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The Messiness of freedom: The ugly tie test

There are two tendencies in talking about freedom that, it seems to me, need to be resisted. The first is an attempt to make absolutely sweeping pronouncements to the effect that people should be free to do everything of type x. Those always have to be qualified. Hence, it is simply false that people should be free to practice any religion, because the obvious examples of infant sacrifice, suicide bombing, and child temple prostitution come up. It won't work, either, to say that people should be free to do anything except to commit force and fraud, because "taking your baby home from the hospital and non-violently leaving him to starve in a closet" is a fairly easy counterexample, as are many others.

A tempting reaction to the first set of sweeping statements, however, is also incorrect, and that is to say that we should be free only to do what is right.

Now, that is wrong, too, and to show it, I present the ugly tie test: Suppose that my neighbor is standing in his driveway, minding his own business, drinking a mug of coffee before going to work. I happen to be outside doing a little gardening, and I notice that his tie seems to me to be the ugliest tie I have ever seen. Being an unpleasant person, I'm not content with merely thinking this privately. Instead, I call over to him, "Hey, Joe, that's the ugliest tie I have ever seen. Did you think you were gonna impress the boss with that tie?" And I laugh and go inside.

If I do that, am I pursuing the right? Of course not. I was being a jerk.

But do we want to live in a polis in which Joe can call the cops on me for that passing unkind remark? I submit that we don't, or at least we shouldn't. He shouldn't even be able to sue me.

On the other hand, when Joe holds a neighborhood barbecue, if he pointedly doesn't invite me and tells all the neighbors about the ugly tie incident, I should have no recourse, either, but to accept the expected social consequences of my rude act.

That's a tiny microcosm of one aspect of a free society. I have the freedom, at least in trivial matters, to be a jerk, and other people have the freedom to hold it against me. One could argue that neither of us is pursuing the highest good. If Joe were a saint, he'd invite me cheerfully to the barbecue, heaping coals of fire on my head.

This is why, unlike in Pakistan, in a free society we don't expect riots against religious minorities because someone puts up something taken to be blasphemous on Facebook.

Can I put the ugly tie principle into a single statement? Well, that's pretty hard to do without getting into those sweeping statements to the effect that "people should be free to do what they want as long as they don't hurt anybody else" and the like, which I already rejected in the first paragraph. Everything has to be qualified. After all, if I start phoning Joe up on the phone day after day and leaving abusive messages on his voice mail about his ugly tie, after a while some sort of tort or harassment law is going to kick in, and rightly so. If I send Joe a letter containing lengthy fantasies about watching him burn in hell, that should probably trigger such laws as well.

The same is true of parental rights. Anyone who reads my musings knows that I'm a huge advocate of parental rights. But what can one say about that except that within reasonable limits parents should have wide latitude in the upbringing of their children? It's the same messy mess, and somebody, hopefully somebody with a good dose of common sense, will end up deciding what constitutes "reasonable limits." No, it isn't child abuse to let your child play in the back yard alone. For that matter, a mother shouldn't be harassed terrifyingly by the police for leaving her son to play a video game in the car while she runs into the store for a gallon of milk. Even parents with somewhat weird diet ideas should be allowed to impose these on their kids, but not if the kids start being evidently emaciated and ill as a result. If the Powers that Be think my religion is contemptible superstition, they shouldn't on that basis be able to stop me from teaching it to my kids or even home schooling. Daniel Dennett is a creepy totalitarian for implying that the state should have a right to insist that kids be taught Darwinism against their parents' objections, and Richard Dawkins is a religious bigot for saying that teaching your children about the doctrine of hell is child abuse. But if I'm actually teaching my children to be suicide bombers, that's a different matter. And so on and so forth.

We all think that we know at least approximately what the reasonable limits on freedom ought to be, and then we find out, especially on the Internet, just how much disagreement there is.

But at the risk of sounding like some kind of mystic, I think it's better to live with the tensions than to try to resolve them by making sweeping pronouncements in either the pro-freedom or the anti-freedom direction.

As I said in this comment, every red-blooded American, and still more, every red-blooded conservative, should have enough of a pro-freedom streak in him that his immediate reaction to Scotland's "named person" proposal is, "Get out of my face. Who the dickens do you think you are? No stranger gets to micromanage my raising of my kids!"

And yes, that means that you should have the freedom to make mistakes in raising your kids. A grumpy, unkind father who tells his crestfallen son that his pitching was terrible in the Little League game should not be subject to state investigation for some trumped-up crime like "harming a child's self-esteem." That's the parental rights version of the ugly tie test. Rightful zones of freedom cannot simply be explained in terms of "freedom to do what is good."

But as for precisely, exactly what principles govern those rightful zones of freedom--I know what it looks like when I see it, and I'll support or oppose policy accordingly. That's probably how it should be.

Comments (84)

If you tell a guy that his tie is ugly and that he's fat, most guys don't get too upset.

If you tell a woman that her clothes are ugly and that she's fat, most women get really bothered by that.

But even that shouldn't be illegal all by itself, should it? I mean, sure, if you _pursue_ a woman every day, yelling at her, "You're fat and your clothes are ugly" and make her life a continual misery, personal harassment comes into play eventually. But just being a jerk in front of the house one time seems like the kind of thing that, if we start policing it, gives us the kind of intrusive state we should not want.

Or to put it a different way, there are some things that are better punished either by God or informally. If you're a jerk, you will have few friends, etc., but being a jerk by itself shouldn't be punishable by law.

Rightful zones of freedom cannot simply be explained in terms of 'freedom to do what is good.'

I think most people would probably explain them more as "freedom to do what does not harm another." Or as the old saying goes, "The right to swing your fist stops where the other fellow's nose begins."

The problem with parental rights is that in the desire to prevent harm, people have regularly pushed the line between "harm" and "discipline" higher and higher until simply inculcating beliefs seen as antisocial is considered "harmful", and as an inevitable consequence the rightful capacity to decide on appropriate discipline is being steadily eroded away.

There's also the problem that harm comes in all flavors. Presumably I hurt Joe's feeling by telling him that his tie is ugly, right? So to some small degree I'm harming Joe. Or I might harm someone (in some sense) by pointedly not inviting him to some social event--by shunning him, maybe for some frivolous or cruel reason. Yet that shouldn't be litigable in itself. So I think we actually want _some_ types of harm to be allowed. Or to take a slightly more controversial example, suppose that I am a Hindu and teach my children that there are many gods. A Christian would _definitely_ say that I am harming my child. There is a real sense in which it is actually true that raising a child to be a polytheist is harmful to him. It may even result in his going to hell! But I don't think we want all Hindus to be forbidden to pass on their religious beliefs to their children.

Or take it the other way: It should be obvious to common sense that harming oneself shouldn't always be legal. That's why we rightly stop people from jumping off a bridge or cutting off their arm with a chainsaw. So in some ways we should have _more_ restrictions on behavior than are allowed by the principle of "freedom to do what does not harm another."

So that principle is both too loose and too strong, in different ways. Some harms to others should be allowed, and some harms to self should be disallowed.

Should a Jehovah's Witness parent be granted the authority to deny a life-saving blood transfusion for his child? Or for himself?

Should adultery be a criminal offense? Spouse abandonment? Fornication?

So that principle is both too loose and too strong, in different ways.

It also doesn't do a thing to deal with Lydia's example of harmful child neglect. Inaction can be harmful just as much as action can be. But Stephen's principle simply cannot be stated so as to prevent harmful neglect (not without making slaves out of us, anyway). Some kinds of neglect are rightfully lawful even though they are very harmful, others are not (I can walk right by a homeless person and never do a thing for him, and this neglect is and should be legal.

Bill, good questions, and I think they point up the very messiness I'm highlighting. My own answers would be, in order:

No
Yes
Civilly litigable as breach of contract
Ditto
No

I would tend to agree with Lydia, except on the first one: yes.

Reasoning: blood transfusion is, inherently, a highly intervenionist sort of medical care (it is never "just" routine physical care, such as feeding, bathing, etc). And there are plausible reasons for people to object to ALL forms of transplants, even blood. Hence, it is sufficiently within the boundaries of reasonability for a person to reject such care as "extraordinary means" and "morally doubtful" that it should not be imposed contrary to a parent's choice.

Which, I think, illustrates the "messiness" very well indeed.

Yep. The word is casuistry, right? You can get to the answer by analogy with agreed upon cases, which is what you were doing here, not by instantiating some abstract norm.

Nice post! Thanks, Lydia. :-)

A recent example from my own life: I've had nurses tell me I must use that black colored pen rather than this black colored pen I'm currently using.

Why? I have no idea. I can't tell the difference. Not in color, line thinness/thickness, smearing, etc.

If I don't comply, however, I "may" get reported that I'm not following best clinical practice or hospital guidelines or the like. It's a not so veiled threat, I guess.

Of course, I don't know of any hospital policy which states I have to use one black pen over another. And the color of one's ink on a patient's notes have nothing to do with best clinical practice. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't hold up anywhere.

For now, though, it's easier for me to just roll my eyes and get on with the job rather than challenge the point. This is a fairly trivial matter, I think.

Although the mindset behind it perhaps isn't. But now that it's on my radar I can hopefully better watch out for it, and hope this little trickle doesn't become a flood to somehow impact significant medical decisions.

This video, which someone just sent me, is somewhat related to the main post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzAe8R0wz-M

I note that Klaven starts by talking about "the sacredness of the freedom of the individual." As the conversation goes on, it becomes clearer that at least part of what he's talking about is the sacredness of the individual himself, of the soul--what Christians would call the imago dei. Why is liberty of individual conscience important? Why is the totalitarianism and repression of Communism abominable if materialism is true?

But the only categories Klaven has to state this in concern the _freedom_ of the individual, without any reference to the obvious limits on that freedom or to the messiness of the issue of freedom.

Lydia,

Great post. While you focus on the dangers of restricting freedom, which are real and present given progressive goals these days, I think that the messiness of freedom you discuss is actually particularly hard for Americans to deal with when conservatives want to discuss "reasonable limits" on freedom when it comes to sexual and reproductive issues. God forbid a conservative suggests you don't have the right to destroy an embryo (i.e. a life) for medical tests or you shouldn't have the right to demand others pay for your birth control or recognize your pretend marriage.

Conservative love and cherish freedom, but we seem to instinctively have a better grasp of its many limits.

Of course, there are lots of inconsistencies in those very liberals. While they will yell blue murder at the implication that they don't have the freedom to have an abortion, they will accept with perfect equanimity all sorts of invasions of their privacy by the government, intrusions on parental rights, and even just more mundane things like increasing restrictions on smoking. So having everywhere be a "smoke-free campus" doesn't bother them at all, but the suggestion that a woman should not be allowed to have her child torn limb from limb is totalitarian! Most leftists have no sense of perspective and balance whatsoever *in either direction* on the issue of freedom. To give another example, they'd rather have the most bizarre and nanny-ish rules concerning "sexual harassment" and date rape on a campus rather than have a college maintain and enforce single-sex dorms.

Zippy's been posting some interesting things about freedom and politics and while I don't entirely agree with him, I think he has a point in his argument that freedom broadly means the freedom to do what you want. So when conservatives want to limit sexual freedom and liberals want sexual freedom broadened, it devolves into nothing more than a clash of raw wills since there is no consensus between the two of what is the right policy.

Conservative love and cherish freedom, but we seem to instinctively have a better grasp of its many limits.

That's because the conservative notion of freedom is not freedom in the broader sense but freedom to make morally licit options. Conservatives tend to be far less concerned with restriction on individual preferences when those preferences are oriented toward things of dubious morality or outright immorality. Liberals appear much more inconsistent in no small part because they disavow the idea of a universal and knowable moral framework aside from the few things they think are matters of genuine common good. But on many things liberals do in fact want to give more expression to various preferences than conservatives. That those preferences ought to have no place in civil society is a major problem.

Mike T,

I've been reading that series of Zippy posts and really should join in in the comments -- you are the only one over there lately who tries to intellectually "duel" with him in a serious way :-)

One thing I think is interesting about his argument ("freedom broadly means the freedom to do what you want") and how it relates to Lydia's discussion of the messiness of freedom, is that for Christians I think Paul's words are important here, in Romans 7:

14 For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold [m]into bondage to sin. 15 For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. 16 But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. 17 So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. 19 For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. 20 But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.

21 I find then the [n]principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. 22 For I joyfully concur with the law of God [o]in the inner man, 23 but I see a different law in [p]the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner [q]of the law of sin which is in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from [r]the body of this death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.

I think what Paul is telling us is that thanks to original sin we are dangerous to ourselves (i.e. "I practice the very evil I do not want.")! That doesn't mean we shouldn't "love and cherish freedom" but it should give us pause when we want to rely on human freedom without limits! Which brings us back to forging the correct balance that Lydia talks about in the OP -- not very easy when our own nature can betray us.

That's because the conservative notion of freedom is not freedom in the broader sense but freedom to make morally licit options.

Mike T., that sounds like the concept that I was disagreeing with in the OP using the ugly tie example. I don't think that conservatives should value freedom only insofar as it is freedom to make morally licit choices. I think there is actually a point to valuing freedom even when the person decides to be a jerk, a cad, or a fool. That's why we don't want the government micromanaging all our choices so that we we choose only morally licit things. (Got a tendency to gluttony? The government will take care of that with 24/7 monitoring of your food intake to prevent you from making the morally illicit choice of pigging out on that chocolate cream pie when you have already exceeded your recommended daily calorie count.)

Now, as you can see in the main post, that doesn't mean that I'm saying, either, that _all_ morally illicit options are something we should be free to choose! Obviously not. That's anarchy, and in the end wise policy has to have and instantiate a conception of the good. But that conception of the good should not be so all-encompassing that there is no realm in which people can make bad or foolish choices for themselves. In fact, it shouldn't even be _close_. That is where some sort of devotion to a broader conception of freedom seems to me important. If it makes me a "liberal," so be it, but I think it's actually rather important that we not take all Hindus' children away from them lest they educate them to worship false gods. I think we should have a freer society than that, even though it's wrong to worship false gods.

Mike T., that sounds like the concept that I was disagreeing with in the OP using the ugly tie example. I don't think that conservatives should value freedom only insofar as it is freedom to make morally licit choices.

Heh, I anticipated that by adding this:

Conservatives tend to be far less concerned with restriction on individual preferences when those preferences are oriented toward things of dubious morality or outright immorality

The state must balance a number of factors there. I don't think you could say that you have a right to be a jerk to someone because that'd be essentially saying that you have a right to mistreat people. The state is simply not able to sanction that sort of conduct because it is too subjective to handle in a court of law and would reduce too many people to criminals. A prudent leader would not support such a policy on the grounds that it is unenforceable and would have virtually no benefit to weigh against the cost.

But that conception of the good should not be so all-encompassing that there is no realm in which people can make bad or foolish choices for themselves. In fact, it shouldn't even be _close_. That is where some sort of devotion to a broader conception of freedom seems to me important.

Agreed. And one of the major problems with a lot of morally illicit activities is that the state cannot enforce them consistently without engaging in tactics that are themselves prone to or actually illicit. That right there is sufficient to make a prudent leader not take that action.

I sometimes wonder if imprudence can get so bad as to be something greater than imprudence. For example, suppose somebody offered you the ability literally to read your child's mind and give him an electric shock every time he thought a bad thought, 24/7. Would the word "imprudent" really cover the scope and depth of the sense in which it would be a Hugely Bad Idea for you to accept that power?

I have an instinct that says that at some level there is a notion of "playing God" that gets involved here. Who really should be the only one to have the power to punish every evil thought and act, however otherwise invisible, brief, or unobvious in its effects? I would answer, God. So the minute a ruler starts viewing it as his job to punish people just for being rude per se (for example) or just for thinking wrongly or just for eating too much or what-not, that ruler seems to be having an ambition to be God over the life of every citizen in his realm, which seems even worse than imprudent.

I don't think you could say that you have a right to be a jerk to someone because that'd be essentially saying that you have a right to mistreat people.

I haven't been reading Zippy's posts on this (I doubt that I am welcome over there), but one thing he has said in the past that I agree with is that it is morally incoherent to claim "I have a right to do something immoral." Which a lot of people do in fact claim: I have a right to overeat if I want. I have a right to fornicate if I want. etc.

I don't know that Zippy and I agree with the way to correct this way of speaking. Mine is to point out that there is a difference between having a moral right do to an action, and a civil right to make a decision without state interference. Here's what I mean: Regardless of the fact that I should never claim to be "in the right" when I am making a choice to do an act that I know is wrong, I can in fact claim that this particular choice is one that rightfully is within my own sphere of decision and thus it is not a matter for the law to speak to. Even if, when I weigh option A over option B (don't eat dessert because I am full, or eat a huge sundae because it is gorgeously tempting), I might do the wrong thing, for the state to block my doing the wrong thing by a law, merely because it is morally wrong for me, is the wrong way for the state to operate. For, the state should limit its laws to things that affect the common good significantly, and the effort to make a law to block my immoral choice would have more damaging effects on the common good than it would improve the common good. Thus, the state has natural limits on what it may regulate, and NOT ALL MATTERS of right are within its reach. This truth undergirds (or maybe springs out of, take your pick) subsidiarity.

So, even if I would be in the wrong to pick B, the state hasn't the right of it to stop me. This is a trivial matter, but sometimes the matter at issue is grave and is a subject that pertains to everyone, such as the obligation to seek religious truth. Man's need for truth makes it a civil right to speak the truth that you have, even if you (unknowingly) speak with an admixture of error. (Though the needs of others is itself a limiting factor to that very right.) This means that we can have a civil right to speak error. It is not quite the same with moral right and wrong, but it remains the case that the state has an obligation not to interfere with some of my choices merely on account of their being morally wrong. Thus I have a civil right to do a moral wrong. This is indeed worrisomely easy to confuse people with, but it is not in itself confused.

I get the sense that Zippy's more than a little uncomfortable using the word "right" in any context other than "moral right", and thus he would balk at calling this a civil "right", even though it is clearly differentiated from saying "I have a right (full stop) to do wrong."

Lydia,

I have similar reservations. We are entering into a world in which an open-ended concept of authority will be exceedingly dangerous for the common good and speaking in abstract terms like "the Good" and "human dignity" cannot accurately capture what you are describing. A lot of people would find it creepy to go that far, but a lot of people would have no problem with say scanning men on a regular basis for signs of being pedophiles, rapists, what have you. They'd also have no problem with invasive medicine aimed at rewiring the brain in deviants, dissidents, freaks, etc. At what point do you just say who gives a damn if it would solve poverty and end crime, it's just too damn far?

I've always been careful to use terminology like "should not be stopped [implicitly, by humans as opposed to by God] from doing x" or something of that kind, rather than "has a right to do x" when x is, ex hypothesi, morally wrong. That's precisely because I'm trying not to give wiggle room to the kind of "gotcha" from the authoritarian side that says, "Oh, so you're saying you have a right to do something wrong? How messed up is that?"

I'm pretty certain that I'm saying much the same thing as Tony is saying in his distinction between a moral right and a civil right.

It's important, too, to mean something fairly forcible by "stopped" rather than merely "deterred by social disapproval." If a man won't marry a woman who smokes, and if a particular woman wants to marry that man and gives up smoking for his sake, that is not her "being stopped" from smoking in the sense relevant to the discussion.

A lot has been lost in society by our treating everything as either "my right to do and no one should even so much as express disapproval" or "so bad that there should be a law against it." The entire delicate realm of purely informal, non-violent social incentives and disincentives is thus eroded.

One of the things that the authoritarians don't really want to admit is that government tends to behave like government irrespective of formal ideology. This is why Communist, Socialist and Fascist governments tend to produce similar tyrannies. It's why even formally democratic and liberal states can commit serious moral crimes, engage in imperialism, etc. The formally liberal states they dislike are still states and there is nothing that by nature will stop them from sliding into openly authoritarian governance or authoritarian states from engaging in the same tyrannies that liberal states suffer from such as nannystatism. In fact, I can't even imagine that their favored regimes like Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain and such would not have enthusiastically embraced modern total surveillance had it been available. Many seemingly liberal abuses of authority are driven by technology and ideas that only make sense in a technology-driven society (such as optimization of society). So it's not fair to say that even Christian monarchs would have refused to avail themselves of such things or permitted their use. They never had a choice on the matter.

A lot has been lost in society by our treating everything as either "my right to do and no one should even so much as express disapproval" or "so bad that there should be a law against it." The entire delicate realm of purely informal, non-violent social incentives and disincentives is thus eroded.

That's in turn a consequence of the erosion of informal sources of authority, and/or their assimilation into the apparatus of state. When there is only the State and the Individual, with nothing of consequence between, we end up in a very confused situation in which discussions of right become almost impossible. The "moral" norms actually being enforced (and with great vigor) are just those which are appealing to bureaucracies, with their emphasis on interchangeability and predictability--e.g., the rule of non-discrimination. The delicate latticework of norms that cover the most basic things, things that are not easily subjected to rational administration, wind up with nothing of real status standing behind them.

Silly as this sounds, that was the whole point of the Seinfeld sitcom, and what's most interesting about that show is the fact that people found it funny at all. Two hundred years ago it would have been impossible even to explain why the dialogue and the situations presented would be so humorous to Americans, but our current situation it's pretty obvious--modern man finds the assertion of basic ethical considerations to be capricious and tyrannical, but he finds it impossible to live without them. So he lives under the rule of norms that are either arbitrary or inscrutable or both.

So it's not fair to say that even Christian monarchs would have refused to avail themselves of such things or permitted their use. They never had a choice on the matter.

This is true as far as it goes, Mike, and in general I agree with your basic point on the nature of government, but I would amend it slightly to read that men will act like men. It's true that a monarch could sometimes be a tyrant, or a churchman sometimes be a cretin. But I'd also say that the adoption of formal ideology matters, inasmuch as it matters whether the tyrant can really seen to be justified even according to his own lights. I do think an ideology, as opposed to more traditional ways of understanding man and nature, will tend to lack any real limiting principles.

Chesterton put it this way in his important chapter, The Romance of Orthodoxy:

There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.

An even worse source of oppression than ideology or orthodoxy, though, is the philosophy which claims to have no philosophy, that of the disinterested expert or the man of science, who considers himself beyond such mere constrains as the natural law, and who thinks of himself as operating from without the bounds of "messy" problems.

I have no strong opinions on whether religious rulers with great powers (*what if* you could give an imaginary Good Christian King the powers of modern technology?) or secular liberal powers are going to be worse. After all, I've seen enough Christian reactionaries on the Internet lusting to bring back burning at the stake for Protestants and at a minimum wishing they could forcibly stop Protestants from "proselytizing" to make my hair stand on end. I simply do agree with Lord Acton that power corrupts.

I don't know, perhaps this is why I saw Mike T. saying somewhere else recently that he now thinks I'm more of a libertarian than he is. But if you got me on a roll, I could certainly say lots of things that would also annoy the heck out of libertarians. I try to be an equal opportunity annoy-er.

I will say the most telling question they never want to answer directly is this: where would you rather have a very serious dispute with the police? Franco's Spain/Salazar's Portugal/Pinochet's Chile/some-other-reactionary-regime or modern America? Where do you think the authorities are less likely to reflexively side with the police unless their conduct is so heinous that only a depraved mind could not side with the victim? That some of them express hostility to even the due process aspects of the Bill of Rights is telling because it means the authoritarians (not necessarily Zippy, in fact I'd wager he'd support most of the Bill of Rights at least as formal principles) are effectively jettisoning centuries of hard lessons on how to effectively craft state power into more just outcomes in order to throw out liberalism.

It seems to me, the tradcon authoritarians are so desperate to throw out liberalism that they'd throw the baby out with the bath water.

I'm very happy to admit good will and even real Christian charity on the part of a hypothetical ruler with enormous authoritarian powers. When I refer to "the kingdom of King Frank the Just" I'm only being partly facetious. Even if we assume that the hypothetical King Frank is really just and good, if he isn't God he shouldn't be given the power to micromanage everyone's lives, thoughts, religious beliefs, etc. It will be bad for him and bad for them, partly because he will simply make mistakes out of a lack of omniscience, partly because he will be corrupted, and partly because "that" degree of power abrogates the freedom to bumble around in life and do both good and bad which is part of being human in this world (as opposed to heaven). Of course, what precisely "that" degree of power is (which is "too much") is a messy thing to decide.

I had an interesting conversation about ten years ago with a man who was a child in Communist Poland. His parents worked with Solidarity, which of course was illegal. They owned a typewriter, which was also illegal. And they used the typewriter to write articles critical of the government, which was uber-illegal. He told with a certain amount of dark humor how they avoided actually getting caught. They had the typewriter padded with towels so no one could hear the typing. They lived at the top of a huge apartment building. He said that the security forces would randomly come and search for typewriters and other contraband but that they were lazy and would start at the bottom of the apartment complex, "beat up a couple of old ladies," and then lose interest and stop before getting as high up as his family's apartment. He said that the government must have had an inkling of his parents' activities but could never get a conviction. And this was the interesting thing: He said something like, "There was due process in Communist Poland, and that was why my parents never went to jail; their activities couldn't be proven. It was just that the things that were illegal weren't really crimes."

BTW, I wrote a few comments on Zippy's blog about the issues raised here and he responded.

Well, just for fun I looked up what Mike was saying, and reminded myself of why I don't go over there much. Brrrrecccchh.

If you start out with a bad definition of freedom, and you try to collar subsidiarity with a completely amorphous term "organic," and then use organic to mean "not whatever someone else says that I don't like", it's going to go off the rails in one direction or another.

While I agree with Lydia that it is always going to be messy deciding how much power is OK and how much is too much in the hands of the state, I do think that subsidiarity generally provides a default position: the authority to decide X ought to be assumed to be lower down in the hierarchy of authority until shown otherwise. This default implies that a person can assume he has the standing to make a choice without outside interference unless some higher authority properly steps in to prevent that choice. Of necessity then, any "all is forbidden" social structure - all is forbidden unless you are told you may/must - is wrong.

But having higher authority (except God) step in requires of any man that he ask 2 questions: is this mandate of itself contrary to the moral law? And, is this mandate within the scope of authority of the mandator? For, the mere fact that the dog-catcher has real authority doesn't mean I should obey him when he says "pay income taxes at a rate of 80%". He hasn't that authority. All human authority is limited and therefore all human authority has the potential to erroneously make demands outside its scope.

Subsidiarity insists that no matter how definitive is the authority of the leader (even an autocratic monarch), he hasn't really got the authority to mandate matters except insofar as they bear on improving the common good, and the meaning of "the common good" in this context is not "all good of whatever sort in the state". The king has not the authority to command to any man "you shall become a monk" (absent any prior commitment the man himself made, that is), for every man has - to the extent of the ordering of the common good of which the state has the care - a natural ordering to marriage which it is no business of the state to preclude by mandating the religious life. There are, then, natural limits to civil authority, and thus commands that exceed these are not morally binding. And, because subsidiarity implies a default position that the proper place of decision-making is lower down, it is highly appropriate (even to the point of obligation in some cases) for authority to state WHY they are taking away the decision authority of some lower-down authority that they didn't use to object to - so that the rational man can appropriately say why this matter is indeed under the higher authority when it didn't use to be that way.

And, because subsidiarity implies a default position that the proper place of decision-making is lower down, it is highly appropriate (even to the point of obligation in some cases) for authority to state WHY they are taking away the decision authority of some lower-down authority that they didn't use to object to - so that the rational man can appropriately say why this matter is indeed under the higher authority when it didn't use to be that way.


That works practically if the status quo has been that there is no law against x and now one is proposed, but it's a little more difficult to use it to justify reform in a less restrictive direction. Suppose, for example, that the previous law, in place since the inception of the colony, has been that everyone in Plymouth must go to church on Sunday or else pay a fine, and what counts as "church" is defined by the Puritan elders of Plymouth. So a Quaker (or for that matter a Catholic) comes along and declares that he should not be required to pay a fine rather than going to a "church" as defined by the elders of Plymouth. He can't say that they have to defend their taking over this authority, because _he_ is the one trying to change the status quo.

I still think that the argument can be made, of course, and very likely in terms of something to do with subsidiarity.

I think this is an interesting take on the state of things today. It's only partly on topic here, but I think it describes quite well the cost of certain kinds of "freedom" we accept today and how we restrict people's conduct.

He's been on a kick for the last few months about various things destroying civilization, and it has kind of taken me aback how much the "right authoritarians" get squeamish about some of the things he proposes such as forcefully repatriating entire immigrant communities back to their homelands.

Lydia,
"...imaginary Good Christian King..."
With all respect, I must point out that Grand Duke Henri, Prince Albert, King Willem-Alexander, King Harald, King Karl, and Prince Hans-Adam would not agree with the term 'imaginary'. Some of these men have much more control and power than Queen Elizabeth and in several of these nations the citizens wither rejected stripping them of power or gave them *more*.
There are enough real sovereign kings, princes, and grand dukes in modern nations to see how they would act with access to modern technology. Liechtenstein in particular is well-known for the high level of privacy it grants its citizens to the point of facing fines from the EU for NOT being able/willing to violate the privacy of its people and being a leader in counter-surveillance activities to protect itself, its industry, and its people from outside surveillance.
Despite the unsupported claim that all governments are alike this appears to not match reality.

There are enough real sovereign kings, princes, and grand dukes in modern nations to see how they would act with access to modern technology.

Some of the examples you cited have real power, others I couldn't find much supporting that. King Harald being one of the ones whose power seems to exist more in formal language than actual political practice. But that doesn't change the fact that, as best I could tell, none of the examples you cite were of militarily significant countries in Europe. There is, for example, no way to tell how a king of France would use the modern French state.

King Richard, my imaginary Christian king wasn't imaginary solely in that he was Christian or good but in that he was both of those things *and* is imagined to have a *lot* of power. Since I've never actually written up the post I was talking about, I can't blame you for not reading my mind, but I'm envisaging someone with near-dictatorial powers who can, say, just order people to be put in the stocks willy-nilly for wasting his time and/or being rude (for example). Or, if he wishes, really can simply use the power of the modern technocratic state to spy on his subjects in order to make them be good. Or take children from their parents on his own say-so, or have people executed without a jury trial. I highly doubt that any of those you have named correspond to my picture of "King Frank the Just" in all of these respects.

I highly doubt that any of those you have named correspond to my picture of "King Frank the Just" in all of these respects.

Indeed, based upon a Wikipedia search all of them appear to be constitutional monarchs whose powers are rather circumscribed by a constitution/basic law. Not a single one of them could be confused for a pre-modern king, especially in an absolute monarchy.

Lydia,

You may find this thread educational about your new interlocutor.

I'm also quite willing to admit that many pre-modern kings were pretty limited, if by nothing else, by the fear of the uprising of the barons. One has only to read well-written, well-researched novels about, say, King Henry III to realize that his powers were limited by simple uncertainty: Would Wales rebel? Would any of the border barons rebel? Would Simon de Montfort make common cause with Wales? Would the barons support a new tax to pay the debts to the pope so England wouldn't be put under interdict as it had been under King John? And a hundred other questions.

In some ways, one can look at certain aspects of the pre-modern period as a semi-libertarian, semi-anarchic situation. In a feudal society, a knight or a landowner was bound almost solely by his oath of fealty, which might be temporary.

However, I sense that if one is really thinking of authority as the answer to things, this is in some ways an _accident_ of some particular time of history. If a pro-monarchist points this out (that modern presidents have far more power than pre-modern kings), it has no real principled _bite_ to it, because the authoritarian is not willing to say, "And that limitation of power is how it should be." So it just sounds like a soothing historical point: "Oh, don't worry. We love authority and oppose the idea of any sort of commitment to freedom per se, but the kings and set-ups we actually _happen_ to admire just _happen_ to have had fairly limited powers. Isn't that reassuring?"

Not really.

Yeah, that's ever so reassuring, while we get one tyrant being upended for one even worse because there is no principle limiting their authority in practice.

To my ears, the problem with the rad trad monarchists is that they seem to hanker after the authority part of whatever vision (past? future?) of their ideal, without any real feel for what the reality would actually be like. And without even the least glimmer of willingness to accept that SOME of the results might not be quite so palatable - such as banning the internet (and its blogging) because of ponography, just for example. Or banning electricity and going back to muscle power. Or forcibly put all kids into a commune for being raised. They always seem to think these authoritarian powers will be used primarily against the things they don't like, and not against the things they specifically want promoted.

And, to borrow Zippy's usual technique, I will name these guys crypto-liberals, for they seem to want authoritarianism without the necessary baggage of historical / social formulas and obligations: most of these guys will have to be forcibly emigrated back to the countries of their great great (add a few) grandparents. Virtually all of them will have to be forcibly turned into serfs, with a few forced to become apprentices in their familial hand-crafts, because those were fixed social structures on which the monarchy rested and in which it made sense. You can't graft monarchy onto just ANYTHING, you know. These revolutionary crypto-liberals want the monarchy but not the implications of that.

I get the sense that no matter how much a rad trad quasi Catholic wants a return to monarchy, he still thinks of a monarchy that is circumscribed by SOME sort of legal structure that limits his powers. He doesn't actually want an autocrat with absolutely NO social structures that restrains the autocrat's use of power with force and threat of force. And if he wants a king restrained by limits, then what he is REALLY talking about is the rule of law, in that the king's authority is not the final arbiter, but law is. And then it is all over but the shouting - he is really in favor of law with officers of the law that have more power than the current ones do, and imagines that these officers will be better rulers because they are constrained by fewer laws, but he hasn't any principle to hang his hat on in claiming this. He is just a crypto-liberal in favor of a slightly different ratio than the publicly leftist liberals.

Whereas a true conservative, one who really isn't a liberal, believes that the source of even a king's authority is God but that this authority is ALSO constrained by human nature, for law (all law, including divine law) is an ordinance of reason for the common good, and the structure of what constitutes the common good is given by the nature of the subject, not an arbitrary choice. This means that the king's proper authority has natural limits, and that means a person is not bound to obey commands outside of those limits. Which is anathema to most of them (except they hardly ever mention the cases of kings demanding that you change your religion "for the common good", or even "for friendship's sake") Calling Sts. More & Fisher, paging...Sts. Peter & John...

This means that the king's proper authority has natural limits, and that means a person is not bound to obey commands outside of those limits.

Zippy and I discussed the issue of when you can fight back. Within the realm of right authoritarianism I think his position is considered and reasonable, but what I found telling was that he simply cannot separate the principle of "I am morally entitled to fight back, up to killing, the king's man if he decides to maliciously maim or murder me" from the king authorizing rebellion against himself. It is rather disturbing to me that he cannot envisage a king of any sort authorizing his subjects to eliminate representatives of the king if they behave like common street thugs and then trusting that an otherwise competent authority can adjudicate whether the action to fight back was legally and/or morally justified.

Part of the problem here seems to stem from the conservative tendency to go to the idea that every man will be an authority in his own eyes which is directly opposite but equal to the liberal tendency to think that an abiding respect and submission to authority must necessarily mean "I'll obey the king until he says to gas the Jews." As I pointed out to him and King Richard, these extremes are functionally useless for discussing actual politics since the overwhelming majority of men are comfortably more in the middle between the two.

Last night I mentioned this thread to my oldest, Prince Jonathan. He read it and made the following comment,
"They'll say they meant a *REAL* king."
A perspicacious young man.

I get the sense that no matter how much a rad trad quasi Catholic wants a return to monarchy, he still thinks of a monarchy that is circumscribed by SOME sort of legal structure that limits his powers.

I _think_ the idea is supposed to be that King Frank the Just (that's my phrase) simply *won't* use his power for something bad, because he's good and wise. If he throws you in the stocks merely for being rude to your neighbor, then presumably you deserved it. The good king is like a perfect parent. Now, if the good king is Jesus, fine and dandy. Otherwise, why assume that this internal limit of perfect wisdom and virtue will be present? Again, I'm quite willing to imagine King Frank the Just as starting out with the best intentions in the world, but since when are good intentions a guarantee of good outcomes? Even as a parent, really personally loving each of my "subjects," I make mistakes. How much the more so if I were a queen with vast powers over a great many people?

"They'll say they meant a *REAL* king."

Meanwhile the Kingdom of Edan remains thoroughly outmanned and outgunned by various South Pacific Polynesian principalities...

Mike,
I was discussing Liechtenstein, Sweden,and other UN members. Or did you not take the time to google 'Prince Hans-Adam'?

Lydia,
Based upon the content of your various comments this may be obvious, but have you ever actually read in-depth discussions by contemporary scholarly Monarchists such as Charles Coulombe? They tend to not be shy about their ideas.

I did and as I said above, based on what I read on Wikipedia only the smaller states had rulers with rather active monarchs.

Lydia's point was based in no small part on having real means to effect tyranny. Hans-Adam has less martial power at his command than the mayor of Paris. Heck, the mayor of NYC has more police at his command than Liechtenstein has population last I checked the size of the NYPD.

The fact is that if a medieval King of France suddenly appeared today and became the official King of newly reconstituted monarchy modeled on his era's monarchy, that King of France would be capable of things that were beyond the wildest dreams of his contemporaries. We would have to rely entirely on his good will to not abuse that as there would be none of the competing institutions of the 5th republic to restrain him.

The good king is like a perfect parent. Now, if the good king is Jesus, fine and dandy. Otherwise, why assume that this internal limit of perfect wisdom and virtue will be present?

I suspect that this is actually the best focal point for the differences of opinion. So let me lay out the scenario:

We are here in this life, the life of fallen man, before the second coming. We expect the coming of Christ in the future, but we know not when. Along comes a man, Frank, of great wisdom and virtue, (and charm, too). Frank is no only a great man, he is also a visionary and a prophet - God has worked miracles through him and Frank's prophecies have come true. We come to some great, terribly calamity that calls for the strengths of a king to get us out, and Frank is it - his kingship is confirmed by God. We are starting a new order, so we are still feeling our way. Frank prays humbly for the people, and God sends (through many people, not just Frank), the clear instructions that God will make sure that Frank's knowledge is absolutely perfect with regard to how to achieve the common good.

I don't know if our rad trad monarchist will agree with me, but I claim that there are definite limits to what Frank can command me to do, and I can refuse submission to some kinds of orders. The first category, the orders telling me to break the direct commands of God or the natural moral law, we will toss off easily - either Frank is a man of virtue and he won't give these, or he goes bad (like Solomon???) and I know that a command against God's law has no authority. But - other than the possibility of Frank going bad - this might be a trivial limitation for our assumed circumstance. Of course, since the single example we have of a great king and prophet divinely granted great wisdom specifically to lead his people did in fact go bad, we have to keep it in mind anyway. That's why I stated above that it is incumbent on any human subject that he ask "is this command against divine law?"

But aside from that, are there any limitations on what Frank can tell us to do, or any limitations on our obligation to obey?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. First, the easy case: Even when a law is a perfectly good law made by a perfectly good and wise king, it can still have exceptions for things that ought to be excepted out, but do not call for changing the law. If you see a kid get kidnapped by a psycho, you don't have to observe the speed limit (within reason) to follow him unobserved (while calling it in): the danger to the kid if the criminal gets away is greater than the danger to the public if you go 5 mph over the posted limit.

To state this more generally: lower laws serve narrowly designated goods, and sometimes exceptional circumstances make it so that serving a higher or larger good means disobeying the narrower law. And good law observes what is needed most of the time, it does not spell out ALL of the exceptions because not every possible exception can be stated (and the law would be too cumbersome even if you could). Even with a perfect set of laws, there are exceptions to the obligation to obey them.

Second case: the king appoints and relies on officers and agents to act in his stead, since he cannot possibly be everywhere at once. No matter how good and wise the king is, his wisdom cannot be communicated in full to his officers, they are going to be flawed, fallible individuals - Frank can delegate his authority, he cannot delegate his wisdom and goodness. Even without bad will, they will make mistakes both as to the FACTS of a given situation, and as to what King Frank wants of them. If a lesser office-holder errs in judgment of facts or the right way to act - or you think he has - are you bound to obey him? I am not going to provide an answer directly, I am going to merely point out the fact that even with a perfect king in place, the existence of lesser officials short-circuits the presumptive perfection of the king's right judgments in the particular case, because the king cannot delegate his virtue and wisdom to the office-holder making the judgment in the particular case. (Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that the binding obligation to obey authority does NOT depend on the assumption that the authority is necessarily right in his judgment, but the particular argument in favor of the obligation undertaken by this scenario of King Frank does depend on it.) We have reduced the problem of the extent of obligation to obey in a monarchy - even a perfect monarchy - to the standard problem of the obligation to obey authority in general.

And, type three: King Frank pursues the common good in his orderings, but not all goods in the state are common goods. There are matters that are too low, too particular, too specific and individual to one or a few persons, to be matters of the common good. King Frank, as a wise and virtuous king, knows better than to make LAWS or commands about these things, even if he also (through his wisdom) knows better than Bob or Pete the right choices to make. For, one of the things of which the good of the men in society is constituted is, precisely, that of making good, intelligent, prudent choices for their own welfare and that of their family, friends, neighbors. If the King made laws about them, he would defeat a portion of the good of the men whose care he holds, that portion in which he is supposed to promote and even build up their own prudence and wisdom. So these are areas where Frank should not rule, precisely because he is working for the good.

As a specific example of type three, one that is actually stronger than merely he should not: Even if King Frank knows that Bob will be happier if he marries Jane rather than Cathy, he cannot order Bob to marry Jane without there being a common good reason to impose that obligation. And the problem here is not just finding some way in which Bob marrying Jane improves the common good (because, after all, his happiness with Jane presumably will benefit others), to even have a SHRED of rationale for this, he must also find enough common good that would be bettered by the former marriage over the latter, so as to counteract and overcome the lack of good normal to Bob working out and achieving and carrying out his own prudential acts under his own authority. That is, the good Frank has in mind has to be greater than the evil anticipated and expected from over-riding the normal sphere of personal decision making in matters of personal responsibility and all the goods attendant thereon.

The reason I chose this example is that with this case, even if Frank actually has in hand a case where making a command decision actually fulfills the criterion I stated (that the good he is pursuing by such a command is a greater good than taking away Bob's sphere of personal authority - and the implicit effect that has throughout society - is evil and detrimental to social good), even so he has not the authority to command THAT particular matter. The reason is that the state and the family each have original authority from God, and in some respects the family is prior to the state. As a result, the state has BY NATURE limits on what it can command to the family. The first limitation is, precisely, that of forming a family - generally, the state cannot either order a person to marry, nor order him not to, absent some additional criteria by which this becomes a matter under the authority of the state (like a prior commitment). Nor can a state tell a person whom to marry (again observing the same limitation). Nor can a state order a family to have a child, or not to, (again with the same qualifier). These are matters in a distinct and special way under the authority of an individual man, and cannot become matters under the purview of the state except (if at all) by some definite and exceptional circumstance that alters the standard relationship.

So, without King Frank having some exceptional situation in view and communicating that exception to Bob, if King Frank orders Bob to marry Jane and not Cathy, Bob can tell him that his so-called command has no binding authority, and tell him to take a hike. For, in addition to every intelligent subject having the right and duty to ask "Is this command moral", he also has the right and duty to ask "is this command binding _on me_?" This is a duty, because if the command is not binding on Bob, then Bob has the obligation to judge the best action for himself and follow his own prudence on it (informed, if necessary, by experts), whereas if Bob is obligated to obey, he is by that fact obligated to submit to the prudential judgment of another. If he gives up on and cedes his own proper authority of prudential judgment where he was not called to do so, that is just as much a moral failing as the reverse. (Of course, being wise, Frank will not even try to order Bob, but will try to persuade him instead, but if Frank fails, he would just have to live with it and let Bob be stupid).

The fact that we can, by a useful and normal mental shortcut, infer almost without thought that nearly all commands by higher authority are actually binding on us (given that we live in what used to be a somewhat moral society this is easier than at some times and places), does not mean that the mental act by which we recognize a law as binding does not take place. To be an intelligent agent, as opposed to an animal or a rock, is to have one's mind and will as an intermediary between the command and the action in obedience. And the virtue of a good subject (qua intelligent) is for the obedience to spring from the will *on account of recognizing that the command is binding*.

Which means that the true virtue of obedience in a rational being requires the mental act of recognizing the command as binding

and freely adhering to it as obligatory.

KR, I'm responding to general ideas on blogs, such as that there is no general presumption in favor of freedom or that freedom should be regarded as a good only insofar as it is freedom to pursue what is good and right. I also have in mind specific proposals I have seen, such as outlawing Protestant "proselytism" or taking children away from pagan parents just because the parents are pagans. Or giving everybody a guaranteed income and then watching everybody's life to make sure people didn't get lazy and forcing anybody to work under duress whom the government deemed to be abusing his guaranteed income to be lazy. (And those were from people I actually liked, by the way.)

If some theorist really does think that there ought to be some kind of presumption of freedom or preference for freedom and limitation of power built into his ideal monarchy, then he isn't the type of theorist I'm addressing. If you do, then you aren't, either. Beyond that, this is a blog post, not a book or a scholarly article, so I feel no particular obligation to read the particular theorists whose ideas you advocate.

Tony, I admit that imagining that King Frank's reign is endorsed by God in the form of miracles does add a certain wrinkle to the entire thing, because I suppose in that case one should take it that God is providing some sort of guarantee (maybe?) that Frank won't be corrupted and won't make terrible mistakes.

Interestingly, even in the case of the kings of Israel, God first tried to talk them _out_ of having a king at all. In fact, God warned them that a king would tax them and place great burdens upon them and lord it over them. When the people demanded a king, God started endorsing kings (through prophets), but it became quite evident that that endorsement could be temporary and revocable and wasn't very sweeping, when they disobeyed God or started worshiping idols. Nor, as I seem to recall, were any of them endorsed precisely by miracles, unless one counts God's word in Samuel's mind to choose the youngest son of Jesse (David) as a miracle.

So I guess in a sense the kings of Israel do present a kind of test case of your points: In a sense they (or some of them, before the kingship just started passing by assassination or conquest) were endorsed by God, in that they were "the anointed" or the "son of David" and so forth, but that endorsement had real limits, as obviously did their wisdom and virtue.

Jeff,

I've been reading that series of Zippy posts and really should join in in the comments -- you are the only one over there lately who tries to intellectually "duel" with him in a serious way :-)

This is where I should probably just give up. I gave up blogging for a reason. I'm starting to remember why...

And since William Luse may be reading this, I'll add per his comment that I still think Zippy is one of the more interesting and considered bloggers I've met despite whatever the hell this is.

Jeff, I'd love for you to come down and discuss things with Zippy. I'm still forming my own thoughts on these issues and at the moment am suspicious of all sides. To see two major "sides" of the debate take each other on directly would definitely be an enlightening experience.

MA, for reasons of history, I doubt that Zippy is willing to have me over at his site, or that he would be capable of reading my words with sufficient openness of mind to actually grasp what I am saying, so it would not be beneficial for me to go over there.

It is rather unfortunate that Zippy and/or some of his cohort seem to think that not having exactly the same view of how authority works as he does works makes one a liberal, and that this would seem to include both Lydia and Paul (and me, obviously), when nothing could be further from the truth.

Mike is absolutely right to argue that subsidiarity is not found and practiced solely and intrinsically by organic growth, but I would have expressed the point differently. Rather, subsidiarity is practiced by men, and it is practiced well by men of virtue. One of the cardinal virtues is prudence, and one of the principal aspects of prudence is taking thought for tomorrow and for conditions that are likely in the future. And so one of the important acts of the virtue of prudence is that of forming groups, associations, clubs, societies, etc, to accomplish by concerted effort what cannot be achieved by men each alone working without overall directedness. These "organically formed groups" are nothing other than the art and craft of the virtue of prudence applied outside the family: they are the result of the craftmanship of men prudently thinking in larger terms than their own household and the matters under their direct authority. That is, they are artificial, in an intelligible sense of the word. They are designed, constructed, MADE.

An example is a homeschooling group we formed in my community about 18 years ago. At first it was simply some friends acting more or less together, but when it got to about 15 families they needed some actual formal rules and structure, so they got together and created it. The initial document was sort of OK, until they found that it was cumbersome, and a sub-group undertook with a considerable degree of effort, persuasion, negotiation, etc, to hammer out an improved document that more clearly and explicitly limited the expected use of authority for the group to more successfully prevent interference into the individual lives of the member families. This act of correction of the formal document (and thus of operating practices) was an outcome of a practical art, the craftmanship of men of prudence operating in community. The formal outcome of restraining the use of the group as group to things which they shouldn't have thought (in absent-mindedness or hurry or ignorance) MIGHT be things in their powers but were not, was an act of protecting and carrying into effect subsidiarity that required mutual agreement and support between equal parties who were none of them "subject to" each other as a member of a household is subject to the father. That is to say, if you want to say that the subsidiarity came to be carried out and in practice more fully, "organically", what you have to mean is that it happened by smaller entities putting it into the mind and heart and soul of the larger entity - and then you have to kind of not pay attention to the fact that this happened through a formal process rather than without art, without foresight, with explicit documents of intention, and, especially, that the (heavily limited and circumscribed) authority of the group entity to act came to be by the choices and decisions and agreements of the member families to form such a group and live with those rules: intelligent men MADE the group by design.

But to extend the picture of our families agreeing to form a sort of group entity, and then getting together and revising it because it needed more carefully thought out structure, this is a great deal like what the sovereign entities of New York, Virginia, Delaware, etc did in 1787 to revisit and reformulate what kind of group entity they wanted to have between them so that it would carry out the purposes acting in concert that they could not achieve acting each alone without overall direction. And their revising the constitution with the bill of rights is a lot like our families crafting new rules to put into effect restraints to prevent violations of subsidiarity on that larger entity that they ought to have known not to breach but in carelessness, hurry, or ignorance they might not realize readily.

Mike, I see that Zippy is calling me a midwit. Coming from him, I take that as a charitable and rare compliment, and I would appreciate it if you would send him my thanks for being so generous with his assumptions of my mental capacity. For myself, I never thought that I was any more than a mid. He's gone and added "wit" to my stature.

MA, for reasons of history, I doubt that Zippy is willing to have me over at his site, or that he would be capable of reading my words with sufficient openness of mind to actually grasp what I am saying, so it would not be beneficial for me to go over there.
THAT I gathered from various things. The comment threads from Zippy's old W4 posts were enlightening.

Am I naive in thinking that a Christian understanding of the common good is all that is required? Suppressing certain evils results in greater evils. Therefore, we must tolerate them for the greater good. No philosophy of "freedom to do evil" is required.

Jeff, I think more is required: the excellence of the individual man is found and expressed in, both at the same time: (a) obedience to public authorities on matters within their authority, and (b) deliberation, decision-making, and execution of his own on his own in matters of his own authority. The latter cannot be achieved as an excellence if there is no scope for or arena under his own authority, if his having room to so exercise is only the accidental happenstance result of "in this case more harm would result if the state tried to step in." The reason we can say broadly, generically, that there are matters within the family that it would be more harmful for the state to rule, is that these matters don't belong to the state's authority or competence. God's provision of original authority to the family and to the state is harmonious, each within its own sphere.

Subsidiarity is a not something that a person can wield, it is an attribute of authority: either the authority is wielded under the character of subsidiarity, or not.

It would be very interesting to see an exposition of the authority Moses held over Israel, as to how it manifested subsidiarity that was organic.

The same is true of Moses' appointment of the 72 elders.

And of the reign of the judges over Israel.

And of the anointing of Saul as king over Israel.

And the anointing and eventual reign of David over Israel.

It would also be interesting to compare and contrast "subsidiarity is organic" with St. Thomas's teaching that a people either (1) has the capacity to erect a king over themselves, or (2) as a subjected people, have the capacity to appeal to their overlord to take away a bad king and put a good one in his place, as well as with the notions that subsidiarity grows organically and is not a top-down imposition, and that authority does not arise from consent of the governed.

I regret that, insufficiently well versed as I am, in all the controversies roiling our esteemed former colleague Zippy at his current blog, I cannot venture a solid opinion on the substance of the dispute over freedom to which commenters here advert. I'm perplexed as to why Lydia's thread on freedom should become the field for proxy wars, as to why this particular proxy war keeps popping up, and as to why such mischief should be carried out and such indulgence for mischief be shown by wiser heads.

As to the substance of Lydia's point in her post here, I largely agree with it. The "two tendencies in talking about freedom," as she puts it, most emphatically "need to be resisted." The Ugly Test, moreover, functions well as a useful tool for analogical judgment. Lydia's ultimate appeal to practical wisdom -- "as for precisely, exactly what principles govern those rightful zones of freedom--I know what it looks like when I see it, and I'll support or oppose policy accordingly" -- can hardly be gainsaid, especially in this world of protean pernicious fads.

I see that our old friend Zippy has been forced to link to Twitter accounts. The poor bastard. No system of derangement was better designed by man, for the purpose of thoughtless replication and emphasis of pernicious fads. Not even Facebook exceeds Twitter in the manufacture of ephemeral mindless imbecility.

Modernity's errors have infected almost everything in our world, but few concepts have struggled with a nastier infection than Freedom. This is probably because Freedom happened to be doing medical missions work right near some of the worst outbreaks. Still, there is hope in me that the patient may beat back the infection and recover. Would that we could just airlift her to the CDC, or circumvent bureaucracy to dose her with some experimental blood treatments.

Finally, Tony's latest comments from early the morning make some excellent points and raise some excellent questions.

Am I naive in thinking that a Christian understanding of the common good is all that is required? Suppressing certain evils results in greater evils. Therefore, we must tolerate them for the greater good. No philosophy of "freedom to do evil" is required.

Jeff, that's an interesting question, and I think very central to the main post. I would say yes and no. First, it is definitely _part_ of the reason for not outlawing rudeness per se and Hinduism per se that "suppressing certain evils results in greater evils." More on that in a moment. Second, I think there is somewhat more to it because of an idea that some things really _ought_ to be dealt with on, say, an interpersonal level because that is in line with human nature and natural justice. So, for example, there is a real poetic justice in my not getting invited to the barbecue because I was a jerk to my neighbor. That is, and ought to be seen as, the natural outworking of human interaction. I have the _freedom_ to do something stupid in interacting with my neighbor, and he has the _freedom_ to respond by not wishing to associate with me. In a sense, he and I both learn something from that interaction. In particular, I might (hopefully) learn the foolishness of being a jerk. There is a sense in which human beings actually need and ought to have that flex on a daily level where that flex includes the freedom to do (some kinds of) stupid, wrong, or foolish things. We see this in families as well.

Nor are all of these trivial things, and this is where I suspect you and I would disagree. I recall that you and I once discussed forcibly taking children away from pagan parents, solely because they are pagan parents, and you seemed to endorse it. So that is a non-trivial case where I think that the integrity of the family and the natural justice of freedom in human interaction at the smallest social unit (the family) requires that the state take more of a hands-off approach.

To return to the issue of how suppressing certain evils results in greater evils: I also think that once one says that "no philosophy of freedom to do evil" has any force whatsoever, one is less likely to recognize the probability of those greater evils even if one acknowledges it in theory. For example, to revisit a different topic you and I have often discussed before, I think one who takes that approach is insufficiently likely to recognize his own limitations and inability to plan an economy so as to make things turn out justly and well.

This is rather amusing. I read Jeff Culbreath's comment and answered it before reading Tony's immediately following comment at 5:10 a.m. in which Tony put one of my points much better. Precisely: Man qua man is supposed to have a sphere of decision-making within his own control, and part of the _reason_ why greater harm than good would come of state interference and micromanaging there is because the state is "out of its sphere."

I think we see this when the family breaks down in divorce and all sorts of court orders have to be made about all manner of familial decisions because the divorced parents cannot agree on them.

I was out all last evening and then went to sleep without reading this thread, so I'm just catching up now. Responding to Paul's concerns about proxy wars, I'll try to lay down a few prudential rules for references to the thread at the other blog: If an interesting _idea_ arises there that is pertinent to this thread, I think it's entirely appropriate for someone to bring it up here and say, "Here's this pertinent idea. Here's what I think about it" or "What do you think about it?" I do refuse, here as in a different thread where the question of another blogger came up, to get involved in questions of whether I have "represented" some other person accurately when I have made no attempt to represent that person at all--that is, when I have addressed a generic position that happens to be similar to that other person's position. If I'm going to represent someone and thus invite hermeneutic controversies, I will do so explicitly. But that doesn't seem to have come up here anyway, so I merely mention it by way of completeness.

As for personal insults that occur elsewhere, while I know that it can be extremely difficult to ignore them, I would ask in the name of keeping this thread lean, mean, and above such things, that they be ignored here. Also, as a general rule, if someone says something unpleasant about me elsewhere and I seem unaware, please don't come and tell me about it here.

Okay, carry on with the discussion, gents.

The reason we can say broadly, generically, that there are matters within the family that it would be more harmful for the state to rule, is that these matters don't belong to the state's authority or competence. God's provision of original authority to the family and to the state is harmonious, each within its own sphere.

Tony, you're right, in political terms more needs to be said. I certainly do accept that the family and the state have their own proper spheres of competence and authority, that this is a foundational principle of our civilization, and that these spheres of authority are divinely ordained. Obviously, there are details to work out, but in general that is the blueprint. However, I am more skeptical about proposing these two spheres as possessing absolute inviolability, which I think leads to an ideological reaction that harms them both. Hence the reason to avoid any suggestion that man has a natural right to do evil. He may have a political right to do evil, and this may be the most prudent of policies, but political rights may come and go.

However, I am more skeptical about proposing these two spheres as possessing absolute inviolability, which I think leads to an ideological reaction that harms them both. Hence the reason to avoid any suggestion that man has a natural right to do evil.

Jeff, I don't think that anyone needs to propose "absolute inviolability" in order to propose, to use the phrase in your first comment, some sort of "freedom to do evil" as having an important place in the political order. As I mentioned upthread, I deliberately avoid the phrase "right" in this context precisely because it gives the wrong impression. However, it is important, and I doubt only _prudentially_ important, for men to be given sufficient freedom of action that they are not always disallowed from doing evil. So far from this meaning that the family is "absolutely inviolable," there are clear cases in which intervention is justified, some examples of which I gave in the main post. So it would be a false dichotomy to say that _either_ one thinks human freedom to do wrong has an important place, in which case one regards (say) the family sphere as "absolutely inviolable," _or_ one denies any such importance to human freedom per se.

A problem arises from saying that there is *no* important sense in which freedom to do evil has an important place in the political order, and that if one could succeed in being the Grand Inquisitor without (drat) doing more harm than good, that would be the right path to pursue. In other words, it seems to me that a problem arises from any implication that total control preventing all rational creatures from doing evil *would be best* if only we could pull it off without doing more harm, and that therefore we restrain ourselves only, as it were, reluctantly from attempting such total control. An alternative is that there are _real_ zones within which it is right and just that man _should_ be free, even free to mess up. One can admit fully, as I emphasize in the main post, that the lines of these zones are fuzzy and not subject to formulaic explanation. One can also refrain from any phrase such as "a natural right to do evil" in expressing this idea.

I recall that you and I once discussed forcibly taking children away from pagan parents, solely because they are pagan parents, and you seemed to endorse it.

Lydia, you might recall my fierce defense of pagan parental rights during the FLDS controversy some years back. So, no, I do not believe that it is legitimate for the state to forcibly remove children from pagan parents solely because they are pagan parents. There needs to be some other overriding public necessity.

I do recall a discussion where, if I remember correctly, I was defending the policies of Spain following the conquest of Mexico in eradicating the influence of the evil Aztec religion. Children were forcibly removed from the homes of their pagan parents and educated in religious schools. This was, in my opinion, an extreme but necessary measure that cannot be condemned as immoral per se. I also suggested that, if our civilization is to be saved, such extreme measures may be necessary again. We're already at the point where - barring a miracle - certain demographic groups in some areas will never recover without a similarly heavy hand.

He may have a political right to do evil, and this may be the most prudent of policies, but political rights may come and go.

Jeff, my old friend, good to have you in the mix:

Doesn't it depend on the evil? in other words on the circumstances of social reality surrounding the "political right" whose protection we may be, prudentially, prepared to supply to evil?

A Christian community, adopting legislation for its self-government, might well say:

"We're perfectly prepared to grant Peyote-ingesting pagans a liberty practice their paganism, on Free Exercise grounds, supposing we permit a wide and rich field for the free exercise of our Christian religion as well. The compromise is agreeable to us, not just because we have seen that our pagan neighbors are largely solid and honorable men, whose children (or they themselves!) might, any day now, crown honor in civil life with repentance of paganism; but also because Our Lord himself, in his own ministry on Earth, frequently adopted a policy of personal persuasion on the level of man to man."

All of which is to say that a Christian community, given the circumstances of social reality surrounding political right, may well be, prudentially, prepared to supply to the evil of paganism a protection of law.

It's easy to imagine these circumstance since we live under them.

In all honesty, Jeff, I didn't know how widely you would apply the term "pagan" or, had I thought of it, whether you would apply it to the FLDS. I gave in the main post an example of a parent who is actually training his child to commit murder as a case where the state is justified in stepping in. Many other examples can be found, including a parent trafficking his child for sexual use. The phrase "evil religion" simply is a rather blunt instrument. I myself am not at all sympathetic to Hinduism, despite the fact that I'm glad that Hindus aren't committing suicide bombings nowadays (that I know of). As a polytheistic religion, it teaches extremely important falsehoods. A god such as Kali is cruel, and the idea of teaching a child to worship her is repugnant. For that matter, I would probably use the phrase "evil religion" for Islam as well but do not advocate taking all Muslim children from their parents. The very fact that you seem to have some contemporary application in mind (in America, I presume) for the "extreme measure" of taking away all the children of a particular religious and/or demographic group is, to my mind, hardly reassuring as to the limits you have in mind for this state power.

Again, I can imagine situations in which something would have to be tried. Suppose that 99% of the Muslim parents in a particular region were sending their children (ahem) to kindergartens in which the children dress up as suicide bombers. _Something_ needs to be done. Shutting down the kindergartens would be a good start. But abrogation of parental rights needs to be done in stages and with a focus on specifics of the version of the religion. I don't claim to know precisely what that looks like in all cases, but coming into a region as conquerors, deciding that the religion in place is evil, and taking all the children away from their parents willy-nilly is at least prima facie problematic.

A problem arises from saying that there is *no* important sense in which freedom to do evil has an important place in the political order, and that if one could succeed in being the Grand Inquisitor without (drat) doing more harm than good, that would be the right path to pursue.

I have no problem whatsoever in saying that "if one could succeed in being the Grand Inquisitor without (drat) doing more harm than good, that would be the right path to pursue". Trouble is, of course, that no such government is possible in a world of fallen men, nor should anyone be deluded into thinking otherwise.

Based on the rest of your comment, I don't think we're very far from agreement except in our choice of terminology. I agree that ordinary political freedom means and ought to mean, to a large extent, the freedom to do lots of things wrong. But I have to insist that this freedom exists only for the sake of freedom to do right and that it's important to keep this end in view. I also think that our political rhetoric should not be perceived as closing the door on the right of government to do good things, and to prevent bad people from doing bad things, when the common good truly justifies action on the part of the state - even if it means occasionally departing from the state's ordinary sphere of action and authority.

But I have to insist that this freedom exists only for the sake of freedom to do right and that it's important to keep this end in view.

I think that this is the very important truth that underlies everything Lydia said above. The freedom to choose well, to act for love of God, is THE REASON for our time of trial and test here on Earth. The importance of allowing men to choose between good and evil is hammered in by God Himself in Genesis and throughout. The immensely, vastly great good of choosing rightly for love is so good that God is willing to put up with many evil choices just to make sure we get our chances to choose well.

So freedom, which is _really_ the ready capacity to choose rightly and well, comes with it the inherent possibility of choosing wrongly, for choice is between opposed possibles. But the character of our possibility of choosing well and of our possibility of choosing ill are not perfectly analogous: in the first, choosing well is exercising freedom and indeed makes the person more free, whereas choosing ill is using free will in such a way as to diminish freedom. THAT exercise of free will isn't "freeing", because freedom properly speaking is the ready capacity to choose that which is your end. Your true good end (happiness, virtue, God) and an apparent good are not equal in that definition, for Christ said "the truth shall set you free." Choosing what appears to be good will not make you happy, and ignorance about what will make you happy (and choosing it) is, precisely, a state where you are NOT FULLY FREE to achieve happiness - which is why ignorance is one of the classic conditions that reduce culpability as well: it reduces freedom. Same with bad habits, and concupiscence.

Thus, while it is true that we always have the option of choosing good or evil, and that it is by our "free will" that we choose one of the two, so that if we chose evil it is through the operation of free will, that is not equivalent to saying that our choice for evil is an exercise of FREEDOM in the same sense that our choice for good would be an exercise of freedom. One exercise is more free than the other. The free-est man is the one so ready to choose well that he isn't even tempted to choose evil, which is why St. Augustine says "love, and do what you will", and St. Paul says that the righteous man is not "under the law", because he is so free to pursue the good that he doesn't even feel the law as a constraint on his choices (like a good bowler isn't bothered by gutters because he won't ever get near them).

However, I am more skeptical about proposing these two spheres as possessing absolute inviolability, which I think leads to an ideological reaction that harms them both.

I agree very much, that's why I circumscribed my own descriptions with qualifiers:

absent some additional criteria by which this becomes a matter under the authority of the state (like a prior commitment)...

(again observing the same limitation)...

and cannot become matters under the purview of the state except (if at all) by some definite and exceptional circumstance that alters the standard relationship.

And I think that this is the whole import of Lydia's original OP: to be wary of laying down inviolable absolutes, and sweeping pronouncements.

All of which is to say that a Christian community, given the circumstances of social reality surrounding political right, may well be, prudentially, prepared to supply to the evil of paganism a protection of law.

Paul, thank you for your always warm hospitality.

Your comment, along with Tony's and Lydia's upthread, seem to indicate that we're all pretty much on the same page. The concern behind my remarks is the tendency of many conservatives to turn historic American political doctrine into a universal dogma of sorts, when today it is rapidly being exposed as inadequate and even suicidal. So far as I can tell at this point, that tendency is not represented here, but sometimes I do see language that raises red flags.

The very fact that you seem to have some contemporary application in mind (in America, I presume) for the "extreme measure" of taking away all the children of a particular religious and/or demographic group is, to my mind, hardly reassuring as to the limits you have in mind for this state power.

I'm puzzled by this. What kind of reassurance would you like to see?

... but coming into a region as conquerors, deciding that the religion in place is evil, and taking all the children away from their parents willy-nilly is at least prima facie problematic.

I agree entirely, but are you talking to me?

You will note, I trust, that the example of Spain and the Aztecs involves something more solid than a "willy-nilly" subjective judgement against the adherents of a peace-loving religion.

I didn't say anything about "peace-loving." I find it interesting to reflect that this sub-discussion actually goes back to my piece long ago that caused such consternation in some quarters (mostly leftist quarters) in which I said that we should restrict Muslim immigration for the sake of parental rights. Part of my point there is that once people are _here_ we have to (or ought to) afford them things like due process and individual treatment before suspending their parental rights. We can't just say, "You're a Muslim, so you're at much higher risk than the general population for engaging in female genital mutilation on your daughters, honor killing, and forced marriage, so we're not going to let you choose your child's school or home school, we're going to put a social worker in charge to be a busy-body in your home and make sure none of that is going on, and we're going to take your kids away if you won't acquiesce in all of these measures." That would be _wrong_. Yet it is _true_ that Muslims are more at risk of doing all of these, and in the UK especially, social services is struggling to know how to deal with 14-year-old girls coming to school "married" against their will and with underground FGM networks. And that's not even discussing terrorism. I'd be the last person to call Islam a religion of peace!

This, I said then, was an argument for restricting Muslim immigration in the first place. Because we don't want to become a nation where you have a certain religious label on you and so we tear down the integrity of your family just for that reason and put government surveillance in place on your children. Moreover, once we start saying that, we have to realize that the government bureaucrats are going to think it applies to all religious people, or anybody who doesn't want their child taught Darwinism as the Truth, and so forth. Therefore, indirectly, Muslim immigration undermines parental rights just as Muslim immigration is partly to blame for all of the demeaning "security" innocent Americans undergo in the course of travel at airports.

In case you didn't see it, King Richard has a rather interesting characterization of how his position here was treated. Some of his comments where I challenged him are rather amusing...

It's odd: I have _explicitly_ disavowed the position that "all kings are by definition bad." In fact, I have said over and over again that I am envisaging a _good_ king, but a king who has been given a *great deal* of power. The question then being whether giving even a _good_ person that much power is a good idea. I have restricted myself to discussing kings who have a great deal of power because part of what concerns me about the authoritarian idea I am trying to call into question is that it shows no enthusiasm for putting limits on power. Now, if one says that anyone who has that much power is *by definition bad*, then one is going a great deal farther even than I would go! So, for example, saying that I envisage King Frank the Just as having the *power* to have someone executed without trial does not mean that I think he is automatically *bad*. In fact, one can easily imagine situations where it is tempting to say that executing someone without trial isn't such a bad idea (e.g., hanging a pirate caught in the act from the yardarm). So KR really does not seem to understand my position or my reasons for restricting myself to envisaging a king who has very great powers.

King Richard also seems not to have actually bothered to engage the discussion here in any substance. Not only Lydia, but Paul and Jeff and I have all said, one place or another, that a monarchy can be a perfectly fine sort of state. NONE of the contributors to W4 even remotely thinks that kings are bad because they are kings. What poppycock to attribute that to us.

As for his comment about how great some of the remaining kingdoms are: I am willing to grant that he is probably right about some of them - they may well be good states, even great states.

What he ignores, though, is that virtually every one of them is a good state due in major part to one of two things (or both): it has a constitutional form (written in a single document or spread out inchoately as "common law") that limits the monarch's general powers (whether those powers are extensive or not); and (b) the fact that most of its neighbors (and in particular its large ones) have become mostly peaceful states that mostly don't invade their neighbors but try to settle things through diplomatic means and negotiation. If you go back 5 centuries to a point where (b) was not true, these oh-so-fine states weren't in any better condition than their monarchic neighbors. It is impossible to estimate fully the extent to which these little states are borrowing off the current peacefulness of their neighbors (who could gobble them up readily if they felt like it) and those neighbors' standing armies against the barbarians of the east, but it is clearly a great extent. Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway would not now exist if large states (that happen to be democracies) didn't kick Hitler's jaws off them.

There is a sort of dilemma here if one is against constitutional democracy and prefers monarchy in part because it is not constitutional democracy. If opposition to representative government is part of one's reason for preferring monarchy, then one really has no grounds on which to prefer monarchies that are part of a hybrid government--where the limitations on the power of the king come from some sort of parliament or other elected body. If, on the other hand, one opposes all such limits on the grounds that democracy is inherently a bad idea (or something of that kind), then the whole concern about too much power or the possible corrupting effects of power comes into play.

I find it very hard to believe that King Richard has a reading comprehension problem after some of the stuff he's said to me in previous threads. I think a lot of what he does is rather deliberate. After some of the crap he pulled on me when I tried to debate with him in good faith, I realized that he is, among many things, not interested in points of view different from his.

I realized that he is, among many things, not interested in points of view different from his.

Mike T,

I'm starting to get that vibe as well. He's too smart for that act. As somebody who has argued, quite strongly at times, for both sides (since I'm still trying to figure out who's right) I've come to notice that KR tends to misrepresent people repeatedly and rather badly. And yet it's also clear that he does quite a lot of research and understands the subject.

His characterization of the discussion on this thread as "Kings are bad because Kings are bad!" is not only wrong, it's insulting, and unfairly so.

His citations have to be verified. He made sweeping claims about Switzerland and when I did some googling, it appeared that most of the changes he said were made to their gun laws were rejected by referendum and parliament (as appropriate based on various proposals). For example he said this:

In point of fact Switzerland is a nation with a very strong understanding of authority and respect for the same. For example, the statistic that you quote that Switzerland has ‘one of the most heavily armed societies on Earth’ neglect to mention that an overwhelming majority of those weapons (and their ammunition) is stored at government-controlled armories and are only released to (trained) citizens in the event of an emergency.

Then had to back track and admit that well no, the government issued weapons really are not stored at government armories--that proposal was in fact defeated, but as we are reliably informed, it doesn't matter because...

As for not finding the 2007 law, care to tell me when the law switched to forcing the ammo to be stored in armories? You know, the law change that you, yourself, quoted? BTW, try the rather intuitive google search of ‘Swiaa gun laws 2007′; 847,000 results. There are statements from the Swiss government on the first page. Yeah, the ban on keeping issued weapons at home was defeated but the restrictions *I actually mentioned* were passed.

"I said that most of those guns are locked up in government armories, but oh snap they really aren't but Mike, you are teh st00pidz (lulz) for pointing out that most of my citation didn't actually happen.

But then, we're all too stupid to understand that a hall monitor is just as capable of being a tyrant as a ruler of the mightiest civilizations on Earth, so what does that tell you Marc?

I'm going to "tweet" a bit on discussing the character and psychology of a commentator at another blog, but it seems to me fair game to point out that this or that empirical claim made on a particular side of the argument does not hold up to research and scrutiny.

("Tweet" here goes back to the pre-Twitter era and refers to the whistle held by a referee, in case anyone needed a semantic gloss on that...)

I think enough has been said. I've provided you the relevant links to my own conversations/examples so you can draw your own opinions. They were provided as a warning to y'all that this is a guy who reminds me of at best a right wing version of "al."

Mike,
I only came back by because someone suggested I should.
I must admit, I am both surprised and amused that you seem so emotional about a discussion that I had forgotten. As I have mentioned elsewhere, you still seem to be making concrete errors about what I said *even while quoting me*.
I am more than willing to discuss this directly via email or chat, if you like.

Lydia, etc.
I am also a bit surprised at the speculation into my motivation, psychology, etc. I am a simple man to find and contact - why not ask?
Since my point seems to have flown right past the audience, let me restate it.

"1)The real world has a large number of functioning monarchies.
2) Even if only discussing Christian monarchs we have a relative broad sample to examine.
3) The monarchies come in a wide range of populations, locations, and with strong variance in the power wielded by each monarch
4) In each case there is a very strong tendency for the citizens of contemporary Christian monarchies to be better off than similar Democracies (in terms of wealth, security, privacy, taxation, etc.)
5) There *seems* to be a mild correlation between an increase in the individual power of a monarch and an increase in the welfare of his or her citizens
6) Since these things are either simply true or plausible it is safe to assume that a monarch with more power and more wealth wouldn't deviate from existing patterns

To conclude - since REAL monarchs are demonstrably good leaders in a wide variety of circumstances, we can assume that in other circumstances kings would continue to do well as leaders."

I apologize since this was obviously not clear. In my defense, I have spent the last 2 decades discussing this topic often with scholars or monarchs and made unfair assumptions about the audience here.
I apologize that I may not be able to answer any queries for a few days, but this time of year is very busy for me. I will attempt to return in 2-3 weeks.

Since these things are either simply true or plausible it is safe to assume that a monarch with more power and more wealth wouldn't deviate from existing patterns

To conclude - since REAL monarchs are demonstrably good leaders in a wide variety of circumstances, we can assume that in other circumstances kings would continue to do well as leaders.

It's at this point that the whole argument seems to me to go off the rails. This portion of the argument bears a most unfortunate similarity to the assumption that, if dose A of a particular medicine is good and helpful, stronger dose B will also be good and helpful. There is absolutely no rational way to apply induction to a situation where you are _varying_ an absolutely _crucial_ factor in the case--namely, the amount of power wielded by the ruler. This is particularly so since it is *precisely* at this point that opponents of strong, centralized authority and power have directed their criticisms! Power corrupts, etc. Nor does this argument place any limit on how far the argument would be taken as far as giving more power to the ruler and assuming that all would continue to go well. It is almost astonishing that someone would argue in this fashion to defend a monarchy of unspecified power.

Well, it makes sense when you consider that among other things he believes that the Prince of Liechtenstein is as powerful over his subjects as the US President is over us.

Lydia,
While you state,
"There is absolutely no rational way to apply induction to a situation where you are _varying_ an absolutely _crucial_ factor in the case--namely, the amount of power wielded by the ruler."
But the various example given of contemporary Christian monarch do vary greatly in power but do not vary greatly in how they are responding to this power. We also have relatively recent examples of monarchs with what seems to be the bugbear in the room - the number of guns - such as the Kaiser and the Emperor of Austro-Hungary and we see that they, too, were following a similar pattern of behavior even as they were arguably very powerful heads of Great Power nations. They did not have the vast security apparatus and despotic systems developed by their Democratic neighbors. Indeed, the last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary is on the path to Sainthood.
This seems to be no more than a difference of opinion - I believe that contemporary and historical examples are relevant, you do not.

You conclude with,
"It is almost astonishing that someone would argue in this fashion to defend a monarchy of unspecified power."
Why?
Your incredulity is not a rebuttal. My argument was direct, clear, and has contemporary and historical examples both within this comment thread. Do you care to respond specifically to any or all of the 6 points above? To any of the other comments about the nature of contemporary or historical monarchies?

Mike,
I did attempt to engage you directly and privately in response to your statements as to my character here. Since you declined, I will respond publicly here, as well.
In your statement above claiming that one must 'check my citations' you took two quotes from a past discussion. Let me elaborate as to how you continue to misunderstand plain English - for the third time concerning this particular discussion.
In that thread I stated,
"...an overwhelming majority of those weapons (and their ammunition) [referring to the weapons issued to Swiss military reservists] is stored at government-controlled armories and are only released to (trained) citizens in the event of an emergency."
This is a fact supported by the Swiss military's own inventory of armories conducted in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. I did not claim that they were maintained in armories by force of law, just that a majority of them were stored there and that, if stored there, they can only be 'checked out' during an emergency.
You later wrote,
"You have some splainin to do…
Early polls in the midst of what was a heated and contentious campaign predicted victory for the anti-gun lobby, but on Sunday, 56.3% of voters rejected the proposal to ban army rifles from homes."
As I pointed out at the time, in the thread,
"As for ‘explaining’ I suggest that you, again, re-read what I actually WROTE not what you keep THINKING I wrote. I never said the law *requires* issued guns be kept in the armories (go check) I said the law requires all *ammunition* be kept in armories and that the majority of citizens with issued gun store them in the armories for *convenience*."
It is from the same comment you quoted here.

Since you cannot seem to grasp the difference between 'the law requires' and 'what people do voluntarily' despite repeated attempts to explain it, let me use an analogy.

I state,
"In a section of Reading, UK, most houses are brick"
You reply,
"But the 2011 zoning law requiring all homes to be brick was not passed!"

It is almost a non-sequitur.





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