An anonymous liberal biorealist — yes, it’s hard to imagine — takes a first cut at biology and justice — and Mencius Moldbug offers his advice:
Your project is ambitious, original, invigorating. I hope something comes of it. I would love to see your real identity disclosed one day in the Times Book Review. Keep it up.That said, here is the basic problem I see: you are trying to reason your way outside the many logical and factual contradictions of 19th and 20th-century Anglo-American liberal democratic thought, more or less from Bentham to Rawls, using only your own philosophical muscles.
Well, you have no shortage of those! A strong man can wrestle an alligator and win. A marathoner can outrun a horse at distance.
Still, if I have to wrestle an alligator, I’d rather have my .45. If I have to race a horse, I’ll make sure I bring my BMW. That is — if my goal is victory, rather than entertainment.
The BMW or .45 in this case is the enormous corpus of pre-liberal and non-liberal thought, ten times as old and at least as massive. (Despite all the subsidized logorrhea of the 20th.) Denied this corpus, you are struggling with great energy to reconstruct it on your own. You would like to see farther, but without standing on any giants — whose existence, in fact, you deny.
So far as I can discern, your only reason for eschewing pre-liberal thought is that its believers were defeated politically and militarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is therefore no longer studied or at least officially sponsored.
This is an excuse, not a reason. Let’s take this .45 and see what it does to your alligator.
For instance: you start with the highly contentious (really almost Orwellian) Rawlsian definition of “justice” — ie, fairness, assuming a basically Christian concept of charity.
Now the word “justice,” of course, is Latin. Predating all this Jesus stuff. And the classical and Continental authorities (originally Ulpian, I believe) give us a two-word definition of “justice” that satisfies me perfectly: suum cuique, “to each his own.” If this two-word formula strikes you as too much the tautology, there’s an equivalent three-word chestnut — pacta sunt servanda — “promises are to be kept.”
Going down this path gives us a definition of “justice” which is not moral, but legal. Of course this is in keeping with the actual origin and meaning of the term, which is why I feel free to regard the Rawlsian redefinition as contentious at best, Orwellian at worst.
Note also that this formal definition strikes us as intuitively correct, as can be seen when we consider its negation. If promises are not kept, if each does not receive his own, we recognize this instantly as a case of injustice. Moreover, in what way can we find injustice, when each receives his own, when all promises are kept?
Here is the .45. Now, let’s shoot that alligator.
You and Rawls are wrestling with the charitable responsibilities of the State. Under your moral definition of “justice,” this is a knotty problem indeed.
The fundamental question is: does the State owe payment X to recipient Y? (The State may also deliver services, but substituting monetary payments is a Pareto optimization.)
The answer is: has the State promised payment X to recipient Y? If so, then X is Y’s own; promises must be kept; failure to pay would be an injustice. If not, no payment is owed; payment is an injustice, a robbery of the State.
Now, we can separate State payments into two categories. One is payments that are fundamentally debts, ie, promises of future payment exchanged for present value. For instance, I would put Social Security in this category, although the Supreme Court disagrees. Insurance claims, of course, are also financial debts. Is it just for the State to pay its debts? Of course it is just.
There is another class of promise and payment, however, which represents a condition of paternal dependency between State and citizen. As non-liberal authorities from Aristotle to George Fitzhugh will tell you, this relationship is fundamentally analogous to that between (a) parent and child, and (b) master and slave.
Thus, it is just for me to buy milk for my daughter, because I have accepted the obligation of caring for her as a dependent. In return, dependency always implies authority: because I feed my daughter, I get to tell her what to do.
Historically, you will find it another of your human universals that dependency without responsible authority leads directly to moral degradation, often literally dehumanizing. Of course we see this everywhere in the 20th-century welfare state, unique in history as a charitable system utterly unconcerned with the well-known degrading impact of dependency.
Thus, under the cold light of Ulpian, we see that all payments of the welfare state resolve into two categories: debt payments, and paternal dependency. Both of these are entirely just, because they are promises fulfilled.
The English word for an adult unrelated dependent is “slave.” The transfer of the bulk of the African-American population from the control and responsibility of private masters, to the State, is not a freeing of the slaves. It is a nationalizing of the slaves. (With a brief window of actual independence, not coincidentally the golden age of African-American civilization, between the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Great Society.)
Moreover, in “welfare reform,” we actually see a recognition of this fact. Even liberals realized: since we have nationalized the slaves, we have to make them work. Otherwise, their human condition becomes unmentionable. Fact. Somewhere, Carlyle laughs.