It's All or Nothing!

Aristotle taught us that the art of politics consists in knowing how to balance the "admitted goods" of the polity, one against another, so as to best promote the flourishing of its members.  This is a tricky matter, calling for experience and judgment. How much simpler if one can forgo any balancing, and declare only one type of good -- equality, property rights, productivity, scientific advancement, military readiness, etc. etc. -- to be a true good at all, and create a politics that makes the pursuit of that good absolute and ignores every other one! This leads to an all or nothing attitude: if there is any compromise in pursuit of the supreme good, then all is lost!

For example, here Ryan Wills looks at my first blog post on obligations. (Funny, unlike some people, Ryan had no trouble figuring out just what I was talking about!) Now, I don't mean to pick on Ryan: he has seemed like a very decent fellow when he has come around here to comment. But he displays the tendency of which I wish to speak very clearly in this post, so, with apologies, let me proceed.

Ryan begins by accusing me of misunderstanding the scope of libertarianism: "Libertarianism, in the strictly political sense, is concerned with justice and the (property) rights that govern it."

Ryan here is stating the very problem I was noting as though it were something I had overlooked! The problem with libertarianism, I was suggesting, is precisely that it thinks justice is only about property rights. They are a part of justice, but just a part.

"While I'll offer that, in order to claim ANY rights outside of property rights you must dismantle property rights altogether..."

Well, what can one say to this other than, "You're political ideology has made you somewhat mad"? (Ryan, I don't doubt you're as sane as most -- and saner than me! -- when it comes to not seeing purple elephants, holding down a job, etc. This is a very specific madness.) If we say someone has a legal obligation to help someone in mortal danger when the person is right in front of them, there is no one better positioned to help, and there is no risk to the rescuer, then... That's it? That person no longer owns their home or their car?

"Let's say that we all have a positive right to be saved. Well, we can go ahead and throw self-ownership and property rights in general out the window at that point - as clearly if there are stipulations and conditions to such rights, then they are not truly rights at all in any real sense, but rather individual privileges bestowed upon us by some exogenous authority."

Again, we have madness posing as thought. ALL rights anywhere ever have had stipulations and conditions on them, as they always must. The right to free speech famously does not extend to the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But to Ryan, that condition "throws that right out the window": not being able to start a stampede that might kill people is exactly the same as the total censorship that existed in the USSR.

"then extrapolate the drowning child analogy into its intended application through the polity."

Intended by whom? By the strawman builder, that's whom.

"It seems like such a principle would call us to give as long as one needs. But the world isn't a pond with a single drowning child. The world is a pond with hundreds of millions of "drowning children" and we are billions of passersby. As I type this, thousands upon thousands of people are dying from starvation and disease. I could be using this time, marginally, to save them. Am I guilty of injustice? Should I be punished? Should I be locked away in a cage?

"And this is where things stop making sense..."

Well, all-or-nothing thinking makes it very hard to make sense of much of the real world, I grant you. For instance, it can make you believe nutty things like having a very limited obligation to help very specific people in very specific circumstances is exactly the same as having an unlimited obligation to help all people in all circumstances.