Tibor Foaming with Much Blood: A Reply to Tibor Machan's review of Escape from Leviathan J. C. Lester A reply to Tibor Machan's "A Hobbesian Defense of Anarchy" reviewing J. C. Lester's Escape from Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare, and Anarchy Reconciled in The Review of Politics, Volume 63, Issue 3, Summer 2001, pp. 612-614. As a critical rationalist, I welcome criticism. A serious response can help to elucidate matters even when the criticisms mainly comprise superficial misreadings, misquotations, unsubstantiated assertions, and ill-tempered ad hominems that together amount to a professional disgrace. Thus, I am happy to reply to Professor Machan's review of Escape from Leviathan. The review begins with this tendentiously mangled pseudo-quotation: "As far as I can tell, no one has hitherto provided an adequate account of liberty in this sense ['It is about the voluntary interaction of persons rather than selfish individualism, as its detractors sometimes misrepresent it']." The part in square parentheses is included as though it might be a sufficient explanation of what went before. Far from it. It is a small part of a longer passage that is itself merely introducing the idea of liberty that is about to be discussed. The point of the first assertion is that a clear formulation of liberty in the libertarian sense does not appear to exist. And such a clear formulation is what I am attempting in that particular chapter.1 I tentatively offer my own version of this small but important aspect of libertarianism. Nowhere does it say or imply that "no one has hitherto done as good a job as the author at treating a vital issue in political philosophy". So, I cannot see that "this amounts to either hype or a very significant piece of intellectual news". Machan objects that "no list of contenders is provided". But I have just said that there are no other contenders as regards a clear formulation. However, I explicitly say that Murray Rothbard and David Friedman have typical approaches and what is wrong with those (71ff). Not being a foundationalist, I do not attempt to "back up" my formulation of interpersonal liberty; but to explain it and defend it from criticism. As it is short but crucial (the absence of-initiated or proactively-imposed costs), why does Machan not bother to quote or criticise it? And why does he not tell us what his own preferred formulation is? I start the book by saying, "There is only one thing that is seriously morally wrong with the world, and that is politics"; but "morally" is carelessly omitted in Machan's misquotation. This is not "quickly qualified" (Machan's words) by stating that I mean by that "all that, and only what, involves the state." To make oneself more explicit is not to qualify what one has said. If I say that I have a doctor as a neighbour, I do not qualify that by adding that I mean a physician and not someone with a PhD. Two small points, perhaps, but typical of the sloppiness in what is a quite short review. 1 A more recent attempt is "The Heterodox 'Fourth Paradigm' of Libertarianism: An Abstract Eleutherology Plus Critical Rationalism." Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 23 (2019): 91–116. 2 When writing of what is "seriously morally wrong with the world", it ought to be obvious that I am referring to supposed general heavyweight contenders such as capitalism, environmental degradation, patriarchy, man's immoral nature, etc. It should be clear enough that I meant, and might have said had the words occurred to me at the time, that the state is the greatest single moral evil by a very long way indeed (does any libertarian doubt this? does Machan doubt this?). In any case, to pique the reader's interest, a certain rhetorical generalisation is surely not out of place in an opening line of a book. I immediately go on to explain that all other major worries are caused or exacerbated by politics or not really problems at all. By comparison, I do indeed think that any remaining "crimes by individuals" and "personal failures" (that Machan cites) are relatively insignificant. I believe a world without politics would be orders of magnitude better than it is now. But then perhaps Machan is not an anarchist and, if so, is more sympathetic to politics than I. He states of these lesser individual problems, "One may assume that we will not find [them] among what is 'wrong with the world' ... Or ... they are the fault of politics". Of course, I accept these things are still wrongs and not all the fault of politics; and nothing I say implies otherwise. That Machan can find it "evident from this much, this is a provocative but annoying book" shows more about his own careless misreading and temperament than the book itself. We are then told, "The author makes all kinds of general allegations against people who have worked on various issues with which he is concerned". What are these "general allegations against people"? Could this be an accusation of libel? No, "their 'arguments have been rarely clear, consistent, comprehensive, and nonmoral.'" What I actually wrote was that "such arguments are rarely clear, consistent, comprehensive, and non-moral". This assertion of mine was explicitly and only about those arguments concerning the extreme version of the libertarian/classical-liberal/pro-market "compatibility thesis" (of liberty, welfare, and anarchy) that the book is out to defend. I cannot see how this assertion can sanely be construed as "all kinds of general allegations against people". Machan continues, "We are not told why it is not paradoxical to consider it wrong to discuss matters of normative politics in non-moral terms. What sense of 'wrong' is being deployed here if not at least a mildly moral one?" Presumably, that "non-moral" should be 'moral'. Machan here uses "wrong" himself and then criticises it as though it were a quotation. The introductory chapter explains the objective (or positive) nature of the thesis that is being defended and why, therefore, moral advocacy is avoided as irrelevant and potentially confusing. It does not suggest that it is "wrong" ever to discuss politics in moral terms. Otherwise, it would hardly have had that opening sentence (which Machan misquotes by omitting "morally"). Machan objects to "all this self-congratulation". It is entirely irrelevant to any philosophical argument in the book, of course, but Machan might trouble himself to cite one plausible example given that he appears to like making such "general allegations against people". He continues, "The more modest task of the author, once we discount the hype, is to defend 'the practical compatibility of liberty and welfare in the market'." That "task" is intended to be bold and probably does not strike most readers as in any way "modest" (they might even regard it as "hype"). Moreover, it is the only overall task. So, there is no other task than which it could be "more modest". We are then told that the book interprets human "welfare" as "subjective satisfaction." No, that is not how welfare is theorised. Welfare is explained and defended as having one's unimposed (or spontaneous) wants satisfied, which might not lead to an end-state of "subjective 3 satisfaction" (as with preference utilitarianism, utility is a motive and not a goal). Machan might make fewer such errors if he would only quote accurately. He asks: "Does the author manage to dispel the notion that the view being advanced is a grand tautology?" And yet he does not mention the idea that, in those limited aspects where this particular point might appear relevant, the defence explicitly involves a critical-rationalist interpretation of a priori arguments. Does Machan think there is no difference between what is tautological and a priori? We are simply not told. Machan then writes of "Lester's claim that valuing and desiring are identical." Again, a quotation might be useful here. The reader might easily think that I claim this somewhere. I do not. I explain how values can be plausibly and innocuously interpreted as a special kind of desire; for the purpose of subjecting them to economic analysis. That is not to say they are identical with desires any more than saying that all cats are types of mammals is saying that all mammals are cats. As Machan then restates his own fairly conventional views without addressing my arguments, which criticise such views, I can make no useful reply other than referring readers to the arguments he ignores. In the book I follow many philosophers, not least David Hume, in defending the compatibilist view of freewill: that freewill is not inconsistent with determinism (and, indeed, seems to presuppose it). In truth, I have some limited sympathy for indeterminism at the quantum level. But as far as I can see that only allows for some randomness rather than a radical 'free will' in the self-determining sense that escapes both determinism and randomness.2 So I follow the common usage of 'free will' as not being compelled by others, as Machan correctly sees. Perhaps this is inconsistent, as is implied, for someone who "places such significance on the idea of initiated force". But I do no such thing. I go to some length to explain why initiated 'force' or 'coercion' needs to be replaced by the idea of imposed costs (or proactive impositions) when theorising libertarianism. This typically slapdash Machanical slip aside, how do I answer Machan's: "where is this sense of the creative capacity of human beings which enables them to take the initiative?" As stated, I do not think we can escape determinism-unless with some quantum randomness-even in our brains. But this does not mean that we cannot have our own ideas about what we want to do, and have creative ideas through our conscious interaction with Karl Popper's World Three of memes. Machan does not offer any argument for how thoughts or actions can be initiated outside of determinism or randomness. A "natural event" can indeed restrict our "freedom" (in the sense of available opportunities), but that is simply not the interpersonal sense of liberty that I am addressing. And the reason that a "crime" (a non-trivial and foreseeable proactive imposition, in my terms) is "significantly different from some natural impediment" (as Machan puts it) is that it is a result of a decision, albeit determined, rooted in a particular person. Such decisions can be affected by whether they are allowed or whether, say, restitution from the imposer to the imposed-on party will be enforced. This appears to presuppose some deterministic, or at least stable, framework of what a particular person is. By contrast, there is no point in making people liable for their mere bodily movements when these are caused by 2 I am now more sympathetic to a free will that escapes both determinism and randomness. See J. C. Lester, Two Dialogues, Buckingham, England: The University of Buckingham Press (2017), pp. 24-26. 4 genuinely unforeseeable external accidents. Intelligent responses to compatibilism are possible, of course, but it is not my job here to pose them and respond to them. Of an a priori (Austrian economics) sense of 'self-interest' that I explain and defend, Machan again totally fails to address my arguments and merely restates his own, trite common sense, position. It is as though he skims the words with just enough attention to spot the apparent thesis and then launches into his own manifesto. This is superficial, boring, and-ironically- egregiously arrogant. He appears to think that I have defended psychological egoism and so proceeds to attack this theory. But I spend some time criticising that idea myself, while showing how genuine altruism is still usefully compatible with an Austrian-economics interpretation of 'self-interest': in short, as these are interests of the self not necessarily interests in the self. I similarly argue how it can be useful and innocuous to treat various kinds of "pro-active attitudes" (as Machan calls them, continuing: "wanting, wishing, desiring, intending or having as one's purpose, for example") as kinds of preferences. Machan again objects by trotting out his pet view without bothering to show exactly where my arguments err. He suggests that "One may, for example, prefer to laugh at a funeral but chooses not to do so." But if one judges it to be too callous, say, then surely one's overall preference is not to laugh. Machan seems to be using 'preference' to mean something like 'initial inclination'. However, that is clearly not the sense I am defending. His common-sense approach continues with the bald assertion, "Preferences are overridden a lot, as are desires, wishes and so forth." This completely fails to explain how one is not doing, or trying to do, what one most prefers to do under the perceived circumstances at the time. Machan continues that it "is perhaps this that renders Lester tone deaf to morality, failing to appreciate how we can act because we let simple preferences have their way with us as opposed to considered judgments." I write a fair amount about morality in Escape from Leviathan. It is all, what is sometimes called, meta-ethics because my thesis is on the objective congruence of liberty, welfare and private-property anarchy (rather than arguing about what is morally preferable). As usual, none of this is cited or faulted. Machan simply contradicts it all by a gesture towards his own naïve view. And that view is so jejunely expressed that it is far from clear that it is really inconsistent with what he is dismissing. I explicitly allow that our momentary preferences might sometimes get the better of our more considered judgements. But I explain how such things must be what we most prefer to do at the time and how they do not appear wrong to us at the time. Hence, they do not escape 'rationality' in either the Austrian economics or the reasoning senses. It is not that I am "tone deaf to morality"; Machan is 'tone deaf to philosophy' (i.e., precise philosophical argument).3 As explained earlier, the book explicitly offers a libertarian theory of interpersonal liberty as the "absence of [initiated or proactively] imposed costs" and tries to show how this solves various problems and paradoxes that arise with normal libertarian accounts. Machan says of this, without bothering even to mention the exact theory or trying to explain his objections to it, "I do not think we have here anything terribly novel". It is, of course, supposed to be a theorisation of the implicit libertarian conception of liberty rather than something completely novel. But how many explicit theories of libertarian liberty does Machan know of? I cite a few of the, at best, somewhat vague ones and explain what is wrong with them and how mine 3 A more detailed defence of a priori instrumental rationality can now be found in my "Adversus 'Adversus Homo Economicus': Critique of the 'Critique of Lester's Account of Instrumental Rationality'" (https://philpapers.org/rec/LESAAH-2). 5 differs. Machan continues that there is "certainly nothing that does not face its own share of difficult problems e.g., with the ideas of initiated force, or voluntariness, neither much explored where it should have been." Of course, this theory of liberty is full of "its own share of difficult problems"-which seems to concede that it is a separate and at least partly novel theory (or how could they be "its own"?). I spend some time dealing with possible problems with the basic theory before moving on to confront it with all the standard problems. What does Machan expect? A simple and unproblematic account of liberty that causes everyone to kick themselves for not having spotted it before? And what exactly are the problems "with the ideas of initiated force, or voluntariness, neither much explored where it should have been"? For one thing, as already explained, my theory of liberty is about the absence of initiated impositions (which I explore ad nauseam, I fear) and explicitly not "initiated force" (which I explain is a hopeless characterisation of what libertarians are against). I do say some things about voluntariness. How are they problematic? Perhaps Machan has some interesting problems concerning this, at least, but I am not a mind reader. Machan moans-irrelevantly even if it were accurate-that the theory of liberty "fails to justify Lester's boastfulness about the breakthrough work of this book". Where is all this "boastfulness"? Where is "breakthrough work", or anything similar, in my text? There is some minuscule publisher's blurb on the inside flap of the dust jacket that finally mentions "groundbreaking work". Like most people, I take such things with a pinch of salt. But perhaps this is the main 'boast' that has piqued Machan's professional jealousy. I also explain at length, in various relevant places, why and how I am not a justificationist; and so not trying to "justify" anything. Professor Machan's disdain in ignoring what is actually written in the book and instead citing his own views throughout is a rather better example of arrogance. At least I do my intellectual opponents the courtesy of comprehensively quoting them (I hope more accurately than Machan does me, where he bothers to do so at all) and trying to deal with what they actually say (however mistaken I freely admit I might be; e.g., 41). The "infelicities" that Machan supposedly finds in the entirety of Escape from Leviathan appear to pall beside the magnitude of those that Machan really manages to cram into an extremely short review (even after dropping or correcting many of them, without acknowledgement, after my response to his earlier version). Finally, Machan complains about my "idea of human motivation" and gives a quotation from Ronald Coase that I "might benefit from considering": "There is no reason to suppose that most human beings are engaged in maximising anything ...". But no "idea of human motivation" is advocated in the book. There are, rather, various a priori arguments about what it means for an agent to choose something or act on that choice. I explicitly say, "this view is not specific to any notion of economic man. There is no substantive theory of human nature here. This notion of self-interested motivation is naturally applicable to all beings capable of action." (47) And to say that we seem a priori bound to act on what we are-on balance at that moment-most interested in achieving, does not entail that we are maximisers of any particular overall goal. But why bother to pay any attention to what an author actually wrote when you already know all the answers and are simply looking for another platform on which to sound off while rubbishing an arrogant upstart's book? Machan "might benefit from considering" a point made by Friedrich Hegel, 6 The easiest thing of all is to pass judgments on what has a solid substantial content; it is more difficult to grasp it, and most of all difficult to do both together and produce the systematic exposition of it. (The Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, section 3.) Or if he prefers to read his own favourite writer: For my money this kind of assertion by a philosopher is disappointing and, indeed, may encourage a bad reputation for philosophy. Where does a philosopher come off asserting something for which no argument or evidence is provided? (Tibor R. Machan, Letter to The Philosophers' Magazine. Issue 16; Autumn 2001.)4 September, 2001; edited December 2019 (partly because the version in The Review of Politics differs from the earlier one that was on againstpolitics.com-including corrections of some of the errors my reply pointed out, but without any acknowledgement). In recent years all my philosophical writings have been in what I call "impersonal text": with no, or the minimum necessary, references to any actual author or his subjective states. But it seemed of insufficient value to have rewritten this reply, or written a new one, entirely in that style. 4 I seem to recall that this is also Machan's response to me in some way (but I do not now have access to the publication). On my final encounter with Professor Machan, some years later, he addressed me as his "nemesis"; presumably, mainly on the basis of my reply to his review. I cannot take much credit for that: his writings are entirely self-nemesising.