Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Hartshorne keeps reproducing the same straw man that classical theism posits a tyrant God who leaves no room for human freedom. Of course, God is nothing of the sort: His power is such that He lures the will, persuades the intellect, and yes, when necessary coerces the body. I have already mentioned that chance or randomness is not human freedom; rather, chance is an attempt to build into nature a primitive way of solving certain easy problems by trail-and-error. Evolution is precisely such a process, combining random mutations and a natural law, according to which fitter organisms tend to survive and prosper. God may choose to flip random events one way or another. But human intelligence far exceeds the abilities of this makeshift.

A repost of my reply to the claim that “[e]conomic libertarianism is protection of the haves at the [expense] of the have-nots”:

No, economic libertarianism is allowing every have-not to challenge the economic position of the haves in order himself to become a have. It’s allowing so far unknown and relatively poor individuals to succeed in business and supplant and “dethrone” the present rich — though political rhetoric is dangerous in discussions of the market, because a “chocolate king” will lose his “power” the minute his customers abandon him for someone who offers to serve them better.

A completely free market does not allow exploitation, because the businessmen are dependent for their success on whether they have customers. This dependence is called in economics “consumer sovereignty.” The consumers decide who will succeed, become rich, and remain capitalists and entrepreneurs, and who will fail and be relegated back into the rank of workers.

No capitalist, no matter how presently successful, can rest on his laurels under a completely free market. He will enjoy no subsidies, no protection from liability, no favorable anti-competitive legislation. He will forever be looking over his shoulder, worrying if someone else is catching up. And eventually someone will catch up. For example, it is almost certain that Wal-Mart will not be the biggest company in the world in, say, 20 years. There are far too many people who are eager for that honor.

And when you subsidize something, you get more of it. What incentives will the failing companies have to strive for profit through faithful service to their customers and for standing on their own feet? This is a question that haunts all protectionism, whether through bailouts or tariffs or subsidies or monopoly privileges. If the purpose is to make a firm or industry strong or able to compete in the market, then protecting it only makes it weaker. One must throw each company out into the “dog-eat-dog” (ha!) competitive environment and through these pressures force it to improve and excel.

Nor is there an analogy from protecting human children and the elderly to protecting “infant” and “senile” industries. If an industry is foreseen to be profitable only after it matures, investors will still put money into it now. The government can’t find out which industries or firms ought to be kept alive and which, aborted. And if an industry is no longer profitable and its prospects are dim, then it deserves to “die.”

Hartshorne’s one important rebellion against classical theism consists in his claim that the God of St. Thomas loves through action only and feels no emotions about our human joys and sorrows. “To sorrow… over the misery of others belongs not to God; but it does most properly belong to Him to dispel that misery” (ST, I, 21, 3), Aquinas writes in a clear and authoritative declaration. Such a God is a “heartless benefit machine” (Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, 29), Hartshorne concludes. In my not-so-humble opinion, Hartshorne would have benefited from my discussion of the 3 “levels” in God. We connect to God at first not through His 2nd-level love, which is the Holy Spirit, but through His 3rd (and highest)-level of goodness. And goodness is communication of being. God, therefore, is fundamentally a sharer of His own perfections, whether of the 1st or 2nd level. When we pray to God, we ask Him to give us something of His own, because God is good. For example, the grace of the Holy Spirit is what is communicated to us by means of God’s goodness. Now goodness graces God with an extra oomph of love, knowledge, and power. As God creates the actual world, He comes to know which of the possible worlds is the actual one and to love that world and the creatures in it. Insofar as God does good, He is mutable. God’s creative (as opposed to begetting) power, God’s free (as opposed to natural and middle) knowledge, and God’s other-regarding love (as opposed to self-love) are added unto God in the process of self-diffusion of God’s goodness.

Now “to love” and “to be good” are almost synonymous. To love is to will good to another; to be good is to love others and help them. So, God’s goodness is manifested first and foremost in God’s love for His creatures. Note that Aquinas said that God does not sorrow over the misery of others. He did not say that God does not feel joy over the successes of others. This is because God does not spend His time in idle contemplation of what might have been or of pleasures that are impossible to achieve. Even though God is discontented over our travails, because the state of affairs in the world is far from ideal, He is far too concerned with how to alleviate our suffering, insofar as it accords with the His law and wisdom. God feels no need for any “sympathetic suffering,” because He is already doing everything He can to help. God is flawless and rejoices in His perfect conduct vis-a-vis the created world. Finally, God appreciates His “uneasiness,” because the state of affairs of “God & the world” is better than the state of affairs “God alone,” though the former can always be better.

What it means to serve God, then, is to assist God-Who-is-goodness in its neverending diffusive task. Of course, making gods out of men is a particularly delicate and precise undertaking. That’s why the world is as complex as it is, containing, for example, evil. Hence, I write, “the paradoxical conclusion that happiness can only be attained in self-giving.” For only thusly does one come to know, love, and expand oneself. The most astonishing thing about our human condition, then, is that there is no limit to the creative advance that is possible through (and only through!) human agency. Progress need never end. Now some say that there is no progress in the state of glory and heavenly life everlasting. But I wouldn’t be so cavalier with making confident statements about that which no eye has seen and no ear has heard. Perhaps our adventures continue on, and novelty will never cease to amaze us.

This is a repost of my comment to If Illegal, Then Immoral?

Yes, Romans 13 is part of the Bible and has some authority. But Christ did not, it seems to me, come to teach us political philosophy (although, to be sure, there is no reason why He couldn’t). At the same time, Jesus’s life testifies to the evils of unchecked government power. To wit:

1. The state prevented His mother from staying in a decent room in a hotel, because its census caused an unforeseen rise in the demand for lodging.
2. The state tried to kill Him as a child, so that the holy family had to flee to Egypt.
3. The authorities smeared Him and tried to trap Him.
4. The state released a murderer yet convicted Him.
5. The state arrested, imprisoned (”bound”), tortured and crucified Him. (It is true that everyone is held responsible for Jesus’s passion and death, but only as the final cause, for He came for the sake of all sinners; but not as the efficient cause which the state was.) And finally,
6. The state tried to deceive everybody about Jesus’s resurrection. Oh yes, and
7. The state also killed John the Baptist of whom it is written: “I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” (Mt 11:11)

So, take Rom 13 with a grain of salt.

Note another thing that the bailouts represent: special privilege to particular market players to protect them from failure. This insulates these firms from the market forces, such that they remain afloat whether they do well or poorly at satisfying consumer wants. Resources cannot be reallocated from what have been revealed as useless projects to more urgent ones, again, as determined by the consumers. The government is channeling the money into uneconomic uses.

This privilege, since protection cannot be extended to every single firm without resulting in a particularly absurd form of socialism and in complete calculational chaos, is the definition of injustice. It’s destructive of the impersonal order that is the free market. On the market it is never about “who you know”; it is almost always about how much money you have in buying and the quality and price of your product in selling. Thus, the market does not respect persons or firms. Good will is hard to obtain and easy to lose. Under hampered market, on the other hand, there arises a class of mafia-like “connected” companies with privileges bestowed on them by the coercive power of the state. They are personal friends of the political elite. They are exempt from the discipline of the market which beats and decimates its every member who fails to please the consumers. This favoritism, I want argue, is unjust. Government cannot pick winners in the marketplace — only consumers can; but losers surely pick the government as their refuge from the rigors of free enterprise.

In one of his Libertarian Party presidential campaigns the late Harry Browne would ask, “Would you agree to let go of your favorite government program if that meant that everyone else, too, would let go of their favorite government programs?” I thought that was brilliant. A person may lose, because he might, for example, have to pay tuition for his child’s education himself. But think how much he would benefit from the end of taxation and regulation and inflation and so forth entailed by everyone else’s also foregoing mutual theft! Think, for example, of how fast the economy would grow in a sustainable way without the Federal Reserve and without corporate taxes’ increasing the costs of doing business. Demand for labor and capital goods would shoot up, raising productivity and wages. Think of the economic progress that would take place under a streamlined libertarian common law, though some shysters might indeed lose. Governments above the local level may produce some private benefits but those benefits are far outweighed by the public costs of those governments. It’s better for the vast majority to get rid of them altogether.

Here is an analogy: suppose Microsoft were seized, carved up, and sold by the government, and each individual in the country received a check for $1,000. Each person would benefit from this cash. But each person would at the same time lose from the fact that other people, too, have received the same amount of money. An important company has been destroyed, its capital consumed, and all each person has got for it is a measly thousand bucks. To add insult to injury, as people spend this newfound money, they bid up the prices of all goods and services. Do the same with every Fortune 500 company, and civilization in America will come to an end. So, it pays to each individual to reject the destruction of Microsoft. On the other hand, it pays to each individual to welcome the destruction of the state.

The reason why the masses are generally opposed to the bailout is that they hate the rich Wall Street “fat cats” and want to see them fail. Of course, they should fail, but not because the mob envies them but because of the realities of the market. If the government, instead of bailing out big business, looted it and distributed the proceeds to the populace, the people would love and cheer the government (absurdly, of course, because their standard of living would fall after the theft).

None of my libertarian writings have been for the sake of the masses. The masses are beyond salvation and are unteachable. I have written for those members of the elite who are capable of and interested in understanding economics and political philosophy and are able to put the common good above their own private good. I have written so that the truth may be preserved and possibly improved upon. But I have no hope of this truth’s ever reaching the mob or influencing politics.

In the Preface to his Simple Rules for a Complex World, Richard Epstein wants us to “reexamine some of [our] more cherished assumptions about the relationship between legal rules and social progress.” (xi) Mises saw this relationship long ago: “Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator. Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee.” (Bureaucracy, 71)

It seems that I could reply to Dawkins as follows: even though the maxima of qualities can be different, e.g., finite (and if such, then either physically attainable or not) or infinite (and if such, then either potentially or actually infinite), still, these maxima can be identified. Thus, there is indeed a “pre-eminently peerless stinker,” for example, a finite volume of air containing nothing but the molecules that produce the smell. Furthermore, any actual smell partakes of that pre-eminence by imitating it only to a lesser degree in a straightforward way, such as a volume of air with just a few of the smell-causing molecules. But though it’s true that the maximum of truth or goodness or nobility is approached differently from the maximum of smelliness, the former have maxima nonetheless. And no matter which example we pick, the maximum is an archetype of everything less than that maximum and causes it, though we have to show how for every case in point.

Again, e.g., the temperature of wood can only be so high before the wood bursts into flame and later on ceases to be wood. Hence yellow fire is the maximum of the heat that can inhere in wood, and fire in wood is caused by exposing the wood to the temperature of fire.

Or, the maximum of interest can be defined as something which so holds your attention that you are not thinking or feeling anything else. Then a subject can be more or less interesting, depending on how much it occupies your thoughts. The ideal of interest, though abstract, causes less interesting things, as people try to produce works that absorb you more than works of other authors, so as to lure you to choose them.

Update. Three more examples: (3) the Internet paragon of the green color is #00FF00. Every greenish color participates in this pure greenness more or less, and the “FF” in the middle causes the green hue to influence every color. (4) Perfect justice is giving everyone his due. Deviations from this perfection qualify as justice more or less, but all receive their quality of justice by comparison with the ideal of justice. (5) The best form of government is local (city or county level) with public enforcement, mixed lawmaking, and private court industry. Any government is good to the extent that it approaches this ideal, and the ideal causes people to set up governments according to it.

Our super-stinker will not be God, however, because smelliness is not a metaphysical perfection. Unlike truth, say, a more intense smell is not inherently better than a less intense smell, again, self-evidently from “wisdom.”

Then there is no need to prove the actual infinity of God. That can be done later as we uncover His attributes. Whatever the actual properties of “something which is truest, something best, something noblest,” God, we must judge, is all those things.

Thomist explains the Fourth Way in part I and II.

The better a thought corresponds to reality, the truer it is. To the more reality a thought corresponds, the truer that thought is. A thought that comprises in itself the whole of reality is the truest. And this thought causes or is the source of thoughts that are less true.

2 min.) as something is true, so it is causal [of other truths, since it contains them; e.g., a greater truth in the mind of a teacher causes a lesser truth in the mind of the student, since the teacher need not impart everything he knows into the student; also causal of knowledge as a necessary part of it, and causal of action as knowledge of ends-means connections]

2 maj.) as something is causal, so it is existent [or has an essence whose act causes some effect].

So as something is true, so it is existent.

Further, the ultimate truth, being of eternal things, must itself be eternal. And what is eternal has the greatest existence. (I love his “self-evident from ‘wisdom’.”) So, God has existence par excellence.

God then is the thought which is true to everything that exists; or God is “the act of understanding” of everything. The doctrine of the Trinity may be useful here: God the Father is the reality to which God the Son is true. Nice!

An NT Rational lawmaker will ask: “What is the best and most efficient way to select local government officials?” And answer, e.g.: “By popular vote.” Having adopted the law, an NF Idealist will ask: “Ought I or you to vote?”; “Is it one’s duty to vote?” Now it would seem that the connection between the two questions is that it is one’s duty to obey the law. True enough, but this duty will be prima facie, not all things considered. Here are situations in which the law will be in full force, yet the duty to do as the law says will be abrogated.

1. Let the town population permitted to vote be 100,000 people. Then if only 20 of those vote, then the institution of voting is undermined, and it make no sense for you to vote.
2. Let 99% of the eligible public have already voted with candidate A garnering 70,000 votes, and candidate B, 29,000 votes. Clearly, your vote will make no difference, so if the goal is to affect the outcome, then it is useless to vote.

   This is an act utilitarian consideration rather than a rule utilitarian one, but it seems to be valid as things stand.

3. Suppose you are sick unto death. Then your business is in the next world, and it is no longer your duty to care for the affairs of this one.
4. You may be out of town at a philosophy conference which is arguably more important than voting. Hence, again, no duty to vote.
5. On the way to the polls, you see a car accident and help the victims. As a result, you are late and fail to register your vote. Here a more important duty has trumped a less important one. All things considered, voting is not a duty in this case.
6. You are an anarchist who thinks there should not be any government. Now the law looks as follows: “If we are to have public officials, then the best way to appoint them is by popular vote.” You may protest the antecedent by protesting the consequent. Once again, there is no duty to vote.

If it is asked, “Why must I, a player, obey the rules of baseball?,” the answer must obviously be, “Because only then will you have an enjoyable game or even a game at all.” So, if it occurred to an act utilitarian that the best way toward happiness is to play some baseball, then he would bind himself to this game’s rules.

If it is further asked, “Why must I obey these rules as opposed to some other set of rules?,” the answer is presumably, “Because these rules have been selected in the market as producing the greatest pleasure for the participants or for those who watch the game or for both.” Here, too, an act utilitarian would endorse the rules.

A baseball game is a consumer good which works according to some set of rules set forth in an official manual. So does a DVR or a car. In order enjoy the game, one must “program” the players to behave predictably and learn the rules oneself. (So, again, a game is a simple abstraction from reality with equality of opportunity and competitive play.) Since baseball has been extensively tested in the marketplace, its rules are probably very efficient, rather like the fact that the internal combustion engine in cars has been more or less perfected in the past 100 years. In a manner of speaking these rules can be said to be summaries of act utilitarian actions; they are guides to what is best on the whole in particular cases. However the game actually progresses, as long as the rules (such as “you shall try to win to the best of your ability, and these are the objectives”) are followed, the public gets what it paid for.

Morality, on the other hand, is not a consumer good which someone produces and offers to us in exchange for money. To be sure, one can write a book on ethics and sell it. But then the “seller” would have to obey the same laws as the “buyer.” Morality regulates the very production of goods and services on the market. It’s the laws that govern real life not playgrounds. Rules of baseball represent a part of an in-demand service supplied on the marketplace. They regulate the actions of baseball players. Morality is about general human actions and emotions. It posits rules for human beings as such.

Is there a difference between rules of baseball and rules of morality? If we consider their purpose, then the answer is yes and no: the goal of the baseball rules is ultimately to create an interesting and challenging game for the entertainment of the players and spectators. The rules of baseball serve to attain a specific goal: enjoyment of the game. The rules of morality, too, are attuned to happiness, but their goal is much more general, e.g., protection of life, liberty, and property.

If it were asked, What are the properties of the rules of baseball?, we would answer: they are simple rules to be followed blindly; there are no exceptions nor a hierarchy of lower and higher laws or of competing systems of laws. The rules enforce (or are designed to) strict equality of opportunity, such that breaking a rule makes no sense, because it immediately privileges one player or team over the other. The players are pitted against each other so as to generate conflict and drama and impel the players to excel one another which leads to clever strategies, bold tactical maneuvering, and other components of a fun game. The game, furthermore, is fully constituted by its rules.

One cannot violate a rule of baseball during a game. I know little of baseball, but I remember people complaining that home runs have become far too frequent. Amending the rules of professional baseball has to be done through a proper procedure; there is no such thing as a unilateral “civil disobedience” while a game is being played.

Moral rules, on the other hand, are complex; they have layers of lower and higher laws; they have exceptions; they come from different sources; they require careful balancing. There will be different correct moral choices for persons of different temperaments. Moral laws do not assume equality of opportunity, nor do they outline a zero-sum game. Life and society are not wholly constituted by moral rules.

One can break a moral or legal rule for two reasons. First, as a protest against the rule in general, i.e., against its general applicability, for example, to “create awareness” of an unjust or inefficient law and suggest a reform. Second, in order to obey a higher law, e.g., in order to further act utilitarianism. This is a challenge to the rule’s particular applicability. Still, in the first case you will be questioned as to why you think the commonly accepted rule is altogether bad. In the second case you will be asked why you broke a rule that even you consider to be useful most of the time. And you had better have good replies.

Introspective understanding is the unity of knowledge. It’s a picture of how all things fit together. Unity is a condition for harmony within some complex system that is working smoothly “as one” without, however, necessarily having a real identity. The paradigmatic cases of such a system is the free market and the human body.

Sensing understanding is a combination of adaptable tactical appraisal and easy logistical grasp of exactly what is needed where and at what time. This is the understanding that allows one to act, to interpret history, and the like. It is different from prudence, as prudence is a practical virtue concerned with finding the most profitable course of action given the known ends and means. Understanding is a speculative virtue that assesses the situation and considers the feasibility of rival plans. In other words, knowledge gives prudence the causal connections between events. Understanding gives prudence estimates of how projects are likely to proceed in any given situation. Prudence then takes this information and calculates the best choice to make.

So far I have assumed that we start with act utilitarianism and employ “you shall maximize utility” as the highest law from which we derive secondary rules, such as “you shall not steal.” And I have written that the reason for having these secondary principles is two-fold: “we have rules, because [acts recommended by pure utilitarianism] are usually lawlike; and we use these rules in moral deliberations instead of considering acts directly, because of the limitations of human prudence.” Thus, we go down from prudence, with the help of which men discover and enact particular laws judged to be most profitable to the community, and we entrust SJs with caring for their enforcement.

But we can also go up from secondary laws to the most formal law of utility, if we can show that whenever these laws are made by some natural process other than explicit rational legislation, such as “by human action not by human design,” then this process will yield laws that — surprise! — happen to be good. I read somewhere that the career of Richard Posner has consisted in no small measure in demonstrating that the common law, made in precisely such a manner, is “efficient,” or in other words, conforms to utilitarianism.

Here’s Mises interpreting Marx: “The capitalists, in their subconsciousness ashamed of the mean greed motivating their own conduct and anxious to avoid social disapproval, encouraged their sycophants, the economists, to proclaim doctrines which could rehabilitate them in public opinion.” (Human Action, 78) Marx was in many ways right in his denunciation, except that he got the theory of class conflict wrong: the numerous so-called economists are sycophants not of the bourgeoisie but of special interests and the state. These economists have betrayed their calling to analyze the consequences of human actions not in the short-run and only for certain groups of people (such as the politically connected Wall Street firms) but in the long-run and for all groups. They have also failed to abide by rule utilitarianism, in that the market and a regime of private property cannot bear bailouts, subsidies, fiat money, massive government debt, and other forms of interventionism and outright socialism. They should be vociferously calling for explicit laws against this sort of things. As it is, they are paid shills for the political class.

In other words, what the government right now is doing to the financial sector should not merely be judged imprudent; it should be utterly illegal, as well, unless it already is unconstitutional.

Have the Federal Reserve buy up the entire country, that is, the assets of every public and private firm, quiet like. It’s really a piece of cake.

1. NF Idealists impose a constraint on SP Artisans as to how the latter live their lives: their lives must be a story, have an identity. More important, they must be true to their own artistic visions.

On the other hand, SPs impose an imperative on NFs: they must fight for what they believe in. To reverse this, NFs urge SPs to believe in what they fight for instead of being their normal cynical selves. That’s why all the SP cartoon superheroes fight for “justice,” an NF cardinal virtue.

2. One of the very few deficiencies of Keirsey’s Please Understand Me II is that he failed to realize that Artisans represent the passions or sensuality which is split into two distinct powers: the concupiscible and the irascible. The former is instinctively attracted to sensual pleasure and flies from pain; the latter is that whereby an animal resists attacks and attacks others. Therefore, to Artisans two virtues belong: temperance and courage. Folks of this temperament seek not only sensual stimulation, as Keirsey asserts, but victory, as well.