Subject: Re: In Defense of Instinct

From: [email-masked] (Eyal Mozes)
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 11:34:22 -0400

In contrasting "Hobbesian egoism" with "the egoism of Aristotle or
Rand", Bryan goes into the survival-flourishing debate, on which much
have been written in recent years by Objectivists and by
neo-Aristotelians such as Douglass Rasmussen or Tibor Machan (for my
own view on the application of this debate to the issue of respecting
other people's rights, see my article "Deriving Rights from Egoism:
Machan vs.  Rand", Reason Papers no. 17, fall 1992). The key point
where this debate is relevant to the current discusssion is in Bryan's
statement:

>What practical difference does this distinction make?  
>For one, the Hobbesian egoist would remorselessly 
>kill or enslave another person if the risks were low 
>and the gain were large.  For the Randian egoist, 
>however, this predatory lifestyle would conflict with 
>our interest in being productive, independent, and 
>just individuals.  The Hobbesian egoist, similarly, 
>would happily steal if the gain were large and the 
>punishment were small; but the Randian egoist would 
>refrain.

I submit that this is an accurate description of Aristotelian or
new-Aristotelian views, but not of the Objectivist view. The
Objectivist view is that a rational egoist recognizes that it is not
the case that "the risks are low" or "the punishment is small" for
initiating force against others; even if in some concrete situation it
seems possible to get away with such actions, a policy of living and
dealing with others by means of force is likely to destroy one's
chances for long-term survival. "Our interest in being productive,
independent and just individuals" derives from the fact that such
individuals are likely to survive for much longer; it is not an
accident, but a necessary consequence of man's nature, that modern
western culture, in which the values of productivity and justice are
accepted to a large degree, has a far longer life expentancy than any
other culture in history or any non-western culture in the world
today.

The actions of criminals may be explained as "Hobbesian egoism", i.e.
as acting for range-of-the-moment gratification without considering the
long-range consequences. But I don't think such an explanation can work
for explaining wars. Bryan writes:

>frequently the risks were very low and the gain was 
>very great.  The Spanish conquered one-and-a-half 
>continents and got a lot of gold and slaves at very 
>little risk to themselves.

This is a very strange reading of the facts. In order to conquer these
continents, the Spanish had to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a long journey
in cramped ships without adequate nutrition, with very serious risk of
death from scurvy and other diseases; and then had to fight against
natives whose weapons, however primitive, were still quite capable of
killing. I don't know any precise statistics on this point, but my
recollection from reading about the Spanish conquistadors was that
casualties among their men, mostly during the journey and also while
fighting, were very high.

So, what made Spanish people willing to join the conquistadors?
Certainly not "a tendency to focus on individual and kin survival". And
you can't even explain it by failure to think about long-term
consequences, since the dangers were actually *more* immediate and
short-term than the gains.

More generally, in order to support his thesis about a "Hobbesian
instinct", Bryan would have to establish that most wars in history had
few or no casualties for the aggressor side; i.e. that people generally
only try to kill, loot or enslave others when this entails little or no
immediate risk to their lives. My impression is that the historical
record proves the opposite.

So I think the evidence indicates that people throughout history were
very willing to throw their lives away in the service of their tribe,
nation or leader. People throughout history have also held an explicit
morality of self-sacrifice, which puts the tribe, nation or leader
above the individual; and their actions were completely consistent
with this morality. Any form of self-interested behaviour, "Hobbesian"
or Aristotelian, has always been rare.

				Eyal

---

From: "Bryan D. Caplan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 95 20:47:41 EDT

I have to point out, in response to Eyal, that I _did_ mention that
many wars were not in the participants interest.  In particular,
I mentioned wars motivated by ideology, such as Christian holy wars
or Marxist revolutions.

I don't have the kill ratios on the Spanish conquest available,
but historians do agree that colonial powers were enormously
superior to native forces, often subjugating entire nations with
a handful of soldiers with muskets.  (If I recall, Cortes won
Mexico with about 500 conquistadors, plus a ton of native discontents
who served as mercenaries.)

But were any of these wars in the interests of the soldiers involved?
You can't just look at the risks they endured; you have to look
at the alternatives available to them at the time.  Trying your
luck as a soldier in the new world might not look good to us, but
to a poor Spaniard farmer, it might look quite different.

I might also mention that often throughout history the soldiers
have had little or no choice about fighting; and given their
position (i.e., death for desertion), their choice to murder
and rob the innocent was still probably their best choice.

--------------------------------------------------------
Now the underlying ethical position that Eyal takes puzzles me
greatly.  Is he saying that cases where the risks of punishment
are low and the level of gain is high, that he would freely
murder and rob innocent people?  What makes you think that such
cases are so incredibly rare?  In the modern mixed economy,
for example, it seems that people willing to "play ball
" with the government do better financially than those who don't.
And in any case, is Eyal saying that if we happen to be in
e.g. Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany that the moral action is to
do whatever it takes (such as murdering innocent people) to get
a comfortable apartment, extra rations, and so on?

In fact, on the egoist view that Eyal outlines, it would be foolish
to accept any principle like "respect other people's rights."  A
far more general principle, applicable regardless of the sort
of society one lives in, would be "obey the law (or at least laws
that are seriously enforced)."  In a relatively free society, this
latter principle would accord with the former; but it has the added
advantage of greater generality.
     --Bryan