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PARTISAN REVIEW
For a legal system, that the institution of private property is essentially a
humanistic institution. Everyone must have a private domain, a sovereign
status within society, one that others must respect and governments are
established to protect.
It
is appropriate to our nature as human beings not
primarily, as economists argue, because it produces prosperity, not because
it generates creativity, but mainly because it accords with our human
nature as self-responsible, moral agents.
Throughout Western intellectual history, it has usually been religion
that has stressed the moral nature of human life. Of course, Christianity
borrowed this from the Greeks and Romans, who already had something
of this in mind. Socrates emphasized the virtuous human life, as did
Aristotle. And from that it follows that some measure of individual respon–
sibility and liberty are necessary conditions of a just society. Both the
secular natural-law tradition and the Christian tradition stress each person's
responsibility for saving his or her soul, which pretty much implies the
underlying framework of a free, liberal society. From the secular viewpoint,
however, these implications were diverted and later even suppressed by sci–
entism. And within the religious framework the zeal involved in making
everyone conform to God's will often served to extinguish the liberal, lib–
ertarian implications.
In the last analysis, the free society has two strong traditions advancing
its defense. The scienti tic approach reigned supreme in earlier times; in
ours the normative approach is gaining prominence. To decisively deter–
mine which of these is the better approach, which is true, is a topic for a
more lengthy and detailed discussion. But we can already see that there is
no obvious superiority to the scientistically inspired position that denies
freedom of the will, ethics and normative politics
in
human life. It seems,
also, that such a view stands a better chance of being a successful intellec–
tual defense of the free society.
What can be said in reply to MacIntyre, if we take his comment at face
value as a sincere lamentation about something possibly devious in the lib–
eral tradi tion? For one, attempts at following Hobbes to reduce all
unders tanding of human affairs to physics-which has today emerged as
the extreme mathematization of economics and some other social sci–
ences-could be taken as a ploy, a way to avoid the hard questions. Put
plainly, by making all human action driven by the profit motive or utility
maximization, the question of whether it is right or good to vigorously
pursue profit is avoided. If wealth maximization is an innate drive, if sur–
vival is such an innate drive,
a
la
Richard Dawkins, then no one needs to
prove that it is a good thing and the argument is over before it begins.
Then, also, a subjective value theory enables us to skip a lot of tough issues
in ethics and poli tics and the view that such a theory leads to liberalism
becomes, once again, a kind of ploy.
