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The following stands out among the many comments to my previous post on Iraq.
How much is an Iraqi life worth? To me personally, about zero. Here’s why:
– I have no friends in Iraq (and doubt I ever will by the end of this post)
– No Iraqi signs my paycheck
– No Iraqi makes anything special that I can’t buy anywhere else (oil?)
– Iraq is on the other side of the globe
“But they’re being killed” you say. So are many other people. What about the North Koreans? What about the people who will effectively be killed because they cannot afford medical care due to this war? What about third world countries where parents have more children than they can afford to feed? Please make an objective, logical argument why the life of an Iraqi rates above (not just equal to) these others.
There are two issues in this comment. One is the old boring question “Why Iraqis and not North Koreans, or Chinese, or any other suffering people?” We have repeated countless times here on Samizdata.net that we do not consider lives of Iraqis above other individuals suffering elsewhere. Yes, I do want the world to be rid of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian and any other statist murderers. By yesterday, if you please. It’s long overdue and given that my taxes also pay for the army (or what’s left of it), I have no hesitation in supporting its use in cases when this becomes part of a government strategy.
The fact that the US and UK government policies are temporarily aligned with my view of the world does not redeem them in my eyes or make them somehow better entities. My objections to the state and my hatred of anything statist is not negated by my support of Bush and Blair in their determination to give Saddam his due. Samizdata’s eye will watch over the American attempts to establish democracy in Iraq with the same vigilance as ever and hurry to point out any misdemeanour by the inherently collectivist and kleptocratic state.
More importantly, the comment touches on an issue far greater than Iraq and the international pandemonium associated with it. Why do most of us hate to see people suffer? Why should we be moved by a sight of a child corpse, a woman tortured or a man shot? Why does the world remain shocked, moved and outraged by the suffering endured by those in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist gulags (although unfortunately too few pictures serve to fuel the horror over those)?
I do not count myself among the emotionally incontinent (public expressions of grief) and the emotionally unsatiated (reality TV). My outrage comes from the belief that an individual is more important than a lofty idealistic concept, more so since every ‘utopia’ has built its edifice on a large pile of human bodies. The more idealistic and utopian the vision, the longer it takes to defeat it and the larger the ‘mountain of skulls’ left behind.
 
Savonarola’s Florence, Robespierre’s France, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq, note that there is an individual’s name attached to every totalitarian nightmare. We are forced to ‘care’ about them, whether we like it or not. If we are lucky, we have not been affected directly, but they certainly had an impact on the way we live today, simply as a result of the international politics shaped by their existence. → Continue reading: Old style morality…
“Jesus Christ was so little minded to give specific guidance as to politics that he didn’t even deal with the issue of slavery. And these twits think that it’s heresy to be in favour of the free market or against the UN.”
Funny how that same topic has kept coming up recently. Just the other day, I posted the words above on my own blog. Now Christopher Pellerito’s comments in the post just below this one, and the Howie Carr and Joe Bob Briggs articles he quotes, have got me thinking.
“What would Jesus do?” when first coined might have been a good phrase to prompt Christians to examine their own lives in the light of Christ’s example. There is nothing logically wrong with that principle, employed with due modesty. Christians Socialists, Conservatives and Libertarians all may sincerely believe that their political beliefs either flow from their religion or are at least compatible with it. (Not all of them can be right, but that’s one for another post.)
However the WWJD phrase has now become little more than a hook for anybody to make any claim they like about divine backing for their side in whatever temporary and local kerfuffle happens to be in the paper this week, secure in the knowledge that the authority they quote is scarcely going to gainsay them.
At least, not yet.
By definition every Christian believes that he or she will one day stand before Jesus. I can’t help wondering whether some Christians would be so presumptuous about putting words into Jesus’ mouth if the prospect of that final, consummate meeting were truly real to them.
Boston-area conservative talk show host and syndicated columnist Howie Carr (presumably unrelated to our own David Carr) wrote a column accusing Bernard Cardinal Law, archbishop of the beleaguered Archdiocese of Boston, of hypocrisy. In Carr’s words:
Until the recent unraveling of his corrupt empire, the sanctimonious prince of the church annually went to Beacon Hill to bang his tin cup on the State House steps, demanding ever more generous handouts for the shiftless, the indigent and the promiscuous. But now that it’s finally Law’s turn to buy a round, he’s tipping over tables in his unseemly rush to get out of the room. Money for sodomized altar boys? Don’t push me, pal. Ever hear of Chapter 11?
Now, this is a little off the mark. After all, bankruptcy laws don’t exist to help debtors weasel out of their obligations; they exist to provide for orderly payment of creditors. The point of filing under Chapter 11 isn’t to avoid paying out potentially massive liabilities; it is to ensure that you will be able to continue operating — and paying your creditors — under a worst-case scenario.
(For a quick refresher on US bankruptcy law, here is a nice little e-pamphlet from the Securities and Exchange Commission.)
But Mr. Carr may have tapped into a richer vein of thought here. (Even a blind squirrel finds a few acorns.) This is what I want to know: when did morality stop being about how you conduct your own affairs, and turn into a referendum on your political views?
Maybe there’s some of that in Rand — who wrote at great length about the moral superiority of capitalism and individualism, etc., and who remained a stern moralist in this arena despite a personal life marked by marital infidelity and other peccadilloes. But I think that Carr is correct in hanging this one largely on the liberal left. → Continue reading: Who would Jesus vote for?
One of the responses to Part II of Libertarians and war, namely the comment by Billy Beck, has puzzled me sufficiently to turn what would otherwise be a rather lengthy comment into another blog. (Part III on Strategic considerations is yet to come…)
“What you have in this is an exemplary waypoint on a logical trail which is consistently extensible toward *validly* including anyone whose productive effort in any way contributes to the efficacy of this so-called “monopoly on the use of force”. And if the logic is consistently extended, then what it means is that your distinction of “civilians” (in your final paragraph, above) is no better than Al-Qaeda’s was on September 11, Adriana.”
It took me a while to work out how anyone could think that the logic of my argument extents to blurring the distinction between combatants and civilians. I came to the conclusion that it must be due to misunderstanding of two other concepts – “monopoly on the use of force” and “collective responsibility” – that I want to clarify.
It is precisely because the state has the monopoly on the use of force that a civilian population can never be a legitimate target. The monopoly on force means that the state usurps the use of force and prevents individuals from using it against external enemies (foreign armies and terrorists) and in many cases, e.g. such as in the UK, internal enemies (criminals). For my part, I resent the state’s exclusive use of force, especially regarding the latter category.
“We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course there is a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer is still there. It was their system of dispersal of industry… I’ll never forget Yokohama. That was what impressed me: drill presses. There they were, like a forest of scorched trees and stumps, growing up throughout that residential area. Flimsy construction all gone…everything burned down, or up, and drill presses standing like skeletons.”
The quote above (from Memoirs of Gen. Curtis LeMay) does distinguish between military and civilian installations and makes it explicit that “the veneer was pretty thin in Japan”. It also admits that civilian casualties occurred but the point is specifically made that they were aiming at military targets, never at civilians. Although civilian casualties were to be expected given the [Japanese] system of dispersal of industry…
It is for circumstances like these the double effect doctrine has something to say. The bad effect may be known beforehand but provided it is not the intention and the act itself is required for bringing about the needed good effect, the doctrine of double effect allows waging a war despite foreseeble civilian casualties. I do not see how it opens up a possibility that civilians may ever be a legitimate target just because they have their role in the functioning of the military machine. It is self-evident and blindingly obvious that an army cannot be raised, funded and function without civilian economy and infrastructure supporting it but I fail to see how it can provide a justification for turning civilians into a military target!
It is Al-Qaeda, as Billy Beck correctly points out, and not me, that cannot make the distinction between the effect civilians may have on the efficacy of the military and the moral grounds for turning them into a target for their ‘war’. As I argue in my posting on just war, it is equivalent to taking defenceless hostages – civilians disarmed by the state are targeted by the enemies of that state for its actions.
Here the notion of collective responsibility becomes relevant as it is often implicit in statements of those who hold an individual responsible for actions carried out by a collective entity, such as state merely on the basis of that individual’s membership of such entity. Would you say that all German civilians were equally and personally responsible for the Holocaust and WWII, by virtue of being citizens of the German state or even by virtue of working in one of the armaments factories trying to make a living?! Surely, there is a distinction to be made and one does not need a rigorous moral code to see that.
The doctrines of just war and double effect mean to provide guidance in situations where our moral instincts are torn between two ‘unacceptable’ options. They are meant to provide a moral template, not definitive or comforting answers, for those who want to know right from wrong even in the most difficult situations. They still leave plenty of room for formulation of policy and strategy…
Part II of III
What would be the requirements of a libertarian just war? Libertarianism permits the killing of another if it is an act of reasonable self-defence. Nothing in libertarianism precludes the possibility of a collectively exercised right to self-defence. This has been accepted by most libertarians as one of the few valid functions of a ‘night-watchman’ state. As long as every individual in a society agreed to be defended by a state and the state acted against only those individuals who were actual aggressors, e.g. an invading army, on what grounds could a libertarian object?
Given that it is not practically possible to fulfil the above conditions, especially the first one, it seems to me that many of those who engage in the debate about war on Iraq for genuine and morally inspired reasons are trying to choose between two evils. Their side in the debate usually depends on which of the two evils seems more morally unacceptable to them. There are also those who find it impossible to choose, their instincts oscillating between the need for self-defence and protection, and fear of compromising their fundamental principles by condoning killing of innocent civilians. One of those is Chris Newman whose comment captures the agony of such moral choice.
The statement ‘as long as harming innocents is not the objective, if a given use of force is justified then innocent bystanders are often just a regrettable consequence’ is based on the acceptance of the doctrine of double effect. It is a useful rule, often used in moral dilemmas that can be summed up as “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. An act with both good and bad effects is morally permissible if and only if the following conditions are all met:
- The action itself is not forbidden by a moral rule.
- Only the good effect is intended.
- The bad effect is proportional to the good.
- The bad effect is not a direct means to the good effect (e.g. bombing cities to demoralise a population and hence hasten a war’s end).
And since Michael Walzer’s influential book Just and Unjust Wars (1971), in the context of war it is common to see added the following condition:
- Actions are taken to minimise the foreseeable bad effects, even if this means accepting an increased risk to one’s own combatants (e.g. one’s own soldiers)
In modern warfare the principle of the double effect is frequently applicable. In waging a just war a nation may launch an air attack on an important military objective of the enemy even though a comparatively small number of non-combatants are killed. This evil effect can be compensated for by the great benefit gained through the destruction of the target. This would not be true if the number of non-combatants slain in the attack were out of proportion to the benefits gained, as is clear from the fourth condition. Furthermore, if the direct purpose of the attack were to kill a large number of non-combatants, so that the morale of the enemy would be broken down and they would sue for peace, the attack would be immoral because the third condition for the lawful use of the principle would not be fulfilled. It would be a case of the use of a bad means to obtain a good end.
Chris Newman takes a similar route but ends up with a different point and in the utilitarian camp:
“…our moral calculus has at least three variables: the importance of the objective, the efficacy of a given type of force in achieving that objective, and the cost in innocent lives of using that type of force. Presumably, for any given values of the first two variables, there will be a point at which the value of the third becomes too high, so that the action cannot be justified…”
There appears to be a conflict between a moral justification for waging a just war and a strategic aspect of it. But does exploiting the advantage of superior military capabilities amount to using incommensurate or disproportionate force? It doesn’t because force is defined by effect on the enemy including the civilians, not by the amount of firepower. You can use superior fighting force and technology in order to shorten the war and ensure you destroy enemy fighting forces rather than civilians. → Continue reading: Just war and libertarians
Libertarians differ about many things and one such area is whether so-called ‘natural rights’ exist or whether, to borrow the phrase of 18th century utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham, they are so much “nonsense on stilts”. Just to be clear from the start, I think natural rights, where they spring from an understanding of human beings as creatures possessed of free will, who need freedom from coercion to thrive, make some sense. However, given the difficulties involved, natural rights for me must be strictly and narrowly applied otherwise the idea rapidly disintegrates.
Over the past 100 years or so, the natural rights doctrine has been progressively (sic) hijacked by collectivists of various stripes who have turned what is essentially a set of prohibitions against the initiation of force against persons and property into a series of claims, which require the use of extensive coercion for such ‘rights’ to be realised. As an example of how this use of ‘rights’ degrades an originally-useful concept, step forward the assemblage of clowns, brutes and hangers-on at the current Earth Summit in South Africa.
It ought to be obvious, but sadly is not, that providing something like the ‘right’ to healthcare begs the question of whether some person or persons have a corresponding duty to become doctors, nurses or hospital staff; does a ‘right’ to AIDS drugs mean people should be forced to become scientists and forced to invent such drugs and then supply them free of charge? Of course, put like that, the entire modern rights-talk collapses. But the contradictions of such talk are rarely remarked on. Sadly, questioning such ‘rights’ has become almost a taboo subject among the chattering classes.
I hate sounding like a dried-up professor by insisting on going back to underlying concepts and definitions but in this case I will. One of the responses I received on my international ‘morality play’ was from Derk Lupinek and although he believes that we should attack Iraq and set up a democratic government, he didn’t think that we have any “responsibility” toward the Iraqi people.
It was his understanding of rights that intrigued me sufficiently to comment on it:
Rights are nothing but wishful thinking without the power to enforce them. The power of enforcement requires an emotional commitment on the part of many individuals. Each individual agrees to help enforce the rights of others and, in return, each individual gains the right to protection under the group’s power. The individual has this right because he contributes to the power that enforces the right. Individuals must contribute to the power that enforces rights or else they have no right to protection under that power. So, I think we can “call for freedom and progress for ourselves” and not feel obligated to kill ourselves helping other countries, especially when those people do not contribute to the preservation of our rights.
I detect a category fallacy in the above paragraph. The definition of a right as wishful thinking without the power to enforce it. So does it mean that where individual’s rights are abused and often cannot be enforced, they do not exist? A right is not a right unless it is enforceable and/or enforced? Just because some people do not wash, should we deny the existence of soap on the grounds of its ineffectiveness with the unwashed?
Which leads me nicely to the various concepts of rights. There are actually three versions at play here. One is the natural rights theory, which assigns inalienable rights to an individual by his/her virtue of being a human being. I will not go into assumptions behind this one here as it is a well-worn and therefore lengthy topic, suffice to say it is the one I subscribe to. That is why I cannot agree with Derk Lupinek’s subscription-based rights, whereby individual’s rights are defined arbitrarily by and within groups of individuals, and protected by a sort of social contract enforced by mutual consent.
In my post on Western intervention in totalitarian regimes, however, I haven’t used either concept of rights, natural or positivist. I was merely thinking of the individuals trapped in totalitarian regimes who never had a choice to enter in any such agreement about either definition or protection of their rights. It is that freedom of choice I feel we have some sort of moral obligation to help them obtain. Not because they contribute to the power that enforces the right or because we are somehow legally or otherwise bound to do so.
Let me put it another way. Try to explain to a child being beaten up by a bunch of thugs, that he has no right to protection since he has not contributed to the power that enforces that right. If you can manage it, you may be consistent but not very humane.
Science is a volatile subject. Traditional science originated from observations of the physical, specific and the immediate. As it progressed to modern science, the turning point being the Newtonian framework for understanding the universe, its evolution to Einstein’s theory of relativity and later quantum theory and computational science, it has increasingly concerned itself with abstract and often counter-intuitive concepts. In recent years a number of alternative scientific paradigms have sprung up and regardless of whether they end up being the next orthodoxy, they have already demolished some of the foundational theories in many scientific fields. Science, itself subject to evolution, pushes the Final Theory further as its horizons expand.
Religion is a stable and more or less fixed subject, certainly compared to science. It does make statements about physical reality and human affairs, but it does not concern itself with the temporary and the transient. I am therefore surprised that Brian can make such definite comparative statements about the two:
…the Book of Genesis makes claims about the origin of the earth and of its biological contents which, as was well understood in the late nineteenth century when these matters were first debated, are in total opposition to the theory of evolution. Either God was the maker of heaven and earth (as I was made to proclaim every Sunday morning when I recited the Creed at school) and men and beasts and plants and bugs, along the lines claimed in Genesis, or he was not.
You can’t have it both ways. Only by completely overturning what Christianity has meant for the best part of two thousand years, as the Church of England seems now to be doing by turning Christianity from a religion into a political sect, can you possibly believe that there’s no argument here.
I do not know whether you can have it both ways, but I am certainly not convinced by Brian’s argument. It doesn’t do to point out that one is ‘an orthodox twentieth century boy’ in one’s scientific ‘dogmatism’ and then proceed making sweeping suggestions as to intellectual viability of religion as a whole. The underlying assumptions at work here seem to be: a) the religious texts can only be interpreted in the 19th century fashion and b) the traditional understanding of evolution is correct and/or final. I shall not grace Brian’s use of the Church of England’s website with any assumptive force or category.
 The book of Genesis, written many moons ago, does contain some very specific and visual claims about how the world came about. The interpretation Brian is familiar with would have been based on 18th century ‘deism’, a rather mechanistic understanding of the world, gradually upgraded with the scientific knowledge as it progressed into 19th century. It wasn’t until 20th century that several scientific disciplines have been shaken to their axioms but none of the tremors have yet been translated into a wider meta-contextual knowledge, quantum theory being a good case in point.
 Brian says that ‘creationism’ is in total opposition to ‘evolution’. Without getting bogged down in definitions, if creationism means that the world was created, word by word, according to the book of Genesis, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, then I agree with Brian. However, that neither confirms validity of evolution as currently understood nor confines Christianity to the dustbin of the unscientific and irrational.
Let’s have a look at evolution. One of the foundations of the theory of evolution is natural selection. According to a modern paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. According to my favourite scientist and complexity theorist, Stephen Wolfram, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. He also discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument and there are, in fact, only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world.
Organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms avaiable to them by the rules of cellular automata. [ed.note: Cellular automata are a set of self-reproducing mathematical rules.] Complexity is destiny – and Darwin becomes a footnote. A mollusk is essentially running a biological software programme.
Stephen Wolfram’s discovery about the nature of the universe suggests that the complexity that we see in the natural world can originate from very simple rule(s). One of the implications of his work is that it creates a ‘bleeding-edge’ scientific theory that proposes that the entire universe – with its perplexing combination of good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark – could have been started by a First Mover using a dozen rules.
It is therefore possible that neither science nor religion are ‘finished’ with their understanding of the nature of reality. For science, new paradigms may change the way it views the universe(s). For religion, it may not be necessary to revise its texts as the ‘creationist’ interpretation becomes irrelevant in the light of new scientific knowledge. One thing is certain though, I have more sense than to start debating religion with a devout atheist and especially one whose atheism, in his more lucid (i.e. not anti-religious) moments, is entirely rational. I merely object to the very narrow interpretation of ‘science’ and ‘religion’, namely Christianity, used to make a rather glove-in-your-face point.
Jack Heald poses some interesting questions to Brian‘s views on science and religion.
Brian Micklethwait is spot-on in his analysis of the conflict between the claims of orthodox Christianity and the claims of Darwinism. Any Christian Church and any Christian person that believes orthodox Christianity and Darwinism can peacefully co-exist is deluded.
But I wonder why someone who posts to a “critically rational” blog would claim to believe that “creationism is bunkum”.
Is it because he is already a committed materialist and Darwinism is the only theory of origins which supports his beliefs? Is it because so many so-called “creationists” are such obvious idiots? Is it because the prevailing weight of public opinion is biased towards Darwinism? Is it because anyone who claims that creationism is a better scientific model is reviled as a bible-thumping fundamentalist, and he cannot bear to be lumped in with those folks?
Surely it’s not because he has carefully weighed the evidence and decided Darwinism is a better model. I have yet to find anyone who, after carefully reviewing the data, concludes that the evidence supports the Darwinian model and contradicts the creationist model.
Are the implications of creationism a little scary? Certainly. But are scary implications any reason to avoid studying anything? Only for the uncritical and the irrational.
Jack Heald
I just took part in a French online discussion about abortion, sale of human organs, genetic material etc. It occurs to me that a libertarian point view includes the following idea:
· The components for the manufacture of human beings are legitimately tradeble.
· The finished product is not.
What is the boundary?
I cringe when Philosophers begin arguing Ethical Systems from First Principles. Codes of behavior built from argument based on mathematical rigour have a place in academia but are extremely dangerous when applied to the real world. People are not logical programs built from a rational base. They are a collection of hundreds of millions of years of gene based behavioral evolution and some thousands of years of mind based cultural evolution. Only the later of these is “perfectable”. One who thinks otherwise carries the shadow of Gulags Yet To Come in their eyes.
More so than the practitioners of many disciplines I’ve delved into, philosophers seem to place Humanity on a high pedestal of Rationality. I don’t. I see people as one more data point on a continuum of data points; a vector of traits which exist elsewhere but reach their highest expression (so far, and in our own biased eyes) in our species.
If you have decided by this point I am a follower of Richard Dawkins, then you are an astute observer and commendably well read. Dawkins changed our way of looking at evolution from one based on populations of individuals to one of populations of genes. Genes do not care about individuals (or anything else for that matter, so excuse my anthropomorphics). If a behavioral pattern kills 10% of a population but causes the other 90% to be fruitful and multiply, there will be more copies of the gene or genes (or memes if we are dealing with culture-based behavior) responsible for that behavior. Genes are the individuals which compete with each other and evolve. Not cells. Not tissues. Not wombats. Genes.
Altruism may be emphasized or de-emphasized by cultural traits and training but it can never be eliminated. It is a part of our hardwired animal program. Species with altruistic behavioral patterns will thrive at the expense of those which do not have them. It may be rather hard on an individual to throw themselves on a handgrenade or charge a machine gun nest, but by their action a larger number of the genes and memes expressed in them will survive and propagate than would otherwise have done so. It’s purely a numbers game.
I chose altruism as an example because it is currently under discussion, but the point I wish to make is a much more encompassing one. Human beings are not empty general purpose computers to be programmed at will to whatever happens to be the Perfect Ethics of the day. They come with a very large baggage of hardwired behavioral preferences which will make a mockery of the Perfectionist’s attempts to create the perfect “Your-favorite-ism” Man.
The attempt may be akin to bean-bag punching but this has never stopped Perfectionists from trying as we can see from Cambodia, Siberia, Dachau and Srbenica and Paris in the Ideological Centuries and the long line of religious pogroms stretching back into the mists of pre-history.
Last week when I posted my response to an objectivist’s objections to altruism, I knew that I was opening a can of worms. How did I know that? Because, like Brian, I am also put off by the vicious religiosity of so many Randian responses to any criticisms of their sacred texts (a few more mentions and this will be a runner-up for the most quoted phrases competition). Sacred texts may be important when it comes to discussing the underlying issues, but neither Brian nor me were doing that in our postings (see related articles below). Brian was objecting to two ‘behavioural problems’ often exhibited by the objectivists and I was responding to a general point about altruism. Therefore, Antoine, no amount of referencing to pages of the sacred texts is going to do justice to the issues raised.
I think it was perfectly legitimate for Brian to mention the fixed-sum economics in connection with the Randians. He acknowledges that they may not believe it explicitly and self-consciously any more than most other people do, but observes that ‘everything else they say is said as if they believe in fixed sum economics’. I see the fallacy sneaking in through a backdoor in their belief system – their views on altruism and its moral inferiority to selfishness.
Unearthing the ‘original’ definition of altruism that sent Rand and the objectivists spitting mad just confirms Brian’s point about ‘definition hopping’. I defined altruism as concern for other people, or unselfish or helpful actions. Randians may base theirs on Comte’s definition of altruism, which is very extreme, treating ‘devotion to other people’s interests as the ideal rule of morality’. It spells out an ethical system that goes directly against the fundamental trait of human nature – the survival instinct. (This is not to say that I do not consider ethical systems based on the conflict between our natural propensities and ethical requirements legitimate and I intend to deal with this in my sequel on Kant.) What I find unpalatable is the conclusion that altruism is immoral, disregarding a) other meanings of altruism and b) common sensical observations that selfless acts are beneficial both in themselves (make the altruist a better person) and in their consequences (the recipient of a selfless act is better off).
This brings me to my original point – perhaps Randians, in their advocacy of capitalism and the virtues of individualism and self-interest, feel that anything that undermines their ‘campaign’ must be purged. I join the campaign whole-heartedly and fervently. As Antoine points out, there still exist the sort of people who believe that profit is a dirty word, but I don’t see why, in trying to defeat them, I should leave them a monopoly on altruism, compassion and generosity.
So, Antoine and Perry, I am not denying the contribution objectivists have made to the discourse about freedom, individualism and ethics of entrepreneurship. I am merely reserving the right to disagree and object to dogmatism, inconsistency and irrational conclusions whatever direction they are coming from.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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