Letters

From the June 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

I hope Stossel's fact-checkers are normally more alert. Google "Al Gore Hotel," sift through the other reporters who swallowed the same line, and you'll quickly find out the truth: When Gore was a kid, the Fairfax was not all that fancy. He lived in a hotel because his family was poor; a cousin owned the Fairfax and let them stay there for free. He did go back down to the farm, and Stossel's interjection of questionable facts to suggest he didn't is irresponsible.

If people believe otherwise, it's because of some excellent PR work by the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Jamie McCarthy
Kalamazoo, MI

Faith, Shame, and Insurgency

What message is to be taken from Steven Vincent's article "Faith, Shame, and Insurgency" (March) other than "the ends justify the means"?

There is no doubt that a vicious tyrant was deposed, or that Saddam Hussein deserves much worse than he has so far gotten. The underlying question, however, is not whether tyrants should be deposed, but how and by whom. Yes, Saddam deserved to be brought down. So do Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, and Robert Mugabe. It takes a tyrant like Saddam Hussein to bring tragedy to his people; it takes a real communist like Kim Jong Il to make statistics of them. And it takes a state apologist to try to make the world better by military means.

Do the ends justify the means? I challenge Vincent to visit Iraq five years hence. In the meantime, he can learn some of the language and then go and visit someone other than the "opinion prostitutes" at the coffeeshops.

Randal A. Anderson III
Millville, MI

Coercion vs. Consent

In "Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that "there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are "all consequentialists now." Fortunately, this is not true. I say "fortunately" because consequentialism is philosophically indefensible as a normative theory.

The basic problem with consequentialism is that it recognizes no limit in principle on what can be done to people in order to promote good consequences. Now consequentialists insist that in the vast majority of cases, killing, torturing, or enslaving innocent people is not the best way to get good results. And of course they are right about that. But by the logic of their position the consistent consequentialist (happily a rara avis) must always be open to the possibility that killing, torturing, or enslaving the innocent might be called for under special circumstances, and this recognition necessarily taints the character of even one's ordinary relations to other people. As Immanuel Kant pointed out more than two centuries ago, to subordinate -- or even to be prepared to subordinate -- one's fellow human beings to some end they do not share is to treat them as slaves, thereby denying both their inherent dignity and one's own.

Many consequentialists will say that they too can accommodate ironclad prohibitions on certain actions, on the grounds that utility will be maximized in the long run if people internalize such prohibitions. This is true, but it misses the point. Once one has internalized an ironclad prohibition, one is by definition no longer a consequentialist. One cannot treat certain values as absolute in practice and still meaningfully deny their absoluteness in theory; a belief that is not allowed to influence one's actions is no real belief. Most consequentialists are morally superior to their theory and, thankfully, pay it only lip service.

David Friedman is quite right to point out, in the same issue, that "concepts such as rights, property, and coercion" are complicated and not always susceptible to clear and easy rules. But this is not an argument for making consequences the sole test of right action. What it does mean is that non-consequentialist moral considerations establish only certain broad parameters, leaving it to consequences, custom, and context to make them more specific.

The parameters are not infinitely broad, however, and I do not see how they could be broad enough to license one group of people, called the government, to reassign title to the fruits of another group's labor at the first group's sole discretion. Hence, even if taxation and eminent domain had good results -- which in the long term they rarely do -- they would stand condemned on non-consequentialist grounds as slavery and plunder.

Roderick T. Long
Department of Philosophy
Auburn University
Auburn, AL