The Aristotelian: “I wish to marry you, for I know that my happiness, both of body and soul, is contingent upon our union in the best and deepest of friendships.”

The Utilitarian: “Would our marriage contribute to the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Please consider waiting for me, dearest, while the best social science does its calculations.”

The Kantian: “I do not love you. Indeed, I find you repulsive in every way. But if I do thus marry you, I can be certain that my motives for marrying are pure and dutiful.”

The Paternalist: “Those who know best have decided that I should marry you. Who am I to question their wisdom and authority?”

The Machiavellian: “Why bother? It is better to be feared than loved, and I can get what I want from you more simply by a judicious mix of threats, bribes, and occasional indulgences.”

The Stoic: “You and I are creatures of Time and Chance, and to embrace you is to embrace a dead thing.”

The Pessimist: “Over half of all marriages end in divorce, so why don’t you just take half my stuff now, and we’ll go our separate ways and save ourselves a lot of grief.”

The Christian: “I will not marry you, for as the Apostle says, ‘It is better for a man not to marry.’”

The Malthusian: “In this world of limited resources, would it not be wrong of us to contribute to the geometrically-increasing rate of population growth?”

The Altruist. “Love is selfless, and I would like you to know upfront that I will get no personal benefit from our marriage; but I will do it because I love you, and love is sacrifice, and marrying you will be major sacrifice for me.”

The Existentialist: “If I commit to you, I thereby commit all of mankind to you, and the responsibility for a decision of that enormity fills me with dread.”

The Nietzschean: “We are fated to marry and remarry for all eternity, and I embrace my fate vigorously!”

The Humean: “Marriage is neither a matter of fact nor a relation of ideas, so I commit it to the flames.”

The Platonist: “As a philosopher-king candidate, I cannot marry you, for our selves and offspring belong to all communally, while marriage is a private and selfish thing.”

The Heraclitean: “Can I marry you? I cannot marry you twice — nay, I cannot even marry you once, for the you and the I have no identity in the flux and flow.”

The Parmenidean: “I cannot marry you, for to marry is to change from not being married to being married and, as has been proved, one cannot change from not being to being.”

The Marxist: “I spit upon bourgeois marriage, yet our synthesis will breed a mass of revolutionaries dedicated to the cause.”

The Leibnizian: “It is impossible for us to marry, for our monads are complete within themselves and must of pre-established necessity realize all of their possibilities independently.”

The Hegelian: “The generative World-Spirit moves within me greatly, and I will not shrink from crushing to pieces the innocent flower that you are in bringing forth the Divine Self-realization.”

The Augustinean: “I lust for you, and for that I tremble that God in his infinite justice will condemn me to damnation for all eternity.”

The Objectivist: “Before one can say I do, one must know how to say the I.”

In deciding best or worst, the students were to specify their criteria, give an overview of the theory in question, and explain why the theory succeeded or failed at meeting the criteria.

Ten students selected the best theory option, and they chose as follows:
Kant 4
Aristotle 2
Nietzsche 2
Rand 2

Three students chose to do the worst theory — and all of them chose Plato.

So I hereby declare Immanuel Kant to be the most sublime philosopher of art for the Spring 2012 semester.

(That was a hard sentence for me to write, somehow. Two indications of my thoughts on Kant’s aesthetics: Is modern art too complicated for us? and Kant and modern art.)

In addition to studying the above philosophers, we also spent time in four art-historical eras — ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Golden Age, and nineteenth-century France — blending a study of the era’s art with its history, philosophy, and culture.

My full interview with physicist R. Paul Drake is now posted at the the CEE site.

I met with Dr. Drake in Michigan to discuss the realities of professional science — multi-tasking, grant-writing, travel, and learning from failure — the adequacies and inadequacies of American science education, and the likely future of America’s pre-eminent position in world science. A shorter version of the interview was published in April Kaizen.

More of my Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site.

During my working visit to Guatemala, Luis Figueroa took me on a tour of Francisco Marroquín University’s library, and UFM’s rare book collection has an almost-complete set of the original Encyclopédie. I had the awesome experience of being able to leaf through the volumes with my own hands.

(Click to enlarge the images.)

By Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

* * *

Translated by Coleman Barks. Thanks to Russell Roberts for the pointer.

Thus stated, BHL accepts the basic Rawlsian line about the morality of politics, and its advocates seek either (a) to wrest the “social justice” label away from the lefties who use it most by showing that ends of social justice are best achieved by free-market liberalism, as Edmund Phelps tries to do, or (b) to find common ground with lefties on moral issues.

Five quick points against BHL:

1. As a political-philosophical method: BHL says we should start politics by dividing people into groups and granting one group special prior ethical status. In this case, BHL divides people into poor and non-poor and holds the poor to have a special moral position in politics-making. That is not the way to ground politics, for two reasons: (a) Politics should start with individuals, not individuals-as-members-of-a-sub-group; and (b) politics should initially treat all individuals as having equal moral status — in my view, as self-responsible, free agents — not as having preferred status by belonging to a sub-group.

2. As a moral justification of liberty: BHL says your liberty and mine are justified only if and to the extent that it serves or benefits the interests of others, especially poor others. This means that its moral principle is serving or benefiting others. This is not the way to do the ethics of politics: Liberty as a basic principle means that each individual’s life is his or her own, whether or not the individual’s choices serve or benefit others. Individuals’ political freedom is justified because they need it in order to think and act independently to produce the values their lives need. My liberty to be a philosopher or a poet or an explorer is not morally contingent upon my doing so’s demonstrably serving the interests of others.

It’s fine to argue the general point that free-market liberalism leads to win-win results for everyone involved, and it’s a worthy effort to show how free markets are beneficial to various sub-groups — women, immigrants, the poor, and so on — but all of that is a consequent sub-topic to the basic moral point that individuals have a right to live their own lives freely.

3. As a conception of life’s core values: By focusing on the poor, BHL seems to make politics essentially or primarily about economics. If political institutions are to be designed by reference to their relative economic impact on the poor and non-poor, then economic wealth is the critical factor. But that is much too narrow a conception of liberty’s scope and the proper purpose of politics. Family, art, sports, religion, and so on, as well as economic pursuits, are parts of life, and the principles of politics should cover them all generally. A narrow conception of BHL would seem to imply that one is free to engage in art, religion, or whatever only if that can be shown to be to serve the interests of the poor.

Or perhaps the BHLs intend for poor to be taken more metaphorically to refer to anyone in a weaker position in any sphere of human life. The final phrase in the above definition adds the “least advantaged.” But then BHL implies that the political rules governing family, religion, and so on, should be crafted to serve the interests of the least advantaged participants. For example, in basketball, short people are less likely to be successful. Does the BHL principle imply that the rules of basketball should be devised and justified by reference to their ability to improve the basketball outcomes of the short? Or religion: Who would the least-advantaged members of religious groups be, and what would it mean to craft political rules about religion to serve their interests? Not a perfect analogy, but: Politicians should not care about the poor any more than they do about men who can’t get a woman to start a family with them — or any more than referees care about short basketball players.

4. As a marketing strategy: This is only speculation, but I know a number of libertarians who complain that their position comes across as too rational and coldly analytic. So to gain broader appeal, they argue, libertarians need to go out of their way to show that they have feelings and care. So perhaps the BHL strategy is to lead with their emotions by emphasizing their empathy.

Well, certainly reason and passion should be integrated, and a morally normal person feels for those who are in poverty through no fault of their own. This takes us into the fascinating territory of the moral emotions, and for BHL our question should be: Why should exhibiting those particular feelings be primary in making the case for a free society? Other passions are part of the morally-healthy package: Admiration for those who have achieved a lot. Anger at those who violate rights. Respect for those who exhibit independence and integrity. And of course empathy for those who are struggling with poverty. But empathy for the poor is not more morally special than respect for integrity or anger at bullies and tyrants, and it is a mistake to single it out for special foundational political status. Instead, political theorists concerned with the moral foundations of liberal society should be concerned with general principles of moral character that enable individuals to live freely.

(Side note: I think a case can be made that admiration for achievement is a more important moral emotion than empathy for the poor is, but that is another post.)

5. As a rhetorical strategy to get the lefties who dominate academic life to talk to us: Again a speculation, but perhaps BHL is partly an internal-to-academics strategy to make nice with the social justice crowd in order to get a seat at the table. Maybe there is some merit to this strategy, and I am all for seeking common ground when possible. But our problem with “social justice” academics is not that they just didn’t realize that we care about the poor too. The modern history of the social-justice movement from Rousseau to Marx to the 20th century is not a story of people with an unworkable theory but whose hearts are in the right place. Of course, social-justice academics come in a variety of degrees, and it may be that some of the moderate and open-minded ones will listen to our case if they are first convinced that we genuinely care about the poor. Fine. But that is at most a tactic within the overall strategy of making the case for the free society, which requires hard-nosed economics, plenty of empirical history, and vigorous and passionately-argued ethics of individualism.

[Update: Further commentaries on BHL: Jason Kuznicki, Jacob Levy, Andrew Cohen, Will Wilkinson, Jason Brennan.]

I was struck by Panama City’s skyline — it’s experiencing a building boom, and many of the towers are strikingly slim. The explanation I received was that Panama does not experience hurricanes or earthquakes, so the engineers and architects have more high-and-slender options.

The Panama Canal is undergoing a major expansion project, to be completed by 2014, enabling this generation’s much larger vessels passage. A fascinating large-scale engineering project. The economic numbers are also large-scale: on average, each ship going through the canal pays $200,000 to do so, but that is much less than the average $1,000,000 cost of going around the tip of South America.

My thanks to Surse Pierpont, Javier Yap Endara, and Cristina De Roux of the Fundación Libertad for a pleasurable experience.

* The first edition of Explaining Postmodernism has dropped from first to second.
* The expanded edition has dropped from fifth to seventh. Too sad.
* But my essay on Free Speech and Postmodernism is now up to tenth.

(The hardcover edition is also ranked in the top ten for print items.)

All part of the plan to make postmodernism™ my personal property.

“Neither historically nor in his time to the present has the political orientation of Chicago’s Department of Economics been mostly free market. In a 1991 article on Laughlin, the first head of economics at Chicago, Friedman writes that the department had always had ‘prominent members who held these [free market] views and presented them effectively. But they were always a minority. The Department has always been characterized by hereogeneity of policy views, not homogeneity.’ What distinguished Chicago from elsewhere when Friedman was on the faculty and to the present was not the presence of market-oriented scholars at Chicago but rather their absence elsewhere” (pp. 59-60).

While in Brazil I also interviewed two entrepreneurs for upcoming issues of Kaizen and participated in a conference on Shirley Robin Letwin’s On the History of the Idea of Law (Cambridge, 2008).

This decade will feature Brazil prominently: the World Cup of soccer will be there in 2014, the Olympic Games in 2016, and several of the southern Brazilian states are economically dynamic. Yet Marcus Nunes at Historinhas paints a less optimistic picture of Brazil’s overall economy.

“Maria’s impressive willpower and focus enabled her to develop into the artist we think of when we think of Callas, but at the time her fellow students were hardly charmed by her chilly single-mindedness. One of them later said that ‘her earnestness was oppressive.’ Maria knew, however, that is was necessary for her to focus her talent into a light that would outshine everyone else. It was Maria against the world, and she would not share the spotlight. Of course, the anger and alienation that she had long felt were elements of this drive, but as time went on she achieved the calm, regal demeanor for which she would become known. A close friend later revealed, ‘When I was near Maria, her appearance may have been of calm and silence, but if I sat near her quietly, without talking, I never felt calm or silence coming from her. Deep down the turmoil was hidden. On the surface everything was quiet; underneath I felt the volcano getting ready to explode at any minute.’”

I like this passage for its highlighting of traits that successful people embody — willpower, focus, single-mindedness, volcanic energy, and so on. But also for its contrasting the genius’s relation to others and the others’ relation to the genius.

Callas early in life ran into those who were uncaring about her talent, unable to recognize it, or obstructionist when they did recognize it. As a result, she developed a generalized attitude of anger and alienation against a world that resisted or opposed her development. But then, as she matured, she strove to rise above the anger, not letting it dictate her reactions, instead focusing her energy positively on becoming how she wanted to be.

Relationships have two sides, and the other side is how those in Callas’s social circle responded to her. Some shared her commitment and admired her talent, and they became friends and associates. But many others were less committed or resented her talent. And it’s striking how the same character trait of one person will generate opposed reactions from others. When a fellow student says, for example, that Callas’s earnestness was “oppressive,” does that tell us more about the student or about Callas?

Related:
Creative geniuses as selfish — Rachmaninoff version.
Creative geniuses as selfish — Richard Wagner version.

Source: Richard Levine, Maria Callas, A Musical Biography (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2003), p. 19.

The abstract: “Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are often identified as strong critics of altruism and arch advocates of egoism. In this essay, Stephen Hicks argues that Nietzsche and Rand have much in common in their critiques of altruism but almost nothing in common in their views on egoism.”

See also Professor Lester Hunt’s rejoinder [pdf] to my essay, which appeared in the same tenth anniversary Nietzsche and Rand special issue.

Panel #1
Chairperson:
Shawn E. Klein (Rockford College)
Speakers:
Erin Flynn (Ohio Wesleyan University): “On the Suárez Handball”
Tatiana Patrone (Ithaca College): “On What Running Could Be”
Christopher Johnson (University of Alberta): “Virtuous Victory”

Panel #2
Chairperson:
Michael Perry (Rockford College)
Speakers:
Christine Neejer (Michigan State University): “Mary Sargent Hopkins, Bicycling, and the Rhetoric of Expertise”
Christopher Garland (University of Florida): “With God on the Sideline: Religious Rhetoric in Tebowmania and the Penn State Scandal”
Jo Ann Oravec (University of Wisconsin at Whitewater):
“Blogging in the Backfield: Social Media in Sport Contexts”

Location: Grace Roper Lounge
Contact: sklein@rockford.edu or mperry@rockford.edu.

My talk was one of two in a panel on the theme of Education: Obey, Think, or Create? The panel was moderated by Tiago Mattas, and my co-panelist was Claudia Costin, secretary of education for Rio de Janeiro.

Here is a report, in Portuguese, of our session. The Google translate version is:

‘The sixth panel “Education: Obey, think or create?” Tiago Mattos introduced the speakers, Stephen Hicks and Claudia Costin.

‘Claudia Costin, municipal secretary of education in Rio de Janeiro and university professor at FGV / RJ was the first to speak. She began her presentation by comparing data from previous decades with current education and criticized the functional illiteracy, the public and private education in the country and the automatic approval system used in some public school systems.

‘Then Claudia talked about the importance of building an academic course, which may be accompanied by students and parents. She also stressed the fact that Brazil is a country that says little. “The price of the book is a result of being a country of non-readers,” noted Claudia.

‘Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship of Rockford College in Illinois, Stephen Hicks, continued the panel. He began his speech by comparing the situation of education in the United States and Brazil, highlighting the extra-curricular activities, especially sports, from American schools.

‘In addition, Hicks made ​​a critique of how schools tend to standardize the behavior of children. “After a few years in school, children begin to lose the light in their eyes, say they do not like art or science,” he said, and added that he believes in fun as a key element in children’s development: “Children learn about serious things the world when they play,” he said.’

More coverage here, here, here, and more fully here. Video of the event is to be posted soon.

My thanks to Ricardo Gomes, president of the sponsoring Instituto de Estudos Empresariais (IEE), for inviting me to the conference, and to Albert Ling who efficiently helped me with logistics, and my congratulations to the sponsors for an unusually well organized and energetic event.

In this extended interview, philosopher Douglas Den Uyl responds to a series of questions about his life and work. Den Uyl is the author of many works. His latest book, co-authored with Douglas Rasmussen, is Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics.

Why did you become a philosopher? [0:19]

Where did you get your degrees? [1:44]

Why does liberal society need a philosophy? [2:17]

What are the key themes from your book God, Man, and Well-Being: Spinoza’s Modern Humanism? [3:34]

How do you reconcile Spinoza’s deterministic metaphysics with liberalism? [8:35]

Would you say that Spinoza is more of an individualist than a consequentialist? [9:34]

What are the key themes from The Virtue of Prudence (1991)? [0:09]

What are the key transitions in the decline of the importance of prudence among the virtues? [2:15]

Is prudence making a comeback in contemporary philosophy? [4:06]

What are the key themes from Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2005)? [4:40]

What are some of the key metanorms that liberal society requires? [7:32]

What would the outlines of that ethical framework be? [10:06]

From which historical philosophers have you learned the most? [11:17]

What aspects of Aristotle’s thought are most important to you? [13:22]

Previous question continued. [0:14]

What appeals to you about 18th century philosophy? [1:45]

From which contemporary philosophers have you learned the most? [3:35]

What aspects of Ayn Rand’s thought are most important to you? [4:24]

What aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thought are most important to you? [5:37]

What major historical philosopher do you most disagree with? [6:07]

What are your thoughts on John Stuart Mill? [7:45]

What is the hardest philosophical problem you are working on now? [8:34]

What is the most challenging criticism of your views? [9:44]

What is the state of liberal thought today among philosophers? [10:59]

To bring about a more liberal society, what key practical steps can and should be taken? [12:18]

Related:
Stephen Hicks interviews Douglas Den Uyl about four theorists of capitalism–Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Hayek.

Previous Profiles in Liberty:
Philosopher Douglas Rasmussen.
Economist David R. Henderson.
Philosopher Tibor Machan.

The Profiles in Liberty main page.

The latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with physicist R. Paul Drake.

I met with Dr. Drake in Michigan to discuss the realities of professional science — multi-tasking, grant-writing, travel, and learning from failure — the adequacies and inadequacies of American science education, and the likely future of America’s pre-eminent position in world science.

Also featured in this issue of Kaizen [pdf] are student essay contest winners Melinda Schumacher, Darian George, Amanda Hofmaster, and John Polemikos, and visitors Michael Newberry from Los Angeles and John Gillis from New York.

Print copies of Kaizen are in the mail to CEE’s supporters and are available at Rockford College.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site.

Professor Smith received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

She is the author of several books in moral and political philosophy, including Moral Rights and Political Freedom, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality, and Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist.

The talk will be at 11:00 am in the Starr Science Auditorium on the Rockford College campus.

Nietzsche on mid-19th century Germany:

“What else, in the desolate waste of present-day culture, holds any promise of a sound, healthy future? In vain we look for a single powerfully branching root, a spot of earth that is fruitful: we see only dust, sand, dullness, and languor” (Birth of Tragedy, Section 20).

The conference has an impressive lineup of speakers, including Lawrence White of George Mason University, Christopher Lingle of Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Karol Boudreaux of the Mercatus Center, and others.

I enjoyed very much my time at the 2010 conference. My talk was video-recorded and later posted online.

Two of the Bases Foundation’s leaders, Federico Fernández and Martin Sarano, visited the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College in 2011 and gave a talk, after which I interviewed them about the business climate in Argentina.

Related: Eduardo Marty — the full Kaizen interview.
Public and private transportation, Buenos Aires style.
Argentina, Hong Kong, and the psychology of belief.