The 1997 Lord Acton Essay Competition

Introduction

Gloria L. Zúñiga—Philosophy Department, SUNY at Buffalo

The meaning of liberty, as the principle inherited by the American system of government from its English Old Whig political ancestry, was understood by the framers of the American Constitution as embodying a formula that delicately balances the often-clashing concerns between self-interests and responsibility toward others. Because of the very complexity of the political ideas and religious morality as the background in which the meaning of the term liberty developed, it has proved difficult to specify a practical and brief definition of the term. In the Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu remarked, "No word has received more different significations and has struck minds in so many ways as has liberty." The remarkable thing was that, for the early American colonists, this ineffable character of liberty did not present an obstacle to their individual apprehension of its meaning as part of the conceptual background shared by them. This shared understanding of the notion of liberty was rooted in their religious moral framework upon which beliefs, such as that in natural law, guided their social and political actions. Tragically, however, this ineffable meaning of liberty became altered by the accretions due to the increasing rejection of religious doctrine in moral matters affecting the political development of the United States as a nation. Early American political leaders recognized the increasingly disparate significations of the term liberty, mirroring the fate of the term's ambiguous signification in the Continent following the French Revolution. "The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty," Lincoln lamented, "and the American people just now are in much need of one." He could have made the same statement of today's America. Today, the word liberty is employed in ways wholly distinct from its original Whiggish use. For instance, nowadays liberty is sometimes employed synonymously with the word freedom, whose meaning has an even broader scope.

This equivocation of the term liberty has led to its becoming associated with the notion of a franchise, which conjures a kind of license in action. This idea of "boundless freedom," of which Albert Beck writes in the first essay of this collection, has become, "the defining virtue of Western society." This, Beck contrasts to that notion of virtue of eighteenth-century Americans: "that which one ought to do," a notion apprehensible through "the law of nature." Perhaps no one more eloquently than Lord Acton was able to capture this idea. "Liberty," Lord Acton writes, "is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought." This definition of liberty is the common thread that grounds all the essays in this collection in a common bond. Lord Acton's poignant elucidation of liberty is significant because it entails that freedom of speech or action does not imply a duty to speak irresponsibly or to act licentiously. Liberty is, rather, a constrained freedom. However, liberty is also a right, but one which must be in accordance with moral standards.

The question is, what are the moral standards of contemporary American society? This is a difficult question to answer. In the second essay in this collection, Greg Markey writes, "Virtues once considered ordinary by American standards are no longer so ordinary." Clearly, there are no moral principles that are distinctive of any American political party or, at least, none as fundamental as were the particular religious beliefs of the Old Whig party, characterized by Hayek as the party of liberty in England. Despite its Christian Protestant foundation, the moral fiber of American society has become largely secular, often antireligious, with a tendency toward what is known as ethical relativism: the denial of universal moral truths. In other words, ethical relativism affirms that what is considered morally right or wrong varies among individuals and societies.

The displacement of objective morals is a result of the current tolerance for, and indeed encouragement of, pluralistic morality -- the belief that there are no moral truths since what is morally right for one person might not be morally right for someone else. "Historically, however," remarks Markey in the second essay, "religion has played the largest role in promoting a society of free and responsible individuals through ensuring a strong family life." But when the wisest individuals in a society, those who through intellectual cultivation acquire the credentials to lead or teach others, lack a compatible foundation of morals, what is to become of society as a whole? Moral pluralism cannot foster a virtuous society since its very practice impairs the discernment between what is right and wrong, good and evil.

Modern-day moral secularism, then, casts religion aside and substitutes in its place what is at best a utilitarian evaluation of outcomes as a means of determining the optimal good in moral agency. What is not recognized is that, as Thaddeus Kosens argues in the fourth essay in this collection, "while the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its theistic worldview and transcendent morality, has been discarded as the basis for legal and political deliberation, there remain institutionally entrenched in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution the governing system and set of political principles derived from it."

The problem is that, if the secular notion of the good is indeed a relative notion, what is the standard for evaluating optimality? One answer viewed from the perspective of secular humanism may be that such a standard may be found in the economic notion of efficiency. The notion of economic efficiency, broadly understood, is an action for which the benefit is greater than the cost. Cost minimization and utility maximization are the goals of economically efficient, hence optimal, outcomes. The efficiency method has thus become the modern-day secular standard for identifying good action. It is in this way that the most important kinds of moral decisions have been removed from the field of ethics altogether and transferred into the province of economics.

The economic principle of efficiency is a derivative of what economists call Pareto optimality, which is the standard for evaluating the desirability of an allocation of resources. More explicitly, an allocation is said to be Pareto optimal if there is no other feasible reallocation that would make one person better off without making anyone else worse off. The influence of Bentham's greatest happiness for the greatest number moral maxim is clear. But as Edgeworth wrote in his Mathematical Psychics more than a century ago,

That the great Bentham should have adopted as the creed of his life and watchword of his party an expression which is meant to be quantitatively precise, and yet when scientifically analyzed may appear almost unmeaning, is significant of the importance to be attached to the science of quantity.

Modern-day economics has evaded the measurement problems which plague Pareto-style utilitarianism by replacing the principle of utility maximization with the analogous principle of wealth maximization. As Judge Richard Posner, a scholar in law and economics, writes in The Economics of Justice,

Wealth maximization is a more defensible moral principle in that it provides a firmer foundation for a theory of distributive justice and corrective justice.

The principle of wealth maximization as characteristic of the notion of efficiency has become not only the prevailing basis of analysis in the making of economic decisions but also the utilitarian method for resolving difficult moral dilemmas. Social utility by means of (social) wealth maximization is thus frequently seen as the only standard of justice, social order, and morality. However, this denial of a structure of objective morals has been criticized by Murray Rothbard in this passage of For A New Liberty:

There are many problems in confining ourselves to a utilitarian ethic. For one thing, utilitarianism assumes that we can weight alternatives, and decide upon policies, on the basis of their good or bad consequences. But if it is legitimate to apply value judgments to the consequences of X, why is it not equally legitimate to apply such judgments to X itself? May there not be something about an act itself which, in its very nature, can be considered good or evil?

Moral oughtness concerns the principles of right and wrong that govern our acts. Wealth maximization is a principle for measuring economic consequences of actions but is not itself a moral principle, since not only consequences but actions themselves can be right or wrong. Economic consequences do not account for the moral status of the act which caused them. Even if the consequences of an action bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number, the action itself could be morally wrong.

If economic principles such as wealth or utility maximization are employed as moral standards, then moral standards are both utilitarian and relativist, rather than universal. In the fifth essay of this collection, Kyle Swan surveys some of the problems with, for example, Mill's utilitarianism, and the resulting inadequacies in the conclusions reached by modern-day defenders of liberty in embracing Mill's definition of freedom. The chief problem, I believe, is that both utilitarianism and moral relativism remain entrenched in our social thinking because we have not succeeded in exorcising from our minds the belief that reason is the only authority in determining one's course of action. The emphasis on a rational framework for decision making in all spheres, including the moral sphere, owes its genesis to Descartes.

The rationalist edifice devised by Descartes in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason is that, in human affairs, a good system of government could not succeed unless its "constitution was laid down by a prudent legislator" because by "being drawn by one individual, [laws] tended toward the same end." As Francis Lieber, an eminent political philosopher in the nineteenth century, wrote: "Gallican liberty is sought in the government" and thus, "the French look for the highest degree of political civilization in organization, that is, the highest degree of interference by public power." Liberty, according to this strand of the French tradition, assumes that man's intellect enables him to fashion successful institutions deliberately and thus regulate an individual's morals in accordance with the principles of reason. A state of laissez-faire would accordingly diminish, rather than augment, man's liberty. This is, of course, a perceptive insight since the absence of rules does not help the coordination of individuals' disparate plans. However, adherence to rationalism taken to the extreme issues what Hayek calls "the fatal conceit": the presumption that human rationality can successfully shape institutions and morals according to man's wishes. It is this faith in the powers of human rationality to devise moral principles that itself betrays human rationality by failing to be critical of its limitations.

Owing to the insight advanced by Adam Ferguson in An Essay on the History of Civil Society, we can raise the objection against rationalism on the basis that the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty is the recognition that successful social institutions are the result of human action but not the execution of human design. It is in light of this notion of evolutionary social orders that we can best understand Lord Acton's insight concerning moral oughtness. Moral oughtness is not founded on principles that are valid simply because reason endorses them, for one could reason that the elimination of the poor would spare them from their suffering. The Nazis, the fascists, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Mob, have made use of reason to support their ends-justify-means morality. But the actions of these groups have been attempts to employ power to do what they like rather than what they ought.

Moral oughtness, by contrast, is apprehended or discovered; and, even though it is not contrary to reason, it is still not designed or imposed by reason. It has been because of man's ability to reason that in the development of social institutions he has been able to apprehend moral principles of right action that often stand contrary to instinct. It is through man's cognitive encounters with objective reality that he has been able to apprehend the objective meaning of moral principles and their interrelations. But, as Kelly Alvin Madden argues in the third essay of this collection, "The evaluation of conscience is not a political question." It is "the natural law," writes Madden, which "served to lead people as individuals to the development of a personal ethic." This does not mean, however, that conscience becomes the lawmaker, since conscience serves only as a vehicle to discover truth in the objective order of morality. Truth, then, emerges as the objective measure of right action. And, according to Scripture, "the truth will make you free" (John 8:32). Liberty, then, can be seen as an evolutionary principle of human institutions resulting from man's apprehension of moral truths that facilitated the fulfillment of his goals in acting together with others. Viewed in this way, liberty is the right of belonging to a community in which the individual's fulfillment as a person can be achieved by the observance of his moral duties toward his neighbors. As Lord Acton put it, liberty is man's "right of being able to do what he ought."

This view of morality cannot be founded on scepticism, nihilism, moral relativism, utilitarianism, humanism, or any sort of moral secularism founded on rational arguments of economic efficiency. In fact, these antireligious tendencies pose the danger of dehumanizing the person and dismantling the spontaneously evolved social orders by emphasizing egoism and material gains as the characteristic and mission of man. A social institution that regards, and indeed fosters, love as the basis for the connectedness of mankind is an institution that emphasizes the value of the human person in acting together with others. Religion is the only social institution that affords such a moral role. And only a religion that advocates moral virtue is a religion that aims to shape the ethos of a society toward the good. Within the framework of Christianity, for example, a commandment such as "love thy neighbor" is not an arbitrary norm but, rather, the principle of social orders that individuals have discovered to be true in their cognitive encounters with objective reality. The practice of such a commandment constrains our behavior; it holds us back from egoist or libertine acts and guides us in the direction of moral oughtness from which we may all harvest the rewards of ordered freedom as our earned right. This is, after all, the essence of liberty.