We are promised new clarity today about the circumstances in which the DPP will seek to prosecute those who assist others in committing suicide. So perhaps a few thoughts about this immensely difficult topic would be timely.

My own feeling about the whole debate is one of discomfort and unease. For a start, I am unhappy with the usual glib rhetoric of “the right to die”. Perhaps this familiar slogan would never have emerged in the first place, had it not been for the assonance of “right” and “die”. In any event, both the “right” bit and the “die” bit of the slogan seem to me to cover over a multitude of pre-empted questions that need to be taken more slowly and carefully.

The trouble with the ”right” bit is that talking about “the right to die” means assuming that there is such a right. But that’s precisely what’s in question: whether we are entitled to do the kinds of things advocated by proponents of this alleged right. There is a further question, too, whether this putative entitlement is best described as a right rather than, say, a permission.

As for the “die” bit. Strictly speaking, the absurdity of talking about a right to die ought to be obvious. Is there a right to be a mammal, or to have a pancreas? No: you are a mammal anyway, and you have a pancreas anyway. And you will die anyway. Rights don’t come into it!

The misleadingly-labelled “right to die debate” is not really about dying at all. It is about killing: either killing yourself, or killing someone else. Or if not about killing, exactly, it is certainly about taking steps to make sure that someone else dies: often steps that, in another context, would be more than enough to bring about a conviction for murder.

Well, what about these steps? Are they ever morally permissible, and should they be permitted by the law? In short, should suicide and assisted suicide be allowed (at least in practice)?

I doubt it can plausibly be claimed that there are absolutely no circumstances in which killing yourself might be the right thing to do.  If you are in a Gestapo jail, and know for certain that you are going to be interrogated with torture and then killed; and that when tortured you will inevitably talk and betray many others to terrible deaths; and if you happen to have a cyanide pill with you;– under these circumstances, there certainly seems to be a good case for taking that pill. Or if you have a second pill, and the prisoner next to you is in the very same case as you, again there seems to be a good case for persuading him to take his cyanide pill as well.

So the point is certainly not that there are no imaginable cases where it might be morally permissible to commit suicide myself, or get someone else to. The question is whether the cases in which suicides and assisted suicides are likely to happen under the new guidelines are circumstances where they will be morally permissible, or should be legally permissible.

I very much hope that the new guidelines will specifically exclude some of the likeliest cases, as where the care of an old, ill person is costing her relatives a great deal of money and trouble, or where there is a will to be fought for, or where a terminally ill person has no close family and so could be seen, if you were callous enough, merely as a burden on the public purse. These are cases where euthanasia or suicide is likely to be a tempting option, and they are surely cases where no one will think it is a morally permissible one. If the new guidelines don’t rule out killing in cases like those, then many people besides me will feel deeply uneasy with that.

But what about the cases that the guidelines won’t rule out? Suppose I am terminally ill and in a lot of pain; my loving family don’t want me to die, but (my doctor tells me) I should regard myself as free to make my own decision about whether to kill myself, or ask someone else to kill me. Is there anything morally wrong with this?

One good way to answer this is to look at the consequences. What if we get a society where old, ill people are expected to take themselves off rather than allowing themselves to become a nuisance? If we decide to let suicide and assisted suicide become a normal part of society, that seems to me not only a possible development, but a likely one. There are already philosophers who talk with a zeal that I confess I find rather distasteful about “the right time to die”. How would you like to be the only ill octogenarian that your family knows who refuses to have himself put down?

Consequences are important to many moral issues. To this one, I think they are decisive on their own: we shouldn’t allow suicide or assisted suicide because of these easily foreseeable bad consequences. But there might be other things to think about too, such as the intrinsic moral properties of suicide and assisted suicide. Is there, in general, anything intrinsically wrong with such actions?

 I think the answer to that depends on our deeper views about what life is all about. To put it very crudely, you can see life as a succession of opportunities to have fun: take away the opportunities, and you take away the point of life. But you can also see life, anyone’s life, as something of unconditional and non-negotiable value: not just a basis for chances to have fun, but something deserving reverence in its own right.

It is because religious people tend to take the second view that opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide is routinely described– by the BBC, for example– as necessarily religiously motivated. It should be obvious that this description is just wrong. Thinking that life is of unconditional value is a view which can have religious roots, but by no means has to.

If you do think that life has unconditional value, then you are likely to think– again, the step is not inevitable, as Ronald Dworkin shows in Life’s Dominion– that this unconditional value should be hedged round with absolute or near-absolute prohibitions: in particular, with a prohibition on killing, including on killing yourself. What you can say to the terminally ill and pain-ridden patient is, then, exactly what doctors always have said, until just recently. This is that for such a patient pain-relief is fine, even up to the level where pain-relief is life-threatening. On the other hand, taking any sort of steps to kill the patient is simply not on the agenda, and absolutely should not be allowed to get on the agenda.

Why wouldn’t this, the traditional response, be a fully acceptable answer to the question about assisted suicide and suicide? Well, many people would reply, first of all because pain-relief leads to confusion, and many want to die lucid. Which is an important consideration, but not one that the traditional response simply can’t accommodate: it is possible to withdraw pain-relief, though of course the result of that is the return of the pain. But also, these people would add, because it ought to be our choice how we die, and some people choose to die by killing themselves rather than by waiting for “natural causes”.

The first thing to note about this response is that it begs the question. Saying that “it ought to be our choice how we die” only makes sense if you mean “it ought to be our choice how we die within the limits of what is morally acceptable“. But the whole issue is, precisely, whether suicide and assisted suicide are within those limits. And if your basic view about the value of life that it is non-negotiable and unconditional, and doesn’t depend on whether your life is fun or not, then you are likely to doubt that they are within the moral limits. (A similar remark applies to that other familiar slogan, “dying with dignity”. Dignity is, 0bviously, a morally-loaded concept. So what counts as real dignity depends at least in part on antecedent facts about what is morally permissible.)

 There is a further and deeper question about the thought “it ought to be our choice how we die”, when that thought is used to motivate arguments for permitting suicide and assisted suicide. The question is: what is the basic view of the value of life that lies behind this thought?

In practice, I find the answer to this question very hard to discern. Despite Dworkin’s best efforts, I do not really see how his repeated affirmations of the basic and unconditional value of life ground his own assent to the idea that suicide and assisted suicide are quite widely permissible. In the debate at large, what often seems to drive such assent is just the idea that I mentioned above: the idea– found for example in Hume’s well known essay “Of suicide”– that, to put it roughly, life is valuable because it is a series of opportunities for fun, and that when it stops giving us such opportunities, then it ceases to have value.

The trouble with this idea can be summed up in two words. It’s shallow.

Green Templeton Lectures 2009

‘Addicted to Big Pharma? Reconciling business, medical and ethical needs’

A series of four lectures exploring the pharmaceutical industry past, present and future.

All lectures take place at 6pm in the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St Anthony’s College.

Tuesday 5 May

The origin and evolution of the pharmaceutical industry
Speaker: Tilli Tansey, Professor of History of Modern Medical Sciences, University College London
Click here for lecture abstract
Tuesday 12 May

Pharmaceutical companies, government and society
Speaker: Sir Michael Rawlins, Chairman, National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence
Respondent: Chris Brinsmead, President of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI)
Click here for lecture abstract
Tuesday 2 June

Pharmaceutical companies, global healthcare needs and profits
Speaker: Dr Patrick Vallance, Head of Drug Discovery, GlaxoSmithKline
Respondent Philip Bloomer, Director of Campaigns and Policy, Oxfam
Click here for lecture abstract

Tuesday 9 June

Is there a healthy future for Big Pharma?
Speaker: Dr John Patterson, former Executive Director, Development, AstraZeneca
Respondent: Sophia Tickell, Director, PharmaFutures
Click here for lecture abstract

Download Green Templeton Lectures 2009 summary sheet

        As part of new government legislation, it will be mandatory before the end of the year to register all British children under 18 on a national data base called Contact Point.
        
        Some parents will already have been contacted by schools for details of their children (this will include addresses, phone numbers, parents’ mobiles, details of schools, GPs, social workers and support services, contact with professionals including dyslexia tutors, music teachers etc). 
        
        There are many people concerned over the security of this data base (see Times March 24th for excellent account of problems uncovered in areas where Contact Point is being piloted). The Joseph Rowntree Trust has described Contact Point as “Fundamentally flawed.”
        
        Not only is there the possibility of losing information, there is
concern that between 350,000 and 500,000 children’s service workers will have access to this database. There is also the possibility of data being wrongly inputted. The fact that the children of celebrities are exempt tells something about the lack of faith in Contact Point’s security.
        
        Below is a web link to sign up to an official petition to abolish
Contact Point. Please send on to other parents, class lists etc because to make any impact more than 100,000 signatures are needed.
       
        http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Contact-Point
<http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Contact-Point>

The Open University Ethics Centre Public Lectures 2009

Integrity in Public Life

Further inquiries to t.chappell@open.ac.uk

…And if you’re asking yourself “Hang on, isn’t Great St Bart’s the church where Duck Face clonks Hugh Grant in Four Weddings?”, the answer is of course “Yes.”  

It seems that in Britain regime fatigue sets in irreversibly after about ten years of any government: everything the government and its ministers do turns to custard pie in their hands. The only cure is the one that John Major wisely prescribed for himself: “When the curtain has fallen, it is time to leave the stage.”

But this blog, as you its readers will be well aware, is very far from dealing in judgementalism as its stock in trade. Still less, perish the thought, in schadenfreude. And in any case the ancient, austere, and august office of Home Secretary–stern and rigorous guardian of a nation’s moral fibre–is well able to weather such passing squalls as an occupant who (albeit inadvertently) claims on her parliamentary expenses account for a husband to watch cheap porn movies on a pay-per-view basis. Jacqui Smith was not personally involved in, and did not sanction, her husband’s solitary viewings. Naturally, then, there will be no call here for Jacqui Smith’s head to roll just over that. 

Such events are not a resigning matter for her–not in themselves. In themselves, such events merely betray her and others like her on the Labour front bench as seedy, incompetent, and more than ready to form Her Majesty’s next loyal opposition.

What is more unsettling is the wider context of very dubious propriety about expenses against which this sorry little episode has played out. How is it possible for Parliament to retain any kind of moral or political authority when its own rules about expenses are so profligate with public money? Never in the field of human auditing was so much claimed by so many with so little real justification. 

And when our law-makers are not busy filing exorbitant expenses claims, or trying to ensure those claims never reach public scrutiny, they are busy passing laws which widen still further their already swollen entitlement to moralise over and intrude into the private affairs of ”their” citizenry. Given Jacqui Smith’s own place in the vanguard of Britain’s Virtue Police, it is not hard to see a certain irony in what is now happening.

The only way for MPs to reclaim public confidence in this matter has been widely advertised, and it’s time, I think, it was tried. They should be given a one-off compensatory 20% pay rise, and then should learn to live by the same sort of expenses rules, and the same sort of penalties for improper claims, that other public-sector employees have always had to live by. Otherwise, what really separates them morally speaking from Sir Fred Goodwin?

Sir Michael Wright, the Coroner in the inquest on the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, has ruled that the Jury may not bring in a verdict of unlawful killing. His reason is, according to the BBC news website, that such a verdict would imply that the officers who killed de Menezes were guilty of a serious crime such as murder or manslaughter.

I find Sir Michael’s reasoning a touch puzzling. Here is a definition of Manslaughter that I found on the internet. (It could be wrong, of course.)

“MANSLAUGHTER – The unlawful killing of a human being without malice or premeditation, either express or implied; distinguished from murder, which requires malicious intent.
The distinction between manslaughter and murder consists in the following: In the former, though the act which occasions the death be unlawful, or likely to be attended with bodily mischief, yet the malice, either express or implied, which is the very essence of murder, is presumed to be wanting in manslaughter.
It also differs from murder in this, that there can be no accessories before the fact, there having been no time for premeditation. Manslaugbter is voluntary, when it happens upon a sudden heat; or involuntary, when it takes place in the commission of some unlawful act. The cases of manslaughter may be classed as follows those which take place in consequence of: 1. Provocation. 2. Mutual combat. 3. Resistance to public officers, etc. 4. Killing in the prosecution of an unlawful or wanton act. 5. Killing in the prosecution of a lawful act, improperly performed, or performed without lawful authority.
The provocation which reduces the killing from murder to manslaughter is an answer to the presumption of malice which the law raises in every case of homicide; it is therefore no answer when express malice is proved and to be available the provocation must have been reasonable and recent, for no words or slight provocation will be sufficient, and if the party has had time to cool, malice will be inferred.
In cases of mutual combat, it is generally manslaughter only when one of the parties is killed. When death ensues from duelling the rule is different, and such killing is murder.
The killing of an officer by resistance to him while acting under lawful authority is murder; but if the officer be acting under a void or illegal authority, or out of his jurisdiction, the killing is manslaughter, or excusable homicide, according to the circumstances of the case.
Killing a person while doing an act of mere wantonness, is manslaughter as, if a person throws down stones in a coal-pit, by which a man is killed, although the offender was only a trespasser.
When death ensues from the performance of a lawful act, it may, in consequence of the negligence of the offender, amount to manslaughter. For instance, if the death has been occasioned by negligent driving. Again, when death ensues, from the gross negligence of a medical or surgical practitioner, it is manslaughter.”

 To a legally untrained eye such as my own, it seems that what was done to Mr de Menezes fits exactly the first disjunction of the fifth clause of the fourth paragraph above: “Killing in the prosecution of a lawful act, improperly performed”.

Indeed I can’t see how Mr de Menezes’ killing could fail to fit this definition. One might wonder whether the killing of Mr de Menezes was a lawful act in the first place. It does not seem right to me to say simply that the police officers made an unavoidable mistake about his identity and intentions under extreme operational pressure. For one thing, the mistake was not apparently unavoidable, but a direct result of the police’ mishandling the operation in basic ways. For another thing (as I pointed out in a previous post, “How to kill somebody and get away with it”), it is arguable that the police officers’ actions in killing Mr de Menezes would have been an unlawfully disproportionate response even if Mr de Menezes had been who they thought he was: they had had plenty of chances in the preceding hour or so to get his identity straight, and/ or to arrest him peacefully in a safer place than a Tube carriage.

But suppose we agree that the shooting was a lawful act. Still no one, I take it, thinks that it was a lawful act properly performed. It has been remarkably hard to get anyone, individual or institutional, to accept any sort of culpabaility for what happened to Mr de Menezes, beyond a rather grudging acceptance from the Met that their actions did not accord with health and safety regulations. But I don’t think anyone disputes that something went seriously wrong with the operation, in a way that should not have happened and could easily have been prevented.

That certainly looks to me like “killing in the prosecution of a lawful act, improperly performed”.  I look forward to hearing from Sir Michael Wright’s Coroner’s report the exact reasons why I have a mistaken impression about this.

In the mean time: if you are a commuter on the London Underground in a time of anxiety about terrorists, and you happen to be of darkish appearance, then be afraid; be very afraid. There is, apparently, a distinct possibility at any time of your being killed out of hand by a police operation that goes wrong, and no one ever being held accountable for it in any serious way. It might be as well to make your will now– and to put an advance directive in it to your family, not to put themselves to the time and trouble of trying to right the wrong if you are thus killed.

  “My Country ‘tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty, of Thee I sing”? 

Fantasy?

Anheuser W. “Tad” Bush, the President of the United States, was having a bad day.  His latest veto had been overturned, the economy was still in a slump, and his ratings were way down.  But that was nothing compared to the problem on his desk right now.  It was a doozy, and as usual the French were to blame.  Even in the year 2076, with its stupendous technology and permanent Republican majority, this problem wasn’t going to go away.  It had nowhere to go.  Here it was, the eve of the American Tercentennial, and America had no place to celebrate it, because the last remaining piece of American soil had been sold off!  How could this have happened?  How would history remember him?

Oh, his administration had enjoyed some glorious moments, especially the constitutional amendments:  restoring the death-penalty nationwide, banning flag-burning, banning same-sex marriage, banning progressive income tax, and pulling the US out of the UN.  These were the crowning achievements of the Conservative Permanent Revolution or “CPR” as it had become known.  (“America is dying!  It needs CPR!” read a popular bumper sticker.)  But there was no need to be vain:  these achievements had, after all, been built on those of earlier administrations, including those of his grandfather.  First, there’d been the deregulation of industry, banking and commerce.   Next, there’d been the privatization of all public schools.  Then those wasteful and inefficient national parks had been sold off to various oil companies, paper companies, mining companies and the Disney Corporation.  Then the American military had been outsourced to a private consortium of Blackwater and Sears (with their popular line of economical “Craftsman” tanks)  Finally, all remaining federal buildings and land had been sold off to a conglomerate of Halliburton and McDonalds, and leased back at surprisingly affordable rates!  Big government had finally been eradicated, all externalities were internalized, all property rights were defined, assigned and protected, and American taxpayers would never again be forced to waste their hard-earned dollars on crap that nobody wanted. 

The problem came, as these things so often do, during an economic downturn, when Blackwater, Sears, Disney et al, were bought out by bigger companies.  Foreign companies.  And those foreign companies, in turn, were either bought out or forcibly appropriated by foreign governments, which is how France came to own Washington, D.C., and which is how, when President Bush applied for a permit for a Tercentennial fireworks display on the Mall, he was told politely by the French (who now owned the Mall) that they were – désolés – unable to approve such a request — unless they received a large security deposit in advance.  The extortionists!  What was he supposed to do?  Make do with setting off bottle rockets in the basement of the White House?! (or “Sav-Mart Whitehouse”, to give it its full name)

In the twentieth century, of course, this would have been unimaginable.  Back then, everybody accepted the idea that when a person or a corporation owned a piece of property it was part of America and when you sold that piece of property, it remained part of America.  But in 2020, the “Smart & Final Supreme Court” had in a landmark 5-4 decision clearly seen such restrictions for what they were and struck them down—unreasonable interference with the rights of buyer and seller to use and dispose of private property as they saw fit.  “Dang it”, Chief Justice Track Palin had memorably argued in the majority opinion, “I don’t want to buy any property from any gol’ dang Russians, but suppose I did?  If they really own their land, why can’t they gol’ dang sell it to me?  And if I really own my land, then why can’t I sell it to them?”  His argument had seemed unanswerable. 

When the going was good, this was not a problem, and Americans had snapped up parts of other countries for a song.  But now the going was not so good, and every last bit of America had been sold off at fire-sale prices to greedy bargain-hunters around the world.  And these sales were not the only reason the territory of the United States had shrunk.  It had already shrunk a lot, for other reasons:

· There was the negotiated secession of Pacifica, the thin strip of land running up the west coast, from southern California to northern Washington, populated mainly by tree-huggers, liberals and weirdoes.  It had been painful to lose the naval base at San Diego, but even that was a small price to pay for a permanent Republican majority.

· Then there was the five thousand square miles of coastal Florida they had lost to rising sea levels.  Reputable scientists at the “Exxon National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration” still disputed whether this was due to fossil fuel consumption, but no one disputed that Miami was now underwater.

· And there was the 100,000 square miles of northern Alaska (or “New Iran”, as it was now known) that the US had been forced to cede to Tehran as reparation after the disastrous third Gulf War.

· And let’s not forget the “Gadsden Re-purchase” of 2053, in which Mexico bought back 30,000 square miles of waste-land in southern Arizona and New Mexico they had sold to the US two hundred years earlier.  The Mexicans had paid good money, but the joke was on them.  They thought they were getting oil fields and copper mines, but all they got was Tucson!  Ha!

So America had lost a lot of land, but they had always thought there was more where that came from.  The problem was, they had now lost their last bit of land.  And to the French, of all people! 

President Bush drained his “Oval Office Special” (black coffee, bourbon and Alka-seltzer), got out his official government checkbook and started to write:  “Pay to the Order of the Republic of France”….

Reality?

The fantasy scenario is meant to illustrate a problem for a kind of conservatism.  The “conservatism” we shall consider is not so much a monolithic political philosophy as a tendency in modern politics, especially American politics.[1]  It is the tendency to combine distrust of big government, acceptance of traditional moral and religious values, and especially patriotic nationalism and libertarian capitalism.  One need not, logically speaking, buy the whole package – some people don’t – but in the current political climate, these positions and commitments seem to come together.  The problem is that they do not harmonize perfectly.  This is hardly a new thought:  it has often been noticed that libertarian capitalism and traditional morality conflict over issues such as the legalization of prostitution or cannabis.  It is less often noticed, however, that libertarian capitalism and patriotic nationalism conflict – and this is precisely what our scenario illustrates.[2]

What the problem Is

In our scenario, the free operation of the market destroys the United States of America.  That is, the thing that the Libertarian loves – free, unregulated market activity – leads to the destruction of what the American patriot loves – a strong, independent America — or if not its destruction, its disembodiment (more on this later).  Moreover, this outcome is not a fluke:  its possibility follows directly from the inner logic of libertarian capitalism (hereafter just “libertarianism”) and patriotic nationalism (hereafter just “patriotism”).  To see this, however, we need to characterize these two positions.

As a political ideal, libertarianism is the commitment to individual liberty as the fundamental political value and to those practical and legal arrangements in which individual liberty can be enjoyed to the greatest possible extent, equally by all.  As one libertarian puts it, it is the belief that “…every being has the right to act in accordance with his own choices, unless those actions infringe on the equal liberty of other human beings to act in accordance with their choices”.[3]  Typically, these practical arrangements include minimal government, minimal provision of public welfare, no paternalistic regulation, deregulation generally (especially of banking and commerce), and the extension of the free market to most areas of human life.  As noted, libertarianism typically includes a commitment to individual rights, where these rights are understood negatively, as rights not to be interfered with in various ways.  Some libertarians follow a sort of consequentialist model, positing liberty (defined as “the state of being unconstrained by other persons from doing what one wants to do”) as a basic value to maximized, and then conceive of rights along rule consequentialist lines as codifying the best way to maximize the basic value of liberty.[4]  Other libertarians follow a deontological model, on which rights are taken as basic side-constraints, and liberty is defined as “the state of being unconstrained by other persons from doing what one has a right to do”).  Either way, libertarians are for liberty and rights and opposed to anything that would restrict them.

What we are calling patriotism is a familiar idea, but it is harder to define than libertarianism.  It is not a mere liking for the place one happens to live – a well-heeled German retiree who enjoys living at Big Sur is not eo ipso an American patriot — nor is it necessarily the jingoistic belief that one’s own nation is the best, though doubtless some patriotic nationalists think so.  It is rather some combination of the following:

1. a love for one’s country and what it stands for;
2. a sense of one’s identity as partly constituted in relation to one’s country;
3. a belief that the ties of citizenship have a special importance, such that one has rights, duties, claims and privileges in respect of one’s fellow citizens that one does not have toward just every other human;
4. a willingness to preserve or defend one’s country, even at cost to oneself.

The practical manifestations of patriotic nationalism (in an American context) typically include, for example:

• insistence on English as an official language;
• support for strong borders and restrictions on immigration;
• support for a strong police force and national defense;
• the reinforcement of shared values (by, e.g., the recitation of the pledge of the allegiance) and the protection of shared national symbols (such as the flag);
• unilateralism and exceptionalism in international affairs.

How the Problem Arises:

These characterizations of Libertarianism and Patriotism should help us to see how the thing that the libertarian loves could destroy what the patriot loves.  The libertarian loves free activity, including free economic activity:  the production, exchange and consumption of goods and services (as long as this does not infringe on the equal liberty of other human beings to act in accordance with their choices).  Such activity is not free when limited by factors other than those accepted by the parties involved, so thorough-going libertarians will not like restrictions on what they may do with a piece of land (if they really own it) any more than they like zoning restrictions limiting what they may do with a house (if they really own it).  Similarly, libertarians will not like restrictions on the parties to whom they can sell my land any more than they like restrictions on the parties to whom they can sell alcohol, tobacco and firearms.  The libertarian may regard this latter point as a corollary to Nozick’s theory of just holdings according to which,

…the following inductive definition would [in a just world] exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings:

1.  A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

2.  A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.

3.  No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2;

and “a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution”.[5]

That is, the libertarian will say that, if I acquire my American property justly and transfer it justly, then the resulting holding, whatever it is, will be just, too.  But the patriot will say that my selling my piece of America to the nation of France is an outrage, that it destroys or diminishes the country she loves.  It is not easy to unpack this thought with Nozickean formal precision, as patriotism is often more of an attitude or posture than a philosophical position on a par with libertarianism.  Even so, it seems to entail some positive judgments about what is or is not permissible so in this respect it resembles a ethical or political position and has some philosophical beliefs at its core.

We can begin to uncover these philosophical beliefs by asking what would be wrong, from the patriot’s perspective, with my selling my personal property , say, France.  Let us consider some possible answers:

1.  “That would be to destroy America, and that can’t be right!”

Reply to (1):  But this objection can’t be quite right, either.  For one thing, it isn’t obviously always wrong to destroy a nation, i.e., to cause it to go out of existence:  it may be sad, but it isn’t necessarily wrong.  Kant, e.g., famously considers the case of “a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members- as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world”.  He makes no objection to such a move; he merely insists that “the last murderer lying in the prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out”![6]  More importantly, even if it were wrong to destroy a nation, selling its land wouldn’t necessarily amount to destroying it.  If the piece of land I’m selling is not the last remaining piece of American land, then clearly I haven’t destroyed America.  And even if it is the last remaining American land, I haven’t destroyed America by selling it.  After all, in our scenario, the American government and people still exist, so the nation still exists, they just happen not to own the land they live on.  They haven’t been destroyed any more than a family is destroyed when they sell the family home and then rent it back.

2.  “But that makes America smaller, and that can’t be right!”

Reply to (2):  Why should the patriot think it must always be wrong to make her country smaller?  Surely, not just because it follows from the general claim that it is wrong to change the size of a country at all.  Most patriots do not mind when their countries extend their borders and become larger, so clearly they seem nothing wrong with change in size per se.[7]  No one would say that, when Mexico sold what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico to the US in 1865 or Russia sold what is now Alaska to the US in 1867, those sales were morally wrong, even if they were inadvisable.  (And they may not even have been inadvisable if those nations needed the money more than wanted the land.[8])

3.  “OK, size per se doesn’t matter. What does matter is the strength and health of a country, and selling America’s land tends as a matter of fact to weaken or diminish America, and that can’t be right!”

Reply to (3):  This makes more sense, but even this cannot be the basis of a legitimate patriotic objection to the sale of American land to a foreign power.  As noted above, the loss of land to a foreign power does not necessarily harm or weaken a country – if we get a good price for it or if the loss of land is otherwise politically expedient (as in the case of “Pacifica” in our fantasy scenario).  Moreover, such a transfer might in any case be necessary to right a wrong (as in the case of war reparations in our scenario); And we might think that losing some land was worth it, if that was the price we willingly paid for, e.g., our preferred levels of energy consumption (as in the case of the Florida coast in our scenario).

So far, we have been struggling to articulate the patriot’s objection in terms of (a) or (d); perhaps we should try another tack, and to articulate the patriot’s objection in terms of (c), the effect on one’s fellow citizens.  That is, perhaps we should consider

4.  “In selling the last piece of America, we have seriously harmed, or violated the rights of, our fellow citizens (by bringing it about that none of them now lives in the sovereign territory of the United State), and that can’t be right!”

Reply to (4):  Again, this is not the basis of a sound patriotic objection to the sale of American land.  For one thing, sale does not necessarily make the American occupants of that land substantially worse off:  that depends on how the French treat them!  In fact, if they qualify as resident aliens for French health care, etc, their quality of life may be substantially improved!  And what rights have been violated?  None of the rights that conservatives – or at least libertarian conservatives – tend to favor has been violated:  rights to life, liberty and property, negatively construed.  Nor have they lost their citizenship.  They remain full citizens of the United States of America; they simply happen to live abroad, in one of the overseas départements of France.  And what other right could have been affected in such a scenario?  The right to live in a country of a certain size and certain shape?  But it is absurd to think that anyone has such a right!  The right to live wherever one pleases?  Again, no conservative is going to support that.

Around now, the patriot may suggest that we haven’t managed to put our finger on the problem, because we have been looking in the wrong direction or, rather, at the wrong level.  We have been looking at certain abstract action-types and asking the artificial question whether it is ever permissible that such actions be done.  Framing the question in such terms, however, obscures who it is that is doing such things, and for the patriot, in this context, this is crucial.  From the patriot’s point of view, the problem is not with those action types in the abstract, it is with those action types when done by private individuals (or companies).  That is, the objection becomes:

5.  “In selling the last piece of America, we have done something that individual private citizens are not in a position to do!” 

Whether or not it is ever permissible in general to make a nation larger or smaller or stronger or weaker, to grant citizenship or withhold it, to bring a nation into existence or to send it out of existence, it is not for individual private citizens to do these things!

Commentary on (5):  Here at last we arrive at an objection that a conservative, patriotic nationalist might legitimately make; however, when it is explained in these terms, it begins to take on a different complexion.  It stops looking like an ethical point and starts looking more like a conceptual or metaphysical point.  It stops looking like a point about what individual persons must not do and starts looking like a point about what private individuals cannot do.  I as a private citizen can no more sell my land directly to France (and thereby make it part of France) than I can sentence someone to prison, award someone the Nobel prize, select the England football squad, or declare war on Canada.  And the reason is the same in each case:  I fail to occupy the relevant role or relation to the thing in question.

The Idea of Nationism?

The objection has changed in another way, too.  In pointing out that, conceptually speaking, private individuals are not in a position to sell land to foreign nations, the patriotic nationalist is not expressing her nationalism so much as she is acknowledging a usually unstated assumption behind nationalism that I will call, for want of a better term, “nationism”.  Nationism is the combination of the intuitive ideas:

N1.  The nature, properties and powers of nations are different from the nature, properties and powers of the citizens of nations; and

N2.  No individual person is a nation.[9]

It explains why individual Americans cannot declare war on Canada, and in the present case it explains why nations have a sort of territorial sovereignty over land that private individuals cannot have and that puts limits on the powers of individuals, precluding their power to transfer ownership, at will, to another sovereign nation.  It is this aspect of nationism that our fantasy scenario skated over rather quickly, with its glib account of the Supreme Court decision of 2020, with its radical implications for property ownership and territorial integrity.

Is it really a problem for Conservatism?

This is a problem for conservatism if patriotic nationalists accept nationism and if libertarians reject it.  Now, nationism is perhaps not essential to patriotism, but there seems to be a natural attraction between the two positions.  In the absence of something like nationism — some belief that nations are bigger, more enduring and of a wholly different order than private individuals – it is hard to see why the patriot would think that her identity is partly constituted in relation to her nation.  In the absence of nationalism, patriotic nationalism seems to reduce to private affection for one’s neighbors, landscape or language. 

Likewise, nationism is perhaps not strictly logically inconsistent with libertarianism, but the two positions naturally repel each other.  To my knowledge, no libertarian has ever explicitly rejected nationism, but then again no libertarian has explicitly considered it.[10]  And it is hard to see how a libertarian could accept it.  Of course, there may be patriotic nationalists who, for practical or personal reasons, prefer small government over big government, but we are not talking about them.  We are talking about the thoroughgoing philosophical libertarian who has his wits about him, and claiming that he will reject nationism, because it looks like an attempt to give specious metaphysical backing to the state’s domination over the individual, and because it entails significant limitations on the right to private property, one of the libertarian’s favorite rights.[11]  What about the common sense idea that private property makes no sense outside the sort of legal framework that is possible only in the context of the nation?  Even this should be unattractive to the libertarian, since it points up a respect in which nations are superior to, or exist independently of, individuals.   Finally, even if the libertarian were persuaded on independent jurisprudential grounds that, in law, certain things could be done only by nations (and never by private persons), he would not have to accept full-blown nationism.  He could adopt a partial version of nationism that affirms (a) but denies (b).  On such a view, even if no man is island, every man is a nation (or potentially so).

Conclusion

Thus our investigation shows how the commitments of libertarianism, as usually understood, conflict with the assumptions of patriotic nationalism, as usually understood.  To the extent that modern American conservatism is committed to both, this is a problem for it.[12]

[1] It is not uniquely American, however.  In the UK, Thatcherite conservatism combines similar tendencies.

[2] In earlier generations, this conflict was more often noticed.  See, e.g., the work of early 20^th century German jurist Carl Schmitt, including The Concept of the Political:  Expanded edition, translated with an introduction by George Schwab, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press:  1996).

[3] John Hospers, “The Libertarian Manifesto”, in Tibor Machan, ed., The Libertarian Alternative (Nelson-Hall, 1974), reprinted in James P. Sterba, ed., Justice:  Alternative Political Perspectives 3^rd, (Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth, 1999), pp. 24-34, at p. 24.

[4] Sterba, op. cit., p. 4.

[5] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, Basic Books:  1974), p. 151.

[6] Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law, Part II, trans. by W. Hastie (Edinburgh, Clark:  1887), p. 194-98, reprinted in Louis Pojman, ed., Ethical Theory, 5^th ed (Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth, 2005), pp. 445-7, at p. 445.

[7] Consider, for example, the patriotic response in 19^th and 20^th C America in its westward expansion, according to the doctrine of “manifest destiny”. 

[8] And money is not always the only issue.  Allegedly, one reason the Russians were willing to sell Alaska to the US in 1867 was that they believed the territory difficult to defend and were afraid that the British were planning to annex the land forcibly in the near future.

[9] Even when these properties or powers must be manifested or enacted by individuals, they are so manifested or enacted by individuals acting in an official capacity as functionaries of the nation.

[10] John Hospers comes close when he quotes the bumper sticker “Beware:  the Government is Armed and Dangerous!”, but even this is not exactly what we are calling “nationism”.  See Hospers op. cit., p. 29.

[11] According to Hospers, “The right to property is the most misunderstood and unappreciated of human rights, and it is one most constantly violated by governments” and “The right to property is consistently underplayed by intellectuals today, sometimes even frowned upon, as if we should feel guilty upholding such a right in view of all the poverty in the world.  But the right to property is absolutely basic”, “Without the right to property, the right to life itself amounts to little:  how can you sustain your life if you cannot plan ahead?  And how can you plan ahead if the fruits of your labor can at any moment be confiscated by government.  Indeed, the right to property may well be considered second only to the right to life.”  See op. cit., pp. 26-7.

[12] I thank Pauline Brand Nelson for helpful comments and criticism.

Normal service is now, I hope, resumed after a summer dominated, for me, by a climbing accident on Ben Nevis on April 5. Some thoughts about that accident here….

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/philos/the_fear_of_death.pdf

Donald Trump asked the people of Aberdeenshire to trust him when he stated he would build the world’s finest golf course, hotel and a housing development on their land. Part of it would be on a piece of protected land, a SSSI, he claimed that benefits for Aberdeenshire citizens would be enormous. He also claimed that this development was dear to his heart because of his Scottish ancestry.
In the local press this development was hailed as the ’savior of the north east’ when the oil industry declines. The local authority planners and chamber of commerce stated the ‘economic benefits ‘outweighed the environmental costs’.
The planning application deviated from the structural plan and local plans on numerous grounds, the economic assessment was written by Trumps own people, and not independently assessed.
The infrastructure committee refused to approve it, largely because of the SSSI. Mr. Trump was free under planning law to reapply, but even before the meeting, he had openly refused to negotiate over the SSSI, suggesting he would take the business elsewhere if refused. He subsequently met with Rev Ian Paisley to discuss an Irish development.
The Councilors who rejected the application were publicly humiliated, labeled ‘neeps’ by the local press, one was attacked, another spat on in the street. The Chair of the committee was sacked, and the Council threw their full weight behind the proposal, those that had voted aginst the development changed their mind and the application was called in by the SNP government and has since been subject to a public enquiry. It was claimed by DT that 90% of the population supported the plan but their was no evidence for his claim, and over 8,500 signed a petition to object, yet this was not mentioned in the local papers.
What does this whole business symbolize? certainly it’s still clearly about human dominance over nature and power. But have some key business people have created a society of mis-trust? do they use the same mis-trust against those that endeavour speak the truth – to undermine their argument as false, and silence them. After all those that speak out to protect our natural heritage have little to gain personally, yet they are criminalized, whereas those that are in favour are motivated by personal financial gain. It seems under this type of society that a man cannot speak his mind because his livelihood depends on him not doing so. Hobbes, said that trust holds societies together and allows people to co-operate – but will we ever co-operate with nature if we can’t even co-operate amongst ourselves? I’d like to hear what you think about this

(based on a discussion with Chris Hoeckley, Kevin Sharpe, Jim Taylor and David Vander Laan) 

I.  Simple-minded question about logical methodology:  Why do we bother to recognize induction as a separate category of inference?  Why not treat all inferences as deductive, but with a probabilistic qualification built into the conclusions of some of them? 

That is, instead of characterizing such inferences in these terms … 

1.  The first 999 ravens I saw were black

Therefore probably,

C.  The next raven I see will be black. 

… why not characterize them in the following terms? 

1.  The first 999 ravens I saw were black.

2.  If the first 999 ravens I saw were black, then probably the next raven I see will be black.

Therefore,

C*.  Probably, the next raven I see will be black. 

I know that there’s a difference between the above arguments and standard deductive arguments such as: 

3.  Ted is a bachelor.

4.  If Ted is a bachelor, then Ted is unmarried.

Therefore,

5.  Ted is unmarried. 

… but that difference can be expressed in terms of the presence or absence of a probability qualifier in the conclusion, and not in terms of a fundamentally different kind of inference. 

So I repeat my question:  why do we distinguish between the two kinds of inference? 

II.  First attempt at an answer:  ‘The point of the distinction is to reflect the fact that many of the arguments we actually use are in fact of the inductive sort.  Our conclusions often are non-probabilistic claims.  Even if (contrary to fact) all our probabilistic arguments proceeded first to a sub-conclusion of the form “Probably P,” in proceeding to P they would involve an inductive step.  In that hypothetical scenario, the inference from probably-P to P would take on immense logical interest.’ 

III.  Second attempt at an answer (with possible bearing on ethics?):  That seems right, but it just pushes the question back one step, because one may reasonably ask, ‘Why do we make such arguments?  And why would we persist in making such arguments even after we saw that we could convert them to valid deductive arguments with merely probable conclusions?’   

Here is one conjecture:  sometimes our action depends on our making certain judgments, and the inferences to those judgments are not deductively secure, but it nevertheless seems inappropriate to act on merely probable judgments.   

Take, for example, the imposition of the death penalty for a capital crime.  Suppose Cain has been arrested, tried and convicted (in a fair trial, etc) for the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Abel.  The evidence against Cain is overwhelming and includes a dozen eye-witnesses (who happened to be a mixed group of nuns, opticians and notaries public on their way to a Mensa convention in broad daylight) and a detailed, coherent and apparently uncoerced confession by Cain himself.  Even if this evidence puts Cain’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt, it is still logically possible (for familiar reasons) that Cain did not commit the murder, therefore that evidence does not constitute the basis for a sound deductive argument to the categorical conclusion, ‘Cain premeditatedly murdered Abel in cold blood.’  But it would seem inappropriate – perhaps ethically inappropriate — for the judge to say to Cain, ‘We hereby find you probably guilty of murder in the first degree and therefore you will be taken from this court to a place of execution where you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead.’   

That is, maybe we need induction for practical reasons including, sometimes, ethical reasons. 

IV.  Challenge:  ‘But if it is inappropriate to act on a probabilistically qualified judgment reached by a valid inference, how can it be appropriate to act on an unqualified judgment reached by a probabilistic inference?  And wouldn’t the world be a much better place if we all faced the fact that even in the highest-stakes contexts, we are acting on probabilistic judgments?’ 

V.  Response – and invitation:  Though it appears oddly asymmetrical, that is precisely my conjecture:  it may be appropriate to act on an unqualified assertion reached by a probabilistic inference when it would be inappropriate to act on a merely probable assertion reached by deductive inference.  This reflects the intuition that, for ethical reasons, we may require a fit between the practical import of our judgments and the form or modality of those judgments.  Perhaps that intuition can explained away in ways that have little to do with logic or ethics, but I at least feel its pull.

What do other readers think?