Over the years I've collected a number of xeroxed articles and manuscript essays . . . and even books. For instance, while at Liberty, a few authors wrote for help and suggestions. Jack Boulogne, a gentleman from Canada, sent me his Hand Book of Practical Morality, and I hope I encouraged him in his enterprise. Unfortunately, it was not right for Liberty, and I didn't see an easy way to edit it down to a manageable essay for the magazine.

The writing of treatises and the writing of magazine articles are often very different things.

When I left Liberty, Boulogne's mss. stayed in my possession. Inadvertantly, perhaps. Or perhaps because I thought that it would just never again be looked at by anyone there.

Now, as I index my whole library onto a database, I begin wondering about Mr. Boulogne's book. Did it ever get published?

Well, here's something: The Moral Code: A Catechism, by Jacob Boulogne. Almost certainly this is what his handbook became. The subtitle, A Catechism shows a pleasing independent streak. (It's not in to write catechisms these days, is it?)

I am thinking of buying the book. Bernard Gert's work — on which it is based — is not quite up my alley, in ethics, but Boulogne is right to admire Gert's low-nonsense attempt at setting something in fixity, a few rules. Further, Boulogne makes little pretense of originality. His aim, I think, has been consistent: to follow Gert, and improve on Gert's understanding of everyday, commonsense morality, in part by upgrading the concept of liberty.

Gert's own work on the subject is well worth reading anyway, and I should get back to it soon.

The best thing about Gert is his realization that, when it comes to justifying rules, one cannot demand any kind of perfection as a source for the rules' salience, but merely aim to get rid of some bad things. Gert is a moralist who's studied his Hobbes. It's by opposing evil, and not enshrining The Good, that morality gains any hope and hint of universality.

Doug Giles's column this weekend is the usual in-your-face, belligerent Christendom/Christendumber rap, this time directed towards atheists.

I assume that even many Christians can see what's wrong with his logic. In case it's not obvious to some, I'll see if I can offer a friendly parry or two to his unfriendly thrust.

He has a great title, I think: Hey, Atheists . . . get your own moral code. It neatly summarizes his point.

The problem I have, however, with the atheists and their goodness and their morality claims is that all your ethical codes of conduct sound strangely similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions. As a matter of fact, it seems as if you have bellied up to the Bible and are treating it like a buffet . . . passing up on the worship of the person and work of God, while taking second helpings of His moral principles, you duplicitous, little, evolved monkey, you.

Aside from the pronoun trouble here (and let's not call too much attention to it; we all fail in grammar sometimes, don't we?), the main charge is that modern atheists, when they attempt to behave morally, pick out the secularizable commandments and such, leaving the obvious religious ones. And then they pretend they . . . well, what's wrong with that, before I go on? Let me consult Giles:

If I were an atheist and I believed that God didn't exist, that the Bible was a bunch of weird bunk written by religiously deluded men several thousand years ago, that Jesus was an apocalyptic, sandal-wearing, hippie forerunner of David Koresh who went around spitting out cheeky clichés who needed not to be heeded, but straight-jacketed or at least ignored — I sure as heck wouldn't be borrowing any tidbits of His wisdom to navigate my life's glide path.

Ah, there it is. He believes that the value of a maxim (or rule, or idea) derives from its source, not from its utility. That is, the maxim Do not kill innocent people (containing a definition of murder, or wrongful killing, and a modification of the vague Thou shalt not kill prohibition) gets its value, Giles implies, from those who adopted it before me, not from the fact (and this is pretty close to a fact, not a mere conjecture) that a society that did not promote the maxim and live by it as much as possible would be one that reduces to conflict and chaos too easily, which would be good, perhaps, only for those not only very good at, but positively enjoying, the act of killing innocent people.

My point is that it doesn't matter to me at all who formulated a maxim. Or supported it.

Take vegetarianism, for example. I'm not a vegetarian. But I might be talked into it. How would I decide whether vegetarianism would be better than an omnivorous diet? Well, it wouldn't be by investigating the biographies of past vegetarians and comparing them to carnivores. Hitler, after all, was a vegetarian. Would that dissuade me? Should it? No. Only numbskulls decide things for that kind of reason.

To decide on a diet, I might study medical research. I might consult my conscience about killing furry and unfurry animals. There are a lot of things I could consider. But putting Hitler on one side and Jerry Falwell on the other isn't going to decide this issue. (Even if, at present, I side with Jerry Falwell for other reasons than his late omnivorousness.)

It's no surprise that Giles brings up Nietzsche:

Nietzsche came to the conclusion that if there is no God — or God is dead, as he put it — then he's not going to live as if God is alive and His moral principles mattered. Yes, brass-balled Friedrich said that the opposite of how the Bible says to live is the way we should live.

Well, not across the board. Nietzsche may have urged a transvaluation of all values, and regarded the slave morality of allegedly altruistic Judeo-Christian ethics as perverse and anti-life and all that, but it's just simply not the case that he chose the opposite on principle.

He picked and chose, according to his values, according to the way he thought the world worked.

But Nietzsche is an apt strawman for Giles. For Nietzsche also believed that value comes from its source, and not from its use, or utility. Lester H. Hunt marshaled the evidence for Nietzsche's position on this expertly, leaving little room for doubt.

And this was a great error. For value has its origin in the usefulness of the object for a subject, in a context of competing objects and competing subjects for those objects. Economists are right; Nietzsche wrong.

So, an economist will not blush if he finds that one maxim he favors came from the acolytes of Ashtaroth, will not be the least ashamed to learn that Zoroastrians supported another of his prize precepts. These things are not important. It does not matter where a valuable things come from, to determine its value. It depends on use and context. The history of an object or a maxim may be very interesting. And it may affect the characteristics, of course. But those characteristics are what's important. Not the alleged unitary source for it.

This is so basic, all should see it. But I guess theologians and proselytizers for religion are so weak in their faith that they have to load their morality with ammo most apt to go off in their face. When you go for the big explosions, which make the biggest noise, you take your chances.

Further, of course, Giles shows himself to be unaware of the antinomies and ironies of his position. Many, many Judeo-Christian ethical positions were earlier advocated by Atenists, Zoroastrians and even worshipers of Ishtar. Does the argument then apply against them?

Of course, as a matter of history, our civilization does come, in part, from Hebraic sources. So of course the flavor of a contemporary atheists' values are going to have more than a tinge from that Hebraic past.

But Hellenism is also a source for our civilization, and it was a polytheistic world-view that morphed into some vague (and not so vague) theisms and atheisms of a philosophical bent. Does the morality of today's atheistic humanists look more like the morality of a Hellenistic Athenian or a Judean Essene? The question almost answers itself: even modern Christians behave more like the Athenian than like the Essene . . . or the Pharisee, for that matter.

Going through the Ten Commandments, of course the first batch are going to be rejected by an atheist, or any modern humanist. But what of the rest, the ones following the Sabbath injunctions? Let's consider:

1. Honor thy father and thy mother . . . Well, this is an honor-culture injunction, and this one encompasses quite a lot of values and virtues in it, values and virtues that most modern preachers wouldn't even know are hidden in it. Still, I bet most humanists would agree that, modernized a bit, the principle here is good, though the content of the honor system has understandably changed since the days of herdsmen at the edge of a desert.




2. Thou shalt not kill . . . This means, surely, Kill no innocent human beings in your social world. The proscription of murder is indeed an important part of any good ethic, eh? So of course humanists and atheists would adopt it and promote it.




3. Thou shalt not commit adultery . . . Well, breaking contracts is a bad idea, and its double bad when the contract is the basis of a family. But the idea that every marriage has the same contract is long past. Further, the sexual immortality notions in the Judeo-Christian history are nothing like the sexual morality notions now dominant . . . even among Christians. Premarital sexual activity is now not merely assumed, it's even encouraged by those of a humanist mind set. Why? For a number of reasons. Good reasons.




4. Thou shalt not steal . . . Most everybody knows that theft must not be encouraged. A view of the social world that really took the prohibition seriously, though, might be radically different than the one most Christians and most atheists now support.



5. em>Thou shalt not bear false witness against the neighbor . . . The most important of the Ten Commandments for the working of law. No rational person approves of lying as a way of life. honesty is key. It is good policy. More important, though, is not to lie on grave matters concerning other citizens. The legal system depends on rare instances of false witness. There's no reason to go back to an ancient text to see why.



6. Thou shalt not covet . . . This rule has fallen a bit by the wayside, in modern times. Its meaning in our culture is no longer clear. But its meaning, though, is not clear to Christians as well as humanists. And this lack of clarity has nothing to do with its origin in something a man named Moses allegedly wrote into stone. The murkiness is a result of the very different cultures of today compared to hard-scrabble living yesterday.

Humanists of today pick and choose from the ethical ideas of all the past and present. They are bound to no one notion, source, or context. They are free, so to speak. They are not limited by any ancient text. If a humanist finds one notion from Plato, another dozen from Aristotle, and a few good pointers from Epicurus, he's not doing anything unexpected or shameful or inconsistent. And if some of those resemble the principles that Jesus preached, that's no skin off anyone's nose.

It's not a matter of consistency to origins:

So what's it going to be, my obstreperous amigos? Are you going to continue to blather on about there being no God and then live like there is one and that His word and will matters? Get consistent, why don't 'cha? Don't live by the Ten Commandments. Don't live by the Golden Rule. Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's our stuff. That's the Judeo-Christian way. Get your own commandments that are logically deduced from the no God hypothesis, write your own unholy book and form your own civilization. Then let's see how appealing it is, how it betters the planet and how far you'll get.

Principles should be consistent. Indeed, one might inquire of a belligerent Christian like Giles whether he really thinks he's living by the Golden Rule when he argues in this manner.

More importantly, humanists should ask the guiled Gileses what makes them pretend to a monopoly on near-universal notions, like opposing murder, theft, and fraud.

And, besides, Giles . . . humanists already revised their morality, and set up a civilization. This one. The Enlightenment changed a lot, and led to the formation of the United States of America, with very secular roots. The Ten Commandments was not recognized in that document of law, nor was a deity even mentioned. And a staple of religious rulership from time immemorial, the idea of religious tests to hold public office, was expressly forbidden.

So, Mr. Giles, how do you like living in the world that humanists have helped recreate?

It really bothers you, doesn't it?

But do you have to bear false witness against the founders of modern civilization, in rants like yours?

Erik Anderson, the man behind Epicurus.info (you didn't think it was Epicurus himself, did you? — he's dead), has started a Wiki about Epicureanism. I stopped by today, and went to the epitome of Epicureanism, the Tetrapharmikon:

Don't fear god,
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.

I'm new to the site, so I hesitate to polytheize (nice word, huh?) the translation. The fourfold cure, in my memory, goes like this:

Do not fear the gods;
Do not fear death;
Good things are easy to get;
Suffering, easy to endure.

My take on Epicureanism can be seen by my renovation of the cure:

There are no fearsome deities;
Death is not worth fearing, either, though death is real cessation and not mere illusion;
Do not fear boredom, or leap to distraction, for there are always important things to learn, beautiful things to experience, and valuable acts to perform;
To fear suffering is to scuttle the best salve to pain before the pain arrives.

Of course, there's a fifth fear that Epicurus himself fell for: the fear of disappointment, the fear of failure. This led him to overreact, to flee from some complexities that are best neither fought nor flown from.

That, in fact, is my main response to Epicureanism: the four fears must be fought, but so also must this fifth fear. The simple life is not the whole of the philosophical life. Some complexities are worth striving for. Since all things fail in the end, and all things die or come to destruction, it does not therefore follow that all things must be avoided. Quietism is not the answer. Even living inconspicuously may not be the answer (after all, Epicurus did not quite manage it). The answer is cautious engagement, and sometimes confident resistance.

In his essay The Claims of Philosophy, A.J. Ayer divided philosophers into two categories: journeymen and pontiffs. He was one of the former, and proud of it. One of the interesting things about both styles of doing philosophy, though, is that both rub up raw against our expectations of philosophers:

Surely, the business of the philosopher is to make clear the meaning of life, to show people how they ought to live. Call him a pontiff or a journeyman, according to his method of approach; the distinction is not of any great importance. What is important is the message that he has to give. It is wisdom that is needed, no merely scientific knowledge. Of what use to us is the understanding of nature if we do not know the purpose of our existence or how we ought to live? And who is to answer these supremely important questions if not the philosopher?

Good points, this challenge to the philosophical status quo. But hey: Ayer has an answer:

The reply to this is that there is no true answer to these questions; and since this is so it is no use expecting even the philosopher to provide one. What can be done, however, is to make clear why, and in what sense, these questions are unanswerable; and once this is achieved it will be seen that there is also a sense in which they can be answered. It will be found that the form of answer is not a proposition, which must be either true or false, but the adoption of a rule, which cannot be properly characterized as either true or false, but can nevertheless be judged as more or less acceptable. And with this the problem is solved, so far as reasoning can solve it. The rest if a matter of personal decision, and ultimately of action.

Though I think things are a bit more complicated than Ayer makes out, this, too, is my position.

But really, the idea that philosophers qua philosohers should only concern themselves with truth, and (by manifest technique) nothing else, strikes me as his strangest limiter. Solving the problem of actions and rules, by reasoning of various sorts, is quite a task, and even if truth is not the ultimate goal (co-ordinated felicity, perhaps, is), those other goals are worthy of a philosopher, and philosophers surely have important things to say about them. Even in proposition form.

Tthose of us who research Herbert Spencer's philosophical and scientific writings will likely find this especially amusing:

Vintage Herbert Spencer Book Of Interest To Alcoholics

Talk about a reach! Why Spencer's Data of Ethics would be of special interest to alcoholics is, well, tenuous at best. Strangest eBay advertising I've seen in some time.

Some wonder at my bitterness towards Ayn Rand. Part of it is simply fear of being found guilty by association. I find her arguments in ethics so appallingly ill-reasoned and substantively perverse that, since we share a general political outlook, I fear being tarred with her nasty brush.

There's a sadness in my revulsion, too. It saddens me to see her admirers frequently miss a great point made by, say, Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer, and miss it by a mile, largely and apparently out of undue interest in and reverence towards the formulations of Ayn Rand.

Take Tibor Machan. He was given the task of introducing a reprint of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics. And in that introduction, he writes this:

It is no secret that the bulk of ethical commentary, whether from the pulpit, editorials, the campaign trails, or the stages from which the oratory of commencement exercises rings forth, urges upon human beings acts of self-sacrifice. In this respect there is nothing revolutionary about Marxism, for example. Marx also places before us the ideals of selfsacrifice — his condemnation of the Lockean human-rights tradition consisted mainly of dismissing such rights as vehicles of selfishness. Spencer, however, advocated egoism. And his ethics could not be faulted for being of the hedonistic egoist variety. such as those of Jeremy Bentham and even John Stuart Mill. Instead, Spencer developed what he called a rational utilitarian moral theory. Omitting from consideration for now the difficulties of Spencer’s fusionist efforts, we cannot deny that the substance of Spencer’s ethical writings deserves extensive study We have here a brilliant theory in which the mutually compatible selfish goals of individuals are demonstrated to be the proper end of human conduct. The principles that would further this goal are the principles of rational utilitarianism, gleaned through a consideration of the self-consistently enhancing course of conduct possible for human beings to undertake.

The trouble with this is that Herbert Spencer did not advocate egoism.

Sure, Spencer wrote a fascinating chapter entitled Egoism vs. Altruism. He demonstrated the commonplace truth that self-directed behavior must take precedence over all else, and that, in fact, self-directed egoistic behavior is necessary for life.

But he followed it with another chapter entitled Altruism vs. Egoism, wherein he showed how life also depends on acts of voluntary self-sacrifice for the benefit of others (chiefly but not limited to offspring). He then spends two chapters dialectically resolving the apparent contradictions. In the end, he comes up with a synthesis which might well be called, as Spencer did put it, a rational utilitarianism, but which cannot in good conscience be called an egoism.

Now, Machan's own egoism isn't quite as outrageous as his beloved Ayn Rand's. But, apparently because of his obsession with egoism, Machan mistakes — nay; he completely ignores — Spencer's real contribution to the subject of agent-relative ethics.

Chris Sciabarra was quite right to identify* Herbert Spencer as the first dialectical libertarian. Spencer's contribution was that sophisticated. Much more sophisticated than most later libertarian philosophies, actually.

But Machan misses that. I believe because he is too enamored of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and especially with her chief obsession, egoism. I could be wrong. This could be misattribution. But I don't think so.

. . .

* Note: By the way, in that Sciabarra essay he argues against something I wrote. Here's what I wrote:

This method — I'm tempted to call it "dialectical," but Spencer's prose and position seem so far from Hegel's that the term is almost indecent — confuses many readers. But it is surely his strength.

Sciabarra counters:

It is unfortunate that Virkkala refuses to give into his temptation, because crucially significant aspects of Herbert Spencer's work are, indeed, dialectical.

I suspect Sciabarra actually did understand what I wrote. I was being ironic. I was calling Spencer's method dialectical in a back-handed way. I see no reason to make every statement in the standard, literalist manner. Even philosophy must have room for some nuance . . . without stooping to the folly of jargon or opacity. Or, ahem, dialectic. Call it rhetorical.

Years ago I wrote of "armament spirituality," and the need for a depth morality of self-defense and other-defense . . . complete with an attitude towards the risks such a stance has of death.

Now I realize that a more general stance is necesssary, a "Confident Resistance," a principled dissent and self-defense against usurpations and tyrannies.

The main enemy of civilization these days is Islamic fundamentalism. Communism is basically a dead letter, though there are indeed plenty of college professors and college students who could switch to become a danger were the context and historical situation to allow for it. Christianity has been tamed, mostly, though the influence of self-conceived victims amongst Christian fundamentalists, orthodox, and evangelicals in the Republican Party has yielded some groundswells of resentment and bad legislation.

Still, the main trouble right now — other than from our own bureaucratic and political classes — is radical Islam, the jihadists. These people must be opposed.

As I've been writing about for years, now, Islam is not at heart a peaceful religion. The Muslim calendar begins from the first year not of Muhammad's public preaching, but from the first year he became a political and military leader. As Robert Spencer makes clear in his new book The Truth About Muhammad, the deal Muslims offer infidels is simple and tyrannical: convert, pay a poll tax and accept second-class status, or die fighting. This gambit is one of warfare, conquest. Spencer's clarity on this reinforces my own glimmering of the truth, that Islam demands hegemony. The rule of Islamic law is proof of Allah, and a good Muslim will not cease fighting until all proclaim that Allah is God.

Against this — as against all tyrannies and usurpations, really — good people, just men and women, must stand opposed, resisting. It's not merely about dissent from trendy universalism. We must confidently re-assert the universality of peaceful co-existence. And those who will not tolerate differences in peace must be forcefully opposed.

Islam itself means confident submission. And submission to Allah entails, according to the old religion, making others submit, too. It's quite stark, written right there in the Qu'ran.

Of course, other passages in the Qu'ran contradict the military, repressive nature of the religion. Like all religions, Islam is self-contradictory, too.

Free men, free women . . . we must not submit to the totalitarian demands of any religion, and, politically, not to any usurping or coercive gambit. Resistance! It means standing up for freedom. For a secular rule of law. For private property. For worship (or not) according to conscience, for generosity and charity (or not) according to conscience. It is time to reject the stranglehold of ancient communisms and forced observance.

Resistance, yes. Confident resistance. It is the opposite of Islam. There must be an Arabic word for it. We who hold to the ideas that evolved in the west, of the idea of liberty as the chief feature of justice, of the idea of a rule of law that is no respecter of persons, we must be prepared to fight.

Take up arms, even. And settle, in our very selves, the spiritual challenge of death and the risk of death in a cause that must triumph.

We who really support a rule of law must resist those who oppose the sepraation of religion and state, who oppose all limits to state power . . . or those limits that seem most burdensome on their religion.

And on a personal level, what can a person say to somebody who might offer conversion but demand oobeissance? As Robert Spencer notes, the mere offer of conversion conceals a threat, when coming from a Muslim. It won't be God who judges you, at least not right away; if you resist, according to the good example of Muhammad, then coercion to submission is the next step.

So, what to say? Do not threaten me. I find your book, the Qu'ran, wholly unreliable as to past and future, and especially as to what should be. I can't imagine ever converting to your nutball religion. And if you make one move towards me, I will call in the police, get a restraining order, or call out this knife I have in my jacket pocket . . .

Something like that. Perhaps, more philosophical: Is this the teaching of your Prophet? Submission to a Spook, and submission to your tyranny? I will not pillory your Prophet or your deity in public, if you leave me alone. But if you do not leave me alone, realize the consequences: I can aim, I can fire, I can stab, I can punch, I can kick, what-have-you. And I will, if you persist on demanding that I submit to either your will or that of your make-believe historical atavism, Allah.

Resistance is not enough. We must be confident in our resistance. But we must also, always, allow our would-be usurpers and tyrants to back away, to settle for peaceful coexistence. But we should also be wary, realizing that coexistance has been a gambit of the weak who wish to become strong.

Just say No to gods and prophets and tyrants!

There are not many from Muslim backgrounds who have the courage for this. But apparently the amazing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel is one such. Do not cease resisting until all who believe in one god or many accept that others who do not believe as they do have just as much right to live.

The opening of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism has often been scoffed at for containing one of the great philosophical boners:

From the dawn of philosophy, the question concerning the summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought, has occupied the most gifted intellects, and divided them into sects and schools, carrying on a vigorous warfare against one another.

Hey, I've scoffed at it. The summum bonum is definitely not the same thing as the foundation of morality.

But I realized, recently, that Mill's error is a very common error. He identified two distinct things. And yet, many philosophers are pointing in the direction of the summum bonum when they talk about the foundation of ethics.

Here's the trouble: there is no one foundation for ethics. That is, the article is misplaced. The foundation of ethics? No one such thing.

Why?

The practical foundation of ethics is its function in human society, and the reasons for the use of ethical language and concepts by human beings. Morality is a toolset. Ethical norms, ideals, virtues, etc., are tools for the influencing of human conduct.

But when philosophers talk about a foundation for ethics, they're not always talking about where it comes from, and why its constituent parts have these or those characteristics (though it would be better if they would look at this more often).

No, what they are looking for is a foundation for a particular ethical system. Why this ethical system, and not another? The reason is the foundation for morality. It's why the true morality is, well, true.

Substitute the word fit for true, if you had trouble with the introduction of the word into the discussion. Think of a tool that holds true, that is, is ideally suited to its task.

The task of a universal morality is to prescribe rules that would allow us to live better lives.

How one toolset, with non-vague prescriptions, could be utterly distinct and completely persuasive is one of the troubles of moral philosophy.

But do you see my point? The foundation of ethics, as I describe it, as a social control toolset, is not what people are looking for. This designation and theory (a metaethical theory, not too far from emotivism and prescriptivism) merely describss and helps explain what people are doing when they do ethics.

What they want, on the other hand, is the ideal ethical system.

Determining that is a bit harder.

Why?

Define the perfect saw. Describe the perfect fastener system.

These are tools. But perfection and universality of use? No way. It depends, says the carpenter.

This might be the legitimate answer of moralists to the absolutist demand of the theologian or Kantian moral philosopher.

Or: it could be that the toolkit, evolved over time to meet differing needs, is broad enough and varied enough to handle most circumstances, and the trouble with some moralists is they misidentify which tool they need at which occasion, taking the moral notions of the family and applying them to politics, or vice versa.

And there may be a key in that only some moral notions are universalizable; the rest are up to personal taste, and that's OK.

Another key might be: there is no summum bonum. No greatest good. There are only many goods, and what we must be most on the watch out for are to avoid a number of obvious and dangerous bads, or evils.

The standard language of natural rights is largely idiomatic. What is said is not literally true. But one is supposed to understand the intent. For example: I have a right to liberty.

A right is a claim to obligatory treatment. But this basic right has been whittled away in our society, and its full operation was never in place, really. Governments routinely abridge this right. They don't recognize it. You do not really have this right.

Now, I could say, I have a right to vote in my county, and I would be completely correct. The government is obliged to take my vote when an election is held. And count it. Were it discovered that the government regularly takes my vote and stuffs it in the trash can, not only would i object, so would most citizens in the county, and the trashing of my vote would stop.

There. I effectively possess the right to vote.

But I do not effectively possess a right to liberty. There are all sorts of things that I could be at liberty to do, and do without abridging anyone else's liberty, but which I am prevented from doing. By the government. I may protest these alleged rights violations, but there is no hue and cry about them in my county, and I effectively possess no such right.

When we say I have a right to liberty, we are really saying I should have a right to liberty. The having is something we should have, not something we actually do have. This is a moral claim, outside of normal law and politics.

It is idiomatic speech. When one says keep your eyes peeled we mean to keep your eyelids up and our attention focused, not literally to take out a peeler and do something drastic to your eyes; when one says over the hill, we think of a metaphorical hill, the peak of which we pass in life at some point; if we are getting down to brass tacks we rarely want to have anything to do with pointy little stick-ems, and certainly don't want to be down there on the floor with them; or if one of us kicks the bucket no one expects to hear any clanking.

Idioms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. (See what I mean?) In normative talk, one of the ways to make the suggested norm, ideal, or rule more compelling is to suggest that the should really is an is. Not just a should.

So we speak of rights as existing apart from their defense and respect in society. They exist in some metaphysical realm. And we have them even when, unlike property we actually own, we can in no sense bring them into causal connection and make them a lived reality. (To use a Mengerian construction.)

In this way, ethics seems like it descends into error. J.L. Mackie propounded the Error Theory of ethics, arguing that human beings naturally misuse philosophical concepts in ethical suasion, asserting, say, objective value when no such value has been demonstrated.

I prefer thinking of this as the Bluster Theory of ethics. We overstep our argument and assert an existent where all we have is a preferred course of a counterfactual or imaginative nature.

I tend to clean up my language and not descend into full-blown natural rights talk. Those philosophers who still assert deep philosophical import into what I see as idiomatic speech I look upon, I'm afraid, with a little condescension. They simply haven't separated speech, and speech acts, and imagined acts, and norms as distinct concepts. They are muddled.

Their muddle is to act as if bluster were an epistemic method. It is not.

One of my best friends is a servile.

Like a number of other friends and acquaintances, he is ill, and retired early on disability, living at the expense of the state, the taxpayers. That's the system.

And he seems, to me, in league with it. Not merely appreciative of it, but supportive of extensions of it. His basic attitude towards the state is, I think, servility.

Our political conversations usually go in a familiar manner. I mention a problem, he identifies some coercive state solution, and readily confesses to be more than willing to give up whatever freedom is at stake. Let's say I bring up how awful crystal meth is, and describe its dangers. He expects the police to crack down further. I shrug and say that this would probably be useless, even counter-productive, and, besides, whether someone ruins his life isn't our business. But it never just is one life, though, he says. Everybody affects everybody else, blah blah. And I say, Yes, Yes, but where do you stop? Sure, a meth head may drive and kill somebody. But so may an alcoholic. Should we make drinking alcohol illegal? And he says, Well, no skin off my nose. And so on.

The number of people in this neck of the woods who would support Prohibition just amazes me. And the willingness of my friend to do so, despite all the evidence of its disastrousness, amazes me, too.

But still, I was also amazed, when we were in our '20s, when he whipped out some food stamps to pay for an item at the store. I'd been down and out, but never thought to get food stamps.

Servility. The willingness to play the role of the slave. To give up freedoms so that others' freedoms may also be taken away, for some alleged greater good. Or perhaps merely a personal good.

Still, it is interesting to note his virtues. He is poor, but generous. He is playing Santa at his place of work. And his wages for this are being donated to a local family, picked for being down and out.

Now, there are few people poorer than my friend. But he's giving hundreds of dollars away, in effect. I ask him why he'd do that. He says, It's a tradition at the mall. Every year the mall selects a needy family, and every year (he says) the Santa basically works for free, giving his mediocre wages to charity.

But my friend really is poor. He has to work just to live above the pittance his early retirement gives him. Even if working sorely taxes his weak physical resources.

It seems nuts to me. I wonder if he's coerced by his employer in some way. But the other night he spent $60 for stocking stuffers for the family in question. I wonder if serviles give more than liberals? That is, people who think little of freedom give more for reasons of charity than people who prize freedom highest.

There must be several dimensions to this problem, and, besides, I'm a poor example of a liberal. After all, I used to be generous. But these days, well, no. I'm not, and don't pretend to be. I'm not saying that this isn't a vice. But I don't think generosity to be the most important of virtues. It's certainly not a cardinal virtue.

But that's another story.