I thought this was a very interesting exchange between Mike Kole who was posing a question to Branden Robinson. (I would also direct readers to Mike’s thoughts on the limitations of democratic governments.) So, as the guy with his name on the blog, I’m exercising my liberty to move Branden’s response to the front page. (Though, more seriously, I recognize that much of the value of this space comes from the thoughtful posts of the commenters. So, here or any other time, let me know if you’re unhappy with the way I use a comment.)
(Mike Kole): How do you reconcile one’s right to choose who they associate against prohibitions against discrimination?
Remember that a right cannot negate a right and have both survive.
(Branden’s response follows)
The subject no doubt demands an essay or more to elucidate fully, but in the interest of brevity (a mistress I serve mercurually at best), let me offer you the guiding principles I’d apply:
* There is such a thing as a public space. Unlike radical propertarians, I do not reject the notion of a commons (in the physical or abstract senses), and do not insist that every square inch of land on this planet be the property of some individual, with right of exclusion to everyone else.
* On the other hand, I do believe each individual does have a right to some area of exclusive use, to which they can retreat when stressed, invite friends and confidantes, and otherwise assert control over an intimate space.
* I find exclusive use to be fundamentally incompatible with operating a retail enterprise wherein one seeks the custom of strangers.
* Economic theory illustrates that markets operate most efficiently when market actors are rational and well-informed.
* Actual market actors, whether as individuals or as organizations, are frequently anything <em>but</em> rational and well-informed.
* Efficient markets are desirable because they ultimately empower individuals to do more with the resources they have.
* It is therefore a societal good to increase the amount of rationality and information in the marketplace.
* You can’t force people to learn or be rational.
* You can, however, through legal prescriptions and proscriptions, encourage (or compel) them to behave as if they were rational and/or informed.
* Such compulsion should only be undertaken where the benefit is worth the infringement on individual liberty.
* There is no easy formula for making such evaluations. The popular will, as well as fundamental individual rights, must be seriously weighed.
* Discrimination against gays and racial minorities is irrational (and frequently ill-informed, grounded on stereotypes or myths, including religious myths).
* Discrimination against gays and racial minorities makes the market less efficient.
* An individual has a fundamental right to exclude whomever he/she chooses from his or her private exlcusionary zone.
* A private exlcusionary zone does not include, e.g., a retail business, as covered above.
* Individuals have a right to transact commerce in public spaces.
* It is acceptable for the society (acting through persuasion, protests, picketing, or petition of their elected representatives) to discourage this form of irrational market behavior, on behalf of the individuals being irrationally discriminated against.
That’s longer than I had hoped, but I hope it is useful to you to illuminate my values and my approach.
*blush*
Er, uh, thanks, Doug. Now my typos and logical errors are writ even larger for all to see. ;-)
Seriously, I’m honored. Part of me wishes I’d known beforehand, so I could structure my argument a little better, but on the other hand time is always short and if I attended too much to elegant style, I might not have posted at all. And that would have been a disservice to Mike Kole, who spends no small effort of his own eludicadating his thoughts here, and is always a polite interlocutor despite my irreverent blame-Libertarians-first conceit. ;-)
I bring up Roe vs Wade as an example of how Constitutional democracy can function when indiviudal rights hit moral absolutes and also the ‘right to privacy’ is also the basis of the argument.
In a Constitutional Democratic Republic, the minority must be respected at the same time the majority is ruling. It has been assumed everyone must compromise and have good will. That’s very difficult, especially when there is moral posturing vs. legal precedents.
The rule of thumb is always the question: is it ‘public money’ or is it’ private money’? I’ve heard about ‘lucrative government contracts’ and civil service jobs’ ( the ‘best pay around’) all my life,and that’s a significant lenghth of time.. So as much as many of us hate government ,we also see it as a ‘cash cow’. The point is separating private money from public money is very frought with thorns.
I dont know to comment on Branden’s insights above without knowing where the money is coming from, who is making profit,and who is rendering service on who’s money. Can we exclude on one hand the same people we make profit from? Why can pharmaceutical and insurance companies, for example, make decisions on serving clients based on how much profit they expect? If service is the goal shouldn’t the level of service be the measuring stick? It seems like a tried and true way to divide private from public. The big issue for me with the Bush administration is that huge amounts of public money are going to private entities and ‘disappearing’ but that’s another topic,or is it? Why not just keep the government corruption we used to have?
You can’t force people to learn or be rational”
My rational is your irrational.
Great post.
One thing to bear in mind is that all ‘public money’ starts out as ‘private money’, since governments do not create wealth.
‘Public money’ is either taken from people directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly, in the form of inflating the currency.
Government does provide services with real value – but they do it using wealth taken from the people.
The continuing question is whether we are getting our money’s worth from the government.
I am reminded of the quote:
“I’m proud to be a U.S. taxpayer – but, you know, I think I could be just as proud for half as much.”
I think there is a chicken & egg problem with that public/private wealth distinction. Governments make it possible to own property in the first place. Without the government, you have only so much property as you can physically defend.
Government steps in, creates laws that make it possible to (for example) title land and enter into legally enforceable contracts. They provide the force necessary to protect property and to enforce property interests. I would respond, therefore, that without government, individual ability to generate wealth is exceedingly limited. And that’s before we even get to other things, like roads and infrastructure that facilitate wealth generation.
So, government is entitled to take a cut, just like any other person that lets you use his capital in a business enterprise. (Alternately, you try conducting business with no access to the courts, no legal protections for your property, and no transportation infrastructure.)
You rightly hit on two key things that shape a society – the closely related ideas of property rights and the rule of law.
Government’s ability to provide these things is very much a measure of it’s quality, I think.
I do think your formulation idealizes the idea of government a bit – since government is always made up of fallible people with conflicting interests, it is reasonable to want to keep a close eye on its doings (which your blog does rather well, I think).
I did note that the government provides services of real value, so we have no argument there – I don’t think the ‘chicken and egg’ metaphor is apt, though.
You only get government (as opposed to family and clan structures) once individuals have created enough wealth to reach the point where you can have large enough groupings of people to benefit from it.
Since humanity has been past that point for many thousands of years, it is easy to think that the current prevalence of large scale government has always been in place.
But, first, individuals created the wealth that made such groupings possible. So, however long ago, the chicken of individual wealth creation came before the egg of government was laid.
BTW, thank you for your site – the commentary seems head and shoulders above a lot of political blogs, in that the commenters seem more interested in outcomes, and lessinterested in argument for its own sake.
Thanks for the kind words, Parker.
Perhaps a ratchet is a better metaphor than chicken & egg. You start with individuals or families with no government. Their wealth generation enables some sort of small tribal government which leads to better protection and the potential for more wealth which leads to the potential for more sophisticated government, etc. You get to the nation-state level of government starting in the late 17th century, I think. (Though, China and Rome jump to mind as obvious potential counter-examples, so maybe I’m wrong on that assertion.) World War II probably put us approximately at the current level of government.
Obviously not all increases in government lead to increased benefits for its people – just like not all growth of a corporation benefits its shareholders.
I don’t have a good segue here, and I’m just spitballing, so keep that in mind. But, it occurs to me that nations can be viewed as organisms in and of themselves, with individuals playing the part of cells in the organism. Biological evolution (sorry to the more fundamental brand of Bible devotee) causes a sort of arms race among biological organisms where you are forced to adapt or be thrown out of your niche when a more evolved organism comes around. When a bigger, meaner society comes along, it can force the earlier sorts of societies out of their niches (government being the organizing principle behind the societies.) So, it’s all well and good to live a tribal life — it might even be a comfortable life. But, when a city-state comes rolling along — even if it’s individual citizens aren’t doing so well — the tribe is going to get shunted aside.
During World War II, the Nazis had a big, mean, efficient government bent on destroying its fellow world citizens. That forced our own government to evolve a bit in response to deal with the threat.
I guess I’m just positing that changes and growth in government may be sort of a necessary evolutionary response to developments in other parts of the world.
(I hope I didn’t evoke a Godwin’s Law red flag by mentioning the Nazis.)
I think Godwin’s law only applies to gratuitous use of ‘Nazi’ as an accusation, since it waters down the term when the use is appropriate.
Since you weren’t calling anyone a Nazi, and the historical context is reasonable, I say ‘no hurt, no foul.’
Note that the Nazis glorified the state above the individual – this seems to be a common characteristic of repressive governments, since it allows them to harm individuals ‘for the greater good’ somewhat more easily.
Me, I want the state to allow for individual liberty, and the culture to encourage personal responsibility. I’m not sure how much of one you can have without the other, in the long term.
It is nice that a political blog has people thinking on their feet and through their finger tips, and even occasionally getting a little reactionary (I’ve certainly been guilty of that on occasion) without there being lots of nastiness.
With the exception of DST–which is like, the dumbest thing ever (how’s that for rational political discourse?)–I think that most issues are more nuanced than standard left/right stances allow. The will of the majority vs. the rights of the minority and individual liberty vs. common good are going to clash. We have to realize, also, that what is perceived as the common good has evolved and will continue to evolve.
What I have found a little bit troubling about this thread and the other one where the discussion originated is that some people seem to long for some mythical halcyon days when people could do whatever they wanted, damn the minority, damn the good of the community. It strikes me that such arguments tend to come from relatively young people who have always lived in a highly regulated world–whether or not they are aware of just how much government regulation and intervention affects their lives. Such people also tend to come from groups that have historically not suffered from the evils of discrimination. I don’t think anyone here is a racist, but I do think that some historical amnesia is perhaps at play.
As Mike said, it could very well be that the majority would vote for a return to Jim Crow laws, if they could. I, for one, am glad that it is not possible to re-enact Jim Crow laws and am glad for the government and the courts that make it impossible to do so. If that tramples on the liberty of a few racists, so be it. I’d rather live in a world where everyone has opportunity and can enjoy the fruits of a free economy and not be relegated to second-class citizenship because it might offend the will of the majority.
Clearly, many people in Indiana and elsewhere are threatened about gays and lesbians getting rights that may be incident to marriage. I’m not gay, but if a gay couple wants to make wills, be able to buy a home together, get married, have protection against domestic violence, etc., why not? I don’t think it makes me any less Christian, black, or American to allow those things.
I don’t mean to offend anyone. Sorry for going on and on.
Pila –
You forget the big advantage of DST – bigger crop yields thanks to the longer days!
That’s very important to an agricultural state, you know…
Crop yields?!?! You’re way behind the times. It’s all about confined feeding pig operations these days. Pigs crammed shoulder to shoulder and tail to snout from horizon to horizon. That’s the future man. The FUTURE!
I see, now.
So the pigs need the extra hour of daylight in the evenings to play golf and be with their families, right?
And to exercise so they can lose 10 pounds or so.
Pila,
You wrote:
FWIW, I’ve gotten the impression that Mike Kole is older than I am (32).
Well, I wasn’t necessarily referring to Mike, who seems to be a reasonable fellow. (Although I was and am concerned about where he was going with his freedom of association vs. discrimination posts.)
I have met people who are like the ones I mentioned. Too young to know that life in the “good old days” wasn’t so great and so stuck in their own ideology that they fail to consider any nuance or complexity. His name escapes me now, but there is a fairly famous black linguist who has become somewhat of a wingnut/darling of the right. He longs for the days of 1930’s ghettos, although he is much too young to have been alive back then. My parents were alive in the 1930’s (They were children and in rural settings, but they still have memories of those times.) Life for blacks back then is hardly something that anyone who lived through it would want to return to or hold up as an example of how things ought to be now. Yet the linguist brushes off any criticism with, “Well, of course, some things back then were intolerable, but…”
Just last night, on PBS’s documentary about the Supreme Court of the United States, there was a stark and, imo, chilling reminder that an expansive reading of the Constitution could be used to promote conservative views of “liberty of contract” that almost no one would tolerate today. There is no “liberty of contract” in the Constitution. Yet, back in the day, justices read that into the Constitution as a way to deny workers minimum wage.
All we hear about now is how an expansive interpretation of the Constitution means coming up with all sorts of luny, liberal, “special” rights that aren’t literally specified in the document. According to some, we need to “return to the good old days” when judges and Supreme Court justices “stuck to the letter of the law.” If that were the case, we’d have almost no workplace protections, very little redress for product liability (privity of contract being the ruling theory of the old days), and few, if any civil rights protections. So many people take these things for granted, as if the rights and protections we have today have always been here and are in no danger of being taken away.
I should add that there is no “liberty of contract” in the Declaration of Independence, either.
I believe the details of contract law are typically left to the states – I’m not sure what the constitutional basis for a federal minimum wage is thought to be (although there should be one).
Possibly the interstate commerce clause?
I think the bar for laws forbidding or restricting contracts between willing parties should be set fairly high – and am not a great fan of the minimum wage since it does restrict our ability to contract.
(The obvious case that hurdles that ‘high bar’ I mention above is contracting for illegal acts.)
Maybe the 9th amendment could be interpreted to protect ‘liberty of contract’ – this seems at least as reasonable as some interpretations I’ve seen.
I’ll refer you to the case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) that upheld minimum wage legislation (in the State of Washington). The court held that restriction of the right to contract was permissible by state law where such restriction protected the community, health and safety or vulnerable groups. This was a departure from the sort of jurisprudence typified by Lochner v. New York (1905) where the court struck down a state law regulating the number of hours bakers could work in a week. The Court rejected New York’s argument that the law was necessary to protect the health of bakers. Instead, the 5 justice majority held that the law was an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract.”
At the other extreme of the Court allowing significant interference in private economic activity is the case of Wickard v. Filburn (1942) — in this case regulation by the federal government. The feds had imposed quotas on crops, including wheat. They contended they were allowed to do this under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Farmer Filburn raised wheat that he fed his livestock, and never sold it anywhere, let alone interstate. The court upheld the law and its application to Filburn, reasoning that if he hadn’t fed his livestock his own wheat, he would have had to buy it on the open market — therefore, it was a matter of interstate commerce.
If the commerce clause is that flexible, there is very little beyond it’s reach.
I’ll comment on a few selected quotes:
“* Economic theory illustrates that markets operate most efficiently when market actors are rational and well-informed.”
“* Efficient markets are desirable because they ultimately empower individuals to do more with the resources they have.”
“* It is therefore a societal good to increase the amount of rationality and information in the marketplace.”
Branden has ably identified some of the unsustainable axioms of neoclassical economic theory, which illustrates why Austrian School influenced thinkers do a much more able job of defending free markets than do the neoclassicists.
Free markets serve man well not because they are efficient, but because they allow us, as a community, to change to adapt to changing conditions. As Eric Beinhocker recently put it: “Markets win over command and control, not because of their efficiency at resource allocation in equilibrium, but because of their effectiveness at innovation in disequilibrium.” Innovation does not depend upon ever more complete information, or even rationality. It can be the sum of endless efforts of trial and error, essentially one of the mechanisms of evolution.
Paul,
What can I say — that’s the brand of Kool-Aid I drank in my misspent Objectivist/Libertarian youth. ;-)
This is interesting because nominally the Objectivists and right-libertarians nominally identified with von Mises and the Austrian School. However the depth of economic analysis was never very great in the literature I was exposed to, and there were some important caveats to this ideological alliance, if you can call it that.
One was that — as I understand it — von Mises didn’t want talk of moral values clouding his analytics, whereas Ayn Rand was staunchly laissez-faire precisely because she felt it was the only economic theory compatible with her ethical views.
The other is that Libertarian Party economic thought seems to be more tightly tied to the Chicago School than the Austrian School these days. But I am not enough of a scholar to contrast these approaches in any detail, nor to identify what the causes may be for this (subtle?) shift in right-libertarian economic thought in the U.S.
Maybe you can help.
Ugh, objectivists. It was long after I had read Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty” and von Mises’ “Human Action” that friends told me I should read Rand. I still wish I hadn’t taken their advice. Rand’s shrill voice was still giving me a splitting headache two months after I finished Atlas Whatever.
Still, as you recognize, it was the “objectivists” (I think of them as complete subjectivists mind you) who needed the Austrians, not the other way around.
Anyway, to sort of get to your request, I only saw it this evening, 3 February, having spent the day with my youngest children in Warsaw at a Chess Meet. Now I have to back to my library shelves and clean the dust from a few books, as well as recover from the drive.
I suspect my dismay from “orthodox” and neoclassical economics stems from having gone to econ grad school after engineering school and stints in industry, which left me wondering just what on earth most conventional economists were talking about. Economists of that era seemed to think they were doing “physics” while basing their equilibrium models partially on “utility”. Convenient that, having as one of your variables something that can never be measured! I had worked in the building wire industry, which with 20 companies competing nationally at the time was by any measure competitive and in which all the competitors had very different mixes of capital and labor inputs. My suggestion that competitive industries might occur without all the players having identical mixes of capital and labor inputs was rejected out of hand as a sort of “heresy”. No need to look as facts I guess!
Friedman shot himself down in my view in the first two pages of his Essays in Positive Economics, which remains, in my view, as complete an example of bad logic as I have ever seen.
Anyway, give a little time here and I’ll see if I can put together a coherent response!
Branden,
I’d add that I agree with von Mises not wanting to add a “moral cloud” to the analysis. If perfect information about our condition were available there would seem to me to be little use to markets because, under such conditions, they are not efficient. As an example, subsistence hunter/gatherer communities make use of the division of labor, but they don’t seem to organize themselves through markets. The leaders of such communities have a solid appreciation of the capabilities and trustworthiness of each member of the community and the resources available to them.
I don’t think it a coincidence that Adam Smith’s intellectual defense of markets coincided with Great Britain’s rapid industrialization of the 18th century, a period when the possibility of such knowledge broke down. Smith strikes me as having struggled with harnessing baser motives, through a market mechanism, to a greater good. But to claim (as I understood Rand to be doing) that markets are are a reflection of the superior moral nature of the human being, rooted in selfishness, was disgusting.
Markets help bring out competitiveness, which can be for the good, but then war is very effective at bringing out competitiveness too.
Branden- I’m not old! I’m 38! (I know the line from ‘Holy Grail’ is ’37’, but it’s hard to resist!
My great trouble with Objectivists was their ironic orthodxy in the name of individualism. :-D
More importantly to me, while they may be much broad agreement, there is a great distinction between Objectivism and the Libertarian Party over the initiation of force. Libertarians believe it is always wrong to initiate force, whereas Rand and her sychophants have long argued that it would have been morally correct to invade the Soviet Union. They were in favor of the invasion of Iraq, which I and most Libertarians opposed.
I really like the term ‘moral cloud’
I used to teach some bits of philosphy, in the high school classes I taught,but of course it had to be presented in a way a 17 yr old could understand.Sure these kids were bright and many are today’s leaders,not to mention lawyers,but they lacked personal experience to compare pure thought to every day experience.. We were discussing Camus’ ‘The Stanger’ one day, and of course everyone ‘hated’ Meursault, the anti-hero, because he went through life in a kind of daze ( from the readers point of view),yet he also enjoyed many things without being moral about it). Everyone knows the plot because it’s a prototype existentialist type message. I had them do an experiment to get into the character. Go 24 hours without making any personal judgments on anything anyone says or does. Just be ‘objective’ and ‘evaluate’. Of course they not only couldnt do it, they hated even having to live life that way!I wonder if adults would admit to that!
I hope Im not way ‘off-subject’.
Lou,
You might be off-topic, but your post is interesting, and that’s rule #1 around here, I think. ;-)
Not to be too clasically dialectic, but the inverse of the Meursault model is also incapable application to humans. Objectivists were schooled in making non-stop moral judgments at every waking moment. This led to amusing and tragic consequences when the Objectivist political movement fell apart in 1968. Not to get into all here, but Ayn Rand pretty much directly called upon Objectivists to repudiate the man she’d been calling her “intellectual heir”, Nathaniel Branden[*] based on vague and unspecified charges or moral failing and misconduct.
Of course, the actual failing was that the two had been having an affair, and Nathaniel Branden didn’t want it anymore. But Rand had insisted that the affair be a secret (to everyone except her own and Branden’s spouses), and wanted to maintain this secrecy even after the affair was over. So the members of the Objectivist society, particularly in New York, were forced to choose sides, and if they wavered, were challenged with questions like “Are you questioning the judgment of the author of Atlas Shrugged?”
Those interested in reading more about the Objectivist movement, I direct to Murray Rothbard’s article “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult“, Barbara Branden’s book The Passion of Ayn Rand, and Nathaniel Branden’s memoir Judgment Day.
Anyway, to close with a little joke:
An Objectivist is someone who will tell you that:
has only one solution, because objective reality affords one and only one correct view.
[*] In case some of you have wondered where I got the unusual spelling of my given name…
Branden,
Being interesting is a higher calling than staying on subject..ask any teacher. Much has been discussed in this blog about values, of religious-based legislation,and making much of the fault line between moral thinking and secular thinking.There are two basic approaches to values’ building.: Teach moral values directly from Scripture . God says ‘Thou shalt not kill(and by the way, this is why abortion is wrong),or we can go into the arts, into literature and learn about humankind’s quest for truths through humanism,which also includes man’s view of a Supreme being. . What do we find at the end? An agnostic has values,a catholic has values, an atheist has values,and an Evangelical has values,and I left some out.
But man’s categorization, self-imposed or imposed by others, doesn’t determine his value as a human being. That comes from our origin ,made in God’s image , made by God.This is my best case for being a believer.I believe our Constitution absolutely reflects that view in its intent. The Bible doesnt.Truth is inductive in that we do not truly know what we believe until we act and we act according to what we have gradually come to believe through lifes experiences and by seeing God’s presence in others..Then and ONLY then can we go to Scripture and categorize our beliefs.Im not saying that catechism shouldnt be taught to youth,but much of what we learn comes to fruition gradually from a dormant state as we experience life,whether secular learning or religious learning.That’s why I can still sit in mass with the institutional church crumbling around me…They aren’t the same. I just felt the need to give a religious point of view,and I know Im sermonzing,but so be it.Others have also done so.
Lou,
Thanks for sharing — and I mean that completely non-sarcastically. (It’s a shame that that expression has become a trope for insincerity.)
I suspect the phenomenon you point to — that “much of what we learn comes to fruition gradually from a dormant state as we experience life”, is true. Permit me to offer an alternative, secular hypothesis.
Noam Chomsky’s theory of linguistics holds that humans have evolved the equivalent of a mental organ for language. While the specifics of the languages we learn are in flux, and vary widely by individual, it is as near a psychological universal as we have that human minds develop a capacity for language at a young age, and more is at work than mere mimickry of what we hear. We have an innate capacity to construct and utter novel sentences that may never have been conceived or spoken in the history of the species. The number of possible sentences truly is infinite in the formal sense — not just merely extremely large — as can be demonstrated by the fact that you can in a syntactically and semantically valid way prefix any existence sentence with the clause “It is widely believed that”. You can even recursive prefix this same clause to a sentence over and over, and it’s still valid (though it swiftly becomes awkward).
Chomsky has speculated that our moral values come from a similar “mental organ” that we have evolved. He is quick to point out that his speculation is unscientific, as he hasn’t done research in the area. But it seems at least as plausible to me as the existence of a Supreme Being of some sort, and moreover, folks like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have offered suggestions for further research and ethological analogues in the animal kingdon, respectively.
Natural rights theory has been an important bulwark against abuses of power, but as a scientific concept subject to falsification and empirical measurement it leaves much to be desired. This does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as a human ethical instinct. What we need to do is to seriously begin looking for it. Even Functional MRIs are only the crudest of tools for beginning to understand the workings of the mind as manifested in the brain — but they’re a start.
Branden,
Sharing and vignettes are my frame of reference,but I appreciate an intellectual exchange ,can usually understand it,and sometimes respond in kind with references. .I know I’m with an intellectual when I have to look up words in my Websters! But I do very well with simple prose.(Also I can check and improve my spelling).
Belief in God has nothing to do with anything else. God can’t be proven,although some have tried, or disproven.It’s faith and faith is a dangerous weapon in the hands of a media-savey cadre.I was merely pointing out that believers come in different colors.
Language has no bounds because we develop words that explain new inventions that we understand but don’t have vocabulary to explain.So we make oursleves a new glossary.A few years ago my 7 yr old nephew asked if he could use my computer to play a computer game and I said ‘Ok’ and then he asked if it he should load it in D because his mother doesn’t want him to overload C at home. This was a 7-yr old mind you! I spent a week back in the 90s trying to learn how to use a mouse. The thinking mind and the capability for language are tightly connected . I also think some people are afraid of thinking beyond the one official meaning of thir own vocabulary and that’s what our Administration uses to their advantage..( but its not the capability of the mind that is at fault) Ive seen 6 year old perfectly bi-lingual kids spontaneously speaking in which ever language they are addressed in and think nothing of it,but by puberty they no longer can easily mimic sounds. It’s as if at 14 or so the body goes on to other piorities. The language-learning room in the brain
closes and learning a foreign
language is pure torture for many after the puberty juices start to flow.
We human beings can evaluate and predict other human’s motives before we can walk and I speculate that may be where moral values start.But still in kindergarten, one of the chores of the teacher is to teach what ‘sharing’ means and that surely doesn’t come naturally.So,yes, I think we need to study more human ethical instinct. I would guess it’s a personality trait.
JJ Rousseau and natural rights theories were part of Western Civilization and sets us off from other cultures of the world.
I don’t know what Chomsky means by ‘mental organ’ beyond what a brain is.I’d have to read him although I think I may have before in my ‘formal education’ years
Lou,
That’s true, and folks on this blog should call me on it if I overgeneralize. As Edward M. Buckner put it is an essay for The Fundamentals of Extremism, religious folks who value secularism are better allies to atheists and agnostics than fundamentalist evangelicals are with any of the above.
Regarding “mental organs”, Chomsky was referring to the widely-observed phenomenon of mental specialization. It’s not some Cartesian dualistic dogma. :) There are systems extant within the mind that are not as rigidly couples to pieces of real estate in the brain in the same way that your gastric functions are tighly coupled to your stomach. When people suffer strokes or brain trauma, they often “get back” many of their facilities even after losing them at first. This isn’t because the brain heals physically in a perfect manner, but because the brain “re-wires” itself to reinstantiate the same functions (or an approximation of them), in a new pattern of neurons.
What are these systems? Chomsky calls them “mental organs”, but at root this is a just a term used for modeling an observable phenomenon. Other terms could be used.