I'm going to be talking today about Jan Narveson, who is a very, in a member of a very rare species, a libertarian philosopher.
There aren't that many of them, and he's one of the most distinguished of contemporary libertarian philosophers.
Narveson, in his long career, has changed his philosophical standpoint.
He was originally a utilitarian and was noted as one of the leading exponents of that view.
He published a book called Morality and Utility.
But partly as a result of conversations and reading manuscripts by David Gaultier,
who's another important Canadian philosopher, he changed his views.
He became a contractarian, and I'll be dealing quite a bit in my talk with what exactly is meant by this and what Narveson's version of contractarianism is.
He also, around the same time, became a libertarian. He was very influenced by Robert Nozick's famous book, Anarchy, State and Utopia, came out in 1974.
So he, from a utilitarian, he became both a libertarian and a contractarian.
He has, what he wants to do is give a contractarian basis for libertarianism.
Now to understand Narveson's moral theories, I think it's best to start by considering what he regards as his number one enemy in moral theory.
and this is you call moral intuitionism now by an intuition there are various
things philosophies are meant by this but by an intuition I think Narvesen
means a moral judgment whether about some issue in moral theory or a
or a particular moral issue, some issue of practice, that doesn't rest on anything else.
It's just a judgment that something or other is moral or immoral.
Sometimes people who have moral intuitions claim the intuition is self-evident.
What do we mean when we say something is self-evident?
One important thing to avoid here that many people think, if you say something is self-evident,
you're thinking that the statement is true because of some psychological feeling that
you have.
For example, suppose I say, it's self-evident that killing people for fun is wrong.
One might think, well, if I think about killing people for fun, I just have a feeling this
This is something that's obviously wrong, I just feel this is something repulsive, so
because I have this feeling of repulsion, then I hold the proposition killing people for
fun is wrong.
But you see, if that were true, if I held this feeling because of this feeling, held
the view that killing people for fun is wrong because of this feeling of repulsion, then
And it wouldn't be self-evident, I would be holding it because I had this particular psychological
feeling.
If I say it holds something that is self-evident, then I'd be saying I'm holding it to be true,
and my belief that it's true doesn't rest on anything else.
So this is a point that Jean Moore made very effectively in the Frenkipi Ethica 1903, that
When you say something is self-evident, it's not that you're holding it because of some psychological feeling on your part.
So, as I say, this is what we mean by moral intuition.
We're just making some kind of judgment that something is morally right or wrong or good or bad.
Now, as I say, Narveson regards this as the main enemy in moral theory.
What is it that he has against moral intuitions?
Well, the basic problem with moral intuitions is that they're very controversial.
Some people will have moral intuitions and others will say, no, we don't have such an intuition.
And if that's the case, there's no way of resolving the matter.
For example, one very important example in arguments for libertarianism,
There are some people who reject the free market and libertarianism on the grounds that, under a free market system, we can have very wide disparities in wealth and income among people.
Some people, unfortunately, are much richer than I am.
This is in the, say, in the free markets, in a free market order.
And to some people, this is an undesirable state of affairs.
They say people ought to be equal in wealth or income or in other goods, social goods.
For example, in probably the most influential 20th century work in political philosophy,
John Rawls' Theory of Justice came out in 1971.
Rawls says that inequalities are justified only to the extent they are of advantage,
the least advantaged group in society.
Otherwise, the inequality is not justified. So he's starting from the assumption that
equality is the preferred state of affairs. Other people say, for example, Ronald Dworkin
says Rawls doesn't go far enough. Dworkin says in some cases, even if inequality would
lead to a better overall outcome, even a better overall outcome for the least well-off class in society, it still would be morally required to have a system closer to equality than that.
So some philosophers, I don't say Rawls and Dworkener among these, will support their
equalitarian views just on the grounds that they have an intuition that equality is morally
mandated or at least desirable.
They say this is just something that they see to be true, they hold it to be obviously
True, and they'll think, say, that libertarians who deny this are heartless. Now, obviously,
libertarians don't have such intuitions, or if they do, they think they're overridden by other
things, but presumably they don't have intuitions of that kind. So, this would be a case that
illustrates, I think, Narveson's chief complaint about moral intuitionism. He said, well,
Well, what are we going to do if we have, say, a group of people who say that they have an intuition in favor of equality,
and there's some other group that said, no, we don't have that intuition at all.
We don't think there's anything at all wrong with some people having more wealth or income than others.
And we seem to be at an impasse. There's no way to go on. So, Narveson said, look, we
should try to avoid appeals to intuition and come up with something else. Now, before I
go on to what Narveson wants to replace intuition with what he prefers, what his contract theory
I want to say something more. Are his objections to moral intuitionism correct? He's undoubtedly right that we sometimes have conflicting intuitions.
Some people, as an example I gave, some people will favor, say, they have strong moral intuitions that equality is morally mandated.
and David and other people don't have those intuitions.
But is someone who thinks there's something to what Narveson calls the methodological intuition,
Narveson distinguishes two different kinds of intuitions.
The kind I'm concerned with now is what he calls methodological individualism,
where what's involved is, just as I did with equality,
particular moral judgements about certain states of affairs and argue on that basis.
The other kind is what he calls metaphysical intuitionism.
That will come in a bit later in my talk, but for now I don't need to go into that.
Are there, can we say anything in defense of methodological intuitionism, or is Narsen
Well, all we have are disagreements that can't be resolved, so we should try for something else.
We shouldn't just rely on intuitions that may not be shared with other people.
Well, one thing I think that can be said in support of the intuitionist standpoint is that someone who has a moral intuition that he finds other people rejecting isn't committed, isn't required just to walk away and say we have a conflict here,
Here there's nothing more I can do about this. There are various means that one
could use to try to resolve the matter. For example, one thing one could do is
try to see if we could come up with a case that's similar, a case that
the person who opposes us will accept our standpoint. We can try to
to distinguish his, what his original claimed from this other case that's different from
it, for example, and that's not very coherent, but let me give you an example of supposing
someone says he favors equality. It's bad that some people have much more than others.
Then we could ask the person, well, let's suppose that we had a society where everyone
If you made at least $200,000 a year, but there were some people, there were some billionaires in the society,
would you say there was something morally questionable about that, just because the billionaire were much wealthier than the ones who made $200,000?
Now, it might turn out the person would say, no, there wasn't anything questionable about that, or not very much questionable.
What was really bothering him was that in our society or in many societies there might be
some people who would be extremely poor in the sense that they didn't have enough of
what we're usually regarded as the basic requirements for living.
So one way we can address an intuition that goes against our views if we think that someone
said he has an intuition in favor of equality. We might say, well, is, come up with a case, we say, is, are you really opposed to inequality or are you really opposed to this other matter, namely some people not having very much, and then go on to argue maybe the libertarian society would be able to cope with that problem through voluntary charity or generally
Raising People's Level of Prosperity Alternatives through the Free Market.
So what the intuitionists can do, face with a conflict, is try to distinguish cases and
reduce the scope of the conflict in that way.
There's a very good discussion of this way of proceeding by distinguishing cases that
Nozick has in the Anarchy State Utopian discussion, around page 277, next to pages. He goes into this and he says there's always a problem in this way of proceeding in that someone, if we can get, move someone from a position he adopts by some new case, he can just decide, rather than say he was wrong in the first place, he could just reject what we're saying about the new case. I mean someone could say,
Let's say, respond that, in the example I gave, somebody could say, well, I think even in the example of the, where everybody earns 200,000, but some people earn much more than that, some people could say, well, the inequality is bad, even in that case, they could reject the way we're trying to move them.
So this method isn't at all guaranteed to produce agreement, but it can work in some cases.
I should say there are philosophers who do respond to the example I just gave in the egalitarian way.
For example, Larry Temkin is an influential philosopher, he says there's something bad in the notion of inequality of any kind.
He gives a rather extreme case of this. He says, supposing we had a society, actually true to the one we do, where some people are blind and other people can see.
So he said, well, imagine that everybody is blind. Would that be better than a society where some people are blind and some people can see?
He says, no, it wouldn't. It would be obviously not good if everybody was blind, but it would
at least have a better feature of it than our society, because everybody would be equal
in their capacity for sight. Namely, they wouldn't have it. So that's kind of an example,
but I mean, where one could be, somebody could refuse to accept what we think is a good case
against their Initial Statement and Intuition.
So what I think Narvesen would respond is he still, he would reject this method, too.
He would say some, he discusses this, he has, sometimes he has really, his two most important
books where he discusses his moral theory are one called The Libertarian Idea, which
came out in 1988, it's been reprinted a few times, in another collection of essays called
Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice, and this came out in 2002.
So what Narveson would say, well, somebody could say what we do is start with our intuitions
and then we try to possibly modify them by considering other cases or then we could come
up with various theoretical judgments and we engage in a process of kind of shifting
between the theories and individual judgments until we can come up with some kind of solution
We're satisfied with what Rawls calls the reflective equilibrium. We try to balance our theories with our judgments, adjusting them so they're somehow harmonious.
Actually, Rawls took this notion from the philosopher of science, Nelson Goodman, who would propose that as a way that scientific inquiry works, adjusting between observations and theories.
in theory, so Rawls applied this to moral judgment. But Narvis has said, no, this is unsatisfactory because it's still relying on these controversial intuitions, even if we can reduce the scope of disagreement in the way I've explained in some cases, we still have this problem of disagreements that can't be resolved at all.
Now, so, could an intuitionist respond to that? Wouldn't the intuitionist have to admit that, in Orbison's point, that we're never going to reach agreement just by relying on intuitions.
We're always going to find that some people don't accept the moral intuitions we have.
Well, I think here we could respond that Narveson has advanced what seems to be an unrealistic requirement.
It's almost never, I don't want to say absolutely never, but almost never the case in philosophy that we find agreement on any theories.
say, for any, not just moral issue, but any theory and philosophy, will always have conflicting points of view and it doesn't see why should one insist that there's some requirement that everyone adopt a particular moral theory, even in the sciences, we don't find that all theories are universally adopted.
For example, in physics, there are some people who don't accept the standard model of quantum mechanics.
David Boehm and others have a deterministic model of quantum mechanics.
They don't go along with the more generally accepted view.
And there are other views that say there are a few physicists who don't accept Einstein's special relativity.
We could find all sorts of conflicting theories in biology. Some people don't accept Darwinian evolution.
So for virtually any scientific or philosophical theory, we find disagreements.
So it's not clear that if intuitionism results in disagreements as it does,
This is, we've struck that view as a fatal blow, the mere fact that there are disagreements.
Now, there's a further problem, I think, is this. Supposing someone attaches some weight to Narveson's objection and said,
Well, say, I, for example, suppose I say, I very strongly attract it on intuitionist ground to the libertarian non-aggression principle, it seems, wrong to use force against someone who has an initiated force himself.
Well, when I say I find that an intuitively plausible view, then I say, but look, there are some people who don't accept that view, say there are some people who find nothing morally wrong with conscripting people into the army or other measures that violate that view.
I might say, well, shouldn't the fact that there is some disagreement make me doubt my initial belief, if I'm just relying on holding the belief because of intuition?
Well, it might well be that it should induce some doubt in me, just as I find, say, people I regard as competent don't agree with me.
There won't be a good reason for making me rethink my views, but if I still think the belief is true, it seems what more could I ask for holding a view?
Certainly, it doesn't follow from saying that I believe something, that the view is true,
But I can't distinguish from inside between my own beliefs, things I hold to be true and things that actually aren't true.
We could imagine, say someone, a teacher giving a true false test to someone, and say the person, imagine the students fill out the exam the best they can.
The teacher looks at them and says, well, all right, you've given the answers, you believe
are correct. Now, take the test over and give me the answers that really are correct. You
see, you couldn't, the students couldn't do that because the ones they, they're only
access to the ones that are correct or the ones they believe to be correct. So if someone
held on intuitive or other grounds that some principle or something is true.
He can't very well reject that, even if he considers that other people don't hold it
as long as he continues to think the view is true.
Isn't that an excellent reason for holding some view that we think it's true, that what
We're not always interested in converting other people to our point of view, even if that's desirable, we want to presumably come up with what we think are the correct views themselves.
And I don't think Narveson has given us sufficient reason to abandon this way of coming up with correct beliefs.
Now, Narveson doesn't really consider that point so much, but he does consider another
objection, which I would call the obvious objection to his views on intuitionism. He
has these interesting responses. Now, the obvious objection to Narveson's view, I'm
I'm sure many of you would have been thinking of this, is that supposing someone says, well, I don't want to rely on intuitions, I don't want to rely on just unsupported judgments that something is true, I want to use arguments, I'm not going to accept any belief just because it's an intuition, I want to have some basis for it.
Well, any argument will rely on certain premises.
We believe, say we have an argument, something is true because something else is true, such and such premises support the argument.
Now, we could ask for the premises, what is the support for them, and we could come up with it, possibly with arguments for those.
But, presumably, we'll eventually have to stop with some premise that we just hold to be true.
We won't be able to go on to infinity and just keep arguing that each premise depends on something else,
or it won't be very good to have a circular justification where we, say, support one conclusion by certain premises
and then support those premises by the original conclusion.
As Aristotle long ago pointed out, we have to come up with some premises that we're starting with.
So the obvious objection Narveson has to answer is,
well, don't you yourself have to rely on intuitions in your argument at some point?
And if that's right, how can you object so much to the moral intuitionist?
You know, his answer to this is that it's true we do have to rely on intuitions.
And in fact, at one point he even refers, he says, well, he has an intuition,
Joseph jokingly has an intuition that we shouldn't rely on moral intuitions in argument, but
what he says is we certainly have to rely on intuitions, but they don't have to be
moral intuitions.
What he claims is that he can come up with something that is some premise that is in
one sense an intuition and one that we won't have any further argument backing up, but
will be something that's non-controversial and also not a moral judgment itself.
Now before I go into what that is, which is involved in his contractarianism that I mentioned
before, I should say he extends his condemnation of intuitionism much further than what I've
already mentioned.
He, in his extended usage, an intuitionist view would not just be one that relies on
particular judgments of the kind I mentioned, such as equality is good or using force against
someone is bad, but he would extend this so that it covers any moral theory that rests
on Controversial Judgments.
For example, I was imagining what he would say to the Aristotelian position that Roderick
has been developing in the lectures this week.
I think what Narbison would say, well, that this view is proposing a certain ideal of
Human flourishing or what is the human happiness consists of, but someone might reject that.
Someone might say, well, I don't accept that idea. So, in fact, not everyone does accept it.
So I think the very fact that people would disagree with, might disagree with the view
is, for a nervous reason, not to accept this theory. I think one could argue that isn't a very good objection because it seems to beg the question, is it right for the other people to disagree? Maybe they should be convinced by the arguments that have been advanced for this view. Maybe they shouldn't just say, it doesn't sound right. I don't accept this view or it contradicts other beliefs that I've
I hold so I'm not going to accept it. What if he isn't nervous and if he were to take
the line of suggestion, seems to be ruling a view out just by fiat. He's just saying
people find this controversial, therefore it is controversial in a way that's unacceptable.
Now, a related point here is, in this whole notion of disagreement, is it's certainly right that someone who holds a conflicting view will disagree with something that we're saying.
For example, I defend libertarianism, say, we shouldn't impose a pattern on what people earn in the market, such as equality.
We should just let whatever comes about through free transactions in the market stay the way it is.
We don't have any further requirements of distributed justice.
Someone who holds a principle of equality will certainly reject that, but to show that a particular principle is inconsistent with another principle isn't showing that we can't convince the other person, it's just showing we can't convince the other person while he holds the conflicting view, but maybe we can persuade him to abandon that view.
I've mentioned before one way I might try that, but Narveson sometimes seems to hold, although he's rejecting intuitionism, he seems to hold that people's views in some ways are fixed, that once a person holds a view then there's nothing anyone else can do by appealing to an intuition to change his mind, but maybe that's not true, maybe we can just get the person to change his mind.
And so this is the way I think he's underestimated the possibilities of agreement.
But still he could respond to all of this, he could say, well look, even if there's more
to this intuitionist methodology than I've allowed, still I've got something better.
And now what is that that he thinks is something better?
Now, he says there is one thing, one thing we really can't quarrel with, everybody will accept this, that each of us has certain wants and interests, by interests he just means the preferences of some that we hold, he isn't meaning any kind of, appeals to any kind of theory of what people should, according to certain views, hold, he just means the actual preferences people have.
People have certain things that they want, everybody wants certain things, we all have an interest in achieving what we want just to say we want something, we want to know, we want to be the case that we achieve as much as possible.
possible what we want. This, at least so far, seems uncontroversial. So then he said, well,
we're in, what is the situation we're in? Each of us has different, each of us has wants
that we all, preferences we all want to achieve these, but we're in a situation where other
Other people can interfere with our preferences.
Other people can frustrate us and stop us from doing what we want.
Or on the other hand, people can cooperate with us.
Say, we know through the study of economics that social cooperation through the free market,
we have these people, at least who have conventional preferences, will be able to achieve much
Much more through cooperation with other people than they would on their own.
So what Narvesen says is given that we're all in this situation, we each want to achieve
as maximum degree possible, we want to get what we want, we want to have our preferences
put into effect.
What can we do when we're faced with a situation that other people are possibly in conflict
with us and can also cooperate with us?
What rules could we put into effect that would enable each of us to achieve his or her own
preferences to the greatest degree possible?
You know, I want to ask, before I get into what are the rules that Narsen comes up with
and thinks people will adopt if we ask that question, I want to ask, is his principle
really as non-controversial as it sounds?
He says everyone wants to achieve his preferences.
It sounds pretty non-controversial on the surface.
What one could raise some quibbles about it, I mean, for example, sometimes people have preferences that certain of their preferences not be realized.
Harry Frankfurt has written on this so-called second-order preference.
Say someone who's an alcoholic could want to drink but at the same time not want to be an alcoholic.
So one way of looking at it is hoping that some of its preferences won't be realized.
But I think I don't want to put much emphasis on that, that's kind of a, it is an interesting
phenomenon but I don't think it really made, it posed the major dent for Narbyses' point
of view.
Similarly one could rate, there's certain Eastern philosophers, possibly some Greek
philosophy, so how we should, we might have certain preferences of things we want, but we should have an attitude of indifference toward realizing our own preferences. We should just take things as they come.
Now, again, I think this is perhaps an interesting issue to explore, but I don't think it's all that central to evaluating Garrison's claim.
So we could say possibly there are exceptions to the principle. We all are whatever it is we want, but really it does sound that he's right. He's pretty plausible.
But I think there is a strong, there is actually a strong objection that can be raised against him, at least I think it's very strongly,
he hasn't what he's his actual principle isn't that that he operates from in in
trying to in his contract theory and perspective when he's trying to come up
with the rules that people would adopt given that we all want to achieve our
preferences but we're faced with people can injure us or cooperate with what he
his actual standpoint isn't the one that I've so far stated he isn't actually
I know of only one general approach to moral theory that is fully non-intuitionist, full-blooded Hobbesian contractarian theory.
The principles and morals, according to this view, are what amount to rational or reasonable agreements made by the people whose behavior is to be directed by those principles.
Moreover, the sense in which they are rational is not a cooked-up, moralized sense.
It is simply that the output of a course of deliberation that is rational is that the
selected course of action has the best chance of realizing values actually held by the agent.
Now, so far, so good. This is just what I've been saying so far. Now, here comes the part
Morality is an output and what makes it rational is the same as what makes any action or decision
rational. It best fills the bill specified by one general set of values, whatever they
Oh, sorry, I skipped the crucial sentence, typical of me.
He said, the selected course of action has the best chance of realizing values actually
held by the agent.
This is the part I want to question.
Those values, of course, need not be, and in the first instance cannot be, moral values.
Morality is an output, and what makes it rational is the same as what makes any action decision
and Rational, it best fill the bills specified by one general set of values, whatever they
are.
Now you see the crucial thing he's put in here, he's starting from the non-controversial
view, at least very non-controversial view, that people want to achieve their preferences,
whatever they are, but he's excluding people's moral judgments from the initial set of preferences
because he wants to derive morality from these preferences, but this is a very, this is not, then his view becomes not at all non-controversial, becomes extremely controversial because what his view now is is that everyone gives overriding importance to his or her own non-moral preferences and views morality as a tool to advance those
particular preferences or interests.
And now someone could quite easily reject that.
Someone could hold, well, I certainly want to achieve my non-moral preferences,
but I have moral views independent of thinking of what I could get other people to agree to in this situation.
But I'm not prepared to give up.
What is the basis that Narbisson has for thinking that our views, our non-moral views, are overriding?
It would seem like if he holds that, isn't he relying on an intuition himself that morality is just a tool by which we can advance our non-moral or pre-moral,
interests. He himself hasn't eliminated the appeal to intuition that he claims to oppose,
that he hasn't at all come up with a non-controversial standpoint, namely that everybody wants to
realize his own preferences. He's only come up with a certain selected set of everyone's
... preferences and ask, how can people realize that set of preferences? So, he's actually
adopted a very controversial standpoint. He hasn't come up as he thinks he has with some
non-controversial starting point that everyone can agree on. He hasn't really, he isn't really
What I'm really able to say to the intuitionist is, look, you have to rely on views that people can disagree with, but I have something better I can come up with a premise that no one can rationally reject, and I can derive morality from that, so I'm in a better position than you are.
He can't say that at all because his position itself starts from a quite controversial standpoint.
I think we could press a related point that some people might disagree with me on this.
I would say, and this will involve some reference to the other kind of intuitionism that I referred to earlier,
that Narveson distinguishes, namely metaphysical intuitionism.
Now, the objection I would give to this point is that if one regards morality as a tool to advance one's own interests,
then, to my mind, one's really rejecting the moral standpoint altogether.
There must be, if, as morality requirements appear to us, they appear to have some force on us, they say, there are certain things that are intrinsically, certain kinds of, a certain type of life is intrinsically attractive,
certain things are absolutely forbidden to us if we hold that the torture is wrong in all circumstances.
That's something that we have to follow that regardless of our desires or preferences.
It's not, if we hold that view, we're not saying that if we follow this view, we'll in some way advance our own interests.
But we're saying this is a requirement of morality. We have to do this whether we like it or not.
So there is, in one of the novels of P.G. Woodhouse, one of the favorite authors,
one of the characters says to Jeeves, who's a famous butler and features in many of these stories,
Whenever something comes up, I always ask myself one question. What's in it for me?
Now, I think we could say somebody who said that isn't adopting, really has not adopted the moral standpoint.
So that we could say that if you pose the question that Narveson has, how can, what rules,
if people were generally to adopt, would advance my own preference, preferences best,
A non-moral preference, as we could say, not only is Narveson adopting a very controversial view, but he seems to be rejecting the whole notion of moral standpoint altogether.
Now, Narveson would probably reply to this, is that, well, it's certainly right that people in the actual world do have a sense of obligation.
They do think that certain things are required to do whether they want to or not.
They hold that certain things are good or bad, independently of their judgment.
But this is simply because we're brought up that way. We've been psychologically conditioned to think that.
I think that, and that his argument shows that, in fact, it's rational for us to impose certain rules on ourselves and to have a process of conditioning of just that sort so that we wind up thinking this, but that at a foundational level,
morality is indeed a tool so that we can advance our preferences.
It doesn't fall that we have to regard morality that way in our actual practice.
But, you see, I think this answer really doesn't deal adequately with the objection,
because what it's really saying is that the sense of obligation is kind of a psychological reduction
of the Sense of Obligation. He isn't really accepting it as it stands. He's saying, well, we can see why it would be rational for us to think that we're obligated to do certain things, but we aren't really, what we really have is self-interest.
I should say, there is a famous article by H. A. Pritchard, I'll put his name down here.
It was a very good article pointing out this sort of objection to self-interest theories and reality,
and Reality. Although I think Pritchard goes too far. Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?
And this came out in Mind, British Philosophy Journal in 1912.
Alright, so see the basic objection there, even if you don't accept that, this objection
that Narveson is rejecting in the moral standpoint is independent of my earlier objection, which
is that he's come up with not a non-controversial starting point, a very controversial one namely
that people were concerned to give a riding importance to advancing their non-moral interests.
So I have the two different but related objections there.
Now I want to mention there's a third objection to this starting point that Narvesen has.
He's assuming that he's quite right that from his standpoint we have a situation where other
people can frustrate or cooperate with us.
But he's assuming that we have to have an agreement with an indefinite number of other
people, with really everyone.
But why do we have to assume that maybe we could cooperate with just a very large number
of people and not with others?
We could regard other people as enemies and not to be dealt with or could be dealt with
in any way we want.
Why would we have to include everybody within the scope of the rule?
And Narsen does consider some one version of this objection.
He said, well, this would lead to problems because a society that held that might find
itself at war with other societies, and then this wouldn't lead in the long run, it wouldn't
help them in the long run to advance their interests.
But even if he's right about that, it could still be that the people could, say, hold that a certain minority within their own society is not to be accorded moral value or could be treated as slaves, like the Spartans treated the Helots and the Inferiors.
It wouldn't necessarily lead, although of course the Spartan case was one where they were at war with other city-states, but it wouldn't have to. It could have a society just where people just treat a certain minority in a bad way, but didn't involve them in conflict.
It was not clear that Narveson has successfully showed that everybody has to be included in the agreement that he talks about.
A criticism of this kind was raised by a very non-libertarian political theorist, Don Herzog, in a review of Narveson's libertarian idea, appeared in Critical Review.
Narveson has a very furious response to Herzog, you can look at it in Critical Review, I think, bonafide number four, they have a big exchange.
What Narveson says is something like, well, he just postulated that everyone is included in the agreement, so this isn't a real problem, but that, of course, doesn't solve the problem.
He can postulate what he wants, but he hasn't really shown, at least I don't think he's shown, that it is rational in his sense for everybody to come up with a universal agreement of the kind he says.
Now, after all these objections, though, we still have to ask, what are the rules that
Narson thinks that people, from his standpoint, will adopt?
Let's say, remember, people are each person's trying to advance his non-moral preferences
and realizes that other people can either frustrate or help them.
What rules would people come up with?
So what he's done here is he's really thinking along, really posing the same questions he
recognizes as Hobbes did in Leviathan 1651, that he's saying we're assuming that each
person is motivated by his own interests and would be in the absence of agreement at war
with other people, possibly not necessarily always fighting, but always in danger of fighting
How can we get out of this situation? Wouldn't it be in everyone's interest to have an agreement, a peace where we wouldn't aggress against each other?
It might be recognized that a few people just like aggressing against other people. People like beating up.
Some people like beating up other people. Even they, he thinks, would have to realize when they do better in the long run if there were some general policy of peace.
I should say, as an aggression, not everybody interprets Hobbes in that way, in this way, sort of this egoistic way.
There are a few people who don't like the famous historian-philosopher A. Taylor and Howard Warndo, who had a book called Political Philosophy of Hobbes, came out in 1957, who said, no, this is not the right way to view Hobbes, Hobbes had a theory more of a Kantian kind of theory, stressing obligation, but this is a very controversial view, and Narson is certainly in the mainstream of Hobbes' interpretation when he takes his own view.
to be a Hobbesian one. If you're interested in Warinder's views or that sort of thesis, you should also look at Thomas Nagel's article, View of Warinder in the Full Soccer Review, 1959, as a good criticism of that minority position.
In any event, so Narveson says, well, we would all agree on some principle of non-aggression.
We would also, he thinks, agree on a principle, a general principle of liberty.
Everyone should be able to do what he wants as long as he doesn't interfere with other
people.
We don't, it's restrictions on people that have to be justified, not liberty, the general
No presumption, he thinks, is one of liberty, not restrictions.
So here, you see, in the way he's proceeding, as you'll gather so far, he's proceeding
in a rather different way from the person whose work influenced him toward his contractarianism,
namely David Gaultier in Gaultier's book Moralified Green.
Gautier has a very formal style of argument. His view is that morality is equated with
rationality in certain situations, and that he comes up with a principle he calls constrained
maximization, which is a way of handling the famous prisoner's dilemma. Narveson thinks
I guess there's something to that, but in Narveson's method, the proceeding is much more informalist proceeding, saying isn't it reasonable to think that people will agree to such and such terms, or he's reasoning in a rather informal way, and I think there's nothing wrong with that, but it's just important to see that it's different from what Gaultier is doing.
Now, he also thinks that people will adopt a, basically, a Lockean or libertarian view of property.
He thinks not only will people agree to a sort of policy of peace and non-aggression against each other and agree not to use force unless force is initiated against them,
But they'll also agree to a libertarian view of property.
And he thinks this follows from the liberty principle.
He said, well, supposing somebody is using certain property,
as we say, kind of on the locking view, he's acquired it.
So if somebody else tries to take it away from him,
he's interfering with what that person is doing with the property.
Now you could say, well, isn't the first person interfering with the second one? He's trying to stop him from taking the property away from him.
But Narsen said, no, the first person, the one who's using the property, really isn't depriving anyone else of anything.
The other person just had an opportunity to acquire some of that property, but he didn't take advantage of it.
So there's nothing really that's being interfered with. It's not as if you're taking away something that the other person had by acquiring property.
You're really just, in some sense, denying him some opportunity that he might in some other possible world of exercise, but he didn't in this one.
Fund. So really he's saying the first user should have the right to own the property.
So what he's saying is that the rule of property acquisition that he favors is the only one
And that's what is what Pareto Optimal, remember from welfare economics, a Pareto Optimal situation
is one in which no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
So say if somebody said, well, let's have some kind of egalitarian property rule, we
distribute property from some people to others, the people who get the property might like
I don't like that, but others, the ones who had the property in the first place, wouldn't, they'd be made worse off, but in Narveson's system, given the initial distribution, only voluntary exchanges take place, so any exchange will make people better off, at least the participants in that exchange.
be having measures that take from some and give to others. Now, here I think there's
some, although I think he's right that that's the locking view is the correct one to adopt,
I don't think he's shown that people in the situation he postulates would agree to that.
First of all, it's not the case that the lock-in first user is not depriving anyone of any
actual thing you could do with the property, he's just depriving you of a possible opportunity
because remember, in the Hobbesian situation that the Narcissists assume, everyone is free
People are still free to do whatever he wants with any object, as long as he doesn't assume
we have some agreement not to use force against people, but people are still free to use any
object they want.
The question, if you acquire some property, you have a right to exclude other people from
using it, and you didn't have that right in the Hobbesian state of nature.
People are free to do Hobbesian state of nature as modified by Narsing.
People are really free to do whatever they want.
So, in fact, people are being deprived of something, namely their right to use but not exclude others from property that's already been acquired.
I think while Narveson has come up with actually the correct principle of property acquisition,
I don't think on his Hobbesian basis he's able to justify that.
And I think in the actual situation, whatever rules of property people would come up with are indeterminate.
So although I think Narveson's work is very much worth careful study,
I don't think for the reasons I've stated that his contractarianism is the best approach in libertarian philosophy.
Well, I see, partly by design, I've concluded, so we don't have time for questions.
Thanks very much.