The Problem With Rational Liberty

So I'm rereading Sir Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty for my Modern Political Thought class, having read it two months ago for my Intro to Political Thought class, and I am having various reactions to it. These are mostly criticisms of some of the doctrines described therein about such things as rational liberty, and even really liberty in the first place. Most of the essay is spent discussing various permutations of the way the notion of "positive liberty," the freedom to rule myself as opposed to being ruled by others, end up justifying monstrosities. Most of these roads go down a path of separating the individual into a true, rational, Good part and a false, irrational, Bad part, and saying that the Good part must also be free of the Bad part, and maybe all of the Good parts in people are all joined together in a nation or a race or what have you, and it's perfectly agreeable for the whole to force its constituent parts to conform to their true, rational will, isn't it? Alternately there's the notion that there exists a rational account of good, and that what is rationally good for one will be rationally good for all, and that since one logical truth and another logical truth cannot conflict, there must never be any conflicts between different peoples' true interests! How neat!

There are a whole lot of problems with this, the first being that it is simply empirically false. I just noticed a parallel between this idea of a system of rationally divined interests that never contradict each other and the notion of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. Both are, in fact, made impossible by the fact that the world has finite resources. (At least the first is; I don't doubt that an angel's advocate could argue that the world does not have finite resources because of the eternal bounty of heaven, but if this is true, why couldn't God just arrange it so that everyone got to hang around heaven being infinitely happy forever? Why do we need this finite earth, which perforce must contain its share of misery, let alone hell? But I digress!) The world has limited resources. Now, it is possible that with few enough people in the world, limited as it may be, the reasonable bounds of what it would be possible to humanly desire (talking realistically, here) would be small enough to allow everyone to have everything they ever wanted. Whether or not this could theoretically be the case (it's kind of a Rousseau-ian model, and I'm skeptical of its plausibility), it is unarguable that there are just too damn many people around for it to be viable. By a lot. So people's desires and wants and needs are going to conflict, and there has to be some system for sorting out those conflicts, or ideally preventing them before they occur. You could argue that this is what politics is.

It is also just not true that any notion of what is good in life can be one-size-fits-all. At least, no specific notion of this concept can be; I might argue that some kind of notion of happiness, being a very flexible and empirical term, could manage the feat. But I would certainly say it is impossible to divine a one-size-fits-all prescription for a good life by logic, partly because very little happiness seems to be particularly logical. When I stand on the fourth tee at Cape May National Golf Club and gaze across one-twelfth of a mile of marshy reeds, place a small white rubber ball on a smaller wooden stick in the ground, hit the ball with a funny-shaped metal stick, and watch a towering fade soar into the vast expanse of fairway, I feel incredibly happy. Sometimes giddy. Why? Logically speaking, why? There's probably an answer, something like "a sense of accomplishment," but why, then, does accomplishment make me feel good? At some level there's no answer, other than the infuriatingly empirical, "it just does." That "it just does" kind of takes the place of a postulate, and provides an ample basis for a logical system derived from it, but that doesn't mean that a notion of a good life can be divined by pure logic. That pure logic must be informed by the irreducibly irrational realities of psychology, and it must also take into account that the psychology of the individual, a.k.a. what they're like, varies considerably by person. There are some constants, though. Lack of food, or water, or shelter, or health, is a bad thing. I'm not sure of anyone, save perhaps certain radical ascetics, who would deny that, and one can leave them to their monasteries.

So I would argue that the legitimate purpose of the state is this: to ensure that everyone everywhere can pursue whatever notions of good appeal to them, within reason. The caveat is mainly a nod to the notion of conflict, and that for person X to pursue their whims might impede upon person Y, in which case the state should prevent person X. I take a very broad view of all of this, however. I view the state's obligation to enable the pursuit of happiness to be a comprehensive one, which certainly includes things like providing higher education. I also am inclined toward a broad interpretation of J.S. Mill's "harm principle" about when an act interferes with another's pursuit of happiness in an unreasonable manner. Having a vastly disproportionate share of wealth violates my rule. Remaining uneducated, below some minimum threshold, may do so as well, and this is where I find the justification for compulsory education.

And as for the notion of whether individual empirical notions of happiness are sufficiently lofty, I say, what else is there? I generally find any attempt to produce a "purpose of life" to be hollow, because after all there is no purpose of life: life is all one grand accident. To me, though, this is not a view that drains life of its meaning; just the opposite, for it means that the simple living of life is the meaning of life. Nothing more needed, because there's nothing more there. And yes, that's backwards, but whatever. I choose to find meaning in the simple fact of life, because it's there and nothing else is, and I don't see a problem with that.

Oh, and on a different subject. The part of me that is virulently anti-speciesist thinks that all of these philosophers suck. All this prattle about "it would be to treat me like an animal," "what makes me human," "what separates humans from the rest of the world." We think we're so special. We can talk, and specifically we can use complex grammar. Rational thought isn't even necessarily our sole property; at least, there's no evidence that it is, and the prevalence of tool-making among non-humans seems to suggest it is not. Get over ourselves, people, and while we're at it, mightn't we start treating other animals a little more like we treat ourselves? After all, we're both animals.