morality — VOICES for REASON

Forbes.com has just published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, an analysis of Arthur Brooks’ recent book The Battle.

What’s the central message of The Battle? That the advocates of big government have offered a potent moral case that wealth redistribution promotes the happiness of society, and that the supporters of free markets need to articulate their own moral defense of capitalism in reply. Brooks’ argument, in short, is that wealth redistribution does not make people happy. The source of genuine happiness is earned success, i.e., “the creation of value” by the individual — and it is capitalism that fosters earned success. To defend capitalism in moral terms, he concludes, is to defend it as the system of the pursuit of happiness.

There are important elements of truth in this narrative, but there is also a gaping hole. What Brooks doesn’t acknowledge is that the pursuit of your own happiness is at odds with the near-universal view that we have a moral obligation to sacrifice ourselves to the needs of others — and that the basic reason we live in an ever-expanding welfare state is because, when faced with a choice between the individual’s pursuit of happiness and his duty to serve others’ needs, we almost always choose the latter.

You can read the entire piece here.

Following the news that Facebook founder and Time Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg had signed the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge, ARC put out a press release arguing that signing the Pledge was not a morally praiseworthy act–that businessmen like Zuckerberg deserve moral credit for creating wealth, not for giving it away.

Nick Baumann of Mother Jones recently linked to it, suggesting, tongue firmly in cheek, that it might be “the best PR ever,” and his comments are getting a fair amount of play around the web. Given all the attention, I would like to recommend that interested readers take a look at the full argument Yaron Brook and I laid out in our original piece on the Pledge.

By the way, I will be discussing the Giving Pledge with Baumann tonight on Thom Hartmann’s TV show The Big Picture.
[Cross-posted from forbes.com]

In our latest Forbes.com column, Yaron Brook and I urge America’s most productive citizens not to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge. From the column:

[Y]our wealth was not an undeserved gift. Every dollar in your bank account came from some individual who voluntarily gave it to you—who gave it to you in exchange for a product he judged to be more valuable than his dollar. You have no moral obligation to “give back,” because you didn’t take anything in the first place.

Whole thing here.

Image: flickr

This week ARI’s Yaron Brook was one of the speakers at The Economist’s “Ideas Economy: Human Potential” conference in New York. Today on CNN.com, Dr. Onkar Ghate and Dr. Brook have an opinion piece related to the theme of that conference. Noting how far the West has advanced thanks to scientific progress and political freedom, they argue that

… human progress demands implementation of a third idea to complete the scientific and political revolutions. We’re still beholden to the past in ethics.

Although few of us would turn to the Old Testament or the Quran to determine the age of the Earth, too many of us still turn obediently to these books (or their secular copies) as authorities about morality. We learn therein the moral superiority of faith to reason and collective sacrifice to personal profit.

But the more seriously we take these old ethical ideas, the more suspect become the modern ideas responsible for human progress.

CNN.com’s editors titled the piece “Our moral code is out of date.” Read the whole thing.

I am thrilled to announce that ARC’s Yaron Brook and I will now be regular columnists at Forbes.com. The co-authored column will appear twice a month and will focus mainly on issues related to business and economic freedom. The first installment addresses a debate that’s been raging over whether President Obama is anti-business. Our answer: Of course he is–but so is the rest of today’s political establishment.

Quick excerpt:

While Republicans often express admiration for Ayn Rand, the one thing they refuse to rein in is today’s massive regulatory-welfare state. To the extent they oppose Obama, it’s not on the grounds that businessmen have a right to function free from government coercion, but on the grounds that the amount of coercion Obama advocates goes a little too far.

The article’s title: “The U.S. Anti-Business Epidemic”

Finally, Yaron and I would like to thank the fine people at Forbes.com for this opportunity. We’re both excited to be writing for the Forbes audience.

image: Wikimedia Commons

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.

My colleague Onkar Ghate has written a guest post for the Division of Labour blog answering a question on the moral views of Adam Smith and of Ayn Rand. The question was prompted by a recent debate between ARI’s Yaron Brook and Prof. James Otteson (a scholar of Smith). That spirited debate took place at the annual conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education. The question:

Take Smith’s famous thought experiment about — by some fantastic unstated mechanism — you (“a man of humanity in Europe”, in 1759) could prevent an earthquake in China by cutting off your pinky. Smith says that of course you would do so, and then addresses why. Yaron, would you cut off your pinky? Assume that knowledge of the whole affair would necessarily remain entire personal. If yes, and you claim to square that with “selfishness,” aren’t you using words in an opportunistic and unmanageable way?

In response, Dr. Ghate begins his post:

The question’s undertone is that everyone “just knows” it’s right to cut off your finger. Moral theory’s task is to rationalize this incontrovertible conclusion; Rand’s theory can’t, however, because it’s an abuse of language to call the action selfish.

But it’s a mistake to think that Rand’s ethics begins with the moral beliefs that happen to saturate the culture, not with reality. True, it would be an abuse of language to label the action Smith envisions “selfish”: it is self-sacrificial. Precisely for this reason, Rand’s ethics would pronounce the action immoral.

To understand the radical difference between Smith and Rand here, one must grasp the principles at work.

Read the whole thing.

image: wikimedia commons

A follow up to my post on Obama’s policy and “just war” doctrine: NPR ran a story Friday that eloquently illustrates how this approach undermines our military, how it (understandably) frustrates our troops, and how it needlessly exposes them to greater risks. The story describes a clear-cut incident where U.S. forces observed insurgents planting a road-side bomb, but under newly tightened, even more restrictive rules of engagement, the soldiers had to let them get away with it.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the report are the comments from Gen. Stanley McChryrstal who champions this approach and believes it will bring us success.

Listen to the audio (4m55s).

image: Flickr/dvids//CC BY 2.0

When accepting his Nobel Peace Prize — a ludicrous, debased award also bestowed on murderers like Yasser Arafat — President Obama spoke about his foreign policy. Pervading his Nobel speech there was a peculiar undertone of contrition. If translated into words, it would go something like this: “Ideally, we would behave like Gandhi, never resorting to the use of force in asserting our rights . . . but alas, as commander-in-chief of the United States, I’m duty-bound to protect the lives of Americans, and that now means having to fight. Sorry about that.”

This apologetic drift flows naturally from the substance of Obama’s foreign policy.

A key point in the speech is that America must uphold — but has lately fallen short of — the standards set by “just war” doctrine. Summarizing this widely held view of morality in war, he explains that a war is justified only “when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Onkar Ghate took part in a BusinessWeek debate on whether Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest is relevant to today. There’s a stark contrast in the attitude of the two sides regarding the seriousness of the issue, and it’s heartening to see from the comments that that fact has not been lost on many readers.

Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Ghate’s argument:

If Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest is irrelevant today, then so is the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration gave sanction to selfishness: to the moral right to live your own life, to exercise your liberty, to pursue your happiness. No more taking orders from king or society. Each was free to live for himself.

You can read the rest here.