what one wills is meaningless without the contingent power -- or to use a more benign term, the contingent capacity -- to actually do what one wills.” That is the crux of the matter. Regardless of the source of our intentionality (e.g. one can imagine a wholly biological and wholly causal origins for “hunger”) our felt sense of freedom emerges in our capacity to shape various instrumental responses to that intentionality (e.g. stopping at Burger King to grab a whopper instead of McDonald’s for a quarter pounder). We would feel less free, more constrained, if there were only one option available to free ourselves from our nagging appetites. We would feel captive if there were no options available. It is here, of course, that free will connects up with the will to power, the capacity to shape one’s world or one’s responses to the world to satisfy our intentionalities and free ourselves from our nagging desires. Unconstrained freedom is the pursuit of power over one’s contingent circumstances, which includes the pesky presence of others likewise in pursuit of power over their contingent circumstances. Within a world where the most powerful prevail, their free will is my serfdom to their will, to one degree or another. At the Machiavellian extreme, the price of freedom, as we all know, is perpetual vigilance, not only to jealously guard such capacity as we have, but also to suppress those who would usurp it.

At the primitive extreme, justice is the response, not to freedom, per se, but to the excesses and abuses of power with which and within which freedom reveals itself. It is all about “getting even,” in the various iterations of the phrase, and to follow up on Martha Nusssbaum’s suggestion that we attend to the classics, it is worth noting at least that, with the Illiad, Western literature begins with a nuanced examination of power and justice. In a contest of raw power, the preeminent king of the various Greek kingdoms, Agamemnon has acquired the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. The priest recognizes Agamemnon’s “right” to this daughter, not in any legal or moral sense, but simply because Agamemnon is the most powerful of the Greek kings. The priest brings to Agamemnon tribute, and asks that he free his daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, the son of Zeus. Agamemnon refuses, and it is this refusal that sets in motion a cycle of retribution. Just why Agamemnon refuses is a matter for discussion, but his motives, the basic intentionalities that drive him, are recognizable, turning between possession and desire, honor and shame. At one point Agamemnon, tells the assembled Greeks, “I have set my heart on keeping her in my own house, for I love her better even than my own wife.” At another point, he asks Achilles in particular, “Are you to keep your own prize, while I sit tamely under my loss and give up the girl at your bidding?” Regardless, he refuses, and the priest, to exact retribution, prays to Apollo for help, who in turn rains a plague down on the Greeks, who in turn appease Apollo by returning the daughter to the priest. Agamemnon is displeased, and says to Achilles, “since Phoebus Apollo is taking Chrseis from me, I shall send her with my ship and my followers, but I shall come to your tent and take your own prize Briseis, that you may learn how much stronger I am than you are, and that another may fear to set himself up as equal or comparable to me.” Therein lies the crux of the matter. Agamemnon is free to take Briseis because he can. One could also say Agamemnon is bound to take Briseis because he must. He is the more powerful, and power inherently claims superiority over others, a superiority that must be affirmed and reaffirmed, until someone, more powerful yet, goes about “getting even.”

Retributive justice is not my principle concern, though I might point out that the basic motives (the primitive intentionalities) have not disappeared and are unlikely to do so any time soon in our evolutionary history. They continue to shape, albeit contingently, how we go about our lives, and we needn’t look far for examples. At its rawest, the violence of gang warfare reveals retributive justice turning on the same wheels of possession and desire, honor and shame, and its not a far stretch to imagine rival drug lords struggling for possession of territory not unlike Agamemnon and Achilles, the Greeks and the Trojans. I am, at least here, less concerned with Homer’s question, more concerned with Plato’s -- that is to say, what constitutes a just state? Retributive justice is important to that discussion, and our system of civil and criminal courts for the most part exact retributive justice, if not exactly an eye for an eye, the cash settlement and jail time nevertheless are compensatory for wrongs committed. Justice is served for the victim, one gets even, when the other “pays for” his criminal behavior at a rate commensurate to the crime. There are reasons, of course, for bringing retributive justice under the auspices of the state -- a broader concern for public safety, the freedom from fear that a well regulated police and criminal justice system brings to the citizenry -- but the principle reason is reason itself. Several of the Greeks attempted, each in their way, to reason with Agamemnon, presenting him with various alternatives, but he would have none of it. From a position of power, he need not listen to reason. He need not consider, much less accept, alternatives to his threatened appropriation of Achilles’ prize, Briseis, and lest his position of power be questioned or qualified, he is bound to do as he threatened and take Achilles’ prize as his own. The result, if not outright internecine violence, has much the same result, and Achilles’ is memorialized as the first “passive aggressive,” stewing in his anger to the great detriment of the Greeks as a whole. The demand for “reason,” backed by the coercive power of the state, adjudicated by an impartial spectator, would not have made for a good story, but it would have made for a resolution of a qualitatively different sort.

It is worth noting that, at issue, is a distribution and redistribution of property. The interest in the women may well be sexual, but it is not romantic. Though spoken in anger, Achilles looking to the distribution of the spoils, to include the women, says to Agamemnon, “you forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled … Never when the Achaeans sack any rich city of the Trojans do I receive so good a prize as you do, though it is my hands that do the better part of the fighting. When the sharing comes, your share is far the largest, and I, forsooth, must go back to my ships, take what I can get and be thankful, when my labor of fighting is done … It will be much better for me to return home with my ships, for I will not stay here dishonored to gather gold and substance for you.” While the people of the sacked cities of Troy might feel the need for retributive justice consequent to the appropriation of their gold and women, Achilles’ “right” to the property is two-fold. On the one hand, it is the right consequent to power. He has, in the full exercise of his superiority, labored to seize it and he has a right to his share. On the other hand, it is the right consequent to equity. Insofar as Achilles is a member of a collective, the Greek’s, his share must be equitable. It is a question of equal pay for equal work, and while Achilles’ was willing to accept some inequality, inequity, in the distribution of the spoils -- pay tribute to Agamemnon’s position among the Greeks -- the threatened seizure of Briseis was the proverbial last straw. His sense of justice was offended.

For the moment, I am more concerned with what has come to be called redistributive justice, getting and keeping things more or less even in an economic sense. Robert Reich is perhaps the most audible contemporary proponent of redistributive justice. He writes, with some alarm, that “income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.” To his credit, in calling for a redistribution of wealth through various state sponsored actions, Reich is purely pragmatic in the American grain. The current distribution of wealth and the policy decisions leading to the wide disparities, in his view, simply do not work well for the state as a whole. As Reich himself put it, “I could have grounded my argument in morality: It is simply unfair for a handful of Americans to take home such a large share of total income when so many others are struggling to make ends meet,” but as he goes on to point out, “I have chosen instead to base my argument on the tangible [economic and political] threats that such inequality poses to everyone -- including even the wealthiest and most influential among us.” While Reich would not perhaps put it so bluntly, on the economic side, while sacking the cities of Troy, there is only so much that the Greeks can take away. Within the modern economy, while perpetuating the on-going assault on the middle class, there is only so much that the richest 1 percent can take away without leaving the cities of America in ruins. On the political side, we come full circle. Achilles’ response to the injustice perpetrated by Agamemnon was anger, and the Illiad itself is the chronicle of “the anger of Achilles,” an anger that “brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.” Anger is the antonym of reason, and Reich, among many others, has noted that we are descending into a politics of anger, a moral outrage at the growing inequities that is, no less than Achilles, misplaced, misdirected, and likely to bring countless ills upon Americans. The sense of outraged justice is more in evidence Harold Meyerson’s recent editorial. He writes, “the banks that are repossessing millions of home with a speed that suggests they’re double parked are the same banks that made billions by swapping paper on millions of homes purchased with mortgages that made no sense.” Meanwhile, “as events would have it, pay at Wall Street’s biggest banks is headed for another record high this year, the Wall Street Journal reports. Pay and benefits at the 35 largest firms will rise an estimated 4 percent over last year, to $444 billion.” In the end, “inquisitive minds might want to know how the big banks -- and bankers -- are getting richer while the underlying economy they serve isn’t.”

There is, or so I am suggesting, a fundamental sense of justice predicated on things being more or less equal, and the growing income disparity, the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, begs the question, what’s wrong with this picture? Of course, one response could well be, not a damn thing! Achilles wasn’t serving the sacked cities of troy, and no one really believes the big banks serve the underlying economy. As a local editorial put it, responding to the same Wall Street Journal article, “the wizards of Wall Street insist that they have a pay fortunes to keep top talent. There’s truth in that. Wall Street is about making money, after all. That’s the only reason to be there. Pay cuts can cause the roaches to scatter to fatter feeding grounds in, say, hedge funds.” Despite the attitude, there is a deep cynicism and despair in such a response, resigned to live, if one is not among the fortune few, with anger and helplessness as one waits for the world to change. Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear that it will. As the same editorial continues, “it does not appear that the Great Recession has made much of an impression on the culture of the Street. All it has done is make a whole lot of other people a whole lot poorer.” There’s truth in that as well, but few really believe that the growing income disparity has much if anything to do with “talent.” Few really believe that their purchase on reality is wrong or simply stupid, that they deserve the abuses of power because they are inadequate and inferior -- and if one or another admits to being mistaken and deserving of misfortune, it is not because they feel themselves to be inferior, rather it is because they share equally in “being human,” mistakes and misfortune a fate we all share alike even though, perhaps, the consequences are disproportionate. As it becomes increasingly apparent, however, that the rich are getting richer, not because they are more talented, but because they are better positioned, in one way or another, to exploit others, the outraged sense that we should, if only we could, “get even” erupts in the misplaced vituperation that has spread across the political spectrum the last few years. Our all too human need for retributive justice for the distributive injustice erupts haplessly onto the op-ed pages and the blogs. If it has any effect at all, given that this is an election season, it will perhaps result in candidates, not one of whom is likely to make the substantive change their rhetoric implies, most of whom will allow the already entrenched further retrenchment.

There is, or so I am also suggesting, an “organizational” component to justice (or, for that matter injustice). An “organization,” however it might be conceived, has the freedom to act, presumably on behalf of justice, getting and keeping things more or less even, and individuals as individuals are subject to its coercive power. Here it might be worthwhile to pause for a triad of sidebar notes. First, of course, intentionalities, ends, are important. An organization is organized, so to speak, to satisfy certain ends, not others, and there is no reason an “organization,” as such, need necessarily be organized to administer justice. Indeed, most are not. Second, for those that are, there need not necessarily be anything remotely pragmatic in the administration of justice itself. There are, for example, few reasons for the maintenance of the death penalty. It does not serve a purpose beyond itself, or at any rate does not serve those purposes well. It does not deter crime, except perhaps among those very unlikely to commit the crime in the first place. It is not “cost effective,” insofar as the cost of execution most often far exceeds the cost of life-time incarceration. The death penalty, rather, as the most extreme form of state administered retributive justice, rather, serves other human needs that need not justify themselves beyond itself. Third, finally, in order to achieve their ends, to borrow a phrase from Hayek, an organization “must create power -- power over men wielded by other men.“ To exact the death penalty, an organization must have sufficient coercive power to take the life of another. To exact any form of redistributive justice, an organization must have sufficient coercive power to appropriate the resources of one for redistribution to another.

There are, perhaps, several strands of thought that need to be teased out in the preceding paragraph, not least is the notion of an organization. I have hesitated in calling I a “state” or a “government” in part to emphasize the pragmatic purpose, the instrumentality of a “organization” to a set of ends, none of which need necessarily be concerned with “justice.” The organization may well have as a purpose the exploitation of certain commodities in order to “make a profit.” When thinking of the large, modern corporate structures, it seems even a bit odd to suggest that they be organized for any purpose other than “making a profit,” though often enough the corporate public relations would suggest their concern for those damaged in that pursuit -- e.g. BP’s recent advertisements expressing their concern for and willingness to make retribution for the damaged lives along the gulf coast. That, however, is not their primary purpose, their governing intentionality, and it is not surprising perhaps to learn that they have not followed through on the retributions with much felicity. It is also important to remember as well that the ends, the governing intentionalities, most certainly do justify the means instrumental to their satisfaction -- that is, they provide a wholly rational justification for the means selected, a point of adjudication between competing ends relative to ancillary criteria like “efficiency,” and thereby an alignment of means to ends. There is some slippage here, and to justify, to align the means with the ends, has little or nothing to do with justice, per se, nor does it necessarily mean that ethical or moral stricture will be a criteria against which those means are adjudicated. It does not, in other words, particularly surprise us that BP, along with Halliburton, was at least in part complicitous in the oil spill. Although “legality” and “regulatory compliance” may be criteria against which the means to profit might be adjudicated, one suspects that they are so only to the extent that potential retribution makes obedience to regulatory restrictions more “efficient” or more “cost effective.” This is “risk management” and has little to do with justice, per se.

The state is not unlike any other organization, and can be organized for any number of purposes, none of which are concerned with justice. Here’s the difficulty -- most states, including our own, are organized relative to ends which have little or nothing to do with either retributive or redistributive justice. Increasingly, and I am not the first to make this suggestion, the major Western powers are becoming more and more shareholder states, and government, increasingly, has taken on the role as the protectorate and guarantor of the modern global corporation. Although it has the edge of paranoia, Chomsky writes, for example, that “there are many factors driving global society towards a low-wage, low-growth, high-profit future, with increasing polarization and social disintegration.” Not least is the “fading of meaningful democratic processes as decision making is vested in private institutions and the quasi-governmental structures that are coalescing around them, what the Financial Times calls a ’defacto world government’ that operates in secret and without accountability.”

The recent banking crises illustrates the point rather well. First, the progressive de-regulation of the banking industry over the last three decades (a bi-partisan effort if one counts the contribution of Bill Clinton) amounted to the abdication of the government’s coercive power, which in turn had rather predictable results. They were progressively freed from the regulatory constraints that limited the available means to the end of profit within the industry, but in doing so also mitigated risk for those outside and served by the industry. The financial institutions were free to engage, albeit creatively, in riskier and riskier behavior. The purpose, the governing intentionality, of the financial institutions was to make money, and so long as they were successful in aligning the means to that end, so long as they paid dividends to the shareholders, their behavior was justifiable relative to those ends. Few complain as the bubble expands. Second, however, when the bubble burst, as was perhaps inevitable, the financial industry, too big and too important to the national economy to fail, did not turn to the shareholders for the necessary capital to survive, but to their guarantors, the government. There are, of course, hundreds of reasons why the corporate giants did not turn to those form whom the entity was ostensibly organized to serve and had benefited some, if not the most, from the excesses of risk. The corporations do not have the sort of coercive power to “take back” money from the shareholders (and it seems a little odd to suggest even that they might do so). Moreover, there is some validity to the argument that the financial industries were too big to fail, insofar as it’s difficult in one way to differentiate between taxpayers and shareholders. Those who leveraged outsized home values, if they were fortunate enough to sell before the bubble burst, benefited no less than the shareholders, and perhaps were share-holders. My own retirement fund, through TIAA-CREF, was invested in many of those same organizations at one or two removes. So, third, using its coercive power to exact dollars from the taxpayer/shareholder, the government intervened. While I have little doubt tha things would be much worse right now for Joe and Mary Paycheck had the state not intervened -- in part because most are dependent upon the mortgage industry for housing -- the result had little to do with justice. Those who put us into this situation continue to draw outsized salaries and, so far at least, are largely protected from, free from, the sorts of civil litigation that would exact retributive justice. They are also largely protected, free from, any efforts at redistributive justice. Foreclosures, for example, continue apace. I am sure the banks will not benefit to the same degree that they would have benefited had all paid off the inflated mortgages, they nevertheless seize full possession of a property, have full benefit not only of the full resale value of the home, but the years of accumulated interest and principle payments. In the meantime, the so-called home owners, duped and exploited, are just out of luck.

I am suggesting, of course, that we -- our government -- has aligned itself with corporate ends, what Jefferson called the “aristocracy of the monied corporation.” Corporate ends have little to do with justice, per se, much to do with the concentration of wealth, and the power that comes away with wealth, into as few hands as possible. In pursuit of those ends, the corporation itself is inherently monopolistic -- that is to say, totalitarian in their internal organization and imperialistic in their external orientation. While I think it true that the monopolistic practices of the monied corporation can work well within a formal electoral democracy, electoral politics have become something of an amusement not unlike the World Wrestling Association. If not exactly a choreographed sham -- there do seem to be real winners and real losers in the electoral process -- then certainly an event brought to you by one or another corporate sponsors. The recent Supreme Court decision of Citizens United has reinforced the trend, allowing considerable sums of corporate and union dollars to sponsor one candidate or another, often channeled through various non-profits that are allowed to hide donors, a good rhetorical strategy given the negative character of the sponsorship revealed in their ads. In answering the question why the worst get on top, Hayek has made a number of observations that are useful to an understanding of the recent mid-term elections, identifying negative selection criteria. One, of course, is an anti-elitism, an appeal to the “lowest common denominator that unites the largest number of people,” the symbols and slogans with the broadest emotional appeal, which is supported by what seems to be “almost a law of human nature.” Though we perpetually bemoan it, we also perpetually engage in negative campaigning based, no doubt, on the premise that “it is easier for people to agree on a negative program -- on the hatred of an enemy, [those presumably against the visceral values evoked by the symbols and slogans] -- than on any positive task.” With that in mind, of course, it is clear enough that political rhetoric is based on the presumption that one will be able to “obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.” Insofar as both wrestlers in the political arena are dependent upon their sponsorship, insofar as both wrestlers come away from the match as grotesquely distorted human beings, in the end, who wins and who loses may not matter quite as much as the rhetoric would imply, so long as the concentration of corporate power is allowed to continue apace.

In this regard, one part of me wants to be amused by the Tea Party, the populist anger it represents, and its appropriation by the Republican party, which is, in the end, anything but populist in its ends. There is an unabashedly “lowest common denominator” feel to Republican rhetoric, but they have been much more masterful in the appropriation of core American values than have the Democrats. As Michael Tomasky puts it in a recent review article, “in American politics, Republicans routinely speak in broad themes and tend to blur the details.” The Republicans “speak constantly of liberty and freedom and couch practically all their initiatives -- tax cuts, deregulation, and so forth -- within these large categories.” The Democrats on the other hand “typically ignore broad themes and focus on details.” They talk “more about specific programs and policies and steer clear of big themes.” Tomasky points out, “there is a reason for this: Republican themes like liberty, are popular, while Republican policies often are not. On the other hand, Democratic themes, [like justice], are less popular, while many specific Democratic programs -- social security, medicare -- have majority support.”

As a result, there has been an odd bifurcation in the American politics for some time, a sort of duplicity at the core. Democratic programs are popular, if they are understood, because they tend to benefit the wider populace, but to understand those policies requires an attentiveness to arcane detail that is easily misconstrued by those hostile to the policies and dismissed by the broader populace unwilling or unable to dig into the discussion. The democrats have become the party of policy wonks, and they have not tied their policies to “larger beliefs,” and have, as Tomasky goes on to say, “tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose” in part because there may well be no simple -- that is, simplistic -- belief systems within which to couch their arguments. The views and tastes of the wonks are more finely differentiated, and consequently they are, to use Hayek’s phrase, less likely “to agree on a particular hierarchy of values,” and the values are irrelevant in any case, because they can agree on the particular benefit of particular policies to a broad range of people. Banking regulation is not intended to benefit the banking industry, nor those few who stand to profit most from the banking industry. It is intended to benefit those who bank with the banks, but those who benefit from regulation have neither the detailed education nor the willingness to exercise the focused intelligence necessary to understand banking policy, much less how they might benefit.

It is deeply ironic, of course, that the conservative appropriation of core American values, particularly “liberty” -- the value of most concern to conservative thinkers like Hayek -- are being used to create a populist base for a party that is anything but populist in program. If the Democrats must hide their ends, the sorts of redistributive justice that form the core justification for their action, the Republicans on the other hand “have been able to present their philosophy as truly American,” and in most respects their public rhetoric is truly American. Americans are for the most part egalitarian and distrustful of elites, particularly intellectual elites, and distrust arguments that are not obvious on the face of it, and it is obvious on the face of it that “regulation” is a curtailment of “liberty,” but it is not always obvious on the face of it that “deregulation” will not lead to greater liberty, at least not greater liberty for all. It will, however, eviscerate the government’s ability to control the behavior of those whole acts have very broad impact on the American populace and likewise eviscerate the basis for exacting retributive justice against those who behave badly, those who leave behind a wide swath of damage across the American landscape, but who have, technically, done nothing “wrong” -- that is to say, done nothing that is overtly or explicitly prohibited. It is obvious on the face of it that “taxes” are an affront to one’s “right to property,” but it is not always obvious on the face of it that “tax cuts” will not necessarily provide greater income to the vast majority of Americans, at least not in amounts that would make a difference. Eliminating social security and the progressive income tax will make a difference in American’s take home pay, and will provide more disposable income predisposed to find its ways into the coffers of various international corporate entities, but it is unlikely to compensate for the loss of medical and retirement benefits. The least among us will suffer the most, and those at the lowest levels of income, those who have the least ability to save, when they are no longer able to eke out a living, will be consigned in the last years of their life to extreme debility and poverty. The elimination of social security and the progressive income tax are eviscerating the government’s ability to effectuate any form of redistributive justice and setting the stage for the continued corporate colonization across the country.

I am suggesting that government is our last best hope for “justice,” and theoretically at least, there is little reason why the state should not, “if it is to achieve important ends, be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole,” presumably a “good” equitably distributed among the “community as a whole.” The first difficulty, of course, is this: “liberty,” on the one hand, is not an end unto itself, but the fundamental condition within which one acts toward certain ends, certain governing intentionalities. Both Hayek and Rawls are correct in assigning it primacy. Although certain ends, certain intentionalities, are given importance in our biological nature, as human beings, we choose others, and it is no less necessary to maintain “liberty” in our ability to align our instrumental acts with the desired ends, whether given or chosen. If the Republicans have the advantage, it is this felt primacy of “liberty,” relegating “individual justice” to a secondary and “social justice” to a tertiary, organizational concern. Organizations, as such, need not necessarily have “justice” or the equitable good of the whole community as their governing end, and as I have suggested, most, including the corporate structures that largely “governs” the day to day life of people across the globe, do not. Government, as a specific organization, should have “justice” as its end, its governing intentionality.

Having said this, however, we are brought up against the second difficulty: just as absolute “liberty,” unchecked by mitigating social justice, leads to a winner take all tyranny of the individual over the collective -- just as absolute “liberty” of competing organizations, unchecked by mitigating social justice, leads to a winner take all tyranny of the one over the others -- absolute “justice,” no less than absolute freedom, undoes itself. The loose thread that starts the unraveling is this: just what is “good for the community as a whole?” Any answer to this question, as Rawls and others have noted, is at once comprehensive, but limiting. To use an observation of Hayek’s again to illustrate, if we have a clear and compelling answer to the question, if we know or believe we know unequivocally that which is “good for” the mass of mankind, ends “independent of and superior to those of the individuals,” and if the community or state is organized and justified rationally against those ends, then of course “only those individuals who work for the same ends can be regarded as members of the community.” It is comprehensive insofar as “a person is respected only as a member of the group, that is, only if and insofar as he works for the recognized common ends,” but it is likewise limited insofar as there are many answers to the question, most of which have been, or take on, the characteristics of a “religion.” Without equivocating over just which God one might mean, whether Jove or Jehovah, once one admits, for example, that “the proper end of mankind is to serve God and advance his kingdom across the earth,” it is not merely a matter of “having faith,” but of enacting one’s faith, an enactment often predicated on the assumption of divine justice, that my God is a just God. The Book of Job, for example, is a case study in divine justice. Job was selected for his affliction, not because he in any way deserved them -- indeed he was without sin -- but because he was the most faithful of the faithful, and it is to test his unwavering faith, against which Satan strikes his wager with God, and for which Job is rewarded in the end, despite some considerable collateral damage along the way in the loss of his original children.

I should point out that state and social organizations predicated on some concept of absolute justice -- if not national socialism, then communism in its idealized, if not its realized, versions -- are no less comprehensive, and just as limiting. As Hayek has noted, for example, “the intensity of the moral emotions behind a movement like that of National Socialism or communism can probably be compared only to those of the great religious movements of history,” and within all religious movements, many things follow, not least the subordination of the individual, as an individual, to the greater good -- the relegation of the individual, as individual, to an instrumental role whose life and livelihood must be justified to and is justified by the predetermined ends -- as Hayek notes, “most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity.” Those features have been well discussed, and most do follow, as Hayek suggests, from the suppression of the individual, as an individual, and the relegation of free agency and its sustaining power upward to larger and larger organizations in the hands of fewer and fewer men. It justifies a form of terror internal to the group in the suppression of the individual, and for the faithful, it justifies terror external to the group in the protection and advancement of its aims. This seems to be true, whether we are dealing with the state religions that dominated the conflicts of the 20th century, or the religions proper that have come to re-dominate the conflicts of the 21st, and the collateral damage left in the wake of those conflicts really needs little more discussion.

I will not reiterate the whole of Hayek’s or other’s arguments against theo-centric or state-centric notions of absolute justice, except to say that any collectivist ethic, consecrated within a comprehensive doctrine, eventually makes a bargain with the devil. While a collectivist ethic within a comprehensive doctrine seems the antithesis of individual freedom -- that is, it “does not leave the individual conscience free to apply its own rules” -- but the collectivist entity itself, the organization, as an organization, must be free from restrictions that inhibit its pursuit of “the good of the whole,” and it must be free to do what is necessary in order to achieve “the good of the whole,” indeed “there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because ‘the good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.” I mention the Book of Job, however, to suggest, perhaps over subtly, that a prescriptive faith the so-called free market is no less comprehensive, and no less limiting than other faiths. There is a congruence between the invisible hand of God and the invisible hand of the Market, both of which dispense an arbitrary form of “justice,” and both of which are for the most part unfathomable. That Weber and others have noted the congruence, and that it continues to play itself out in the Republican party, with its restrictive social legislation coupled with its laissez faire economic legislation. Conversely, of course, it is opposed by the Democratic party, with its regulatory economic legislation coupled with its laissez faire social legislation.

If the Republican party is in ascendancy within the United States, and it certainly appears to be, it is perhaps indicative of a shift in sovereignty. The free market is free for whom? We as consumers are free to consume, and we do so with some abandon within the limits of diminishing capacity, as the corporate engines that provide for consumption grow larger, more powerful, and ultimately more coercive of the various governments where they do business. It is perhaps worth pointing out that, while we still feel the romantic urge to worship great men and women, the concentrated power of an organization is nothing personal. Individuals within an organization wield power, but it is positional power. They do so within the system constraints of the organization itself. It is perhaps not surprising that those at or near the top of an organization are most attuned to the traditional Republican need for freedom, internally the freedom to “manage” the organization making contingent adjustments of means in pursuit of its given ends, and externally the freedom to extend the encompassing reach of the organization for the greater good of a greater whole. It is perhaps not surprising either that those at or near the bottom of the organization are most attuned to the traditional Democratic concern for justice, particularly redistributive justice. The leveling intent and effect of labor unions, for example, not only draw down corporate profits in the redistribution of wealth in the form of personnel costs, but in doing so they also inhibit, put real constraints on institutional -- that is to say, corporate -- freedom. I probably don’t need to point out that labor unions are not examples of moral probity. They have adopted means no less limiting of the individual conscience in the contingent adjustment of their means in pursuit of a greater good for a greater whole. In either case, I am not sure it much matters whether one chooses the Republican yin to the Democratic yang, except that the one serves to be a counter-balance to the other, so that neither has the opportunity to fully govern, to fully align means and ends within a comprehensive doctrine. If I tend to favor the latter, it is, at the instant, less an ideological concern, more a corrective concern to restore a balance between liberty and justice if we have not already tipped too far.