A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece discussing where our obligation to obey the government comes from, as a response to an article I’d read which was written by Mr. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  My thesis was that our obligation to obey the government comes from the fact that the government holds the legal monopoly on force, i.e. the government can kill you and get away with it.  Thus, when the government gives us an order, the people who obey are ultimately obeying out of fear; they’re looking out for their own rational self interest.

Mr. Hinkle read it and was gracious enough to respond.  He was also willing to allow me to continue this conversation in a public forum.

Mr. Hinkle’s response was quite thought provoking.  I’ve been mulling it over for weeks now, and I’ve finally decided how I’d like to respond.

He begins his questioning with the following statements and inquiries:

Of course it’s in our self-interest to do what the people with the guns tell us to do. But unless you’re a strict Randian (and I’m not, though I like a lot in Rand), defending your own self-interest is not, per se, a moral duty.

Is it in our self-interest to obey the mugger? Yes. Do we have a moral duty to do so? Certainly not. We should be able to agree that a correct ethical system would require people to refrain from initiating violence. If it then also requires people to submit to the initiation of violence, then it collapses into incoherence.

The start of the second paragraph, the question about our moral duty to obey a mugger, made me chuckle.  To those of us who see no difference between government’s taxation and armed robbery or slavery, that’s getting pretty down right revolutionary… 

His then asks about my thoughts on several specific examples:

What’s more, if self-interest is defined as mere self-preservation, then it argues against individual autonomy. Suppose I decide it’s in my self-interest to smoke, drink, and shoot heroin. OK for the government to stop me? Is it something more than survival? Do we have a moral duty to get regular exercise? To avoid trans-fats?

Our “natural instincts and basic hard-wiring,” as you put it, command us to propagate our DNA, too. Does that impose a moral obligation to have children? Does it impose a moral obligation to have just one, or to have as many as possible? What happens when the natural instincts and basic hard wiring bump up against the moral duty to respect the autonomy right of others? Surely the natural instincts should give way before the moral duty not to rape.

See why I had to think about those four paragraphs for weeks, and re-read seven books, before I came up with my response?

Paragraph 1: “…defending your own self-interest is not, per se, a moral duty.”

I’m a fan of Robert A Heinlein’s philosophy on moral duty and self interest (survival instinct):  It isn’t moral to make demands of a person that forces them to violate their self interest.  Moral duty and self interest are mutually supportive of one another, they are one and the same in any just society, and any system which pits the two against one another is doomed to failure.

This is a thought which has been around for a long time.

Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.  Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy.

Care must be taken that laws do not offend against nature.  Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws.

It is an immoral system which separates moral duty from the survival instinct as expressed through self interest.  The Laws of Man and the Natural Law must be in accordance, as observed by Rousseau in Letters Written From the Mountain.  Thus, socio-economic systems which subjugate the individuality of the citizens always fall into abject poverty and fail.  Men are not ants, nor bees.  They cannot exist in systems that try to change that reality.  They are not allowed by their genetics to NOT be men while trying to be something else.  Nature has already given species with the qualities of ants a chance to survive and thrive, and those species are the ants, not men.  Long-lived, stable governments are those which maximize the freedom of an individual to be an individual, for they most approximate the natural state of man sans government.

I refer you to Mr. Heinlein himself:

“No, my dear, you have cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one.  Man has no moral instinct.  He is not born with moral sense.  You were not born with it, I was not — and a puppy has none.  We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.  These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it.  What is moral sense?  It is an elaboration to survive.  The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it.  Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations.  This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.

“But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive.  Young lady, what you mis-called your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival.  Survival of your family, for example.  Of your children, when you have them.  Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale.  And so on up.  A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinctto survive — and no where else!”  — Robert A. Heinlein  Starship Troopers

I ask that you ponder for a moment the reason that we have civilization in the first place.

Humans are predatory.  Forward facing eyes for binocular vision.  Sharp, meat eating teeth.  The large brain that results from a protein rich diet.  We are built to kill.  Indeed, we became very, very good killers.  The best in the world, actually.  And we did it as individuals. 

If you have read Jared Diamond’s wonderful book Guns, Germs, and Steel, you’ll see how that fact forced human evolution.  Mankind was at the top of the food chain long, long before we began to domesticate grains and start civilizations.  If you think about human evolution for a moment, you’ll realize that men began banding together after they had become the top individual predator in their environmental niche and population pressures forced a change in hunting techniques.  In other words, we became so proficient at hunting individually in our natural niche, at catching the prey we could kill on our own, that our populations began to swell in size to the point where we had to switch to hunting prey which was bigger than we are in order to feed everyone, a step that required men to begin to work in teams.  This further increased the size of our populations, leading us to look for longer term means of producing food, the domestication of grains, and the settling of these new farmers into cities for protection and the birth of modern civilizations.

Thus, civilization is inherently moral, from a self interest worldview, because it is a tool we have developed to help us survive.  We can survive individually, but we have evolved and developed civilization because it increases the likelihood thateach and every individual in a large population will meet the minimum requirements for day to day survival; it helps the citizen exist long enough to pass on their genetic material, in accordance with Natural Law.  Civilization, from the local community all the way up to the Federal Government, is an expression of rational self interest.  You are choosing to yield some of your freedoms for the opportunity to exercise a plethora of freedoms and liberties in which you could not indulge without society.

I touched on this idea in one of my earlier posts on Arizona’s immigration law when I wrote:

Society exists for one reason. That reason is to increase the likelihood that each member of the society will survive. If we had better survival rates as loin-clothed hunter-gatherers than we did as members of a community and society, we’d have never evolved society in the first place. Coming together like this is NOT meant to be a suicide pact, a thought which is backed up by US Supreme Court case law in Terminiello v. Chicago:

“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” – Justice Robert H. Jackson

There is no liberty, no freedom, in anarchy.  This is a point I made in my very first post here on When Falls.

We also see this theory of civilization expressed in Adam Smith’s thoughts in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and in his theories on the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations.  In response to Hobbes’s assertion that the pursuit of self interest by everyone in society can only lead to hell on Earth, Mr. Smith offered up the idea that humans are quite capable of realizing that their own self interest can be fulfilled through the assistance we give to one another, that we can work towards our own self interested goals by helping others achieve their self interested goals.  The result of this theory when applied, the division of labor, is that each of us is allowed to help another satisfy their own individual goals, and thus have our own self interested goals satisfied beyond our ability to sate them were we toiling at the task of survival by ourselves.

All governments which thwart the natural course are unnatural and, to support themselves, are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.  — Adam Smith  Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith

Thus, when asked if I believe if you have a moral duty to defend your own self interest, I would say “Yes.”, even though I am not a strict Randian.  I say this because Ibelieve that self interest (the survival instinct) governs and gives birth to the ideas that moral systems of government consider to be “good”.  And because the terms we use to describe people who give up acting in pursuit of their own individual self interest are “slave” and/or “victim”, both of which are states of being which I’d desperately like to avoid experiencing. 

The society in which you live is a tool which you are using for the moral AND self interested purposes of increasing the chance that you, just like every other citizen, will survive and pass on their genetic material.  Therefore, laws, systems, and individual actions which prohibit another individual from achieving the maximum benefit of engaging in civilization are immoral because they ask that individual to forfeit their share of the liberties supposedly granted to each and every citizen equally, thus defeating the whole point of engaging in civilization in the first place.

 Paragraph 2:  “Is it in our self-interest to obey the mugger? Yes. Do we have a moral duty to do so? Certainly not.”

I would argue that we do have a moral obligation to defend our life, liberty, and property, and thus it is also in our self interest to fight off the mugger and not to obey them.

“Struggle up the scale” a bit, as Mr. Heinlein would say, and think about it this way:  Getting mugged by a lone gunman is, from a self interest standpoint, the same as a nation full of people suffering through an armed invasion.

If the US was invaded by an army, it wouldn’t have any choice but to defend itself, now would it?  That’s the “contract” of society: protection from threats of physical violence.  The most major step taken towards real, modern civilization was taken when farmers banded together to repel raiders, correct?  Just like every other species on Earth, the minute a society ceases to try to survive, it won’t.  It gets disciplined in Nature’s time honored tradition: elimination.

It is in the autonomous nation’s self interest to continue to exist autonomously, correct?  It is not in their self interest to will their own demise, to commit societal suicide, is it? 

One’s country must be defended, whether with glory or with shame; it must be defended anyhow.  — Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy.

In fact, upon reflection after reading Machiavelli’s words, how do we view suicide?  Is it considered a moral choice?  Even in cultures which practiced a form of seppuku, who really wanted to do it?  It was a fate reserved for failures, something to avoid.

“At least that miserable, rotten failure didn’t make someone else waste the time to kill his useless butt.”  Not exactly something you want chiseled into your headstone is it?

So a nation has a self interested obligation to fight off armed invaders, to fight for survival, and thus society has made it moral for a nation to do so.

I’d argue that the same applies to the individual being robbed by the lone gunman.  Think about it this way:

If everyone in America carried a side arm and tried to shoot anyone who attempted to rob them, and if the various levels of government made it their number one mission to capture and execute everyone who mugs another individual, how long do you think we’d have muggings in this country?  If, as a society, we responded to muggers in the same way we’d respond to armed invasion, mugging would quickly go away in the face of such combined might, since the mugger is operating individually instead of working as part of a coordinated effort with like minded individuals.

If it was common knowledge that trying to mug someone was as dangerous as trying to jump into one of the power line crews’ chipper-shredders, you’d get just about the same number of people trying to do both of them.  How many people do you know who will try to jump into a chipper shredder after watching them feed half a tree through it in about 2 seconds?

And that is the point of the law.  Laws and punishment exist where persuasion and respect are not enough to compel individuals to honor the unwritten social contract of mutual support for mutual survival.  We give the government the power of the gun specifically so that we can eliminate those individuals who choose to repeatedly violate the basic purposes of civilization by preying on their fellow citizens.

The first of all laws is to respect the laws: the severity of penalties is only a vain resource, invented by little minds in order to substitute terror for that respect which they have no means of attaining. —  Jean Jacques Rousseau A Discourse on Political Economy

Paragraph 3: “What’s more, if self-interest is defined as mere self-preservation, then it argues against individual autonomy. Suppose I decide it’s in my self-interest to smoke, drink, and shoot heroin. OK for the government to stop me? Is it something more than survival? Dowe have a moral duty to get regular exercise? To avoid trans-fats?”

I wish to add in the last part of paragraph 4 here, since it asks the same kind of question:

Paragraph 4B: “What happens when the natural instincts and basic hard wiring bump up against the moral duty to respect the autonomy right of others? Surely the natural instincts should give way before the moral duty not to rape.”

There are two ideas questioned here.

A) Autonomy

Let us examine the idea that parents take care of their children, becoming in some degree a slave to their children’s needs and forfeiting some measure of their own autonomy, because the survival of our children is the way by which we, as in our genetic material, survive.  I sacrifice my freedom to do with my finite amount of life as I wish in order that I may work and provide food, shelter, clothing, and the other necessities of life to my child because my child’s survival is the same as my survival, in terms of genetic material.  And isn’t that the ultimate proof of the theory that self interest and the survival instinct defines “moral”?  Examine society’s historical response to parents who do not sacrifice and take care of their children…

By helping my child meet her self interested goals of getting enough food, I am engaging in a symbiotic relationship and advancing my self interested goal of passing on my genes, a very Randian thought which fits with what I wrote in response to paragraph 1.  The people who do not do this, the parents who don’t take care of their kids and help them meet their self interested goals, are almost automatically and almost universally considered to be in the “wrong”.  This idea that we satisfy our own self interests by helping others satisfy their’s, and that everyone’s instinctive self interest is equally moral, is the very cornerstone of society and civilization, and it will probably prove to be impossible to set up a society where this does not occur, for who would join it and how could it exist if they were not assured of it’s benefit to them?

B) Government, Prohibition, Healthy Living, Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll

Here is an interesting thought.  Is it the government’s responsibility to prevent you from engaging in activities which society considers to be health risks?

Of course, I’d argue “No”, based on the idea that government which seeks to institute a system that is out of alignment in regards to the Natural Law is doomed to failure, but “Yes” in terms of our obligations to others, such as your children.

1) In nature, creatures are forced by their survival instinct to reproduce.  That’s about it.  The choice of lifestyles, adaptions, strategies, form, etc, these are all left up to the individual species itself, and to each individual of each species specifically.

A lion is more than welcome to try to live off nothing but grass and leaves, and the other lions will not try to stop it.  They will happily allow the lion to choose its own strategy for surviving and to experience the success, or failure, of its choice.  Nature leaves quite a bit of room for individual choices, and individual responsibility when it comes to dealing with the effects of those choices.

Where would giraffes be if that first short necked giraffe had been forced to abandon its attempts to get at leaves higher up the tree for fear it might sprain or break its neck in the attempt?

If you decide to smoke, drink, or shoot heroin, that’s your business, and as long as the costs are not passed on to the rest of society (get into a crash while drunk driving, using government subsidized health insurance, etc) the rest of society has no moral justification to try and halt your behavior.  Don’t forget that for there to be a term for “rational self interest” we must be trying to differentiate it from “irrationalself interest”.  A creature in Nature is allowed to operate either rationally or irrationally, as long as it is acting in what it perceives to be its own self interest.  This is the backbone of natural selection.

Indeed, the instances where the government has tried to prohibit the individual’s choice to drink, do drugs, and engage in prostitution have all been abject failures, have they not?  The War on Drugs hasn’t reduced either supply nor demand for these substances.  Prohibition didn’t make people stop drinking, it just created bootleggers and the mafia.  Prostitutes roam the streets of every major American city and post ads on websites like Craig’sList everyday.  The government has tried and tried to get people to cease what it views as destructive behavior, and has not succeeded in the least.

2) There is a “Yes” aspect to the question, however.  In society, we are engaged in the process of increasing the chance of survival for ourselves by actively supporting the ability of others to increase their chances of survival.  If your meth habit, or your violent, drunken rages, mean that those around you are put into immediate danger (and the key word is immediate), then the government has the responsibility to prevent you, and your decisions, from harming them.

If you are a meth addicted prostitute, that’s your business.  If you’re a meth addicted prostitute with ten different kids by fifteen different daddies who leaves her children at home alone for days on end while you wander the streets looking for your next fix, the government has the responsibility to step in and prevent harm from being done to the children who are not yet capable of fending for themselves.  In a just, moral society you are allowed to choose what your own diet, exercise schedule, and living standards should be for yourself, but not to make those decisions for others when they lead to immediate harm for the other, or a reduction in the other person’s ability to enjoy the maximum benefits of civilization themselves.

As I’ve pointed out earlier, society is not a suicide pact.  Children should not be immediately harmed because their parent makes bad choices which threaten their lives.  It is in this regard which we are different than the animals.

This idea is proven in the success of politicians to get legislation passed by using the emotional plea of “It’s for the children!  Think of the children!”.  Whether or not you agree with their tactics, you must admit that they work.  They work because people realize that your children are your means of survival, in a natural sense, and that actions which endanger them are neither looking out for your own self interest, nor theirs, thus violating every reason for the existence of society and are immoral.

But as you may have noticed, I stress the phrases “immediate danger” or “immediate harm”.  Some actions which you take may eventually have a negative impact the lifestyles of your children, but they are not immoral.  For example, the people who saw significant chunks of their 401ks vanish when the stock market fell in 2008 were not immoral for investing in the stock market because their “earnings” vanished.  They thought they were doing what was correct, that they were providing for their children (by trying to provide an inheritance, or not becoming a fiscal burden on their kids), but circumstances and the situation changed rapidly. 

This has been the case through out Earth’s history.  Volcanoes erupt, ice ages set in, plagues of locusts eat everything and starve the other animals, these sorts of “dangers and harms” are natural, normal risks of existence over which you have no control.  It cannot be immoral if there is no choice.

3) We must also keep in mind the inability of humans to know the truth of anything non-mathematical when we discuss the idea of government banning, or promoting, things based on their ability to impact your survival.  For many years, everyone KNEW that the Earth was flat.  For many years, everyone KNEW that blood letting would allow the evil spirits inside of you to escape, curing your illness.

In fact, when you look at human history you’ll find that just about everything we have ever built a world wide consensus on has turned out to be false.  Often it is completely and utterly wrong.  With such a lesson into the fallibility of mankind when thinking he knows the way something MUST be staring us right in the face, how can we justify our responses to transfat, nicotine, or eggs, all of which are legal substances that have been considered to negatively impact health?

For a group of people to think that they know what is good for you, what is bad for you, and to pass laws trying to regulate those behaviors amongst the citizens, is absolute foolishness.  Look at eggs again.  How many times have we been told “They’re good for you!”, then a year later, “They’re bad for you!” before flipping around again in the following third year?  No, the only time I’d trust humans to determine what is “bad” for you are the instances where your actions lead to near term death, such as murder, or starving someone.

While they have produced a world I’d much rather live in than that of our Stone Age ancestors, having modern science and highly educated minds doesn’t guarantee that we’ve got all the right answers.  The only difference between you and an “expert” like a PhD is that the PhD has read more books than you have; the only difference between an American citizen and an American politician is that the politician won a popularity contest.

Paragraph 4:  “Our “natural instincts and basic hard-wiring,” as you put it, command us to propagate our DNA, too. Does that impose a moral obligation to have children? Does it impose a moral obligation to have just one, or to have as many as possible? .”

Yes, I believe we do have an obligation to have children, but I also think that the number is dependent upon the individual.

And the “why” to my response will certainly cement my reputation as a complete geek.

As we’ve explored already, population pressures have forced the bulk of the change and evolution in human society.  As our ability to hunt became more refined, as we became better, more efficient predators, we had to come together to hunt progressively larger and larger game with which to feed the swelling population, thus birthing government.

Over time we had to master farming through the harnessing of the power of grains to provide large quantities of storable food.  This put an end to nomadic tribes and gave birth to cities and stable civilization.  The division of labor which resulted from our ability to feed large numbers of people gave birth to technological advancement and the modern world.

All of human’s social evolution has occurred in response to the needs of a growing population.  Populations which cease to have children will begin to fade away and eventually vanish in the face of increased competition from species which continue to grow, expand, and fight for survival.

But humans, of all the animals on Earth, have an advantage.  We can “know” the future, and show proof of our knowledge by looking into the past.

We know that the Earth has suffered massive extinction periods in the past, periods where vast swaths of the species on Earth have suddenly died.  The causes of these mass extinctions have varied, from the onset of ice ages, disease and plague, or from celestial impacts, but the inescapable truth is that we “know” that these events happen, and that they affect all the populations on the entire globe.  We have every reason to conclude that these events could happen again.

In fact, it’s almost a mathematical certainty that they will.

What is the solution to humanity’s problem of surviving the next mass extinction event that Earth experiences?  Not being on Earth.

In the long term, humanity’s chances of survival are non-existent if we stay on Earth.  We’re violating the basic idiom against keeping all of our eggs in one basket.  We must spread out to ensure long term survival.

What will this require?  We’ll need ships.  They’ll have to be massive ships capable of supporting a self sustaining biosphere and multiple generations of people if we don’t develop some form of cryogenesis or faster than light travel, but no matter which path we pursue as we try to leave the planet, we’re going to have to have major technological advances in order to accomplish the task.

And since all of our major technological advancements have resulted from the pressures of expanding populations, it would make no sense to pursue policies which call for zero population growth, or negative population growth.  Any idea which proposes that we need to reduce the number of men living on the planet is calling for the eventual extinction of the species, and is essentially suicidal.

Thus, given our ability to “know” what the future holds, it would be immoral not to increase the population and help provide for the catalyst which sparks human invention and ingenuity, correct?  From that standpoint, a person who doesn’t at least replace themselves is in effect harming the society around them and the race’s chances of survival over the long term.  That would qualify as “immoral” in my book.

 Again, this idea that we’re morally obligated to have children can be backed up in nature.  The creatures which fail to reproduce are considered failures by Nature, and eliminated through selection.  This would be the epitome of immoral by the only law which counts in the jungle, and since we’ve already seen that human law and society, if it is to be successful, must emulate the Natural Law, we should conclude that the same holds true for human cultures.

But there are no set standards or limits on the number of off spring a creature produces.  Some critters have 10 kids at a shot, some have only a couple.  Insects lay hundreds of thousands of eggs, cows have a single calf.  Thus far, Nature has not ruled that either of these survival strategies are “immoral” since the species which have multiple off spring, and the species which do not, are both found to be thriving in the world we inhabit today.

Conclusion

I know this has been a long response, and if you’re reading this paragraph, I thank you for sticking around this long.  I have written this response over the course of several weeks, and now that I’m finished, I find that I’ve produced a monstrosity which prints out to 15 pages.  I had debated whether or not to break this post up into two or three separate posts, but I’ve decided to leave it together, in its entirety.  Thus, I’m going to try to summarize my arguments here.

I feel that all moral behavior is based on the survival instinct common to all creatures.  For something to be moral, it must support the inviolate instinct a creature has to perpetuate its own genetic survival.  Anything which requires a human being to act against their own survival instinct is, viewed through the lens of natural law, immoral.

This view holds true all the way up the scale of human society.  It is immoral for parents to cease to protect and nurture their children.  It is immoral for a nation or society to refuse to fight for their own survival when attacked, for the purpose of repelling attacks is the reason we evolved human society in the first place.  It is immoral for people to choose to ignore this.  It is immoral if you choose NOT to fight back against the muggers and rapists. 

Society is based on the idea that we can each achieve our own self interest more efficiently by banding together and helping someone else achieve their own self interests.  Any action which costs another human in your society the equal chance at survival and the full benefits of civilization is considered immoral.

But there are limits, different survival strategies, recognized by nature, which should also be recognized by human governments.  The government which tries to tell you how you must live your life in terms of day-to-day survival, such as listing what you may or may not eat or telling you how many children you are allowed to produce, is immoral.  Nature doesn’t dictate to its creatures anything except that they must fight for survival. 

Humans shouldn’t either.

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