FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
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Ironically, the champions of classical liberalism, influenced by this sci–
entistic outlook, had deprived themselves, philosophically, of the
ideas-namely, moral analysis and, in its wake, exhortation-that could
possibly undermine government tyranny and intervention. If moral truth
does not exist and its purported language is merely a guide for the expres–
sion of sentiments, preferences, biases, and tastes, it would follow that
convincing others about what they ought or ought not to do can never be
achieved. Preferences may change, but by this account, not because one is
convinced they are wrong, that one ought to prefer something else.
In contemporary classical liberal or libertarian thought, all this has
been understood to have a destructive impact on the prospect of human
liberty. The notion, for example, that individuals have the right to liberty–
that they have a right to trade their wares, to acquire property, to enter into
and freely consent to a contract, to resist being stolen from, intruded upon
or governmental prior restraint-makes no sense if someone who violates
those rights is doing just what has to be done.
It
may be bad but it cannot
be wrong! The indictments against such conduct become, then, expressions
of our wishes. Of course, our wishes go against the wishes of those who
do want to tyrannize us, intrude upon us, kill us, steal from and regulate us,
but there is no valid issue of who is right and who is wrong because it all
just happens, for better or for worse.
Freedom cannot be difended
if
it
is
not a genuirle human option to respect peo–
ple's right to freedom.
Killing isn't even
murder!
It's merely homicide. Even
criticism, as such, in philosophical or scholarly contexts, is nonsense: no
one could do better or worse than he or she in fact does.
Classical liberalism today, at least at the hands of many philosophers
who find promise in it, recognizes that if one views human beings as noth–
ing other than automatons, in tinctually-driven, material, pulsating things,
then ultimately there is no way to say to them that what they are doing is
wrong and they ought to change their ways, and they ought to, for exam–
ple, pay compensation when they have done wrong-or even merely that
they ought to apologize. That language, the language of norms, ethics, pub–
lic policy and any kind of action guidance, is completely ruled out. It is no
different from demonology, witchcraft, astrology or alchemy. Just as all
those are bogus disciplines, so mus t poli tical philosophy, poli tical econo–
my, ethics and public policy become bogus fields, if the scientistic approach
is true.
But-and this is the crucial question to raise-is the scientistic
approach sound? Or are these paradoxes fatal?
A further major problem with the scientistic approach is that it actu–
ally violates a most important tenet of science, which is that you judge by
the evidence and do not impose a framework from some other area. If one
