Charles Johnson’s excellent essay “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” which appeared in the anarchism/minarchism anthology that Tibor Machan and I edited, is now available online.

Read it now, or the statists win.

A quick reply to Neera’s last, on the pyramid of ability: I certainly don’t doubt that “in every area of human endeavor a few people stand out above others and benefit others much more than they are benefited by them,” and I agree that it “would be odd if this were not the case in business.” If that’s all that Rand meant by the pyramid of ability, I’d have no objection.

But at least much of the time Rand seems to assume that the pyramid of ability corresponds to the hierarchy of the firm, with the best decision-makers gravitating to the top – as when she says: “The standard of living of [a] blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.”

Moreover, Rand seems to assume that this generalisation holds, not just under idealised laissez-faire but, at least approximately, in the state-hampered market we live in. And that in particular is a claim that I think we have much reason to reject, both on the basis of everyday experience of what the business world is like, and on the basis of a theoretical understanding of the likely effects of government intervention.

Rand would never suggest that the government bureaucrats regulating a particular industry are likely to be better decision-makers than the people being regulated; quite the contrary! But to the extent that the market is pervaded by governmental privilege in the ways that Kevin Carson et al. delineate, the likelihood that success within the market must be tracking superior performance likewise goes down.

While Neera grants that workers know more about their own jobs than the owners do, she insists that “the owners know more about their work than the people they regulate.” I think that, to a large extent, this is not true under conditions of actually-existing corporatist capitalism, for the same reason that it was not true of state-socialist bureaucrats regulating the economy in the Soviet Union.

In order to regulate your work, I may not need to understand it as well as you do, but there’s a certain minimum extent to which I need to understand it if my regulating is to be useful rather than counterproductive; and what I’m claiming is that under both state socialism and corporatist capitalism, there are governmentally-enabled structural mechanisms that both a) interfere with the transmission of information up the hierarchy, thus making it harder for bosses to find out about the work of those they’re regulating, and b) insulate bosses and boss-driven systems from the ordinary negative effects of lacking such information. In short, Kevin is simply applying to corporatist capitalism the same critique that Mises and Hayek applied to state socialism.

On a different point: I notice that in the comments section of a previous post here, Neera objects to my defense of the unity of virtue (where I suggested, following Alexander of Aphrodisias, that if I am cowardly then I cannot be completely just, since justice sometimes requires courage) by noting that I might conceivably be cowardly only in situations where justice is not at stake; but when it is, “it’s not necessary that my cowardice prevail; my justice might trump my cowardice.”

Here, though, Neera seems to be thinking of the unity of virtue as solely a thesis about motivation; but as I see it, it’s at least as much a thesis about the cognitive aspect of virtue (and thus a thesis about practical wisdom, to get back to another issue that Neera has rightly been stressing). (Actually, I think that, even more strongly, it’s a thesis about how the contents of the virtues are determined, in the metaphysical rather than the epistemic sense of “determined”; but I only need the cognitive point for now.)

In order for me to do the courageous thing in just those cases where justice demands it, I have to be able to identify what justice demands; but, I claim, the coward’s ability to do this is necessarily impaired, at least to some extent. As I put it in the piece I linked to:

I do not count as fully courageous unless I can be counted on to do the courageous thing in every situation, which in turn requires that I be a reliable assessor of which risks are worth taking; but which risks are worth taking might sometimes depend on the requirements of prudence, or justice, or loyalty; to the extent that I am imprudent, or unjust, or disloyal, I cannot be counted on to assess those risks properly in such possible or actual situations, and so I will not be fully just.

In other words, the problem is not just that the coward will see what justice requires but won’t be motivated to comply in cases where what’s required is risky, but that the coward’s confidence about even having identified what justice requires is to some extent ill-grounded, since cowardice itself exemplifies an inadequate responsiveness to what’s worth losing to gain what.

One more thing: I agree with Neera that Greek tragedies can offer good examples of cases where doing the right thing entails suffering for the doer, but I’m puzzled by her choice of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia as an example, since that seems like a monstrously wicked choice rather than a virtuous one. I’d offer Antigone or Philoctetes as more plausible examples.

In addition, back on the pyramid-of-ability issue again, Bryan Caplan has another response to me here; once again I reply in the talkback.

Addendum: This response by Wendell Hoenir was just pointed out to me; I’ll comment on it later. Gotta prepare for class now!

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I’ve just sent in a response to Mike’s latest, which will go up either today or tomorrow. The discussion will wrap up tomorrow.

Alexander of Aphrodisias and Aristotle

I’ll save detailed comments on Neera’s piece for the discussion – and I agree with most of it anyway – but just one quick point: if by the unity of virtue Neera means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue to a significant degree without having them all, then I agree with her that that’s false (and I also agree that Rand seems, at least sometimes, to have held it). But if she means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue completely without having them all, then I’d be willing to defend that thesis. In the words of Alexander of Aphrodisias (the leading Aristotelean of the 2nd century CE):

That the virtues are implied by one another might also be shown in the following way, in that it is impossible to have some one of them in its entirety if one does not have the others too. For it is not possible to have justice in isolation, if it belongs to the just person to act justly in all things that require virtue, but the licentious person will not act justly when something from the class of pleasant things leads him astray, nor the coward when something frightening is threatened against him if he does what is just, nor the lover of money where there is hope of gain; and in general every vice by the activity associated with it harms some aspect of justice. (“That the Virtues Are Implied By One Another,” On the Soul II. 18; trans. R. W. Sharples)

(See also section 9 of this piece.)

Since there’ll be some back-and-forth among the authors later on, I won’t comment on his piece now; at any rate, it should be obvious from my own piece where my disagreements with his will lie.

Here’s Cato’s summary:

In his reply to Rasmussen’s lead essay, Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long sets out to sort the wheat from the chaff in Ayn Rand’s moral and political thought. Long maintains that “Rand sets out to found a classical liberal conception of politics … upon a classical Greek conception of human nature and the human good,” and he goes on to defend the plausibility of this project.

In particular, Long stands up for Rand’s reliance on a naturalistic teleology to ground her neo-Aristotlean ethic theory, pointing to contemporary philosophical work that supports Rand’s view.

Long is less happy with Rand’s political thought and criticizes her ideas of the “pyramid of ability” and of big business as a “persecuted minority.” Long credits Rand for her trenchant analysis of corporatism, but argues that she was mistaken to deny that corporatism and capitalism go hand in hand. According to Long, Rand’s ideal of voluntary interaction not only implies a radical departure from historical capitalism, but also a more thoroughly anti-statist social order.

Also, Directive 10-289 from Atlas can be converted to the same format just by shifting the hyphen.

Now all we need is a song titled “Union 7-5309.”