>Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 07:49:06 -0500 (CDT)
>From: Tibor R Machan <machatr@mail.auburn.edu>

		  The Two Defenses of Liberty

			Tibor R. Machan

  The case for a free society, as understood within the classical
liberal tradition, has been defended on several basis.  Two of these may
be broadly distinguished.  There is the defense that's advanced by some
social scientists, such as economists.  Then w e have a more normative
associated with Lord Acton, Ayn Rand and Michael Novak in our time.  In my
view Rand put it on record perhaps in the most fully developed fashion,
but earlier hints of such a defense were available from John Locke and
others in the natural law school of moral and political philosophy. =20
=09In the classical liberal tradition, there has always been this
division between the so called scientific or positive versus the so called
moral or normative defense of the free society.  The scientific defense is
usually derived from the grandfather of li beralism, Thomas Hobbes, and
includes such champions of the free society as Adam Smith, John Stuart
Mill, David Ricardo, Milton Friedman, to some extent Ludwig von Mises, and
F.A. Hayek and the Chicago School of Economics. They are very prominent
represen tatives of the case for the free market.  These, indeed, are the
people who are accepted within mainstream forms of discussion, and you
could now and then=97especially a few years back=97see Milton Friedman on M=
eet
the Press and read him on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal
even now.  You can see the same prominence evident in the appointment of
someone like Richard Posner as judge of the 7th District Court up in
Chicago, as well as by the number of Nobel Prizes received by other
scientific econom ist who defend a free market system of economic
arrangements for human communities.  The books of these social scientist
champions of classical liberalism are very well published, by prominent
publishers such as the University of Chicago, Harvard Universi ty,
University of California and other premier presses.  We will shortly get
to those who advance the moral defense.=20
=09It is clear that the scientific defense of freedom has had a
better reputation than the moral defense.  One reason is that the
normative defense has seemed weak, in light of the dominance of science.=20
Another is that the normative defense has had to give credence to some
version of the ethics of prudence or self-interest, something that has
been nearly impossible to do within post-Kantian philosophy (in which
goals or results are morally irrlevant).  The main reason is, when all is
said and done, that a lot of people have had great confidence in science.=
=20
Science is supposed to be the most reliable road to truth.  Everything
else, especially ethics and normative politics, is deemed to be
pre-scientifi c, to use a term from the late B. F. Skinner.  Talk about
right and wrong, morality, immorality, ethical notions, true justice, the
American way=97all of that is often decried by scientific defenders of the
free market as "music," as creative myth, not, how ever, as provable
truth, factually based, verifiable, confirmable, testable, or capable of
being demonstrated.=20
=09This means that most prominent defenders of the free society,
whether in its pure libertarian or watered down welfare statist version,
are skep tical of making a moral case for their system on anything but an
intuitive, subjeective basis, one that clearly has no other implication
than that the proponent prefers it. For the last 400 years in western
civilization, the scientific mode of thinking had been impressive by way
of its great productivity.  It still is, of course, although some dismay
with extrapolating the methods of the natural sciences to all other
studies is being voiced..  Still, most of our technology, productivity,
the gadgets and technology you and I now take for granted are the results
of science.  Scientific thinking, research, and their application, namely,
engineering, can honestly be credited to the prevalence of scientific
thinking.=20
=09When science became available to Western society, around the 14th
century=97after Aristotle was reintroduced to the Western world and unseate=
d
Plotinus and St. Augustin, the idealistic and otherworldly followers
Plato=97Western civilization started to look to the natural world.  Nature
started to be studied systematically and thus began the march toward
rearranging and building on earth for the benefit of human life.  The
practical, social manifestations of that change of focus in Western
culture are all arou nd us.  But the intellectual consequences occurred
around the 16th century. One of the major elementts of that change of
focus=97namely, to look and to measure, arrange, manipulate and work throug=
h
a test and confirm, and then start rearranging the world so that it works
for our purposes in agriculture or in manufacturing and all s orts of
other areas of our life, not the least of which of it is medicine=97was tha=
t
people got very hopeful with the scientific outlook.  This turned science
toward one of its most dangerous but also understandable temptations,
namely scientism.=20
=09Scientism is the outlook that the methods and principles that are
applied in the hard natural sciences, such as physics, astronomy,
chemistry and so on, are the only principles that actually govern nature.=
=20
Thus, these principles could also be applied to the study of all aspects
of human life, not the least of which is political.  In other words,
political science was born, probably at the hands of Machiavelli and
Thomas Hobbes.=20
=09Morality or ethics, in turn, had thus been unseated from its
prominence.  From ancient Greece up until the Middle Ages, morality was
taken very seriously, albeit usually as a means to prepare people for the
afterlife.  The notion that human beings are the sort of creatures who can
make choices between right and wrong, that they have the responsibility to
do the right thing, and when they do wrong, they are blameworthy for
this=97this had been very prominent.  Human beings were seen as an utterly
unique phen omenon here on earth=97almost closer to the divine than the
mundane=97even though, of course, everybody knew that we bled and we had to
eat and we had to do a lot of things that other animals did.=20
=09Nevertheless, our having a mind appears to have been such a s
hocking, awesome fact that it was pretty much believed by all the
intellectuals that human beings really are not ultimately of this earth.=20
Thus the principles that really are of more interest to human life
appeared to be those that have to do with spirit uality.  Of these ethics,
or morality, is central.  Even today most people receive their
ethical-moral teachings from church, not from science.  As science made
gains on this spiritualistic approach to human life, indeed to an
understanding of the whole universe, not only was the idealistic
other-worldly focus beginning to recede, but morality, too, became
dethroned from its earlier lofty place.  Ethics began to take a less
prominent position in our culture.  Human beings were beginning to be
viewed as really just more complicated physical beings.  Everything was
ultimately thought of as governed by the principles of classical
mechanics, that is, the physics which ultimately got its major expression
in the work of Isaac Newton.=20
=09Thus the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.  To appropriate
the study of nature, everything that even seemed otherwordly had been
abandoned. Galileo Galilei had been one of those who initiated the
mechanistic approach to physics, and Thomas Hobbes, the English
philosopher, was his admirer and even visited him in Italy.  Hobbes became
inspired by the prospects of understanding the world by mean s of the
categories of the physical sciences.  He forged an entire philosophy,
including a philosophy of human life, that tries to understand everything
solely in terms of the principles of physics.  The Hobbesian notion, that
human beings are by instinct inclined toward self-preservation, is taking
the laws of motion into the realm of psychology and ultimately social
philosophy.  That a social contract is established amongst human beings by
which soc iety and government is formed is founded on a kind of physics of
human life.  It is the application of classical materialistic
(meta)physics to politics: human beings in a state of nature, outside of
civil society, are taken to be clusters of matter trying to keep in
motion, to survive.  Since, however, ultimately there's too many of them,
they collide and repeated conflicts ensue.  Well, once this happens, their
higher form of material intelligence, =97something like a complex computer
(the favorite model of the mind in our own time)=97forces them to make rule=
s
that will establish peace .  In other words, we are just inclined, like
billiard balls, to go on moving, living, but then we start colliding and
then our feedback system tells us, "Now, sit down and make some rules."=20
Once the rules are established, just as with traffic laws, they go vern
our continued movement or pursuit of our self-preservation.=20
=09So, essentially, the grandfather of liberal politics, Thomas
Hobbes, =97and I say grandfather only because he was not quite liberal, jus=
t
laid the philosophical foundations of a certain version of liberalism=97was
a thoroughgoing (i.e., reductive) materialist who wanted to apply the
principles of the physical sciences to everything, including human life
and, especially, to politics.  One of the results of this is the removal
of nearly all element s of morality from the intellectual framework of
classical liberalism.  (What remained was a somewhat minor "imperative"
inclining us toward self-preservation, which in economics is transformed
into the profit motive or utility maximization.  But while th is is
something like a norm, it is not optional for us and thus has no moral
significance.)
=09In this scientisits perspective the ideals we promote=97the language
of blaming people for violating our rights for example, for holding them
responsible for rape or assault or kidnapping or all the less serious
crimes=97were actually removed from the framewo rk of liberalism.  All we
are, by the most fundamental tenets of this vision, is atoms moving
forward and when we collide we automatically adjust and proceed more
smoothly and peacefully.  That's how society was supposed to come about
and get its laws est ablished.  Furthermore, any mishap along the way is
entirely attributable our lack of sufficient information, not to
irresponsible, negligent or vicious conduct.  No personal, moral
responsibility could be involved in how things turn out in society (just
as so many claim today, from academic psychologists to guest on tabloid
television talk shows).=20
=09Of course, this view didn't affect everything since not everybody
held it and even those who did were of somewhat varyings minds about it.=20
Clearly the position did not completely eliminate blaming or praising=97for
one, if you didn't hold these beliefs you would be blamed for being
foolish or stubborn!  Still, the scientisitic outlook became very
prominent.  Capitalism itself ultimately was rested on it.  Adam Smith,
when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, essentially took the Hobbesian idea a
step further and said that not only are we all embarking on promoting our
self-interest, but the less government there is, the better this system is
going to work for o ur prosperity.  Because government intervention and
regulation amount to the introduction of friction into human social life,
unless all it does is keep the peace.=20
=09The whole notion of the free market economic system owes a great
deal to this tradition of scientism, of lifting the principles of the
physical sciences and applying them to the human nature.  For example,
subjectivism in ethics, another tenet of a good p ortion of classical
liberalism=97namely, of the idea that there are no judgments of right and
wrong that are objective, that all judgments of right and wrong are
expressions of preferences=97is really driven by this scientistic outlook.=
=20
Scientism doesn't all ow for objective values because the notion of right
and wrong doesn't even make sense.  You can't say, meaningfully, that it's
right for Haley's Comet to come near the earth 70 or so years from now.=20
It'll either happen or won't, period.  It is not a matt er of whether it
ought to happen.  Even the few free market economists who overtly attacked
scientism tended to reintroduce it by the back door, e.g., by way of
modeling the market along lines of more complex physical systems.=20
=09Despite what F. A. Hayek argued, that in fact the modeling wen t
the other way, so that, e.g., Charles Darwin adopted the framework of
social scientists such as Adam Ferguson, by which to understand natural
phenomena, the basic grounding remained scientism.  The social theory of
Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, had by that time been placed under the
influence of a more complex version of scientism, one that retained the
foremost ingredient of the earlier, mechanistic type, namely, determinism,
the denying of the possibility of free choice, self-governance or initia
tive in human life.  For example, Ferguson held that we are motivated by
"subrational drives."  In turn, Hayek claimed that Ferguson, "with his
phrase about the 'the results of human action but not of human design' has
provided ... the best definition of the task of all social theory." The
crucial point about scientism is its thoroughgoing determinism, its denial
that human beings are agents, its relegation of human reasoning into the
service of the human passions, so that cognition and self-regulation in
light of understanding play no role in the explanation of human action.=20
What matters is the simple or complex ways we are driven to behave. In
contrast the moral viewpoint treats human beings as agents of their own
conduct, as crucial first causes of some of what they do.  It's only with
human beings that people tend to talk about what ought to be done.  It
doesn't appear to apply to other an imals, although there are, of course,
some who would say otherwise.=20
=09Still, it seems right that when a dog bites the mailman,
we don't believe it ought not to have done that, even as we lament the
fact.  We don't treat the dog as a responsible agent, as i f it could have
made a different choice and thus mightn't have bitten the mailman.  But if
we are indeed what the essence of scientism contends, namely, mechanical
or, these days, computational systems, and we just behave as we do with no
choice about the matter, then we cannot be held responsible, for better or
for worse.  If scientisti sm is true, human beings, too, become bundles of
particles being moved about in the universe, and there is no question of
right or wrong as to what they do, nor about what they believe (which is
one place where scientism leads to serious difficulties, sin ce it is
unable to make sense of people being wrong, even as to what they think).
At first scientism seemed to offer support for freedom because the idea
was that with less intervention in their lives by other persons, including
governments, people would move about efficiently.  Laissez-faire public
policy is in a way like frictionless space, posing the least resistance to
human motion and progrtess.  Without government regulation, coercion, and
interference, human beings would advance more rapidly toward
self-preservation and self-enhancement.  It makes pretty good sense. =20
=09The problem is that in the human realm one always has to consider
something along the following:  "Since governments obstruct progress, we
should or ought to, or it is right for us to reduce government
intervention, so government intervention is wrong."  We even go on to
think that coercion and government regimentation may well be morally evil,
politically unjust.  , Yet, while it seems inescapable for us to think and
say such things=97for even to recommend the mechanistic framework involves
saying, "This i s how we ought to think"=97that kind of thiking and talk
makes no sense within the scientistic framework.  It is interesting that
someone like the late Professor George Stigler, a Nobel Laureat in
economics and a supporter of deregulation, had actually bit the bullet and
accepted the consequences of this Hobbesian, scientific approach to human
life.  He was a great champion of the free market.  Yet he also accepted
the consequences of scientism.=20
=09In one of his talks, at the Mt. Pelerin Society, he argued
that we live in the best of all possible worlds!  Why?  Well, because
there is no other possibility.  Since there is no choice about what we
will do, the world we live in is the world that came about through the
laws of nature.  There is no other way that it could be.  So, blaming
people, including governments, is entirely futile.  It is like protesting
the we ather or one's height or age. Here is where the central flaw in the
scientistic approach to politics comes into clear focus, and it was one of
classical liberalism's champions who pointed it out:  If everything is
governed by deterministic laws, then there is no right and wrong about
anything, including, of course, tyranny and government regulation,
intervention, crimes, etc.  So, ironically, the champions of classical
liberalism, influenced by this scientistic outlook, had deprived
themselves, philosophically, of the sort of ideas th at could battle
government tyranny and intervention.  This is because the only way you can
battle something that people do wrong is to see it as something that might
have been done differently and could be changed in the future. =20
=09One element of such an ou tlook is to declare tyuranny, as an
example, as morally corrupt.  It exists, but it might not have existed had
people done things differently.  Without the availability of that
intellectual position, all we can do is describe how things happened, are
goin g on and will develop, as we do in astronomy or evolutionary biology.=
=20
Fretting about how it might have happend and should turn out is irrational
within such a perspective.  If it is impossible for people to do anything
differently=97if they must do the thi ngs they do, if this is a
deterministic university through and through, such that none of us have
any choice in what we do=97then all we can do is look at tyranny and say
that's how it's got to be=97as when our picnic is rained out.  We can lamen=
t
it a little , say it's too bad, but we cannot meaningfully say, no one
ought to be a tyrant!  We cannot rationally then say to politicians,
presidents, criminals or terrorists that they shouldn't act the way they
are acting, do what they are doing.  We simply have to accept it, describe
it and make predictions.  And that's the end of the story.  That is the
effect of scientism on how we view human affairs. All this now has a
destructive impact on the prospect of human liberty.=20
=09The notion that individuals have the right to liberty=97that they
have a right to trade their wares, to acquire property, to enter into and
freely consent to a contract, to resist bein g stolen from, to be intruded
upon or governmental prior restraint=97makes no sense if someone who
violates those rights is doing just what has to be done.  It may be bad
but it cannot be wrong!  The indictments against such conduct become,
then, expression s of our wishes.  Of course, our wishes go against the
wishes those who do want to tyrannize us, intrude on us, kill us, steal
from and regulate us, but there is no valid issue of who is right and who
is wrong because it all just happens,m for better or f or worse.=20
=09Freedom cannot be defended if it is not a matter of a genuine
human option whether you respect people's right to freedom.  If you must,
for example, intrude on them, if it is indeed an unavoidable fact that
somebody murders someone, it's not even murder.  It's merely a killing.=20
It's no different from when a hyena attacks a zebra.  A zebra can't say or
think, nor can we think this about the hyena, that it oughtn't to do this,
it is wrong.  It makes no sense.  Well, if you view human beings as
nothing other than these automatons, these instinctually driven material
pulsating things, ultimately there is no way to say to them, what you are
doing is wrong and you ought to change your ways, and you ought to, for ex
ample, pay compensation when you have done wrong=97or at least ought to
apologize.  All of that language is completely ruled out.  It is nothing
different from demonology, witchcraft, astrology or alchemy.  Just as all
those are bogus disciplines, so must p olitical philosophy and ethics
become bogus fields, if the scientistic approach is true.=20
=09But, =97and this is the crucial question to raise=97is the scientistic
approach sound, is scientism true?  We have already noted some problems,
so let us see why there are further serious doubts about it. One major
problem with the scientistic approach is that it actually violates the
most important tenets of science, namely, that you ought to go with the
evidence and you don't impose a framework from some other area where the
evidence may not apply on to the subject matter you are interested in
understanding.  If you are studying the psychology of rats and then you
apply the findings to teenagers, you are likely to go wrong.  Not that
there could not be some help there.  Sometimes there are aspects of the
rat psychology that we share, but there are aspects we don't share, just
as we also fall, exactly the way in which a sack of potatoes falls when
you throw it off the top of a building.  It's a not a great deal of
difference between a person and a sack of potatoes falling down.  They
both just land and make a big mess.  But that doesn't mean that a person
is a sack of potatoes, that only the truths that apply to the sack of po
tatoes apply to the person.  You can take some of the findings of some of
the sciences and apply them to some other subjects, but it's a very
delicate process, and it has been driven, throughout the last 400 years of
western civilization, by lot more hope than evidence.  Just as the natural
sciences improved our ability to manipulate nature=97to control it and to
extract from it all sorts of benefits for ourselves=97the hope was that we
could do the same in ethics, politics and so on.  The assumption was made:=
=20
If we only kne w the laws that drive human beings to do what they do, we
can go in there and apply social engineering to human life and improve it,
too."  But that hope didn't get fulfilled, as we well know now.=20
=09There are other obvious difficulties with scientism and its
application to social policy.  400 years of scientism and 150 years of
social science has not really improved the world a whole lot, not at least
outside of the realm of technology itself where i t had its home in the
first place.  The Nazis, the Soviets, the hoods, the child molesters,
rapist, serial killers, and the rest were not rehabilitated or repelled by
means of social engineering.  At most things got no worse than they have
always been, ex cept, again, where technology applies directly, as in
handling household chores or producing the information highway.  We also
know that 150 years of interventionist economics, which is also based on
Keynesian, Marxian, Galbraithian, and a lot of other so cial science, did
not improve the world a whole lot.  If anything, it has left us as
confused as we were to start with, at least as a general rule, throughout
the globe. What is necessary to make amends for the sins of scientism is
to become properly scientific.  This would amount to the recongition,
first of all, that this animal species we call the human being has certain
unique attributes, ones that cannot be derived f rom our understanding of
other features of reality.  We would learn that just because there are
some things we share with the rat, the computer or the north star, it
doesn't follow that we are just like those entities, that we share their
basic nature or essence.=20
=09A proper scientific approach reveals that with the emergence of
the human species some unique attributes have emerged in nature.  The
foremost of these unique attributes is that human beings can think and
that this is an activity that cannot be automatic.  At first, this is
something we know from plain common sense.  To any parent or teacher this
should be obvious.  Those who have d ealt with children or students cannot
miss that one cannot force them to think.  That contribution to the
rearing or educational process has to be provided by the child or student.=
=20
They have to will it to happen.  If they don't, it isn't going to happen.=
=20
You can wear funny hats, you can sing songs, you can do all sorts of
tricks but they are not going to pay attention until they choose it on
their own initiative=97because it is up to them to do it. More technical
reflection also affirms that this is a unique aspect of human beings.=20
They produce ideas, theories, novelty throughout the parameters of their
lives and none of that can be adequately explained by reference to mere
exterminal stimuli or ge netic constitution.  Human beings initiate some
of what they do.  Much of what is crucial to their lives is not simply the
result of previous forces working on them.=20
=09The late neurophysiologist/psychophysicist Roger W. Sperry of Cal.
Tech., who received the Nobel Prize in the '50's for his split brain
experiments, devoted his life (after he received the award) to
demonstrating, by the tools of his particular science, t hat there is
actually a physiological basis for freedom of the will.  Indeed, that free
will is the power of the cerebral cortex to govern the function of the
rest of the human brain.  Sperry argued that human beings have the kind of
brain in which a higher portion monitors and can assume control over the
rest.  That's pretty much what we know from common sense:  We have
inclinations, desires, wishes and habits.  But we can watch over t hese
and we can guide ourselves away from or in line with them.  We may want to
eat more than we finally decide we should.  So, we stop.  That doesn't
mean that our inclination isn't there.  It means that our higher brain
functions are capable of monitori ng and altering our inclinations.  This
is what we call self-restraint.  This is resisting temptation.  Many of
the people in academe, as well as those who end up on Oprah, Donahue and
Geraldo, have completely overlooked that what most people are doing when
things go awry is falling into temptation and failing to resist it.=20
Instead, they are treated as the special, rare case in which someone is
addicted or have to carry on as they do for other reasons over which they
have no control.  (The fact that they are put to jail may be an additional
wrinkle on this story that hasn't been told yet.  But I'm sure we will
eventually have judges appearing on Geraldo who say, well, we can't help
ourselves, we just have to put these social misfits in jail.  They will
say, "We are addicted to jailing people.")
=09Criticism of any position implies that some criteria are being
applied to which adherence is required.  And if we deny the capacity for
human initiative, there is no way to make sense of criticism, in the last
analysis: one's insistence on following certa in standards would also be
the result of nothing more than certain forces that make one insist on it.=
=20
Those who would deny those standards would have as valid a ground for that
as those who embrace them.  All propositions, in the end, would turn out
to b e equally sound, equally true, which would produce intellectual
chaos.=20
=09In a sense this result has actually been achieve in certain
circles.  Multiculturalism is distinguished, in part, for insisting on the
impossibility of making any distinction between cultures that are better
and those that are worse, even in their underst anding of the world.  That
this is itself a claim to a better understanding of the world does not
seem to disturb the proponents of the position.  We can learn from it at
least that the implications of the deterministic, value-free approach are
quite dras tic and intellectually intolerable.  Truth itself dies once
freedom is denied. So we can affirm human initiative without violating
science or the tenets of coherence.  So what are the broad political
implications of this? We start with noticing that under most normal
conditions, unless a person has been terribly abused or kept in a closet
for the first 12 years of his or her life, human beings have the capacity
to make free choices, that they actually can initiate some of their
conduct and the conduct is not simply explainable by reference to past
events.  From this it follows that human beings have to learn to act
because they are not given prompters, instincts, that tell them what to
do.  Put generally, we all, except fo r the crucially incapacitated, have
to learn to live right.  This accords with most of the cultural practices
throughout human societies and history.  We send people to school.  We
don't expect them to acquire knowledge of chemistry or computer science or
philosophy by instinct the way in which most birds and bees acquire most
of their behavior through instincts.  Birds don't forget to fly south=97the
bulk of them do not make a mistake and stay home.  They don't have this
problem.=20
=09Human beings are the ones who can act badly or well, on their own
initiative.  Furthermore, another implication of this understanding of
human nature is that we are self-responsible creatures, that a great deal
of what is important in our lives, we must individually produced.  We have
to play a very decisive role in what happens in our lives.  If we don't,
we don't learn.  We don't realize the cost of mistakes.  They come back to
haunt us.  This can be noticed right in the course of discussing the topic
at hand.  if someone disagrees, the implication is that one has argued
badly.  I f someone agrees, the implication is that one has argued
correctly.  One is held responsible for either. When we consider what
self-responsibility implies, the notion of liberty starts creeping into
our vocabulary.  It turns out that this self-responsibility requires, in a
social community context, that people have their own private jurisdiction
where both t heir achievements and their failures are within their own
domain and not dumped on others.=20
=09Here one can notice the implications for environmental ethics and
politics.  Human beings, who are self-responsible, who can create as well
as destroy, need to hav e their own dominion, their own private property
wherein their achievements and mistakes take effect.  That implies, for a
legal system, that the institution of private property is essentially a
humanistic institution.  Everyone must have a private domain , a sovereign
status, within society, one that others must respect and governments are
established to protect.  It is appropriate to our nature as human beings
not primarily, as economists argue, because it leads to prosperity, not
because it leads to cre ativity, but mainly because it accords with our
human nature as self-responsible, moral agents.  We human beings need to
know what props are available with which to guide our lives and make
choices.  We human beings need to know whether when I want to be
charitable, can I take Jim's telephone and give it to somebody, or is it
only my tape recorder th at I can give to somebody?  If we all get
confused about this, as we do in this society and nearly all others, then
the requirements of our humanity are not being met.  Such a society is
literally demoralized.=20
=09Now, you can then see that from the enthusiasm from science we
went and moved toward sort of the diminution of morality.  From that, we
lost the ability to talk about liberty in a normative fashion.  We can
only say, well, some people have it and some peo ple don't and let that be
the end of the story.  If we revise this framework and recognize that true
science does not permit reckless extrapolation from the natural sciences
over to the social sciences to the psychological sciences, but requires
that in e ach case we learn what's the case, and if you then take
seriously the possibility that we will find about human beings, that some
things are the case that imply a moral nature in human life, then you can
see that liberty can now be given a moral defense, and this is not the
best of all possible worlds because there are Clintons and Hillaries in it
and it would be much better if they would just resign and leave some more
liberty-loving people to govern. Throughout Western intellectual history,
it has been mostly religion that has stressed the moral nature of human
life.=20
=09Of course, Christianity learned this from the Greeks and Romans,
who had something of this in mind already.  Socrates emphasized the vi
rtuous human life, as did Aristotle.  And from that it follows that some
measure of individual responsibility and liberty are necessary conditions
of society.  Both the secular natural law tradition and the Christian
stress on each person's responsibility to save his or her soul imply the
free society.  From the secular viewpoint, however, these implications
were suppressed by scientism.  And within the religious framework the
zealotry involved in making everyone conform to God's will tended to
extinguish the libertarian implications. In the last analysis, the free
society has two strong traditions advancing its defense.=20
=09To decisively determine which of these is the better, which is
true, is a topic for another discussion.  But we can already see that
there is no obvious superiority t o the scientistically inspired position
that denies freedom of the will, ethics and normative politics in human
life.  It seems, also, that such a view stands a better chance of being a
successful intellectual defense of the free society.=20