diseño Ladder

A TEST CASE FOR INDIVIDUALISM

It may be one of the most frequently cited general problems of political life in modern times, with traces of it found in every age: The supposed conflict between the rights of individuals and the welfare or good of the community as a whole. Examples of such alleged conflicts abound: Environmentalists stress that the power conferred upon individuals by the principles of the right to private property is extremely hazardous to the common welfare;1 _{some criminologists stress that upholding the individual rights of the}

accused is threatening the good of the community by helping to leave criminals go unpunished; those who are concerned about the general moral climate of our society claim that upholding the individual’s right to use harmful drugs will surely undermine public morals, while others, who are concerned about the ethics of the marketplace, often express impatience with the right to freedom of commerce, claiming that such freedom unleashes the forces of avarice and greed at the expense of decency and harmony. No doubt, other examples can be cited. The curtailment of individualrights rarely occurs without claiming some public benefit from it. And the dominant political forces tend to claim for their agenda of such curtailment just that kind of public benefit.

But does it have to be thus? Must individual rights conflict with the common welfare? Certainly those who proposed the doctrine of individual natural rights didn’t think so. It was precisely to show the congruence of the protection of individuals and the enhancement of the community that many advocated the protection of individual rights. John Locke would never have admitted that there has to be conflict in this area. Rather, the conflict, if there is any, stems from a basic misunderstanding. This involves thinking that the community is anything but a community of human individuals who share certain community concerns which will best be served if each individual has his or her rights fully protected.

The idea is that human nature unites us into one species and gives us standards by which community life may be fully harmonized, at least potentially. And the natural rights tradition held that such harmony is best secured by granting every individual a

sphere of personal jurisdiction. Within this jurisdiction each person is most likely to accomplish the best he or she can, giving rise to the least degree of mischief in the process, since by not granting persons the authority to intrude on others, the evil or harm they do is most likely to hurt only them.2This will certainly serve as a discouragement to wrong doing, which, in turn, confers overall benefit to the community.

Even many thinkers who believed that ideally the best course of conduct for everyone is to serve the community believed, also, along with Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, that public benefit could be procured viaprivate vice, provided certain principles of liberty are upheld. And, even earlier, Aristotle believed that the right to private property would enhance public welfare, when he wrote:

That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.3

One way to support the idea of the harmony of individual rights and the common good is to demonstrate the compossibility of individual goods and rights—i.e., that no one’s objective good need obstruct another’s objective good, which, in turn, suggests that the pursuit of individual goods within the framework of individual rights will bring about the maximum well-being of the community. But are the objective goods or values of individuals really compossible, that is, fully capable of being realized for all? Some argue that this isn’t even conceivable, let alone possible. They believe that no common human nature exists so as to be able to identify some common standards of good or value. Or they argue that human nature is a myth, so any idea of compatible values is hopelessly futile. Then there are the more empirically minded critics who point to how history is replete with major and minor conflicts among human beings, so any belief in some kind of harmony is Utopian, even if theoretically not entirely absurd.

Yet, of course, there is plenty that’s problematic even with the idea of a common good, over and above individual goods. How are we to identify some transcendent specific common good in the first place?4_{Will any candidate not always be the candidate of some}

special group of human beings and thus by definition not the common good? Is there even such a being as humanity or society apart from the individuals who comprise it? So what else is there but the good of individuals?

But perhaps the more immediate issue that springs to mind under the heading “individual rights vs. the community” has to do with environmentalism. There are very few people involved in the international discussion of the environment who do not

believe that some inherent conflict between the individual and the common welfare faces us here. Consider the alleged problem of the ozone layer. It seems that in the long run the right of individuals to secure for themselves, for example, refrigeration and air conditioning simply cannot help but conflict with the prospects of a healthy (current and future) human race. Free trade, the freedom to pursue one’s happiness, even the freedom to express oneself freely seem to some not to be rights but occasional, highly circumscribed privileges that can and ought to be revoked by government whenever the environment or some other value is being threatened by them.

So there are a few who would protest and argue that, in fact, environmental well-being and other values not only are compatible with but entirely depend on the respect for individual rights.

ECOLOGY: A NEW EXCUSE FOR STATISM?

As we noted in the previous chapter, in the early part of the twentieth century Ludwig von Mises observed the same principle identified by Aristotle. Mises, as Heilbroner has reminded us, argued that collectivist management of resource allocation can simply never work.5 Effective information dissemination and communication of what something is worth to whom and how much they want requires that individuals enjoy the freedom to buy and sell, which, in turn, requires the protection of their right to private property.

More recently, Professor Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” argued that the difficulties first noticed by Aristotle plague us in the context of our concerns with the quintessentially public realm, namely, the ecological environment. Here over-usage is most likely because the realm seems to be inherently resistant to privatization. Hardin did not draw optimistic conclusions from this. Nevertheless we can conclude that the collectivist system, which rejects individual rights, does not appear to solve problems very well.

These various indictments of collectivism, coupled with the few moral arguments against it, didn’t manage to dissuade many intellectuals from the task of attempting to implement various forms of the idea. Our own century is filled with enthusiastic, stubborn, visionary, opportunistic but almost always bloody efforts to implement the collectivist dream. Not until the crumpling of the Soviet attempt, in the form of its Marxist-Leninist internationalist socialist revolution, did it dawn on most people that collectivism is not going to do the job of enabling people to live a decent human social life. Although most admit that in small units—convents, kibbutzes, the family—a limited, temporary collectivist arrangement is feasible, they no longer look with much hope toward the transformation of entire societies into collectivist human organizations.

Heilbroner, who was for a long time sympathetic to socialism, admitted, finally, that “…Ludwig von Mises…was right…”6 But, unlike previous thinkers who have seen various examples of the failure of idealist normative moral or political schemes, Heilbroner does not abandon the hope for government regulation of some essentially

peaceful areas of human life. He notes that there are two ways central regulation may remain something of a handy concept. First, it may leave us piecemeal social objectives to strive for.7 Second, it may reemerge as the adjunct of the ecological movement. And just as we noted earlier that the planned economy is misguided, we need now to examine in that light Heilbroner’s suggestion that coping with the challenges of environmental problems must involve considerable government interference. Heilbroner tells us that:

The ecological crisis toward which we are moving at a quickening pace has occasioned much scientific comment but surprisingly little economic attention. [Professor Heilbroner does not follow the burgeoning literature of free market environmentalism; e.g., the works of John Baden and Richard Stroup.] Yet if there is any single problem that will have to be faced by any socioeconomic order over the coming decades it is the problem of making our economic peace with the demands of the environment. Making that peace means insuring that the vital processes of material provisioning do not contaminate the green-blue film on which life itself depends. This imperative need not affect all social formations, but none so profoundly as capitalism.8

To this idea, that a new problem faces us that is too complicated for free men and women to handle, we may respond by recalling that since this is not in principle different from other problems, Heilbroner’s call for more meddling from government is unjustified. As we have already seen Heilbroner issues the “new” warning that capitalism needs to be restrained, now so as to secure environmental objectives. As Heilbroner put it, the system needs to be “monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism.”9 _{Despite already having attended to}

such objections to the free market economic, this recast skepticism about individualism needs to be addressed, if only because it is time that the technique it exhibits of undermining confidence in human freedom needs to be exposed.

THE POTENCY OF INDIVIDUALISM

First, none of anyone’s bona fide, reasonable environmental worry justifies distrusting “the market,” as opposed to some scientific bureaucracy that is to do the monitoring, regulating, and containing Heilbroner and so many other champions of regimentation are calling for. Put plainly, if men and women acting in the market place, guided by the rule of law based on their natural individual rights to life, liberty and property, were incapable of standing up to the ecological challenges Heilbroner has in mind, there is absolutely no reason to believe that those could be met better by some new fandango statist means. Why should ecologically minded bureaucrats be better motivated, more competent, and more virtuous than those motivated by a concern for the hungry, the unjustly treated, the

poor, the artistically deprived, the uneducated masses of the world? There is no reason to attribute to any ecological politburo or central committee nobler characteristics than to the rest of those who have made various failed attempts at coercing people into good— prosperous, generous, prudent, courageous, wise, moderate, and other kinds of virtuous— behavior. In short, if free men and women will not manage the ecology, neither will anyone else. But there is much more to be said than this.

Again, put plainly at first, more optimism is warranted about the prospects of managing environmental problems in a legal framework of individual liberty than is expressed by Heilbroner and numerous others. This is the result, first, from examining just what are the sources of our ecological troubles. Given, especially, the fact of collectivism’s far greater mismanagement of the environment10 than that of the mixed economies we recklessly label individualist or capitalist, there is already some suggestion implicit here about what the problem comes to, namely, too little individualism. What Heilbroner and friends fail to realize or reveal—for it is no secret and takes no genius to discern—is that the environmental problems that can be clearly identified rather than merely speculated about are due to the tragedy of the commons,11 not due to the privatization of resources and the implementation of the principles that prohibit dumping and other kinds of trespassing. With more attention to protecting individual rights to life, liberty and property, there would have to be fewer human-created ecological problems.

Let me put the argument I wish to advance in its most general terms first. The natural rights defense of the free market rests on the realization that it is the nature of human beings to be essentially individual. This can be put, alternatively, by saying that the individual rights approach is most natural—i.e., it most readily accommodates human nature and, therefore, the natural ecology.12 If there is a crisis here, it amounts to the history of human action that has been out of line with ecological well-being, health, flourishing. But how do we know what kinds of human action might have been more or less conducive to ecological well-being? We need to know about human nature—what it is that human beings are and what this implies for their conduct within the natural world. If, as the natural rights tradition has intimated, human beings are individuals with basic rights to life, liberty and property, that also means that this is how they are best fitted within the natural world. This is how they fit best within the rest of nature.

The market is, after all, merely the result of the implementation of the principle of private property rights—the recognition that each person must have a sphere of individual jurisdiction within which to effectuate his or her choices, decisions, plans, purposes, etc. As noted, Aristotle and others have discovered that such an arrangement of a community, into individual realms of authority, tends in the main to facilitate responsible conduct. There can, of course, be exceptions—irrationality is not preventable even by the establishment of the most natural and useful organizational social principles. Even at great cost to themselves, people will sometimes misbehave.

Yet it makes good sense that when this cost does not affect individual agents, or affects them so remotely that the connection between their actions and the consequences that follow is very difficult to observe, confusion and mismanagement are more likely. And what is a human-created ecological crisis but the macro-result of such individual

confusion and mismanagement—individual persons dumping their potentially harmful waste onto the lives of others, apparently costlessly. It means people using up difficult to secure resources as if they were free goods, etc., etc.

THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALISM VIS-A-VIS ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

Clearly, the ecological realms mostly affected adversely by human agency are public realms—the air mass, lakes, oceans, many parks and beaches, and, of course, the treasuries of democratic states (for what is deficit spending but a tragedy of the commons?), etc. The ultimate harm, of course, befalls individual human beings—now or in the future—and other living things upon which human life often depends or from which it gains a great deal of benefit and satisfaction. Yet the injury occurs not in a way that is judicially manageable—namely, where victim and culprit can be linked and the crime may be dealt with.13

Let us for the sake of argument understand Heilbroner not to be advocating out and out collectivism but rather something of a compromise between an individualist-capitalist and a collectivist system, namely, what we have come to call the welfare state. After all, he admits that he envisions an ecologically prudent socioeconomic system to be substantially individualist—i.e., the institution of private property has not been entirely abolished in such a system—but one that is also “monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism.”

Do we really need once again to abandon the individualist alternative for some such regimented order? Let us take the environmental problem as a test case and ever so briefly present the case for why an individual rights approach will more likely solve it and, thus, be more conducive to the common good—as understood within a framework that acknowledges the ontological priority of human individuals to their various groupings—than alternatives that proposed to violate individual rights. While this may appear to be question begging—by denying at the outset any meaningful non- individualist sense of the common good—it will turn out not to be, once the individualist environmentalism that emerges comes to full light.14

First of all, we need to stress the individual rights position on pollution: Wherever activities issuing in pollution cannot be carried out without injury to third (non- consenting) parties, such activities have to be prohibited as inherently in violation of the rights of members of the community. (This would not include trade in pesticide-treated fruits, for example, where the risk of harm from eating such fruit is lower than or equal to normal risks encountered in everyday life.)

When pollution occurs along lines of thresholds, such that only once so much emission has occurred could the emission be actually polluting (i.e., harmful to persons) rather than simply defiling, a system of first come, first served might be instituted, so that those who start the production first would be permitted to continue, while others, who would raise

the threshold to a harmful level, would not. This may appear arbitrary, but in fact