Freedom is a noble thing

You may not know this, in fact I am reasonably certain that most of you will not know this, but after the Republicans and the Democrats the Libertarian Party is the third largest in the United States. It defines itself as the party of principle, of minimum government and maximum freedom. Could there be any better desideratum, I ask? No, there could not; for these are the principles on which America was built; these are the principles upon which all free societies should stand.

There is so much ignorance over libertarianism, over precisely what it means. It does not entail a free for all; it does not mean licence. While it is true, as I have said on several occasions, that my personal libertarianism – it is such a personal philosophy – comes close to anarchism, at least in the form advanced by Max Stirner, a considerable gap still remains. While I would prefer no government and no state, both restraints on natural liberty, I fully recognise that such a condition could not exist anywhere east of Eden. Instead I will go with the definition given by the US libertarians;

Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

Let me put this another way, let me put it in the form of a joke, one recently told by James Delingpole;

Have you heard about the vast Libertarian conspiracy? We’re going to take over the government – and then leave you alone.

Oh, my, how we need to be left alone; how we need to be free. Yes, free from all of the silliness of the interfering and bloated state; free from all of the health fascism, all the exhortations to do this and don’t do that. We could save millions by cutting government to the bone, by doing away with all of the unrepresentative extra-governmental bodies set up to monitor this or that aspect of our lives and our conduct. Above all we need government to stop treating us as if we were children.

Yes, the state is there, or should be there, only to protect our basic rights. This is what used to be referred to in this country as the night-watchman state, a condition where the sovereignty of the individual, the individual’s right to freedom and property, was respected. The problem is that a new type of state began to emerge from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, one that in the name of ‘reform’ created a form of feudal servitude, spending the money of the citizen, taking increasing amounts of personal income from tax creators to pass to tax eaters. As the state waxed liberty waned.

It’s not a question of ideology or party politics. The Conservatives, I regret to say, were just as bad as the Liberals, Disraeli just as bad as Gladstone. Both began a process of interference which combined in David Lloyd George, who opened a new, more intense style of intervention that is still being followed to the present day, a ruinous path of taxation and welfare that benefits nobody, that creates more problems than it solves.

No, that’s not quite right: it benefits the agencies of the state; it benefits the bureaucrats. We are robbed of personal income as we are robbed of choice in so many areas of our personal life. I would like to reverse it all, clear out the Augean Stable, clear out government and return sovereignty to where it belongs, to each and every one of us. There is no nobler cause than freedom.

Dial M for Metaphysics

Rudolph Carnap , a German-born philosopher and a leading member of the Vienna Circle, claimed that from a reading of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he could construct precise forms of language, free of metaphysical corruptions. But such an understanding is based on a partial reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's complex little dissertation. For Wittgenstein meaning came from the world, not from sense-experience.

Carnap's approach was both impossible...and impossibly funny! The idea of restricted language was applied so rigorously among the Vienna Circle that it reached the stage of making any form of expression all but impossible;

We appointed one of us to shout 'M' (for metaphysics) whenever an illegitimate sentence was uttered in our discussion. He was shouting 'M' so much we got sick of it and got him to shout 'not-M' whenever we said something legitimate.

Ha-ha! Fortunately for Carnap he began to think a little more clearly, introducing what he called the 'tolerance principle', according to which there is not one but many logics. So, by this standard, any expression of language is acceptable as long as there are sufficient rules governing its logical application.

Other Minds

This is a problem that has been addressed by both Bertrand Russell and A J Ayer. Russell puts forward one solution: the argument from analogy. We see that other people's behavior resembles our own, and we know that our own behaviour arises from mental processes, so it follows that other people also have these processes, though, of course, this proceeds from intuition, it might be said, rather than proof. The example here is that if I experience pain on the basis of certain unpleasant experiences, then if someone else reports pain I assumer that they are having the same unpleasant experience.

It's not a particularly strong argument, as Ayer was quick to recognise. To assume that it is possible to generalise one's own thoughts to those of other people is not a justifiable inference. Ayer also rejects a behaviour-based version of the argument from analogy. We learn what words like 'pain' mean by observing the behaviour of others. This means that our justification for attributing pain to them simply comes from the fact that their behaviour exemplifies what pain means. Put this way pain doesn’t refer to a particular type of inner sensation at all. It is, rather, whatever causes a certain type of behaviour. In other words, if the behaviour is present so, too must pain, as pain is simply the cause of the behaviour. In such ways is the problem of mind dissolved.

But for Ayer this is quite wrong, because he sees no reason to suppose that the meaning of words should be strictly determined by the way in which they were learned. Just because we learn what mind-words mean by observing behaviour, this does not imply that the meanings of these words can be exhausted by what can be observed in behaviour. It is a mistake, as Ayer sees it, to confuse the method of learning a word with its actual meaning. You may learn what a tiger is from seeing a photo of a tiger, but it does not follow that 'tiger' means 'photo of a tiger’. So, on this basis, it does not follow from the fact that we learn about mental concepts from behaviour that the manifestation of certain kinds of behaviour ensure that which the mental concepts refers to are present.

The argument between Russell and Ayer gets ever more complex to the point where it seems impossible to discuss the problem of mind on any common philosophical grounds. But Ayer offers a solution in the work of Hilary Putnam, who argued that the belief that others have minds like mine is justified because it explains human behaviour. More than that, there is no other rival theory which explains human behaviour so well.

I suppose it's a solution, it might be said, of simple exhaustion; it is because it is! For, as with all other sceptical problems, we simply cannot prove beyond all doubt that other people have minds. In the end the words of Aristotle have abiding relevance-"It is a mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits." Amen!

Thoughts on The Prince

Insofar as Machiavelli's perceptive little essay is based on a realistic appreciation of forms of political practice, independent of received wisdom and theological precepts, it is perhaps the most brilliant expressions of Renaissance thought.

There was nothing new in The Prince: it had all happened before; the cynical and brutal manipulation of power was part of European history. What was new was Machiavelli's honesty, his willingness to see through hypocrisy and false conceits; to describe politics as it was practiced rather than as some abstract Aristotelian or Platonic model.

If properly read it is acutely funny, one of the wittiest satires ever written about politics; a satire on the unruly and selfish behaviour of leaders, kings and princes of all kinds. Or, if not that, it is offered as a kind of mirror, showing an image of power, and the misuse of power, from which all those with any sense of morality should recoil! Or he produced the book because this is what he knew that people like Lorenzo de Medici would want to hear, a justification of themselves. However it is read it is a little work of great value. So says The Princess!