美国大法官Oliver Holmes说我们的社会生活存在一个思想的市场(Marketplace of ideas)，不同的思想在这个市场里面竞争，交锋。我赞同这个思想的市场，可是在一个书报互联网检查制度还存在的国度，思想和思想之间显然是不平等的。我的一个埃塞尔比亚朋友告诉我，1984在他的祖国都是禁书，没听说过中国把1984列为禁书，但是我想1984没被列为禁书的理由不是中国更开明，而是中国的书包检察官太没文化。如果每一个自由的信仰者和实践者利用所有的机会在思想的市场上兜售贩卖我们的思想，那自由社会的实现也就多一分机会。中国人喜欢说又做婊子，又立牌坊，在我认为，做婊子和立牌坊都是人生很重要的事。由此，我这个8万多字的小册子就叫它：
全片对红帮理论着墨不多，只说红帮理论是德意志马老师和恩老师所创，海归仲甫和守常去日本留过学，他们连原版书都没看过，只是看日文翻译的二道贩子罢了。至于土鳖润之和他的那几个会友们，红帮理论更是仲甫和守常传播给他们的，基于大佬仲甫和守常都没出席会议，所以红帮建帮大会叫做红帮思想3道贩子大会更符合事实。另外，红帮当时参与领导的学潮罢工中，那些青年和现在论坛上随处可见的愤青，那些看到法国接见达赖就要去砸家乐福，看见美国卖武器给台湾就要去砸麦当劳的爱国青年们没什么不同。在这里我要表扬韩三爷对历史的忠实，对红帮历史稍有了解你就知道，红帮从来所说的团结广大劳苦大众，所谓劳苦大众大多数时候就是这种头脑发热就喜欢打砸抢的年轻人，这种人有更恰当的洋词来表述就是goons and thugs.
It is easy to see why Michael Sandel is a popular Harvard professor. He presents major ideas of ethics and political philosophy in a clear way, tied to important contemporary issues. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, based on a famous course that Sandel teaches, offers a discussion of what Sandel regards as the three main competing views of justice.
The first of these takes welfare to be the criterion of justice. What counts as just is what leads to the best consequences. Thus, supporters of the free market such as Milton Friedman praise the market because it leads to prosperity, in contrast with other economic systems.
Why do we care [about prosperity]… The most obvious answer is that we think prosperity makes us better off than we would otherwise be — as individuals and as a society. Prosperity matters, in other words, because it contributes to our welfare. (p. 19) Another approach, which many libertarians will find familiar, takes freedom and rights to be fundamental to justice. What is essential, according to this way of seeing things, is to give each person what is rightfully due to him, even if following this course does not lead to the best consequences.
The approach to justice that begins with freedom is a capacious school… Leading the laissez-faire camp are free-market libertarians who believe that justice consists in respecting and upholding the voluntary choices made by consenting adults. The fairness camp contains theorists of a more egalitarian bent. (p. 20) The third view, the one to which Sandel is himself inclined, stresses virtue. What character traits should the government, as well as society as whole, endeavor to inculcate in the population?
The idea of legislating morality is anathema to many citizens of liberal societies, as it risks lapsing into intolerance and coercion. But the notion that a just society affirms certain virtues and conceptions of the good life has inspired political movements and arguments across the ideological spectrum. (p. 20) This latter approach may be less familiar than the other two, but an example will show what Sandel has in mind. He considers sellers who increase prices in response to a disaster. Are not such people displaying greed, a character trait we do not wish people to have? Sandel knows full well the argument that raising prices in a disaster increases the supply of goods that people need. He quotes a characteristically incisive passage from Thomas Sowell on the point at issue.
Thomas Sowell, a free-market economist, called price gouging an "emotionally powerful but economically meaningless expression that most economists pay no attention to, because it seems too confused to bother with" … Higher prices for ice, bottled water, roof repairs, generators, and motel rooms have the advantage, Sowell argued, of limiting the use of such things by consumers and increasing incentives for suppliers in far-off places to provide the goods and services most needed in the hurricane's aftermath. (p. 4) Nevertheless, he does not regard this consideration as decisive. Even if raising prices promotes welfare, still, "we" don't want to promote greed, do "we"? Sandel is evidently willing to sacrifice a great deal of welfare to obtain the sort of virtue he wants. As we shall later see, his virtue-oriented position has little to recommend it. I have here merely introduced it briefly.
Sandel does a good job in showing the weakness of the welfare view, although here he goes over standard ground. If we aim to achieve the best consequences, will we not sometimes be required to do morally abhorrent things? Some actions, e.g., torture, are wrong, regardless of consequences.
To this objection there is a familiar rejoinder. What about the terrorist and the ticking atomic bomb? Are we really sure that torture is in all circumstances wrong? Sandel has an excellent response. In the imagined case, the terrorist is guilty of a horrendous moral wrong, planting the nuclear bomb. We can sharpen the case by asking whether it would be wrong to torture someone completely innocent, in order to extract the essential information.
Suppose the only way to induce the terrorist suspect to talk is to torture his young daughter (who has no knowledge of her father's nefarious activities). Would it be morally permissible to do so? (p. 40) The consequentialist would have to answer, implausibly, that it would not be wrong.
Readers of this journal will naturally be interested in what Sandel has to say about one rights-based approach in particular, libertarianism. One might reasonably fear the worst: Sandel stands among the foremost communitarians and, as his previous work makes evident, he views the free market with disdain.[2]
Sandel here proves unpredictable. He thinks that most of the standard objections to libertarianism fail; even if there is something to these objections, libertarians have plausible responses.
Those who favor the redistribution of income through taxation offer various objections to the libertarian logic. Most of these objections can be answered. (p. 66) If an opponent claims that the free market leaves too much to luck, libertarians can respond that people are self-owners and have the right to make exchanges as they wish. Further, libertarians are by no means obviously wrong when they compare taxation to forced labor. Nor will it do to respond to this that taxation has been democratically enacted. If taxation is slavery, majority support does not change things.
If democratic consent justifies the taking of property, does it also justify the taking of liberty? May the majority deprive me of freedom of speech and of religion, claiming that, as a democratic citizen, I have already given my consent to whatever it decides? (p. 68) Surprise has its limits. As readers will have already surmised from Sandel's comments about the market and greed, he has not converted to libertarianism. But if he thinks that the usual objections do not overthrow libertarianism, why does he not join us? He answers by moving to his own preference among the three approaches he distinguishes. The problem with libertarianism involves virtue.
"Sandel stands among the foremost communitarians and, as his previous work makes evident, he views the free market with disdain." Libertarianism allows people to engage in degrading exchanges. A free market would permit people to sell their kidneys for frivolous reasons, e.g., to satisfy a healthy and wealthy eccentric who collects kidneys. Even worse, it would allow consensual cannibalism. Sandel describes a bizarre case in Germany in which this occurred.
[C]annibalism between consenting adults poses the ultimate test for the libertarian principle of self-ownership and the idea of justice that follows from it. It is an extreme form of assisted suicide…If the libertarian claim is right, banning consensual cannibalism is unjust, a violation of the right to liberty. (p. 74) Further, libertarianism leads to such horrors as an all-volunteer army. People with proper civic spirit will want to defend their country out of patriotism, rather than for pay. If they are not thus motivated, nevertheless they have a civic responsibility to serve and the draft enforces this obligation. Sandel appears to have forgotten his earlier remarks about taxation and slavery — or is slavery all right as long as civic responsibility mandates it?
Sandel's complaints about degrading exchanges cannot be so readily dismissed as his misguided praise for conscription: nevertheless, the appropriate counter to them is apparent. Libertarianism does not claim to encompass the whole of morality. Quite the contrary, it asks only, when is force or the threat of force permissible? The answer to this question delimits a sphere of rights, but not everything that is within one's rights counts as morally acceptable. People are free to do bad things, in the sense that they cannot be compelled to do what is morally required. Only if they violate rights can force be used against them. The fact, if it is one, that the consensual cannibal does not violate rights leaves us free to recoil from him in disgust.
Sandel is well aware of this response, but he does not accept it. He subsumes it under a more general doctrine, neutrality. In this view, the state must remain neutral between competing moral views. (Of course, many libertarians think that the state should not exist, but we can readily substitute "the protection agencies" for "the state" in the argument.) Thus, even if most people find cannibalism morally abhorrent, the state cannot impose this opinion on those who dissent from it.
Sandel argues that neutrality cannot be sustained. Are there not certain issues that require the state to commit itself, one way or the other? The state cannot be neutral on abortion. Either fetal life merits protection, or it does not: the state cannot say that because people have conflicting moral views on the issue, it must stand aside.
For, if it's true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide. And few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to kill their children. So the "pro-choice" position in the abortion debate is not really neutral on the underlying moral and theological question… (p. 251) Sandel makes this point in criticism of a familiar target, John Rawls. Here Sandel has in mind Rawls's famous doctrine of public reason, which limits the considerations that may be invoked in public debate.
Sandel's complaint against neutrality fails. Even if he were correct — in my view he isn't — that the state must take a stand on some issues, it hardly follows that it must do so wherever a moral controversy arises. Abortion inevitably raises issues of rights; Sandel's horror stories of degrading exchanges in a libertarian society do not. He thus leaves intact the libertarian contention that people should be free to act as they wish, so long as they do not violate rights.
Anyone with the slightest libertarian inclinations will shudder at Sandel's own approach to justice. As he sees matters, we must determine the meaning of social institutions such as marriage. "What counts as the purpose of marriage partly depends on what qualities we think marriage should celebrate and affirm" (pp. 259–60). Of course it will be the courts that decide this; such weighty matters cannot be left to individual decision. In this way, e.g., disputes over gay marriage can be settled. Having settled such controversies, we can then be enlisted in programs of civic improvement.
A politics of the common good would take as one of its primary goals the reconstruction of the infrastructure of civic life … it would tax the affluent to rebuild public institutions and services so that rich and poor alike would want to take advantage of them. (p. 267) We can thus transcend the market economy and the greed that motivates it. Onward and upward!
Notes [2] See, e.g., his Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard, 2005) and my review in The Mises Review Fall 2005.
There are times and places where most people want more individual freedom than they have. The majority of the citizens of the Soviet Union did not want the state to seize farmers' land, or send Orthodox priests to Siberia. The majority of the citizens of 18th-century France and Spain did not want to pay high taxes to build their kings more palaces and fund more foreign wars. And I bet that the majority of the citizens of modern China want the freedom to have any many kids as they want. In the right times and places, a libertarian can say "give the people what they want" with a good conscience. In the right times and places, a libertarian can be a populist.
In modern democracies, however, libertarian populism is not a viable option. Why? Because there is very strong evidence that the majority favors either as much or more government than exists. (For a summary, see here). All of the main categories of government spending - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, military - are popular. The only item the public consistently favors cutting is foreign aid - about 1% of the budget. Furthermore, the public heavily supports even the least defensible infringements on personal liberty - like prohibition of marijuana.
OK, libertarians: Suppose you could press a button that overruled one of the multitude of statist policies that a majority supports. Would you push?
If you won't push the button, you're not much of a libertarian. The libertarian who refuses to overrule popular statism is saying, "Individual freedom will have to wait until the majority thinks it's a good idea." That's more tedious than waiting for Godot.
If you are willing to push the button, however, people will call you an "elitist" for second-guessing the majority. And they'll be right. The libertarian who overrules popular statism is saying "At least on this issue, I know better than most people."
With my recent piece in Cato Unbound, several people have questioned whether my elitism is consistent with libertarianism. They've got it all wrong. In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right. So how can you be one of the nay-sayers, unless you think you and your fellow nay-sayers have exceptionally good judgment?
None of this means, of course, that libertarians ought to be rude or unfriendly. If we want to change the world in a libertarian direction, we have to convince people who don't already agree with us. And rhetorically speaking, "I'm right, you're wrong" falls flat. (I prefer "I'm right, the people outside this classroom are wrong, and you don't want to be like them, do you?") But in a modern democracy, libertarians cannot honestly praise the wisdom of the common man. He's the guy who got us where we are today.
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