Abortion Rights and Wrongs

South Dakota last month became the first state among 10 contenders to pass a ban on abortion in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the landmark case from 1973 that blocked states from outlawing abortion. This is, unfortunately, an argument in which there is wrong on both sides. On balance, however, it is the religious agenda of the anti-abortionists that gives rise to the greater concern, seeking as it does to break down the barrier between church and state erected by America’s founding fathers.

The move to prohibit abortion services is effectively an attempt to interfere with the right to bodily integrity, the most basic of property rights held by every man and woman. No religious leader, president, or judge may seek to abrogate that right for any reason. It is inalienable. Nor are there any countervailing rights to be considered: the unborn fetus, a potential human being, has no rights until such time as it is born. Leonard Peikoff puts it this way:

“Just as there are no rights of collections of individuals, so there are no rights of parts of individuals—no rights of arms or of tumors or of any piece of tissue growing within a woman, even if it has the capacity to become in time a human being. A potentiality is not an actuality, and a fertilized ovum, an embryo, or a fetus is not a human being. Rights belong only to man—and men are entities, organisms that are biologically formed and physically separate from one another. That which lives within the body of another can claim no prerogatives against its host. Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child's proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves "right-to-lifers."”[1]

Equally, however, woman’s rights campaigners go too far in their attempts to claim special privileges for women over and above the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by the Constitution. There can be no “right” to an abortion, for the same reason that there can be no legitimate economic rights, such as the “right” to a job. Rights are freedoms to act, not claims to unearned values, or guarantees of an acceptable outcome. Consequently, while a woman has every right to seek an abortion without the need to justify that decision to anyone, it is equally the case that doctors may legitimately decline to provide that service if they so choose. If the entire medical profession of South Dakota were voluntarily to decide to discontinue the provision of abortion services, they would be entirely at liberty to do so. In those circumstances a woman living in the State would have to accept that she has no right to seek to force them to provide the service she seeks, but instead must look for it elsewhere. In a moral society, such as that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, men deal with other men voluntarily, when it is in their mutual self interest to do so. That is not the situation here, of course. Rather, South Dakota has sought by force to prevent a legitimate kind of transaction between consenting parties which, however difficult the circumstances, infringes no-one’s rights and is therefore entirely Constitutional.

It is to be hoped that the current members of the US Supreme Court choose to re-affirm the ruling of their predecessors given more than thirty years ago and strike down this latest attempt to undermine the legitimate freedoms and inalienable rights held by all Americans, regardless of their gender.

[1] Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand

The Philosophical Basis for Man’s Rights

An animal rights commentator writes:
“Why rationality as a criterion for rights rather than interests? Why rationality as the criterion for moral consideration rather than the fact of sentience? ….. I find the idea of rights for both humans and animals a risible idea… I find your claim that humans have rights because they are cognitive risible as well. As far as I am concerned, it begs the question: I think, therefore I have rights. Where is the link? ...... When we're out protesting, invading offices, bull horning animal abusers, and so forth, and you pass by to point out that animals do not have rights, we'll shrug our shoulders.”

Here is the root of the problem: a lack of understanding of what rights are, what their philosophical basis is, and why they are essential for Man, but not animals. The inevitable result is moral confusion: hence the dismissal of the issue of rights as irrelevant, when in fact they are of central importance. One should not be surprised by this:

“The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking hat few men grasp it fully – and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives – the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.” [1]

““Rights” are a moral concept – the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others – the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context – the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”[2]

The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A – and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. Man’s right to freedom of action is rooted in the volitional nature of his rationality. Unlike animals, which survive largely by instinct, man must choose to exercise his means of survival, his reason. Hence, if he is to survive as man, he must to free to make that choice. "Man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient or infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursuer their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.”[3]

“Since Man has inalienable individual rights, this means that the same rights are held, individually, by every man, by all men, at all times. Therefore the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another. For instance: a man has the right to live, but he has no right to take the life of another.”[4]

So it is the moral concept of rights that provides the philosophical basis for man’s freedom and protection from other men, and this in turn depends on man’s nature and, more fundamentally, on the Axiom of the Law of Identity. Absent the requirement to exercise the choice to think in order to survive, the concept of “rights” has no meaning in the context of other species. Animals are, in fact, the moral equivalent of stones, for precisely this reason.

Furthermore, it is the moral principle of Man’s rights that places restrictions on the actions that a Man may legitimately take. We do not refrain from enslaving other men or taking their lives because we “love” them, because we are commanded not to do so by divine authority, or even because it would be contrary to our assessment of their “interests”, but because it would entail a breach of their inalienable rights and would therefore be wrong. The same does not apply to animals: they have no such rights that may be abrogated.

The concept of “interests” is a far weaker basis for the defense of animal welfare than the concept of rights. Firstly, it is not the supposed owner of said “interests” that asserts them – the animals in question are incapable of formulating or even comprehending such a concept – and therefore, unlike Man’s inalienable rights, are open to question. Such “interests” are like the poor substitute for inalienable rights handed out by Governments in Statist societies to their subjugated citizens in the form of “permissions” and, like the former, may be changed or revoked at any time. Secondly, in any conflict between Man’s inalienable rights and animals’ putative “interests” it is the former, being beyond legitimate dispute, that must prevail. Consequently, while a man may give cognizance to the principle that he should not cause unnecessary suffering to animals, it is because it would reflect poorly on his own moral character if he did not. He is otherwise generally at liberty to make use of animals to sustain his own life as he sees fit.

When a man gives a woman a fur coat, he is making the statement that he would put his own life at risk (albeit only notionally these days) in order to protect hers; that he values her beauty, pleasure and comfort more than other values he may aspire to, including his own comfort, and more than the lives of the animals whose skins he has used to make it. These are consistent values for a man to hold and an appropriate way for him to express them. He does not wantonly cause suffering to animals, but uses them to serve his own legitimate purpose and gain values that are consistent with that purpose.

[1] Ayn Rand, “A Nation’s Unity”
[2] Ayn Rand, the Virtue of Selfishness
[3] Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual
[4] Ayn Rand. “Textbook of Americanism”

The Moral Failure of Socialist Education

There has been an outcry in recent weeks over Prime Minister Tony Blair’s modest proposals for education reform, and the bill now faces the threat of a major rebellion by recalcitrant Labour MP’s. The idea of a return to any kind of process of selection which would enable schools to decide which pupils they are willing to accept is an anathema to the Socialists. The stigma of the 11-Plus examinations, by which pupils were allocated to Grammar or Secondary Modern schools, the latter being the predecessor of comprehensive schools, is regarded even today, decades after its abolition, with fear and loathing.

The principle that Labour espouses in support of this position is one of “equality”: the notion that it is the duty of the Government to manipulate the playing field until it is approximately level, so that no pupil enjoys any kind of advantage. In reality, when Socialists talk about “equality” and “fairness” the notion they are in fact alluding to is the Communistic principle that no-one should be allowed to have something that others do not also enjoy. It is the same political principle that underpins their policy of aggressive taxation of the “rich”, who are considered to be enjoying too much of what good fortune and their own hard work have brought them. In other words, it is the politics of envy.

Socialist manipulation of the education system goes far beyond the hobbling of schools’ freedom to select on ability and aptitude. Courses are dumbed down to enable less able pupils to keep up; examinations are made progressively easier to delude those being educated as well as the nation as a whole that higher standards are being attained; legions of unsuitable candidates are ushered into universities by quota system to take meaningless courses which bring no tangible benefit to students or prospective employers, simply so that the Government can meet some arbitrary target for the proportion of students going on to further education; and Polytechnics are re-christened as universities in a further attempt to erode the ability of students and employers to distinguish the excellent from the merely commonplace.

At the same time, in a breathtaking act of hypocrisy, the Government enshrines specialist schools that may be as selective as they like as long as their specialty is not related to any academic discipline. In other words, it is acceptable to select on the basis of physical attributes such as speed or dexterity; but under no circumstances may selection be permitted on the basis of a person’s native intelligence. Why is this apparent dislocation of logic tolerated, one may enquire. Socialists almost certainly do not realize the answer and even if they did would be afraid to acknowledge it. It is this: that Man’s survival depends primarily, not on his instincts or physical prowess, but on his intelligence and ability to reason. In refusing to allow selection on the basis of intelligence, Socialists are deliberately evading a fundamental fact of reality regarding Man’s identity: namely, that some are better equipped to survive than others. And beginning from that fundamental evasion, Socialists are then obliged to evade a sequence of consequential facts such as, for example, that the deliberate hobbling of the more gifted ultimately impoverishes all of us, including the less able.

The moral principle that Socialists fail to understand and the root of so much of their mistaken ideology is this: a man does not require precisely the same skills and abilities as every other man in order to successfully pursue his own happiness. In other words, each individual’s life is the standard for all his values.

The Shaming of America

Prime Minister Blair, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, describes Guantanamo as “an anomaly”. It is much, much more than that. Despite being locked up tighter than a nuclear facility, news of what is happening at America’s equivalent of the Tower of London is leaking out, like a poisonous chemical from a toxic waste dump. The US administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists has been condemned around the world on two grounds: its illegality and its ethical failure to respect the most basic standards of human rights. The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly has released its own report on the Lawfulness of detentions by the United States of America in Guantánamo Bay and more recently both Amnesty International and the United Nations have expressed their own concerns in a series of reports into what they call "a human rights scandal". Today comes testimony from a detainee, Moazzam Begg, communicated through his attorney, the latest in a series of leaked revelations that clearly implicates the United States in the routine mistreatment of prisoners in a process that can only be properly described as torture.

The argument that America is permitted to conduct its operations in Guantanamo under the laws of war is, I believe, unsustainable. Not only is the weight of expert legal opinion solidly against such a reading of the law, this view fails other simple “sniff tests”. Firstly, who is America at war with? Which country or legal entity? While it may legitimately regard a group of individuals as terrorists and combat them with every means at its disposal, what a country may not do is declare a state of war upon them, at least not in the legal sense. But let us suppose that the United States could muster an argument to overcome this legal hurdle and convincingly establish grounds on which such a declaration may be valid. Accordingly, there would be no need to afford a trial to Al-Qaeda members, or those who support them, until hostilities have ceased. On what grounds then, does America support the trial of Suddam Hussein and his henchmen in Iraq? They stand accused by the USA and its allies of being active sponsors of Al-Qaeda terrorism, and must therefore be classified as enemy combatants. Can it really be that America’s position is that hostilities in Iraq are at an end and that Hussein may therefore be brought to stand trial? If there is a valid reason for the inconsistency in the way in which America is handling this issue, I have yet to hear it.

Let us accept for the moment that the vast majority of those detained at Guantanamo are dangerous terrorists, who furthermore are motivated to lie not only about their innocence, but also about their treatment at the camp in an attempt to smear the good name and reputation of the United States. Even so, if there are reasons to believe that even one of the detainees might be an innocent who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the continued denial of due process becomes insupportable. Are there grounds for such doubts? Certainly it is a position taken by many of those detained there, and by some of those that the United States has chosen to release, having presumably itself become convinced of their innocence. So doubts do exist – how could they not in the circumstances in which these prisoners were captured? – as the US itself appears to have recognized. I do not say for one moment that all those detailed in Guantanamo should be released. On the contrary, if tried and convicted they should face the severest possible penalty permitted under the law. But the essential point is that the detainees should face justice, not retribution.

There is, however, one argument against the continuation of Guantanamo that outweighs every other, and it is this: that the harm that America is doing to its own moral character and reputation as a champion of liberty and justice far outweighs any benefit it derives from continuing to hold the detainees there. The reason that America is so hated around the world by terrorists and dictators alike is precisely because, as the first truly moral society in the history of the world, it is the living embodiment of those ideals. To see the daughter of Locke, of Adams of Jefferson and of Lincoln, frolicking in the moral filth in which they habitually bathe, gives the greatest possible satisfaction to all those who stand in opposition to human freedom. For that reason alone, America must turn its back on the politics of the concentration camp and instead once more lift high the scales of justice and its torch of liberty.

Little Boxes

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

- Malvina Reynolds

So now we know. David Cameron's big idea is to turn the British Conservative party into a facsimile of New Labour, sweeping away the last vestiges of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. What does the Conservative Party now stand for? Cameron’s answer is clear: continued intrusion by the State; profligate and wasteful spending on failing education and health systems; forced redistribution of wealth coupled with a “moral obligation to make poverty history”; wholesale adoption of “green” ecology issues; and favoritism for women, ethnic minorities and other pressure groups. Cameron’s “vision” for the country is simply a replica of the Statist nirvana created by Blair and Brown.

Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war, that leaves men no choice but to fight to seize power over one another. In a full dictatorship, that civil war takes the form of bloody purges, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In a “mixed economy”, it takes the form of “pressure group” warfare, each group fighting for legislation to extort its own advantages by force from all the other groups.[1]

Modern day politicians are almost entirely incapable of doing anything productive. If you doubt this, ask yourself this question: is any of them capable of earning anything like the £200,000 that they have awarded themselves, if they were obliged to find a job in the real economy? In fact, would you be willing to employ a single one of them in your own business for a salary of even one tenth of that amount? Hardly. These are people who have no skills worth paying for and whose only hope of “earning” an income is to appropriate it as a superannuated politician. If that means rejecting every single principle and core value hitherto advocated by conservatives in order to get elected, so be it. In truth, the only principle that Cameron’s Conservatives now stand for is this: re-election by any means and at any cost.

So the British electorate is left with the following choice: the Red Statists, the Yellow Statists, the Green Statists, and now, courtesy of David Cameron, the Blue Statists. In other words, you can have any colour you like, as long as it’s Statism.

[1] Ayn Rand, War and Peace

Unintelligent Design

The days are long gone when significant numbers of people could be persuaded to believe that the world was created in perfect form by divine fiat just a few thousand years ago. The widespread adoption of the scientific method, together with an overwhelming abundance of contradictory evidence from geology, astronomy and physics, has caused that creationist theory to be thoroughly discredited. Just as with other quasi-"scientific" theories inspired by religious faith, such as the notions that the earth is flat, or that it sits at the centre of the universe, the facts of reality eventually prevail once human reason is permitted to function properly and the necessary epistemological frameworks have been developed. But now a new attempt is being made to foist a reconstituted variant of the creed of creationism on the American public under the rubric of "intelligent design".

"Intelligent design" is yet another pseudo-scientific theory that, at its core, is nothing more than an article of primitive religious doctrine dressed up as modern scientific fact. Stripping away the verbiage, the essence of the case presented by its proponents is that elementary constituents of biological material are improbably complex and must therefore have been designed by a superior consciousness. The traditional name given to that “superior consciousness”, i.e. God, is often omitted altogether, presumably in the hope of making the idea as palatable as possible.

Let us begin by correctly identifying the philosophical genus to which this theory belongs. It is a variant of the doctrine of the primacy of consciousness, the belief that there exists a form of consciousness which is antecedent to reality and on which the latter is ultimately dependent. The Descartesian version of the theory takes the form “I think, therefore I am”. The creationist variant is “God thinks, therefore I am”. In either case, whether the thinking agent is Man or God, that agent’s consciousness is the root of all reality.

We may acknowledge at the outset that some primitive components of biological systems are indeed marvelously complex entities. Let us also recognize that Man, the rational animal, is capable of awesomely complex creations. But the syllogism that seeks to link the two by suggesting that complex structures can only be the product of a purposeful intelligence is entirely false. Let me draw an analogy to illustrate the point.

There is a theory which has a wide currency amongst less sophisticated investors that patterns in financial markets exist and can be reliably detected by means of charts and other simplistic analytical devices which go by the collective name of technical analysis. A technical analyst will study a chart of prices and pronounce on the future of the stock on the basis of his recognition of a variety of patterns having labels like a “head and shoulders”, “double top”, or “opening gap”. Unfortunately for its adherents, however, there is now an overwhelming body of empirical evidence refuting the theory that future stock prices are somehow predictable by these means. So why does the theory still persist? What accounts for its allure? Much in the same way that “intelligent design” has a superficial appeal, the theory of technical analysis is highly seductive to novice investors because it too obviates the need for hard thinking. Moreover, it appeals to the tendency in Man to see patterns in the world around him, even where none in fact may exist. The magnetic draw of these two aspects of the theory is often sufficient to overcome an under-educated rational faculty. Hope triumphs over reason, if not experience.

One of the tasks I set myself as a finance professor was to try to “cure” my students of this delusional fantasy at an early stage of their studies, so that they could make more rapid progress in avenues of rational enquiry bearing some correspondence to reality. Since, evidentially, the straightforward presentation of contradictory scientific evidence would not necessarily be sufficient, the way I would go about this task was to teach my students technical analysis. We would study every aspect of the theory and put it into practice, so that by the end of the course students were thoroughly convinced that the arcane theories of technical analysis held the key to untold riches in investment markets. Then, in the final lesson, I would reveal the secret I had withheld from them: that all of the stock series they had been analyzing had been generated by computer simulation. Not only were the stock prices themselves artificial and random, so too were every single one of the “patterns” that they had so successfully detected by technical analysis. The conclusion was starkly inescapable: random events are indeed capable of producing complex patterns which appear meaningful to Man, but which are not in reality significant. Despite appearances to the contrary, there is no “intelligent design” acting in financial markets, just the natural evolution of a random process. Once they had grasped these facts Occam’s razor did its work and students were able to eschew the more complex theory of “intelligent design” expressed in technical analysis in favor of the simpler, more rational, and empirically correct efficient market hypothesis.

Perhaps a similar process of education through simulation and hands-on experimentation in the classrooms of American schools would facilitate the consignment of the dangerous nonsense that is “intelligent design” to the dustbin of discarded pseudo-science, along with astrology, ecology and technical analysis.

Animal Rights, Animal Wrongs

This weekend saw another example of an extraordinary new phenomenon in British public life - the backlash against violent extremism by a hitherto silent majority, sickened by the policy of appeasement adopted by their elected representatives. Just as with the recent demonstrations by Islamic extremists in London, people have finally found a voice to protest the intimidation and hatred perpetrated by a minority of violent thugs. An estimated 500 to 800 people were prepared to march on Saturday in Oxford on behalf of a new lobby, Pro-Test, in support of animal testing at the university's new £18m biomedical research centre which is having to be built under strict security measures as a result of the success of intimidatory tactics used by animal rights protesters. In a significant sign of the times, the formation of Pro-Test has been masterminded by a courageous 16 year-old bedroom blogger from Swindon, Laurie Pycroft, who has used the internet to mobilize support and has already received dozens of hate emails, including death threats.

The "arguments" advanced by animal rights extremists are entirely self defeating because, as Ayn Rand showed, "force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins." Using violence and the threat of it to try to advance the cause of animal rights is as futile and morally repugnant as the use of torture as a means of political persuasion.

But, if they are to succeed in their efforts to rout extremism, those who oppose the fanatics must do more than simply demonstrate and raise their voices in protest at their antics: they must win the philosophical debate. The argument that animal suffering is immoral, but justified by the greater good, is highly suspect, even dangerous, because it risks ceding to extremists the central tenet of their faith: that animals have rights, which we have a moral obligation to respect. Once we hand over the moral high ground to our opponents, it is only a matter of time before the cause of freedom and progress is lost, no matter how many Phyrric victories, like the one in Oxford, are won along the way.

The right way to present the argument is to challenge the moral premise that animals can have rights. The central argument is this: that even if it were possible to demonstrate the capacity for conceptual thought in animals, the case for animal rights would be no further forward: at most, protagonists will have succeeded in demonstrating that conceptual thinking is possible in animals, not that it is a necessary condition of animal existence. Even if we were to go further and suppose that in the case of a specific animal it could be demonstrated that conceptual thinking was not only a regular occurrence, but also had become (perhaps through training) a necessary condition of its survival, that would, at most, have implications in that one exceptional case – there should be no implications whatever for the animal kingdom as a whole. Animals would continue to survive by instinct alone, just as they always have.

According to this view, then, whatever its significance in terms of furthering our understanding of the conceptual function in Man, conceptual thinking in the context of animal behavior, if it really exists, is no more than an elaborate circus trick – one that is exceptional and without major ramifications for the moral issue of rights as applicable to animals as a whole. Proving that chimps have minds is not enough: proponents of animal rights must also demonstrate that the use of a rational faculty is a necessary condition of the existence of animals if they are to justify according them similar rights to those enjoyed by Man. To date, proponents have not yet properly addressed this second fundamental objection. Until they do the argument for animal rights remains untenable.