In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Immanuel Kant describes three versions of the categorical imperative, the law of reason on which a human will bases moral action. Morality, for Kant, exists in a sphere that is separate from prudent or sensibly motivated action, such as the quest for happiness. Kant did not put much stock in the pursuit of happiness and saw morality as something else, the duty to act in accordance with the universal moral law. The categorical imperative contrasts with the hypothetical imperative, which is just a reason to do things based on real-world motives, such as I aim to find a job so I ought to network and read the help wanted ads. Or I am a ship captain and therefore I ought to do what a ship captain ought to do. In determining what to do, people use what Kant calls "maxims" or rules of behavior such as Madoff's maxim that "lying to people to take their money is a good aim". While hypothetical imperatives determine action of a sensible nature, morality is universal and the categorical imperative is the universal ground of morality.
In contrast to the hypothetical imperative, the categorical imperative governs all maxims and defines morality. Because it is universal, argues, Kant, it must describe morality as a universal law. Thus the first way he states the categorical imperative is:
"Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law"
In other words, if you do something you are saying that you think it's ok if everyone does it.
The second way that Kant articulates the categorical imperative (and he controversially claims that all three ways are logically equivalent) is:
"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only."
In other words, each person is an end to himself, and we should never use or harm others. The link between the categorical imperative and the Golden Rule is evident.
The third way relates to the second:
"A rational being must always regard himself as giving laws either as a member or as a sovereign in a kingdom of ends which is rendered possible by the freedom of will...Morality consists then in the reference of all action to the legislation which alone can render a kingdom of ends possible...In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity...Morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in himself, since by this alone is it possible that he should be a legislating member in the kingdom of ends."
Philosophers continue to debate about Kant's ethical system to this day. Scholars like Onora O'Neill articulate vigorous and elegant arguments on Kant's behalf, while particularists like Jonathan Dancy argue that moral principles are impossible because any principle must permit exceptions so that the basis on which a moral conclusion is reached cannot be the principle itself.
Kant wrote Groundwork 225 years ago, in 1785. His claim, that morality must be deducible from rational (or "a priori") principles, continues to challenge and amaze readers today.
Even if Kant does not ultimately prove a rational basis for morality, and even if his system has been misused and condemned for fracturing moral belief, it remains a monument to the good, great and reasonable in humanity. Much as Aristotle said that we must look to the phronimos, the man wise in practical wisdom for guidance, so we may look to the moral aims of Immanuel Kant, who sought to ground morality on the cold, hard foundation of practical reason. In doing so he articulated the notion of the kingdom of ends, of humanity's dignity, and so even if his scheme does not withstand philosophical skepticism, it stands as a monument to the ultimate in human morality, intellect and ambition.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Mike Huckabee Should Study Economics
Last week Newsmax reported that Mike Huckabee felt that too many conservatives are too focused on economic rather than social issues. Newsmax's Ralph C. Hallow writes:
"In a sign of lingering divisions on the right, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee blasted last week's Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest meeting of conservatives in the nation, saying it was unrepresentative of the Republican Party as a whole.
"'CPAC has become increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years - one of the reasons I didn't go this year,' said the former Southern Baptist minister, who enjoys a devoted following among Christian conservative voters and who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008."
I have told my colleagues in New York's Republican Liberty Caucus the same thing I'm going to say to Huckabee. The religious movement cannot go it alone, nor can the libertarian movement. Together they can win. That means that libertarians need to compromise on certain social issues and Christian-oriented Republicans need to respect (compromise is not the right word because libertarian economics is totally compatible with Christianity) libertarians' economics concerns.
During the Bush years big government apologists, who often were really neo-conservatives, adopted Christian rhetoric but advocated policies that subsidized banking and the pharmaceutical industry supposedly in a move toward "compassionate conservativsm". Those of us who are committed libertarians will no longer stand for this. I would rather see Obama in the White House in 2012 than another Republican like George Bush or Mike Huckabee.
So Mr. Huckabee has to make up his mind. Either he will work with freedom oriented Americans, or he will remain a newscaster.
Moreover, the idea that there is anything "compassionate" or "social justice" oriented about Keynesian economics is ridiculous. Anyone who thinks that should contact the Foundation for Economic Education and obtain a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Laissez-faire capitalism provides greater social justice than any other economic system in human history.
Governor Huckabee, it's time to study economics.
"In a sign of lingering divisions on the right, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee blasted last week's Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest meeting of conservatives in the nation, saying it was unrepresentative of the Republican Party as a whole.
"'CPAC has become increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years - one of the reasons I didn't go this year,' said the former Southern Baptist minister, who enjoys a devoted following among Christian conservative voters and who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008."
I have told my colleagues in New York's Republican Liberty Caucus the same thing I'm going to say to Huckabee. The religious movement cannot go it alone, nor can the libertarian movement. Together they can win. That means that libertarians need to compromise on certain social issues and Christian-oriented Republicans need to respect (compromise is not the right word because libertarian economics is totally compatible with Christianity) libertarians' economics concerns.
During the Bush years big government apologists, who often were really neo-conservatives, adopted Christian rhetoric but advocated policies that subsidized banking and the pharmaceutical industry supposedly in a move toward "compassionate conservativsm". Those of us who are committed libertarians will no longer stand for this. I would rather see Obama in the White House in 2012 than another Republican like George Bush or Mike Huckabee.
So Mr. Huckabee has to make up his mind. Either he will work with freedom oriented Americans, or he will remain a newscaster.
Moreover, the idea that there is anything "compassionate" or "social justice" oriented about Keynesian economics is ridiculous. Anyone who thinks that should contact the Foundation for Economic Education and obtain a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Laissez-faire capitalism provides greater social justice than any other economic system in human history.
Governor Huckabee, it's time to study economics.
Let Socialists Live with American Exceptionalism
In 1630 John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, spoke these words:
"for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world..."
Since then, Americans have considered themselves to be exceptional: the freest, most God-fearing, successful and since World War II the most powerful nation. It is not surprising that those who dislike America claim that America ought not to be an exception; that it ought to adopt the tyrannical and godless practices of Europe. "Americans are foolish for not copying the Germans," claim the America-haters, the socialists and the progressives.
Yet I have seen or heard of few who would trade their place here for citizenship in other nations. Who among them offers to move to socialist nations like India or Cuba, who after sixty years have dirt poor economies? On the other hand, I have seen many, many come here from Europe, eager to partake of the fruits of 19th century laissez faire, that still flower but are dying, and patronizingly claim that America should become more like the Europe from which they departed. Such people should return home. And as Americans have heeded the naysayers, the socialists, those who hate freedom and who would trade it for a world that minimizes maximum loss, America has declined and lost its virtue.
Let us re-read De Tocqueville, who argued that America would occupy a special place in the world. America was greatest without central banking; without a planned economy; without a big government in Washington or the state capitals. And as we have imitated the Greeks, the Spaniards, the French and the British, so have we stumbled.
"for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world..."
Since then, Americans have considered themselves to be exceptional: the freest, most God-fearing, successful and since World War II the most powerful nation. It is not surprising that those who dislike America claim that America ought not to be an exception; that it ought to adopt the tyrannical and godless practices of Europe. "Americans are foolish for not copying the Germans," claim the America-haters, the socialists and the progressives.
Yet I have seen or heard of few who would trade their place here for citizenship in other nations. Who among them offers to move to socialist nations like India or Cuba, who after sixty years have dirt poor economies? On the other hand, I have seen many, many come here from Europe, eager to partake of the fruits of 19th century laissez faire, that still flower but are dying, and patronizingly claim that America should become more like the Europe from which they departed. Such people should return home. And as Americans have heeded the naysayers, the socialists, those who hate freedom and who would trade it for a world that minimizes maximum loss, America has declined and lost its virtue.
Let us re-read De Tocqueville, who argued that America would occupy a special place in the world. America was greatest without central banking; without a planned economy; without a big government in Washington or the state capitals. And as we have imitated the Greeks, the Spaniards, the French and the British, so have we stumbled.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Jewish Socialists Continue to Collaborate with the Holocaust
I recently blogged on Hannah Arendt's discussion of Jews' cooperation with the German National Socialists in their own mass murder through the Judenraten, the Jewish Councils that assisted the Nazis in facilitating an orderly movement of Jews into concentration camps. While Hannah Arendt attributes their cooperation to the moral decline associated with National Socialism, I claim that socialism per se, national socialism, socialism in one country or of any other variety, contributes to obedience to authority that in turn leads to collaboration with tyranny. Glenda McGee recently forwarded my blog to a left wing activist (and published poet) in the Village of Woodstock, NY who briefly responded to my blog and I respond to his comments.
The founding fathers, especially the Anti-Federalists, viewed private ownership of guns and the ability of private citizens to constitute a militia as crucial to defense against tyranny. English history is full of instances of taxation and tax revolts, and as well, other forms of tyranny such as religious suppression. But the founding fathers, although some like Hamilton were in fact socialists, could never have envisioned a system as horrific as the socialism that was conceptualized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nor the mass murders to which socialism led in Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, China, Germany and worst of all, the USSR.
The respondent writes:
>Yes, we (human beings) are almost always complicit, to a greater or lesser degree, in our victimization at the hands of other human beings. This is not news. Native Americans allowed themselves to be used as scouts by the U.S. Army in its brutal campaigns against the Indians in the mid- to late-19th century. Closer to our time and more apropos of the behavior of Jewish councils in World War II, the French notoriously collaborated with the Nazis (the "Resistance" was much, much smaller in number than postwar myth makes it out to be), as did citizens in every country the Nazis invaded (think of Quisling in Norway, whose name has become synonymous with treachery to one's own people). To posit that this very widespread human tendency to save one's own skin at the expense of others has something to do with an ingrained "tribal socialism" is misleading.
>Also, unless I'm mistaken, the Jewish councils were mostly composed of upstanding members of the community — the more well-to-do, the upper class. These people did not have socialist ideals; they had vested interests in maintaining the status quo. And we should note, too, that as far as Hitler was concerned, there was not a lot of difference between socialists (or communists) and Jews; they were all fodder for the ovens.
My response:
>Do upper class American Jews like George Soros and half of Hollywood have socialist or capitalist ideals? Since Soros was a prime backer of Obama, as was Warren Buffett, might we conclude that socialism and upper class socioeconomic status go hand in hand? And why would it have been different in the 1940s?
The leading Jewish Progressives in pre-World War II America included: Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Bernard Baruch and Robert Moses. All were German Jews from upper class backgrounds and all were socialists or bordering on it (Progressive/corporatists like Moses or Baruch). Likewise, the leading WASP socialists of the pre World War I period were often trained in German universities, which were the source of Progressivism in America. The reason that Progressivism grew so rapidly in the US was the large number of upper class US graduate students who went to Germany for graduate school in the post Civil War era, the Gilded Age, at a time when only 5% of the population attended college. The graduates came back advocating the same socialism that upper class Jews of German ancestry like Walter Weyl advocated when he taught at Wharton.
It was the upper class that was most strongly socialist and this was true in the US going back to Alexander Hamilton, who advocated a socialist (government owned) manufacturing industry. The Whigs were the upper class, more socialist party in America between 1830 and 1856. Thereafter, the Republicans were the more socialist/upper class of the two parties (they were basically the same as the Whigs) until 1932, when the Democrats adopted Whig socialism cloaked in Jacksonian rhetoric, which has always been a lie. Of course, the socialism of Hamilton would not have repealed private property rights or fostered tyranny to the degree that the Marxist advocates of socialism in one country or the National Socialists of Germany did.
In America, socialism was advocated most strongly by the patrician Theodore Roosevelt and his advisers, Herbert Croly and George Perkins, president of International Harvester and adviser to JP Morgan before TR's patrician cousin, FDR, picked up the mantle. Socialism by its own nature favors the upper class because they can more flexibly implement their whims when all of the nation is forced to live at their mercy. Hence, the segment of the upper class with strongly developed power needs (Kennedy, Soros) have always been socialist leaders.
As far as Hitler, not only did he not mind socialism, he was an aggressive socialist himself. Prior to Hitler, the Nazi Party had been called the German Worker's Party. Its 25 point program was socialist and included advocacy of expansion of national health insurance. "'The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the term National Socialist. Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) called for short, Nazi." Note that the terms "national socialist" that Hitler adopted and "socialism in one country" that Stalin adopted are logically equal. As a result, left-wing historians prefer to incorrectly call Hitler "fascist".
Nazism was very much socialist in operation. Hitler's government oversaw and directed industry. Germany's was a socialist, centrally planned economy.
Without socialism the Jews would have been much more able to resist. For instance, if they had owned guns and had private property rights resistance would have been much easier. Who favors gun control today, socialist Jews or the Tea Party? In other words, American Jews continue to advocate the holocaust accomodation that killed the Jews in Germany. They call themselves "progressives" in doing so.
Nazism was financed through the same Keynesian economics that Jewish progressives and neo-conservatives advocate today. Nazism was very much liked by progressive Democrats of the World War II era, such as Joseph Kennedy, who advocated appeasement and lost his job as ambassador to Britain because he said that Germany was the new progressive model and democracy was finished.
As well, the Swedish socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal was an open supporter of Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s. The socialist Swedes were officially neutral but quietly admired and supported Hitler (including his anti-Semitism, according to some) through the war.
It seems evident that the socialist impulse toward belief in collectivism; toward belief in the justice of unlimited majority power; opposition to individual rights such as the right to bear arms and the right of private property; belief in the right of the state to monopolize money and redirect its value into the hands of the military and banking elite all militate toward holocaust risk to this day. Socialists believe that the collective ought to have authority over the individual. Where in socialist ideology is there emphasis on the right of the individual to resist forcible tyranny of the collective? People who trust in the authority of the state are more, not less, likely to trust in the authority of the Nazi state, or of some future tyrannical state.
Even today, the increasing power of the United States is viewed as tyrannical by Jewish libertarians, but viewed with ardor by Jewish socialists. In their eyes, the state can do no wrong. So where would the Jews of Europe have found the intellectual resources to resist the Nazi state? Where in the socialist imagination would such resistance reside?
Milton Friedman made similar arguments in Capitalism and Freedom, and he was right. The Jews have been their own worst enemies. The current positions of the majority of Jews are exactly the same as those that were widespread in Germany between 1880 and 1920 and that are directly linked to the rise of Nazism.
The founding fathers, especially the Anti-Federalists, viewed private ownership of guns and the ability of private citizens to constitute a militia as crucial to defense against tyranny. English history is full of instances of taxation and tax revolts, and as well, other forms of tyranny such as religious suppression. But the founding fathers, although some like Hamilton were in fact socialists, could never have envisioned a system as horrific as the socialism that was conceptualized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nor the mass murders to which socialism led in Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, China, Germany and worst of all, the USSR.
The respondent writes:
>Yes, we (human beings) are almost always complicit, to a greater or lesser degree, in our victimization at the hands of other human beings. This is not news. Native Americans allowed themselves to be used as scouts by the U.S. Army in its brutal campaigns against the Indians in the mid- to late-19th century. Closer to our time and more apropos of the behavior of Jewish councils in World War II, the French notoriously collaborated with the Nazis (the "Resistance" was much, much smaller in number than postwar myth makes it out to be), as did citizens in every country the Nazis invaded (think of Quisling in Norway, whose name has become synonymous with treachery to one's own people). To posit that this very widespread human tendency to save one's own skin at the expense of others has something to do with an ingrained "tribal socialism" is misleading.
>Also, unless I'm mistaken, the Jewish councils were mostly composed of upstanding members of the community — the more well-to-do, the upper class. These people did not have socialist ideals; they had vested interests in maintaining the status quo. And we should note, too, that as far as Hitler was concerned, there was not a lot of difference between socialists (or communists) and Jews; they were all fodder for the ovens.
My response:
>Do upper class American Jews like George Soros and half of Hollywood have socialist or capitalist ideals? Since Soros was a prime backer of Obama, as was Warren Buffett, might we conclude that socialism and upper class socioeconomic status go hand in hand? And why would it have been different in the 1940s?
The leading Jewish Progressives in pre-World War II America included: Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Bernard Baruch and Robert Moses. All were German Jews from upper class backgrounds and all were socialists or bordering on it (Progressive/corporatists like Moses or Baruch). Likewise, the leading WASP socialists of the pre World War I period were often trained in German universities, which were the source of Progressivism in America. The reason that Progressivism grew so rapidly in the US was the large number of upper class US graduate students who went to Germany for graduate school in the post Civil War era, the Gilded Age, at a time when only 5% of the population attended college. The graduates came back advocating the same socialism that upper class Jews of German ancestry like Walter Weyl advocated when he taught at Wharton.
It was the upper class that was most strongly socialist and this was true in the US going back to Alexander Hamilton, who advocated a socialist (government owned) manufacturing industry. The Whigs were the upper class, more socialist party in America between 1830 and 1856. Thereafter, the Republicans were the more socialist/upper class of the two parties (they were basically the same as the Whigs) until 1932, when the Democrats adopted Whig socialism cloaked in Jacksonian rhetoric, which has always been a lie. Of course, the socialism of Hamilton would not have repealed private property rights or fostered tyranny to the degree that the Marxist advocates of socialism in one country or the National Socialists of Germany did.
In America, socialism was advocated most strongly by the patrician Theodore Roosevelt and his advisers, Herbert Croly and George Perkins, president of International Harvester and adviser to JP Morgan before TR's patrician cousin, FDR, picked up the mantle. Socialism by its own nature favors the upper class because they can more flexibly implement their whims when all of the nation is forced to live at their mercy. Hence, the segment of the upper class with strongly developed power needs (Kennedy, Soros) have always been socialist leaders.
As far as Hitler, not only did he not mind socialism, he was an aggressive socialist himself. Prior to Hitler, the Nazi Party had been called the German Worker's Party. Its 25 point program was socialist and included advocacy of expansion of national health insurance. "'The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the term National Socialist. Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) called for short, Nazi." Note that the terms "national socialist" that Hitler adopted and "socialism in one country" that Stalin adopted are logically equal. As a result, left-wing historians prefer to incorrectly call Hitler "fascist".
Nazism was very much socialist in operation. Hitler's government oversaw and directed industry. Germany's was a socialist, centrally planned economy.
Without socialism the Jews would have been much more able to resist. For instance, if they had owned guns and had private property rights resistance would have been much easier. Who favors gun control today, socialist Jews or the Tea Party? In other words, American Jews continue to advocate the holocaust accomodation that killed the Jews in Germany. They call themselves "progressives" in doing so.
Nazism was financed through the same Keynesian economics that Jewish progressives and neo-conservatives advocate today. Nazism was very much liked by progressive Democrats of the World War II era, such as Joseph Kennedy, who advocated appeasement and lost his job as ambassador to Britain because he said that Germany was the new progressive model and democracy was finished.
As well, the Swedish socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal was an open supporter of Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s. The socialist Swedes were officially neutral but quietly admired and supported Hitler (including his anti-Semitism, according to some) through the war.
It seems evident that the socialist impulse toward belief in collectivism; toward belief in the justice of unlimited majority power; opposition to individual rights such as the right to bear arms and the right of private property; belief in the right of the state to monopolize money and redirect its value into the hands of the military and banking elite all militate toward holocaust risk to this day. Socialists believe that the collective ought to have authority over the individual. Where in socialist ideology is there emphasis on the right of the individual to resist forcible tyranny of the collective? People who trust in the authority of the state are more, not less, likely to trust in the authority of the Nazi state, or of some future tyrannical state.
Even today, the increasing power of the United States is viewed as tyrannical by Jewish libertarians, but viewed with ardor by Jewish socialists. In their eyes, the state can do no wrong. So where would the Jews of Europe have found the intellectual resources to resist the Nazi state? Where in the socialist imagination would such resistance reside?
Milton Friedman made similar arguments in Capitalism and Freedom, and he was right. The Jews have been their own worst enemies. The current positions of the majority of Jews are exactly the same as those that were widespread in Germany between 1880 and 1920 and that are directly linked to the rise of Nazism.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
