Man, Economy, and Liberty

16

In Defense of Rights

David Gordon

If a recent work is to be believed, the entire basis of Murray Rothbard’s political thought rests on myth. As even Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, Rothbard’s defense of libertarianism stands or falls with the notion of “natural rights.” It is precisely this idea that L. A. Rollins, whose engaging and much discussed pamphlet The Myth of Natural Rights1 I propose to examine, dismisses as unfounded.

What is a natural right? Rollins’ definition of the term is one of the few items in his pamphlet not open to objection; “‘Natural Rights’… are rights that people are supposed to possess simply because they are human beings. Since natural rights are supposedly possessed simply because one is human, such rights are therefore considered to be universal: possessed by all people” (p. 1).

To show that natural rights, taken in the sense just mentioned, do not exist was, one would have thought, a broad and ambitious task. But Rollins’s aim is more far-reaching still. He attempts to show that all morality is mythical. “But if one sees through the myth of morality, one realizes that one does not need a ‘moral justification’ (and that there is no ‘moral justification’) for anything one does or says … nothing is ‘morally wrong’ ” (pp. 38-39). (This thesis is broader than one denying the existence of natural rights since one can have a moral theory, e.g., utilitarianism, that makes no use of rights. If, however, morality is rejected, natural rights go with it.)

But isn’t it obviously wrong that “nothing is morally wrong”? To take a simple case, suppose someone, just for fun, kidnaps babies and eats them. What could be more evident than that the person is guilty of monstrous evil? Rollins himself discusses the Nazi mass murders of Jews during World War II. Surely these were morally wrong.

Rollins does not think so. He states: “the rejection of the idea of natural rights entails the conclusion that the Nazis were neither ‘justified’ nor ‘unjustified’ in killing six million Jews” (p. 11). (I do not think this is quite accurate as an expression of Rollins’s thesis. One might morally reject the Nazis’s conduct without believing in natural rights: it is rejection of morality, rather than just natural rights, that entails Rollins’s conclusion. It is clear, though, that he intends to embrace the wider claim.)

What reasons does Rollins advance for his extraordinary claim? First, he rightly points out that his rejection of morality does not entail that it was moral for the Nazis to kill Jews: he casts aside altogether the use of moral language. It isn’t that Rollins wishes to propose a new morality in which everything is morally permissible; he doesn’t think morality makes sense at all. It certainly doesn’t follow, though, that one has good reason to believe a proposition simply because there is some absurd view which the proposition doesn’t entail. Once more the question arises: isn’t it just obviously false that nothing is either moral or immoral?

At the very least, Rollins needs to have powerful arguments if we are even to take his radical claim seriously. In fact he has none which withstand examination. (Here I refer only to his arguments directed against morality as such, rather than those specifically aimed at the libertarian natural rights tradition.)

He lays great emphasis on the claim that one cannot prove something to be moral or immoral: “No matter how much I might gain from murdering you, I ‘must not’ murder you. Why not? Simply because I ‘must not.’ This ‘must not’ is unconditional and absolute. But, as such, it is merely an arbitrary, unprovable assumption” (p. 11).

There is a trivial sense in which Rollins is incorrect, but this does not affect his point. In one sense, it is quite easy to prove that “I must not murder you”: one simply derives it from the premise: “No one ought to commit murder.” But of course what Rollins means is that one cannot prove that something is moral or immoral unless one appeals at some point in the argument to an unproved moral premise; and it is the use of such a premise that introduces arbitrariness.

But why assume that a premise must rest on some other premise(s) to escape the charge of arbitrariness? On the contrary, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, one cannot go back to infinity in asking that the premises of one’s argument be justified by a new argument, the premises of that argument be justified by another new argument … etc. Somewhere one must end with a premise which is both true and not in need of further arguments. As Wittgenstein says, “Somewhere justification must come to an end.” (I don’t mean to claim that it is a necessary condition for rational belief that either p is self evident or is derivable by argument from self-evident propositions. But this is, I think, a sufficient condition for rational belief in p.)

If this is right, why can’t some moral propositions be self-evidently true or false? If they can be, an argument that appeals to one of these premises is not arbitrary: to assume that any appeal to moral axioms is dogmatic is to assume just the point at issue. When, in a passage from a review which Rollins is kind enough to quote, I claimed it to be obvious that slavery is wrong, I did not, as Rollins thinks, rely on an unprovable “hunch” of my own. I thought that this was an obvious truth, true regardless of how I or anyone else felt about it.

Of course, Rollins will have none of this. He cites a characteristically acute passage from Nietzsche, according to which philosophers “all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the development of cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic … while at bottom it is an assumption that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact” (p. 42). Elsewhere Rollins claims that “natural law and natural rights are human inventions (not discoveries) intended to further the interests of the inventors” (p. 12).

No doubt it is true that people often use morality as a tool for their own purposes and allow their passions to color their judgment; and we owe much to Nietzsche’s acute psychological insight in enabling us to see how these distortions arise. But it does not follow from the possibility that emotion or interest can bias one’s judgment that there is no moral truth or falsehood. A defender of moral objectivity need only say that we should examine our judgments as closely as possible to see that they are as free as we can make them from such failings. (Note further that one way we can often show that someone is emotionally carried away or self-serving is to show that his judgments do not correspond to the truth as we see it.) Further, it does not follow from the fact that a belief is in someone’s interest that it is false.

If someone regards appeals to self-evidence as irrational generally, rather than confining one’s skepticism to morality, the result is chaos. All reasoning depends on certain principles: the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle. (Fortunately, I will resolutely ignore here intuitionism, three-valued logic, “dialectics,” etc.) These, as the basis of all proof, cannot be derived by arguments which do not presuppose at least one of them. If all appeals to self-evidence are to be rejected, is logic also to be thrown out as arbitrary and dogmatic? (Nietzsche, in some of his moods, seems to want to do just this.) If, on the other hand, Rollins holds back from this abyss of irrationality, he must recognize that there isn’t a general reason for rejection of appeals to self-evidence. If so, he owes us some explanation of why moral judgments that seem to be self-evident really are not.

Rollins in fact makes some attempt to provide this. He states that “natural rights are mythical and are really fake or metaphorical rights” (p. 2). He obviously intends this characterization to apply to any moral claim. Why are natural rights unreal? Because, says Rollins, they do not have effects. To say, e.g., that you have a right against theft of your property will not in itself stop anyone from stealing it. Further, it is false that the failure to observe the rules of morality always has bad consequences. (“Bad” here does not mean “morally bad” but “contrary to one’s non-moral interests.”) There is no reason to think that all those who violate conventional morality lead unhappy lives.

Rollins’s argument seems founded on misunderstanding. First, why is it a condition for a rule of morality to be true that it have some effect in the physical world? It is certainly true that the moral law against theft does not act as an invisible physical barrier impeding thieves. But who ever supposed that moral laws are some sort of physical force like gravitation? Nothing will physically stop one from drawing an invalid conclusion: people do it all the time. Does this show that logical laws are mythical or imaginary? Similarly, why is it a necessary condition for a moral law’s being true that those who observe it fare better (in the non-moral sense) than those who do not? There are no bad consequences, so far as I can see, entailed by believing that one can square the circle; nevertheless this belief is logically false.

Of course, on some views of morality, e.g., egoist ones, it is a necessary condition for a moral rule to have just this consequence. But then at most Rollins has an argument against a particular view of morality rather than against morality as such. (I don’t mean to suggest that ethical egoists have no adequate defense here: this is a topic for a different paper, most probably by another writer.)

It is in fact a general weakness of Rollins’s pamphlet that it persistently confuses two different questions: are the judgments of morality capable of objective truth? and, why ought I, or anyone else, to follow these judgments in my own life? Rollins at one point asks: “Why should I refrain from violently interfering with Murray Rothbard’s freedom simply because Murray Rothbard needs freedom? If I can advance my life by violent interference with Murray Rothbard’s freedom, why should I care what Murray Rothbard needs?” (p. 27). The question of motivation (why ought Rollins to respect Rothbard’s rights?) seems entirely different from the question whether he does or does not have rights that ought to be respected. To reply to this that unless there is some non-moral reason to respect rights, the rights are just arbitrary, begs the question.

It is possible that I have misread the passage just cited. Perhaps Rollins is not claiming here that it is a necessary condition for a moral proposition to be true that one have a non-moral egoistic reason to accept it: rather, he may think that Rothbard holds this assumption and intend the point as an ad hominem argument against him. But regardless of how this passage should be construed, Rollins in many places does make just the assumption I am questioning (e.g., pp. 2, 4, 11).

Rollins has another argument against natural rights in particular and morality in general. There have been many disagreements about exactly which rights are “natural”; Rollins provides an extensive list of such conflicting views (p. 5). (Obviously the same point could be raised against any moral theory, not just rights-based ones.) But it doesn’t follow from the existence of disagreement that objective truth does not exist. There are in philosophy of mind many conflicting views on perception, the conditions of knowledge, and the mind-body problem: does the existence of such conflicts in itself show that no solution to any of these problems is possible? Once more Rollins has begged the question: only if one first assumes that moral beliefs reflect irresolvably different standpoints need the existence of disagreement be taken as indicating the absence of truth. No doubt it is true that, even if there are true solutions to disputed moral questions, many will not accept them. But it isn’t a requirement for a proposition to be true that everyone accept it. There are many true scientific theories that some people reject.

I suspect but cannot prove (and do not regard it as self-evident) that what is really bothering Rollins is that he does not see any force to the alleged dictates of morality. I have claimed that certain moral judgments are obviously true: but they certainly are not obvious to him. Fortunately, it is not an argument against a moral theory’s truth that L. A. Rollins fails to believe it. That is a fact of purely biographical significance.

Before turning to another issue, I should like to clarify one point. When I have spoken of certain moral judgments being obviously or self-evidently true, I haven’t meant to deny that there might be a moral theory explaining or systematizing such judgments (or deriving other moral judgments that are not evident). There have been philosophers, e.g., H. A. Prichard, who thought that one must simply see one’s duty: no further explanation is possible and any attempt at one merely reduces morality to something else. But nothing I have said entails this view.

Rollins does not confine himself to presenting a case for moral skepticism. On the contrary, he gives a large number of specific arguments against writers who have argued for libertarian rights from an Aristotelian or Randian perspective. (Incidentally, even if one rejects entirely my suggestions about moral self-evidence, Rollins has not made his case against morality unless his arguments against the members of this school work. They claim, if I have understood them, to deduce morality from non-moral premises. Unless Rollins can show them wrong, he has not proved that morality is arbitrary.)

In the remainder of this paper, I should like to examine some of Rollins’s arguments against a writer having a certain interest for readers of this volume—Murray Rothbard. I shall not cover all the points Rollins raises: merely a couple of particular interest. To begin with, Rothbard rests part of his argument for the self-ownership principle on what human beings need to survive and flourish. Rollins asks: “Why don’t the survival needs of all other organisms generate ‘rights’ for those organisms? After all, they need freedom from violent interference with their survival activities as much as men do. Rothbard, however, clearly does not believe that animals have ‘rights’ ” (pp. 28-29). I do not think Rothbard is guilty of inconsistency here. The argument against him (which originates with George Smith) assumes without proof that one must derive the premise that human needs entail certain rights from a more general premise that all organisms’ needs generate rights. (See the quotation from Smith at the top of p. 16.) But why must one assume this? Is there anything odd or aberrant in starting with a premise dealing with human beings rather than deriving this as a conclusion from a premise about organisms? It may well be a good question to Rothbard how he would block an inference from an analogous premise to the conclusion that animals have rights based on their needs—but this is a separate point. (He might say, e.g., that only rational beings can have rights and that the question, what rights would animals have, if they could have rights, is empty.)

Finally, Rollins inquires of Rothbard why he claims that all human beings have the same rights. People are biologically very different (Rollins quotes (p. 35) an interesting passage from the biochemist Roger J. Williams elaborating this point): how then can they all have the same rights? But Rollins gives us not the slightest reason to think that rights-claims rest on assertions of biological equality. Further, even if they did, the fact that people are unequal in many respects does not preclude their being the same in others. And, for all Rollins has shown, it may be just these that generate claims to rights.

To sum up, both morality and Rothbard emerge from Rollins’s attack unscathed.

Notes

1. L. A. Rollins, The Myth of Natural Rights (Port Townsend, Wash.: Loompanics Unlimited, 1983). All references to this work will be by the page number in parenthesis in the text.