Tibor R. Machan

Finally Paul Krugman, Princeton University Nobel Laureate in economic science and columnist for The New York Times, has come clean about his “moral” position (TNYT, January 14, 2011). He has admitted that he doesn’t believe that when you earn something, you own it. (Don’t know if he believes we own things we haven’t earned, such as our kidneys or eyes! Maybe he thinks that as with earned resources, these unearned ones, especially, belong to the government which can proceed to distribute them just as Krugman thinks it can redistribute the resources citizens have actually come by through hard work, ingenuity, luck and the like.) Let’s see then whether Kurgman’s moral stance has any chance of being sound. Is it the morality by which people ought to guide their conduct in their lives? Do we and what we own belong to government to do with as government officials believe? But isn’t that slavery?

If my life doesn’t belong to me–if the norm the Declaration of Independence identifies as universal, namely, that every human being has a right to his or her life, is false–then what is true? Does my life belong to the government? If we recall that government is a group of individuals to whom a certain social role has been delegated–namely, the role of securing the rights of the citizenry–the claim that government owns our lives and resources means nothing else but that these individuals in government own our lives and resources.

But that is very odd–why would those people be in the privileged position of owning us and what to all appearances belongs to us while we, also human beings and with equal rights, do not own our lives and resources? This makes no sense.

So when we take even a cursory look at Professor Krugman’s position, it turns out to be incoherent, rank nonsense. It reminds me of the remark attributed to the poet W. H. Auden, namely, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.” So we all belong to government but then to whom does government belong?

The idea that we belong to government is obscene and harks back to an age when Caesars, monarchs, tsars, Pharaohs and such were believed to have been given their realm by God and everything within that realm, including all the human beings, therefore belonged to them. Later these slaves and serfs began to be called subjects, implying that they were all subject to the will of the government. This is were serfdom and even taxation have their origin.

Now we have, in 21st century America, one of the most prominent commentators and educators reiterate this horrendous outlook. Incredible. But it gets even worse.

An essential aspect of any bona fide moral position is that it must be practiced voluntarily, not because someone–e. g., government–holds a gun to one’s head and coerces one to do what is right. That doesn’t count as doing the right thing, so any such policy is literally demoralizing. It robs people of the opportunity to be morally good (or bad, of course).

A society that’s fit for human habitation must not have policies that prevent citizens from exercising moral judgment. So, OK, assume for a moment that we should devote ourselves entirely to serving other people, to serving the public good. If, however, all of this is accomplished through governmental coercion like taxation, regulation, regimentation, and so forth, there can’t be anything moral about it. So Dr. Krugman’s so called moral stance isn’t one at all. It leaves no room for morality because it makes all purportedly moral conduct involuntary, imposed by rulers and not a matter of one’s own free will.

So Krugman’s moral stance is not only incoherent but it isn’t even a moral stance. So much for the “morality” of one of America’s foremost public philosophers.

What someone like Dr. Krugman could more fruitfully do is urge people to be generous toward those in need, to give support to worthy causes, to help the poor, etc., but always of their own free will. That is what moral leaders may do, nothing else. Whether the morality they advocate is sound is another matter. But to remain something morally relevant it must not be imposed. Elementary, Dr. Krugman, really.

Tibor R. Machan

It is often held, by admirers of modern science (which took off near the 15th century) that if human beings are parts of nature, there can be no room for morality in their lives. They are then simply complicated machines working as they must, with no possibility that they can make choices, which is an essential part of morality. Science and morality are, then, often juxtaposed.

But there are several problems with this. For one, nature is bountiful in its variety; so simply because other parts of it are mostly determined to move as they must, it doesn’t follow that all parts do. Just as there are living things that swim, as well as some that fly or simply slither about, there could also be some that are dumb beasts and others that think, reason and make choices. Nothing unnatural about that at all. And once something uses higher reasoning to get on in its life, choices are just around the corner.

Also, those who insist that we are all fully determined to do as we do tend, paradoxically, to be very moralistic about insisting that this is how everyone ought to think about us. In effect they believe, “No one ought to believe that people have free will, that they can make genuine choices in their lives; they ought to be thought of as complex machines.” However, without the capacity to choose, such admonitions are meaningless. Without the capacity to choose, without free will, our thinking is also purely determined and so if we do believe in free will, we then must believe in it. Yet why then get annoyed with us for failing to heed the advice of those who deny our capacity to choose?

Not only that, innumerable scientific minded folks make moral declarations galore. Blaming and praising are part of this exercise and champions of the scientific way quite often blame and praise. They blame those who reject their imperialism about how nature behaves and they praise those who share it. They often outright denounce those who think they shouldn’t be given extensive government funding for their work.

In the recent discussions by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, the group called “the new atheists,” all kinds of blaming is in evidence when others who don’t embrace Darwinian evolution or do embrace creationism are being talked about. These people, these champions of science insist, others aren’t doing the right thing, namely, accepting Darwin as correct about how the world works. (Not even all of these scientifically minded people deny free will, by the way.)

The point I am making isn’t about whether such blaming or praising is correct but that it doesn’t square with the belief that we are all determined to be the way we are, that we all work like machines.

In more recent discussions of human choice some scientists have suggested that there might be room for it now that Newtonian physics has been superseded by contemporary, post-Heisenbergian quantum physics, the kind that leaves some room for uncertainty (at least at the subatomic level of existence) and thus might allow that not everything is fully determined to happen one and only one way. (Not that the features of quantum physics that they rely on for this necessarily support anything like human freedom of choice!) In particular the late Karl Popper and John Eccles had thought that the new physics allows for free will (presented in their book The Self and Its Brain [Springer Verlag, 1977]).

So while there is wide consensus among champions of the natural sciences about whether human beings have a moral nature–can reasonably be held responsible for the conduct they choose to embark upon–some dissidents do exist who think that, yes indeed, we are moral agents; it’s a distinguishing aspect of our nature but still quite natural. And certainly quite a few scientists and their champions act like we all did have free will, when, for instance, they blame those who refuse to accept their ideas about evolution. As already mentioned, blaming someone implies they have the freedom to choose how they think and act.

Of course, the world of human beings is filled with moral elements. Personal, social, political and international affairs are all replete with moral concerns, with how we ought to and ought not to think and act. And since this is also in evidence among scientists, it is probably the right way to think about us.

The Importance of having Free Will

Before anything else, in discussing the nature of law and government one needs to know what kind of entity these are supposed to serve. Human nature, in other words, must be examined to see what sort of system of community life suits it best.
To this end I need to explore an ancient but still utterly relevant topic, namely, whether human beings are free agents or merely puppets on strings that move them independently of their choices or will.
This is not a common topic of discussion outside the discipline of philosophy and a few other fields. Yet nearly every interesting human issue is related to this problem, usually in more ways than one. For example, if, say, a certain system of law or political economy is taken to be just, this implies that it ought to be implemented—even if only gradually, over time. If one claims that aggression or neglecting the poor or fighting a war for oil is wrong, one implicitly holds that people ought to refrain from do such things. And if one promotes bailing out failing banks or car companies or providing health care and insurance for all citizens, that, too, implies that these ought to be accepted as public policies.
And as the philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out, "ought implies can," meaning in part that only if it is possible to choose to do something can it be the case that it ought to be done. So the very meaningfulness of the advocacy of moral or political ideals and policies implies that free will exists. (The other meaning of "ought implies can" is that some objective standard of human conduct must be identifiable, otherwise one could never do what one ought to do.)
Even as far back as Aristotle it was clear that the moral virtues must be practiced voluntarily, as a matter of one’s free choice or personal initiative. (I advance a fuller case for this in my Initiative—Human Agency and Society [Hoover Institution Press, 2000].) Indeed, even to say that some argument concerning any topic from logic to astronomy is unsound, we are claiming, implicitly, that one ought not to propose or accept it and that people in the main are free either to do so or refrain from doing so.
Thus, clearly, it is of some value to explore briefly whether human beings have free will. In connection with any set of principles in ethics or politics and the need to respect and act in accordance with them, the idea that people must have an area of personal responsibility within which to make choices about their lives or wherein to initiate their actions is, again, implicit and inescapable. In other words, this all assumes, again, that human beings have free will or that they can make basic choices about their lives, initiate basic conduct, that can turn out to be right or wrong. Furthermore, requiring of people that they respect such principles again assumes that they possess free will. Otherwise it would make no sense to require such adherence from them: something they have no choice about cannot be something they morally ought to or can fail to do.
There is also the more familiar matter of the issue of personal responsibility concerning everyday conduct, those matters discussed daily in the home, in the press, and on the various media. Not only is there the issue of who is responsible for various good and bad things, but there is also the question of whether most of us are, as so many people seem to believe, in the grip of various forces over which we have no control. This or that addiction—to drugs, sex, violence, power, athletics, or work—is supposed to be our master, with us as mere puppets on strings moved about by it.
Yet, only if we have free will does any talk of blaming our parents, politicians, insurance companies, the rich, bureaucrats or the rest make sense. But there are many people who believe that modern science, including, of course, all the social sciences, leaves no room for such a thing in human life. Where does it stand, then, with the free will issue? It seems to me worth discussing this topic outside the confines of philosophy graduate seminars and encourage some thinking about it on everyone’s part. After all, it is a central feature of political philosophy that individual citizens in society should be treated in certain ways. What does this come to unless they possess free will, the capacity to produce their own behavior?
I want to argue that there is indeed free will. And I’m going to defend the position that free will means that human beings can cause some of what they do, on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable solely by references to factors that have influenced them, though, of course, their range of options is clearly circumscribed by the world in which they live, by their particular circumstances, capacities, options, talents, etc. My thesis, in other words, is that human beings are able to cause their actions and they are therefore responsible for some of what they do. In a basic sense we all are original actors capable of making novel moves in the world. We are, in other words, initiators of some of our behavior.
The first matter to be noted is that this view is in no way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their kind of minds, namely, minds that can think and be aware of their own thinking.
Nature is complicated and multifaceted. It includes many different sorts of things and some of these are human beings. Such beings exhibit a unique yet natural attribute that other things apparently do not, namely, free will.
I am going to offer eight reasons why a belief in free will makes very good sense. Four of these explain why there can be free will—i.e., why nature does not preclude it. But these do not yet demonstrate that free will exists. That will be the job of the four reasons I will advance next, which will establish that free will actually exists, that it’s not just a possibility but an actuality.

Nature’s Laws versus Free Will
First, one of the major objections against free will is that nature is governed by a set of laws, mainly the laws of physics. These laws control everything and we human beings are basically more complicated versions of material substances and that therefore whatever governs any other material substance in the universe must also govern human life. Basically, we are subject to the kind of causation everything else is. Since nothing else exhibits free will but conforms to causal laws, so must we. Social science is merely looking into the particulars of those causes, but we all know that we are subject to them in any case. The only difference is that we are complicated things, not that the same principles or laws of nature do not govern us.
Now, in response I want to point out that nature exhibits innumerable different domains, distinct not only in their complexity but also in the kinds of beings they include. So it is not possible to rule out ahead of time that there might be something in nature that exhibits agent causation. This is the phenomenon whereby a thing causes some of its own behavior. So there might be in nature a form of existence that exhibits free will. Whether there is or is not is something to be discovered, not ruled out by a narrow metaphysics that restricts everything to being just a variation on just one kind of thing. Thus, taking account of what nature is composed of does not at all rule out free will. Yet, simply because of the possibility that there is free will, there may still not be. We consider that a bit later.

Can we Know of Free Will?
Now, another reason why some think that free will is not possible is that the dominant mode of studying, inspecting or examining nature is empiricism. In other words, many believe that the only way we know about nature is by observing it with our various sensory organs. But since the sensory organs do not give us direct evidence of such a thing as free will, there really isn’t any such thing. Since no observable evidence for free will exists, therefore free will does not exist.
But the doctrine that empiricism captures all forms of knowing is wrong—there are many things that we know not simply through observation but through a combination of observation, inferences, and theory construction. (Consider: Even the purported knowledge that empiricism is our form of knowledge is not “known” empirically!)
For one, many features of the universe, including criminal guilt, are detected without eyewitnesses but by way of theories that serve the purpose of best explaining what we do have before us to observe. This is true, also, even in the natural sciences. Many of the phenomena or facts in biology, astrophysics, subatomic physics, botany, and chemistry—not to mention psychology—consist not of what we see or detect by observation but of what is inferred by way of a theory. And the theory that explains things best—most completely and most consistently—is the best answer to the question as to what is going on.
Free will may well turn out to be in this category. In other words, free will may not be something that we can see directly, but what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the many mistakes that human beings make in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanical causation, the type associated with physics. We can examine a person’s background and find that some people with bad childhoods turn out to be decent, while others crooks. And free will comes as a very helpful explanation. For now all we need to consider is that this may well be so, and if empiricism does not allow for it, so much the worse for empiricism. One could know something because it explains something else better than any alternative. And that is not strict empirical knowledge.
Furthermore, if there is no free will, it would mean that our “knowledge” is something that we must have or lack, without our having anything to do with which it turns out to be. So if one is not free in some basic sense, such as free to think or focus or be aware or not, the content of one’s mind must be what it is. So if one believes in free will for example, or determinism, that is just how one must be, a believer or an unbeliever (or an agnostic) about the topic. And, furthermore, if one cannot help being one or another of these, neither can one double check whether one is correct since that, too, will be a matter of one’s having to hold one or another position about it.
The bottom line is that independent, objective judgments about reality, including whether free will is or is not part of it, are impossible if free will denied. So determinism leads to having to abstain from trying to reach any conclusion about anything whatever. One will simply be forced to think as one does and there can be no way to tell if one is right or wrong.
This self-referential problem is a very serious one and it seems that quite a few thinkers are reluctant to be radical determinists because of it.

Is Free Will Weird?
Something that very often counts against free will is that none of what exists in the inert or living world, apart from human beings, exhibits it. Rocks, water, flowers, trees, cats, lizards, fish, frogs, etc., appear to have no free will and therefore it appears arbitrary to impute it to human beings. Why should we be free to do things when the rest of nature lacks any such capacity? It seems an impossible aberration.
The answer here is that there is enough variety in nature—some things swim, some fly, some just lie there, some breathe, some grow, while others do not; so there is plenty of evidence of plurality of types and kinds of things in nature. Free will could be yet another variety in nature.
Should We Become Determinists?
There’s another dilemma of determinism. Determinists want us to believe in determinism. In fact, they believe we ought to be determinists rather than believe in this spooky myth called “free will”. But, as already mentioned, “ought” implies “can”. So then if one ought to believe in or do something, this implies that one has a choice in the matter; it implies that we can choose as to whether determinism or free will is a better doctrine. That, then, assumes that we are free. In other words, even arguing for and advocating determinism assumes that we are not determined to believe in free will or determinism but that it is a matter of our making certain choices about arguments, evidence, and thinking itself. That’s a paradox that troubles a deterministic position.

We Often Know We Are Free!
In many contexts of our lives introspective knowledge is taken very seriously. When you go to a doctor and he asks you, “Are you in pain?” and you say, “Yes,” and he says “Where is the pain?” and you say, “It’s in my knee,” the doctor doesn’t say, “Why, you can’t know, this is not public evidence, I will now get verifiable, direct evidence where you hurt.” In fact your evidence is very good evidence. Witnesses at trials give evidence as they report about what they have seen, which is introspective evidence: “This indeed is what I have seen or heard.” Even in the various sciences people report on what they’ve read on surveys or seen on gauges or instruments. Thus they are giving us introspective evidence.
Introspection is one source of evidence that we take as reasonably reliable. So what should we make of the fact that a lot of people do say things like, “Damn it, I didn’t make the right choice,” or “I neglected to do something.” They report to us that they have made various choices, decisions, etc., that they intended this or that but not another thing. And they often blame themselves for not having done something; thus they report that they are taking responsibility for what they have or haven’t done.
In short, there is a lot of evidence from people all around us of the existence of free choice.

Modern Science Discovers Free Will!
Finally, there is also the evidence of the fact that we do seem to have the capacity for self-monitoring. The human brain has a kind of structure that allows us, so to speak, to govern ourselves. We can inspect our lives; we can detect where we’re going; and we can, therefore, change course. And the human brain itself makes it possible. The brain, because of its structure, can monitor itself and as a result we can decide whether to continue in a certain pattern or to change that pattern and go in a different direction. That is the sort of free will that is demonstrable. At least some scientists, for example Roger W. Sperry—in his book Science and Moral Priority (Columbia University Press, 1983) and in numerous more technical articles—maintain that there’s evidence for free will in this sense. This view depends on a number of points I have already mentioned. It assumes that there can be different causes in nature, so that the higher functioning of the human brain could involve a kind of self-causation. The brain as a system would have to be able to cause some things about the organism’s behavior and that depends, of course, on the possibility that there are various kinds of causes in nature.
Precisely the sort of thing Sperry thinks possible is plainly evident in our lives. We make plans and revise them. We explore alternatives and decide to follow one of them. We change a course of conduct we have embarked upon, or continue with it. In other words, there is a locus of individual self-responsibility that is evident in the way in which we look upon ourselves—and the way in which we in fact behave. (Some, such as Benjamin Libet, in his Mind Time: the Temporal Factor in Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2004, have argued that our actions aren’t actually a result of our initiative at all. But others, such as Al Mele, have disputed this; see Mele’s Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will, Oxford University Press, 2009. See, also, David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us, Doubleday, 2010.)

Some People are Determined; some are not.
There clearly are cases of conduct in which some persons behave as they do because they were determined to do so by certain identifiable forces outside their own control. A brain tumor, a severe childhood trauma or some other intrusive force sometimes incapacitates people. This is evident in those occasional cases when a person who engaged in criminal behavior is shown to have had no control over what he or she did. Someone who actually had no capacity to control his or her behavior, could not control his or her own thinking or judgment and was, thus, moved by something other than his own will, cannot be said to possess a bona fide free will.
Those who deny that we have free will simply cannot make sense of our distinction between cases in which one controls one’s behavior and those in which one is being moved by forces over which he or she has no control. When we face the latter sort of case, we still admit that the behavior could be good or bad but we deny that it is morally and legally significant—it is more along lines of acts of nature or God by being out of the agent’s control. This is also why philosophers who discuss ethics but deny free will have trouble distinguishing between morality and value theory—e.g., utilitarians, Marxists.

The Best Theory is True.
Finally, as I have alluded to earlier, when we put all of this together we get a more sensible understanding of the complexities of human life than otherwise—we get a better understanding, for example, of why social engineering and government regulation and regimentation do not work, why there are so many individual, religious and cultural differences, why people can be wrong, why they can disagree with each other, etc. It is because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern the way cats and dogs and orangutans and birds tend to be. (I develop this point in my Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite [Rowman & Littlefield, 2004].)
In principle, all of the behavior of these creatures around us can be predicted because they are not creative in a sense that they originate new ideas and behavior, although we do not always know enough about the constitution of these beings and how it would interact with their environment to actually predict what they will do. Human beings produce new ideas and these can introduce new kinds of behavior in familiar situations. This, in part, is what is meant by the fact that different people often interpret their experiences differently. Yet, we can make some predictions about what people will do because they often do make up their minds in a given fashion and stick to their decision over time. This is what we mean when we note that people make commitments, possess integrity, etc. So we can estimate what they are going to do. But even then we do not make certain predictions but only statistically significant ones. Clearly, very often people change their minds and surprise or annoy us. And, if we go to different cultures, they’ll surprise us even more. This complexity, diversity, and individuation about human beings is best explained if human beings are free than if they are determined.

Is Free Will Well Founded?
So these several reasons provide a kind of argumentative collage in support of the free will position. Can anyone do better with this issue? I don’t know. I think it’s best to ask only for what is the best of the various competing theories. Are human beings doing what they do solely as the consequences of forces acting on them? Or do they have the capacity to take charge of their lives, often neglect to do so properly or effectively, make stupid choices? Which supposition explains the human world and its complexities around us?
I think the latter makes much better sense. It explains, much better than do deterministic theories—be they hard or soft—how it is possible that human life involves such a wide range of possibilities, accomplishments as well as defeats, joys as well as sorrows, creation as well as destruction. It explains, also, why in human life there is so much change in language, custom, style, art, and science. Unlike other living beings, for which what is possible is pretty much fixed by instincts and reflexes—even if some extraordinary behavior may be elicited, by way of experiments in laboratories or, at times, in the face of unusual natural developments—people initiate much of what they do, for better and for worse. From their most distinctive capacity of forming ideas and theories, to those of artistic and athletic inventiveness, human beings remake the world without, so to speak, having to do so! And this can make good sense if we understand them to have the distinctive capacity for initiating their own conduct rather than relying on mere stimulation and reaction. It also poses for them certain very difficult tasks, not the least of which is that they cannot expect that any kind of formula or system is going to predictably manage the future of human affairs, such as some of social science seems to hope it will. Social engineering is, thus, not a genuine prospect for solving human problems—only education and individual initiative can do that.

Tibor R. Machan

Despite all efforts to deny it, by philosophers, natural scientists, and psychologists, there is little doubt that human beings have free will. That is one way they are so different from the rest of the world.

The impetus to deny free will is not difficult to appreciate. For many people nothing would be more convenient than to reduce everything in the world to just one kind of stuff. It used to be atoms; then it was matter-in-motion; later some more complicated subatomic stuff took front and center; today the candidate that is getting some traction is strings. But the basic message is always the same: the world is made of just one kind of stuff (like we are all made up of dust).

This idea has its advantages. If it is true, then one need but learn just one science, that of the stuff of which the world is made. No need for different disciplines like chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, ethics and such. Just one principle of motion will do the trick since everything is the same. Differences among things are an illusion. And the same causal principle drives it all, so no need to figure what makes different things tick in, say, chemistry or biology, as if there were different kinds of things making up reality.

The evidence doesn’t support this view. Just check around and see if everything is the same. Major differences are observable between, say, rocks and fish, birds and lions, people and donkeys and so on and so forth. Lumping them all together seems to me the lazy way to study them.

Now if there are genuine, bona fide differences among things in the world, it would not be odd at all that human beings are different in the important respect that they can exercise a unique capacity of free will, to direct their own conduct by their own initiative. Apart from the fact that this is very difficult to deny even as we discuss the issue–how would one explain all the different ways people behave, believe, hope, wish, etc?–it also makes sense of how differently we see the free will issue. What other plant or animal has such a wide variety of opinions, religions, politics, and so on, on some topic? This is best explained by the postulation of human freedom of thought.

Now why is this important just now? Because our free will also makes it understandable that people are able to be good and bad and move along the continuum between those two opposites. And this applies to their politics, not only ethics. We are witnessing it every day as we learn of crimes being committed all around the globe, throughout human history, with no progress in stemming it in any significant measure. Both immorality and illegality testify to the basic human capacity to choose between doing what is right versus what is wrong, whatever the details.

Not only that but this capacity needs to be kept in mind as we understand political ups and downs in various societies.

As a case in point, take socialism. It is a vile political system, a grand one-side-fits all regime, with a few “leaders”–would be tyrants–running the show for all the great variety of individuals who really need to be free to direct their own lives for better or worse. But now, socialists, one group of political criminals, keep attempting to ride rough shod over everyone. (They aren’t the only ones but one of the most active current crop, ruining Greece, France, as well as much of Latin and North America.) They will make some headway, just as often criminals will succeed in violating victims and getting away with it with impunity. In Eastern Europe these criminals lorded it over millions, with catastrophic results, for the better part of the 20th century–both the national and international socialist varieties. Today we have some of them still in full power, in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, but elsewhere their failure at doing any good at all has become evident. Still, as with criminals, they keep trying again and again.

In the U.S.A. they have not had much success nor, however, have they disappeared, no more so than have ordinary criminals vanished. For now the socialists are back with a vengeance, taking over a larger and larger portion of American culture. And one needs to remember that even criminals are not uniformly evil–some love dogs, some may even be decent parents or fine bowlers, you name it. But in essence they are corrupt human beings and so are socialists, when it comes to political ideas and ideals.

The only remedy is that old standby of eternal vigilance. The human spirit isn’t going to permanently conquer political crime, any more than the other kind. But it may make progress toward justice and liberty in a sort of roller coaster fashion. I am ready for the next upward swing, big time.

Sincerely,

Tibor R. Machan

Tibor R. Machan

I want to discuss a very important element of ethics in almost any school of moral philosophy. Ethics is probably one of those fields in philosophy that has many, many competing schools. The basic task of ethics is to answer the question, “How should I act?” “What standards apply to me as I conduct my life?” “What are the fundamental principles that I should follow?” Those are pretty much equivalent questions but the answers are extremely complicated and multi-faceted. There are a lot of very different answers that have been proposed and these are the schools of ethics most people are familiar with. Almost every major philosopher throughout the history of philosophy, east and west, has advanced an ethical theory; a theory about how human beings should conduct themselves. This is something most philosophers do. Some even contend that ethics is but a branch of politics which is prior to it, although the opposite is how most view it today. They contend that among the ancient Greeks, like Aristotle, politics is prior to ethics, although reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics doesn’t consistently support this idea.

There are, however, also philosophers and other thinkers who deny that there is any such discipline as ethics. In fact many philosophers, as well as many social and natural scientists, contend that the entire field of ethics is bogus. It’s akin to astrology, something most regard as a bogus field, and a lot of social and natural scientists believe this about ethics. There is no valid idea that includes the concept “ought.” Ought is an incoherent concept. That’s because judgments including it cannot be shown to be true (or false). Also those who are skeptical about ethics deny that we have any choice about how we conduct ourselves, that we can make free decisions as to what we will do. Thus for two reasons for many ethics is a non-starter (like astrology).

But the bulk of philosophers (and I would say the bulk of human beings) have a concern with ethics and take it seriously. They don’t dismiss it as bogus but tend to think there is a right answer to the question, “How should I act?” or “How should I conduct my life?” or “What principles should guide me?” whenever it is raised.

One reason that ethics arises for us (not an uncontroversial reason but a reason that makes sense) is that we don’t have the requisite set of instincts–or “hard wiring”–prompting us to behave as we need to in order to survive and flourish in our lives. If you look at almost any other animal (and I’m not going to get into the big debate as to whether there are some borderline cases), almost all have these instincts, these hard-wirings, so that, for example, in the winter they fly south and they don’t have to have a committee or go to graduate school to learn about it. Human beings, in contrast, have to figure out what they should do, how they should conduct themselves, whether to do this or that. When one’s a parent, one needs to make a choice too be a good one but might not do so and simply muddle through it all. When you’re a professor you have to consider how to be a competent one, a decent teacher and scholar, etc. And so on and so forth throughout the entire landscape of human activities. The issue of what are the right things to do and what are the wrong things to avoid doing always faces us. That is what editorials are about, that is what most famous plays and novels are about. Almost anything interesting in life tends to revolve around ethics.

Now I’m not going to try to sketch an ethical theory here but discuss the connection between ethics and human responsibility.

Responsibility is a very broad concept and one sense of it underlies any school of ethics; whether one considers utilitarianism, altruism, egoism, Aristotelian or Kantian ethics sound, all involve a person’s responsibility for conduct. However one answers the question, “How ought I conduct myself?” the issue of responsibility is central and unavoidable. But what does it mean? What is being meant here by using the concept of responsibility?

There are many uses of the idea “responsibility”. Sometimes crop failures are due to the weather so the weather is taken to be responsible for them. Buildings collapse because of earthquakes so earthquakes are responsible for the carnage. In this sense responsibility means that these factors are the causes of such happenings. What happens is because of this or that event that is responsible.

There is a relationship between this use of the term “responsible” and the one that bears on ethics but it is a controversial relationship because ethics in its customary sense–namely pertaining to how human beings ought to act–assumes one of the most controversial contentions in philosophy, psychology, and almost the entire list of the human sciences. That is that human beings have something usually called free will, that they can act one way or the other and it is up to them how they will act. What they choose to do is not because of god, the weather, their genes, their DNA or anything else. They, the actors or agents, are the ones who are responsible.

Those of us with children are familiar with this without having to become too philosophical. Children quite early in their lives try to avoid being held responsible for bad things and prefer being credited for good deeds. This is a very early idea in one’s life–as well as in the history of philosophy. It is one of the earliest ideas of ethics in any region of the world. Wherever people talk or write about ethics, it is generally assumed that they have to do the right thing of their own free will. This is very common with many thinkers, especially those writing novels, editorials, Op Ed columns and the like. Whenever there is exhortation about what people should and should not be doing, the idea surfaces immediately for blame and praise are accorded in the case of most significant human activities.

Some are unsure in their views on the matter but most have, to the extent that they have a normative framework, views about how people ought to act, whether individually or institutionally. In all such cases there is much concern about responsibility. And that is quite natural. One need not be an academic philosopher to appreciate that when human beings worry about their lives they worry about something over which they believe they have a say. They have some effective influence over how they will act. They are what is often referred to in philosophy as the causal agent of their actions. And if there is anything to that, then indeed a central element of human life is one’s personal responsibility to do the right thing so that if one fails to do the right thing, one is usually held responsible for it. Criminal law obviously banks on this notion and ethics and morality do as well.

The difference between ethics and morality isn’t germane here–”ethics” was the earlier term used by the ancient Greeks and it usually meant living right, whether it has to do with one’s personal life or the lives of intimates over whom one has influence or strangers. Morality mostly has to do with coordinating properly our actions with the actions of others. Morality is the social dimension of ethics. Though this may not seem like very significant, the distinction has had a major influence on the evolution of ethics, at least Western thought. (It is often maintained now that how one ought to act is only important when it effects other people, not oneself.)

After the highly influential work of Thomas Hobbes, there has been more emphasis on morality, on what you might call social ethics instead of personal ethics such as that which we find in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But this is not a major issue here. Both ethics and morality concern themselves with right as distinguished from wrong conduct.

A very recent (in the sweep of human history) thinker on this matter was Immanuel Kant who coined a motto that many philosophers invoke when they connect ethics and freedom. The motto is, “Ought implies can.” It just means that if one ought to do or abstain from doing something, it has to be what one is capable of doing. It is nonsense to say someone ought to jump 30 feet into the air unassisted because that’s impossible. One couldn’t very well have a moral responsibility to do the impossible.

So “ought implies can” refers to the fact that one has to be able to choose between doing something or not doing it in order to have the ethical or moral responsibility to do it. And there is another element to this as well. Not only must one be free to do the right thing and not be compelled one way or another–not just that it is one who is doing it–but it’s must also be knowable. In other words, what is the right thing to do has to be correctly answerable because if there is no possible correct answer to the question, “what is the right thing to do?” or “what ought I to do?” then one can’t do it. So if “ought” does imply “can,” then it also requires that there be some standards of proper conduct, of proper behavior.

The issue here isn’t which of the many ethical systems that have been proposed, advocated, defended, and championed throughout the history of ethics is right. Instead here it is these elements that are crucial: People have to be free and there has to be some standard by which their conduct is to be evaluated. Otherwise there is no ethics. Ethics then really becomes a bogus field if you cannot be free to choose the right course and if you cannot determine what the right course is. And needless to stress, all these are extremely controversial issues in the field of moral philosophy in ethics, especially in a field that precedes ethics, called metaethics.

Metaethics simply means, how do we get to know about ethics? How do we figure out ethics? Metaethics is the considerations that come before we get to the issue of how we should conduct ourselves. There are considerations that need to be handled before that and one of them is, “Are you free to choose?” The other one is, “Is there a way to determine what is the right thing to do?” These are metaethical issues. The ethical issues are, “What should I do?” or “What should I not do?” But “How do I know it?” is what’s called a metaethical issue. If one pays close attention to this, one will already have an inkling how this all relates to political philosophy, even political theory. Clearly if one is responsible for one’s conduct and others interfere with and prevent one from acting feely, one’s ethical life is squelched. If somebody forces a person to do something, one is not going to be able to take any credit for or be blamed for it. Which is well recognized in criminal law and it is also in morality. People often defend themselves against charges of malpractice or misconduct in court by trying to make out the case that they could not help themselves, that they did not have the freedom to act, that they were not the ones that were responsible for the behavior that is deemed criminal. It was something else. Maybe it was drugs, or “the devil made me do it.”

This idea of the intimate connection between freedom and ethics is ancient, hardly anybody denies it. There are some, however, who are deniers. These are people who in my view have abandoned ethics altogether but still like to keep the word around. They are people who believe that although you don’t have the freedom to choose, or there really isn’t any way to determine there is right conduct versus wrong conduct, nonetheless there is some vague thing called ethics having to do with what the public expects of one, or how one may be enticed to act in certain ways that are desirable from the social point of view, or some other thing; these aren’t what ethics is about, however, only what may be associated with ethics. Such matters pertain to what is to be encouraged amongst each other that’s desirable, but not with choosing to do the right thing, which is the province of ethics proper.

Doing the right thing is the task of a sovereign individual, someone who has the capacity to choose and may exercise that capacity well or badly, That is where this issue of responsibility pertains to human beings squarely and in a society in which the government regiments the population (even just a little sometimes is enough) what takes place as a result is demoralization, the removal of moral choice from people’s concerns. IN such a regimented society people’s moral lives are undercut and undermined. They no longer have the responsibility to act properly because the law has taken it upon itself to coerce them into doing whatever governments considers to be the right thing to do and to abstain from what government regards wrongful conduct. But if one is coerced to do the morally right thing, one is not actually doing it. One then has become a mere puppet.

One thing one tells one’s children after they have reached a certain age is that now they must take responsibility for their own actions, whereas before that one is perfectly willing to give them very close instructions as to what they should do, maybe even force them to do the right thing (but perhaps only with an eye to their growing up to do it on their own, rather than being prodded into doing it).

Some aspects of the current political situation are incompatible with the intimate connection between ethical responsibility and political freedom. Most generally put, it is where other people treat one as though they were one’s parents. A recent inventions of President Obama’s close associated and an architect of forthcoming government regulations is Professor Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School. He and some others have forged the concept of “libertarian paternalism” or “governmental nudging,” both oxymorons by any reasonable account. What Sunstein and Co. have in mind is a situation in which people are manipulated into doing what the government considers the right thing for them to do, akin to how when one attends a party at someone’s house who want one to take off one’s shoes at the entrance. They are likely to leave some kind of clue at the entrance, such as a bunch of shoes by those who live at the house, suggesting that it’s time to take off one’s shoes, without having to come up and ordering one to take off one’s shoes. That would be libertarian paternalism or nudging.

Sunstein co-wrote a book with Richard H. Thaler, titled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale 2008) that instead of promoting out and out tyrannical government promotes a subtle and circumspect but still intrusive public policy by means of which citizens will be manipulated so as to bring about the government’s goals in such a way that one won’t really notice this. Such would be a not very disguised Machiavellianism for the 21st century.

Once again, the notion that you ought to be free to conduct your own affairs is trumped with the idea that we need to be ruled, even if only with a nudge.

There are many other areas where this kind of interference, pushing, and paternalism take place. It is almost impossible to list them in the current political climate because virtually everything that is done in Washington and in many other centers of legal power amounts to interference in people’s liberties. And, of course, there is always some excuse, some attempt to achieve something good or worthwhile. Often complaining about is met with the response that, well, it is done all over the civilized world, such as France, Germany, England, and Scandinavia.

Yet what is missed in this reply is that the American political system began by rejecting the approaches to public affairs deployed in most places around the globe precisely because of their intrusiveness. Any good that is achieved by intrusive, coercive means, be these mild or Draconian, looses it’s moral significance. It can’t even be considered a bona fide human good, one that’s brought about by human beings, because such a good must be the result of human choice and not coercion, not from having a gun put to the heads of the human agent.

And this has to do with the connection between responsibility, ethics, and freedom, the kind that the classical liberal tradition has started to emphasize more and more over the last 500 years and which had its full public impact during the American Revolution with an official document, the Declaration of Independence, that enshrined those ideas as political guidelines.

The Declaration of Independence makes reference to our unalienable natural rights, ones no one can lose as long as one is human. Those are the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of one’s happiness, among others (!), all of which require one to be free to choose. (Notice it doesn’t mean that one has a right to happiness but to the pursuit of it, something that no one can guarantee that anyone will actually do.) Having the right to choose doesn’t mean that one will in fact exercise it. One might not. Even to pursue happiness is but an option, not a demand–one may just decide to settle for being melancholy (as one recent book recommends–it argues that melancholia is a healthier state for civilized human beings than the pursuit of happiness).

In any case, no one can have a moral life, conduct oneself in morally significant ways, act morally responsibly, without the right to freedom. Its’ not possible and those who try to promote that idea are badly mistaken.

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*This is a transcript of a lecture delivered at Cato University, San Diego, CA , in July 2009.

Tibor R. Machan

The basic task of ethics is to answer the question, “How should I act?” “What standards apply to me as I conduct my life?” “What are the fundamental principles that I should follow?” Those are pretty much equivalent questions but the answers are extremely complicated and multi-faceted. There are a lot of thinkers who have answered it in very different ways.

Almost every major philosopher throughout the history of philosophy, east and west, has advanced an ethical theory or ideal; a theory about or ideal of how human beings should conduct themselves. This is one thing that philosophers do. Some even contend that ethics is but a branch of politics which is prior to it, although the opposite is how most view it today.

There are, however, also philosophers and other thinkers who deny that there is anything like ethics. In fact for many philosophers, as well as many social scientists and natural scientists, the entire field of ethics is bogus. It’s kind of like astrology–though I don’t want to step on any toes here but I regard it a bogus field–and a lot of social scientists and natural scientists feel the same way about ethics. There is no such thing as ought. Ought is an incoherent concept. There is no such thing because most of the time those skeptics about ethics deny that there is any choice we have about our lives that we can make decisions as to what we will do, and thus for them ethics is a non-starter (like astrology). But the bulk of philosophers (and I would say the bulk of human beings) have a concern with ethics and they take it seriously. They don’t dismiss it as bogus. They tend to think there is some answer to the question, “How should I act?” “How should I conduct my life?” “What principles should guide me?” I’m sure that’s true for many of you although some of you probably are skeptics about this.

One of the reasons that ethics arises for us (not uncontroversial) is that we don’t have instincts prompting us to behave as we need to in order to survive and flourish in our lives. Other animals (and I’m not going to get into the big debate as to whether there are some borderline cases) have these instincts, these hard-wirings, so that say, in winter they fly south. Human beings on the other hand have to figure out what they should do, how they should conduct themselves. When you’re a parent you have to make a choice too be a good one. The issue of what are the right things to do and what are the wrong things to avoid doing always faces us. That is what editorials are about, that is what all the plays and novels are about. Almost anything interesting in life tends to revolve around ethics.

Responsibility underlies any school of ethics whether utilitarian, altruist, egoist, Aristotelian, Kantian, Christian or Hindu. However one answers the question, “How ought I conduct myself?” the issue of responsibility is central. What does it mean?
There are many uses of the word responsibility. Sometimes crop failures are ascribed to the weather so the weather is responsible for them. Buildings collapse because of earthquakes so earthquakes are responsible for them. In this sense what we mean by responsibility is merely that these are the causes of certain happenings. Some things happen because of this or that.

There’s a relationship between this use of the term “responsible” and the one that bears on ethics, a controversial one, because in the case of human beings, ethics tends to assume one of the most contentious ideas, namely, that human beings have what’s usually called free will, that we can act one way or the other and it is up to us how. It is one of the earliest ideas of ethics in any region of the world whether it’s east, west, north, or south. Wherever people write about ethics, it is understood that we have to do the right thing of our own free will. You don’t have to be an academic philosopher to appreciate that when human beings worry about their lives they worry about something over which they believe they have a say. Both ethics and morality concern themselves with right as distinguished from wrong conduct.

The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant coined a motto, “Ought implies can.” It just means that if you ought to do something, it has to be something that you can do. It is nonsense to say you ought to jump 30 feet into the air unassisted because that is impossible. You couldn’t very well have a moral responsibility to do the impossible. But not only must one be free to do the right thing so that one isn’t not compelled one way or another but what is the right thing to do has to be knowable because obviously if there is no answer to the question, “what is the right thing for me to do?” or “what ought I to do?” then one can’t do it. So if ought does imply can, then it also requires that there be some standards of proper conduct, of proper behavior.

Moreover, if one ought to do one thing rather than another, one may not be forced to do it. Forcing people to do the right thing, other than to abstain from interfering with others, renders them morally impotent. People have to be free and there has to be some standard by which their conduct is to be evaluated. Otherwise there is no ethics.

Ethics is bogus without responsibility and liberty, if you cannot be free to choose the right course and if you cannot determine what the right course is.