Positive Liberty

Commenter Elliot left the following reply to this post, to which I thought I’d devote a top-level entry. His words are blockquoted, my replies are not…

1. Representative government: If you’re referring to ancient Israel, Israel was, as I understand it, first a theocracy, than a monarchy. However, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Bible that suggests that a monarchy is the best form of government. In fact, if you read 1 Samuel 8 and 11, you’ll find Samuel warning the people against appointing a king over them…

Personally, I understood the biblical era of the “judges” to have had a polycentric legal system, perhaps similar to the one in medieval Iceland, and therefore highly amenable to libertarian readings. This may be wishful thinking, but it may also be of interest to you. But whatever it was, “representative” it was not. Judgeship seems to have been a meritocracy. Then, as you say, we have the kings…

For example, in 1 Samuel 8:11-18, Samuel says, “This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”

This passage should be familiar to any libertarian, and it’s bound to be a favorite among us. Yet nowhere does it say that the people should vote on their rulers instead of all this. In our discussion, I asked for biblical support for representative government, and this isn’t it. First Samuel 8:11-18 is a warning against bad kings, and maybe even a warning that all kings tend to be bad, but it neither says that all kings are bad, nor that that representative government is good.

Indeed, others have argued that absolute monarchy is the only system that truly fits with what the Bible teaches. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the Catholic preacher and apologist, is one of them, as was Sir Robert Filmer, John Locke’s famous foil in the First Treatise. That is, there have been bad kings, but the mere fact that they are bad does not release us from our duty of obedience. Even I Samuel doesn’t suggest that the people should rise up and overthrow these rulers, but I and others in the classical liberal tradition certainly would.

As for “government by divine command,” I do believe political leaders should see themselves as primarily responsible to God for their actions, whether they are elected by the people, appointed by a higher authority, or otherwise. As Nehemiah wrote in Nehemiah 5:19, “Think upon me, my God, for good, according to all that I have done for this people.”

This presents problems of its own, because the U.S. Constitution does not declare that rulers are primarily responsible to God. (Indeed, the oaths that officeholders take need not include “so help me God,” words not found in the original document.) Officeholders are answerable only to the people, who created the government, and to the law, which applies to all of us equally.

Now, I could certainly imagine a faith system that held that God’s will always coincides with the best interests of the people, and I think that some of the more decent politicians probably do have this belief, but thinking this way requires an extra step beyond what the constitution says. It also requires going beyond what we find in the Bible, since, as we’ve seen from I Samuel 8:11-18, sometimes God may actually want rulers to be hurtful to us.

On a sidenote, we find three branches of government delineated in Isaiah 33:22, long before any political philosopher I know of came up with the idea, “For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us.”

But… I do not find three branches of government here. I really don’t. Let’s suppose I write my own scripture, and it runs as follows:

For Jason is our judge, Jason is our lawgiver, Jason is our king; he will save us.

I would be rather a dictator, wouldn’t I? This is certainly not separation of powers. It’s pure one-man rule. Now, a total unity of powers may make sense when God is in charge, but it makes no sense at all when fallible humans take control.

2. Slavery: The Bible doesn’t specifically condemn slavery (at least as far as I know), but it does teach that all men are created equal, which was (and still is) at the very heart of the argument against slavery. If we don’t have an objective basis for believing that all men are created equal, then I don’t see why slavery shouldn’t be allowed.

It’s true that the Bible teaches the spiritual equality of all people, but it does not teach their political equality. It teaches instead submission to the powers that be, even for slaves. This is at best a tactical concession to the awfulness of the Roman Empire, but it’s a poor guide to the modern world.

3. Equal rights for women: I do believe the Bible teaches that husbands and fathers should be the head of their families. However, that is not to say the Bible doesn’t lay the foundation for equal dignity and fair treatment of women.

Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it; That He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself.”

1 Peter 3:7 says, (after giving a charge to the wives), “Likewise, you husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.”

First Peter 3:1 says that wives are to be submissive to their husbands in family matters. Paul elsewhere says that women should be silent in the Church. The Bible says nothing specific about women in civil government, but it’s not hard to infer, however, that they should have no place there, either. This was the status quo, after all, in both Jewish and Roman law at the time, and the Bible did absolutely nothing to challenge it. (Side note: Is the Bible actually indifferent to the status of women? In a world full of injustice, this in itself is a problem.)

Simply saying that we’re to love women does not mean that we are to treat them as equals. It’s an improvement over many other cultures, but… I love my cats, too, and yet I don’t give them the right to vote. This really isn’t adequate if it’s left without any supplement from more modern thinking.

I don’t see this respect for women displayed in many cultures of the past, whether in Greece, Rome, the Middle East or Asia, and I say that as one whose parents were both from Taiwan. In fact, if not for the Bible, I tend to think we would see women mistreated much more frequently on a sort of “might makes right” basis.

Oh, but I do see love for women elsewhere. Sappho, my friend, Sappho! Whether she was a lesbian (in the modern sense) or not.

So, if not for the Bible, where would [we] be in terms of equal rights, equal protection, and equal dignity for women?

This depends a great deal on what would have replaced the Bible. There is some evidence that certain European pagan cultures were highly amenable to women in places of power. Epicurean philosophy taught that there are equal natural rights for all, and as we have seen from other natural-rights movements in history, this idea can often conduce to women’s rights. Even just a few timely edits to the Bible might have done a great deal of good: Suppose Jesus had had female apostles? Or what if he’d specifically praised the example of Esther, the woman rebel who saved her people in the Hebrew scriptures? If he’d done that, we might have had both a stronger tradition of women’s equality and a stronger tradition of Christian resistance to tyranny. (The book of Esther, by the way, is my favorite in the entire Bible, just so you know. Not all atheists are biblically illiterate!)

Ultimately, though, we can argue about counterfactuals to the point of exhaustion. It won’t change the reality that examples of this type, where the Bible elevates women to places of equality, are few and far between. There is the occasional, very rare heroic woman. But there are maybe only a handful of passages where woman is understood to be the equal of man in worth and dignity, and they are heavily outweighed by passages where this is not the case.

4. Private property ownership: Genesis 1:28 says, “And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” I believe this “dominion mandate” is the Biblical basis for private property ownership, as God tells two individuals to take dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

Your “dominion mandate” is vague enough that it has far more often been used, historically, as a defense of absolute monarchy. Bossuet and Filmer both did this, as did many others. Adam wasn’t the first property owner; he was the first monarch.

As for the early Christian church holding their property in common (Acts 4:32), I would just say that that was an example of private individuals voluntarily choosing to share their property in common (and provide for each others’ needs), as distinctly opposed to the government carrying out some quasi-communistic “redistribution of wealth.”

The Biblical role of civil government, as found in Romans 13:4, is to punish that which is evil, and command (or reward) that which is good. [As Blackstone writes in his Commentaries, “[M]unicipal law is a rule of civil conduct, commanding what is right, and prohibiting what is wrong.”] This pointedly excludes any sort of government involvement in interfering with private property ownership.

This establishes that Blackstone supports private property (I think). But if I determine that private property is “evil,” then Romans 13:4 would mean that I am compelled to abolish it.

Historically, communes only do work when they are voluntary and based on a high degree of shared communal purpose. Otherwise they’re train wrecks. But this alone does not mean that a commune is wrong, biblically speaking. Are we not to follow the example of the early Christians?

5. So, in summary, if NOT for the Bible being a 100% objective standard we can reference on many of this issues, I think we would be a whole lot worse off than we currently are.

The problem, though, is that you haven’t established anything like a 100% objective standard. You’ve shown that there are hints and suggestions of something like private property and civic equality, if we kinda look at the Bible sideways, and import a bunch of modern reasonings, and ignore what was going on in the cultures that first received these scriptures, and ignore Church history, and ignore what nearly all Protestants and Catholics thought that these passages meant.

This is not objectivity. It’s perhaps the most selective and qualified reading of the Bible imaginable. Not that it reaches bad outcomes, mind you, but please, try to realize what you are doing here. You’re importing your own values into the text and then declaring them to be objectively supported.

B. Really, if I’m understanding this discussion correctly, the basic question here is this: What law do we live by? Specifically, do we pick and choose what we want to believe, according to what we think is decent, and right, and fair, and reasonable, or do we rely on some other objective standard (such as the Bible)?

I know some of you will probably disagree with me here, but I believe, for a number of reasons, that the standard we ought to live by is the Bible.

I respect that you are searching for objectivity, and I respect many of the conclusions you have reached. I think you would find yourself more easily able to argue in favor of your conclusions if you admitted that the Bible is not necessarily the basis for them, but that they are grounded in human reason instead. The Bible in your arguments seems more like ornamentation to me.

The truth is, we all “pick and choose” what moral code we want to live by, even the people who live by the Bible. They just happen to have picked “the Bible” from a menu of choices. Their choice may be arbitrary, too, based on custom, or social expectations, or intuition rather than reason.

Now, I admit that I’ve picked my values — not arbitrarily, but I’ve picked them, and if I am ever convinced that these values are wrong, or unfair, or unreasonable, then I throw out the ones that don’t work, and I do my best to find new ones. I try my hardest not to choose values simply because of custom, expectation, or intuition, although these can be good guides, too, in the right contexts. (Why do we wear clothes? In the summer months I’m really not sure, but I’m not about to give up doing it.)

Meanwhile, you’ve picked your values, namely by choosing the Bible. That, too, was a choice. As is your choice of biblical interpretations. I think your conclusions are good as they stand, but I am concerned about the difficulties you must go through to reach them — and the probable injustice you are doing to the Bible itself, by supposing that it contains within it many things that are not in fact there. (As I recall, the Bible itself cautions against doing this.)

The argument that my values are arbitrary, while yours are not, is empty. We have both chosen, and we are both called to demonstrate, by the example of our lives, the goodness or badness of our chosen values.

1. I believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God. I know there are some people who don’t believe that, and as I said earlier, you either believe it or you don’t (or you believe some of it, and not the rest), but if you believe, like I do, that the Bible has been given to us by “the benign interposition of divine Providence, which, in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, hath been pleased, at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation…to be found only in the holy scriptures,” then it is only reasonable to hold that the Bible should take precedence over all other standards of morality, reason included.

It’s remarkable, though — your interpretations of the Bible, mostly in a liberal direction as I’ve seen them so far, are also based on reason. You take passages and apply reasoning to them, and perhaps add several additional premises, as I’ve noted above.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but I’d rather you admitted what you are doing. You’re placing the two of them, the Bible and reason, side by side. (To me, this is the sounder course of action, given the choice between “Bible plus reason” and sola scriptura.)

2. Reason is great. As Blackstone said, “As, therefore, the Creator is a being not only of infinite power, and wisdom, but also of infinite goodness, [H]e . . . . has graciously reduced the rule of obedience to this one paternal precept, ‘that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness.’ This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law . . . .” Again, however, I believe with Blackstone that man’s reason (while a helpful tool) is “corrupt, and [man’s] understanding full of ignorance and error.” As Hume pointed out, there will always be a gap between what “is,” that is, what we can observe about human nature and the world around us, and what “should be.” I personally believe the Bible is the only true and objective (and best) standard to bridge that gap, although of course many will disagree with me on that point.

Well, I don’t much care for that part of Hume’s philosophy, but that’s the subject of a different post. I consider myself a neo-Aristotelian in ethics, although, again, I reject what Aristotle said about women. (And a lot of other things, too, but that’s the subject of a different lifetime.)

3. If we believe in the law of nature, unchecked by any other law or standard, that is, if we get to pick and choose the standard by which we live our lives, than in the long run, anything goes, as long as we can (i) justify it in our mind, and (ii) get by with it in our community.

Well, let me ask you then — if I can make a decision, and live at peace with myself about it, and harm no one else, then really — where is the problem? So it’s not based on the Bible. Does that mean that my decision is necessarily wrong? What if it’s based on natural reason, and what if my reasoning is sound?

Suppose I decide to give money to Amnesty International. (I do, in fact.) I believe that it’s a terrible thing for people to be locked in prison for their political beliefs. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose cruel treatment of my fellow human beings, whether they are innocent or guilty, simply because every time I imagine these cruelties I find I always picture myself in the victim’s place, and I cannot help but think these acts are wrong.

Are you saying, then, that I have picked this value arbitrarily, and that I could give it up as easily as I could change my socks? Or are you saying I am just more likely to give up on my beliefs than someone who professes belief in the Bible? Or are you saying that if I don’t base my charitable giving on the Bible, then it is somehow wrong, even if it has the general form of a right action?

These are very different questions, each of them. They are vast topics, and I don’t really know what you mean when you say that for me “anything goes.”

So… I’ll just throw out one observation and then see where you’d like to take things, if you want to pursue this angle: Empirically, atheists appear less likely to commit crimes than the religious. Atheists are capable of being good people, and they seem particularly able to stay out of trouble. Is this a fake goodness?

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