Letters

From the August/September 1998 issue

Corporate Responsibility

Among other strange things, Nick Gillespie ("Rebel Rousers," May ) writes that Bill Bennett's criticism of companies like Time Warner and Seagram is "rooted" in an "embrace of top down authority as the ultimate, rightful source of value and structure in society." Huh? Too much Hayek, perhaps. Bill Bennett is not making a complicated (or fascist) point.

It's very simple, in fact: Influential people should act responsibly and decently. Which raises a more interesting issue than the one Gillespie fumbles. What do libertarians make of those two words: responsibility and decency?

Jason Bertsch
Empower America
Washington, DC

Nick Gillespie replies:Jason Bertsch, who works for the Washington, D.C., think-tank-cum-"grassroots"-political-group co-founded by Bill Bennett, is at least partly right: The former drug czar and education secretary is not given to making complicated points, particularly when it comes to popular culture. Which was part of my critique of left-wing and right-wing cultural critics. Using author Thomas Frank as an example of the former and Bennett as an example of the latter, I noted that both focused exclusively on producers of cultural messages while ignoring consumers of such messages. The result, I suggested, is "impoverished analysis" that fails to do justice to how such messages circulate throughout society and what their actual meanings may be. Hence, Bennett's continuing use of an unpopular song by the unpopular band Cannibal Corpse as a leading indicator of cultural ruin.

Although I hesitate to speak for a group as diverse, contentious, and individualistic as "libertarians," I suspect that most of them would agree with the bland injunction that people, whether they are "influential" or members of the mass that makes popular culture popular, "should act responsibly and decently"--at any rate, I know I do.

The real issue, of course, is how such terms get defined. Unlike Bennett, I find nothing particularly objectionable in Burger King's Thoreauvian suggestion that "sometimes you gotta break the rules," or in Time Warner's continued interest in hawking popular music. Indeed, to the extent that such companies are attempting to serve customers, one might conclude that they are acting both responsibly and decently.

Generous Nature?

As a law review editor (many, many years ago) I had the privilege of editing an article by Tibor Machan. I've been a fan and reader of his work ever since. So I'm surprised that neither he nor Loren Lomasky ("Generous to a Fault?," May) addressed the most obvious explanation for people's decisions to be generous and help others: What goes around comes around. People who generously help others may actually be motivated by the notion of the "magnificent obsession"; what they do for you this time will somehow be done for them by someone else at some other time.

At its heart, this idea is in fact the basis for the Golden Rule. If everyone is decent and kind (and generous) to others, even to strangers, then in the grand scheme of things this decency and generosity will be passed around among us all.

People are led to be generous, at least in part, because they hope (and believe) that in some way this will lead to others being generous to them. Their own self-interest, manifested in their perhaps unconscious belief in the magnificent obsession, motivates them to extend a hand to others--even when there is no obvious or immediate reciprocation.

Paul Bent

In Loren Lomasky's review of Tibor Machan's book Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society, we once again encounter the implacable conviction that ethical egoism is incompatible with various forms of benevolence--specifically, in this case, with expressions of generosity.

It appears to be a widely held notion that, to the extent someone pursues his own interests, he must thereby be opposing the interests of someone else; or, at least, that while acting selfishly, he is necessarily unconcerned with the interests of others. Indeed, virtually all of the arguments against egoism include a belief that the basic conditions of human existence inevitably entail conflicts of interests among men, and that constructive social interaction therefore requires, at least occasionally, that individuals act against or beyond the scope of their own interests.

This idea is even implicit in some formulations of individual rights, such as the statement that one's rights end where another's begin, or that one's rights are limited by a duty to respect the rights of others. Such expressions presuppose that one might somehow have a valid interest in violating the rights of others, and that the rights of others are principles intended primarily to restrain the pursuit of such conflicting interests.