Philosophy with Meaning.

• Author: Machan, Tibor R.
• Position: OUTSTANDING TITLES - Column

In this work I wish to present and defend 'my' philosophy or rather the philosophy that I consider sound. In addition, I will also answer a host of questions in the discipline put to me by people over the course of about 8 years as an 'expert' on Allexperts.com. The ethics I will be defending is concerned with guiding human living to be successful, to excel as human living in the particular instance of the individual agent. Some minimal general principles will be identified while the highly plural element of right conduct will also be made evident. After I consider ethics, I will turn to politics and explore what kind of communities are best suited for human beings. Such communities may well be highly diverse but arguably, since they are to be places for human beings to live and to flourish, they will have to have certain attributes or constitutive features (constitutions) that are best for people.

TIBOR R. MACHAN, PhD

R. C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University and Professor Emeritus at Auburn University

In philosophy the most general questions about the world are addressed and answers debated. What is it to be something, anything, at all? What is it to know something? What is it to act rightly and wrongly? What is it to set up a just community? What is it to create good works of art? And there are the derivative questions in all the subbranches of the discipline, about truth, meaning, reference, significance, importance, value, and so on. The difference between philosophy and other disciplines is just that the former addresses very, very general questions and for the latter some of those basic questions need a reasonably good answer for them to get off the ground--in physics, chemistry, math, sociology, economics and the rest those doing the work have to have some clue what counts as knowledge but they usually do not try to defend what they think about that (philosophers of science, epistemologists and such do).

Socrates wants to construct a model of a just society and this model--not a blueprint (!)--stresses reason without temptation of emotion, so he imagines impersonal sex, no loyalty to family, and marriages that are arranged based on good judgment. He doesn't claim this is what should happen but that we should keep this model in mind and try to emulate it.

Abstraction begins with differentiation and integration--the mind selecting similarities and differences and forming ideas on this basis that are valid, well grounded, with names of their own. For example, we have a shape like a table, then one like a chair, etc., so we form these ideas but then we detect another similarity between chairs and tables (and sofas and beds) and we form the idea of furniture, then household items, then objects and so forth.

Both Hobbes and Locke held that the function of government is to secure the peace and the American founders, following Locke, said it was to secure our rights. The reason security as such cannot be its function is that security is something we would want against all adversity, including disease, earthquakes, financial calamity, hurricanes and whatever, and surely these are not all the business of government. (Here is where insurance services come in handy!) The task of government, within the classical liberal tradition (starting with Hobbes but worked out consistently by Locke and contemporary libertarians) is to protect our rights from those who can violate it (or abstain from violating it), namely other people (criminals and foreign aggressors) who have a choice in the matter and can be persuaded to respect those rights and justifiably punished if they fail to do so. That is, government is "instituted among [us] to secure our rights," not to secure security! Hobbes thought this would require an absolute monarch or dictator, Locke thought, on the contrary, it would require a very limited but highly focused government, limited by the very rights it must protect and focused on the protection and nothing else.

'Democracy' is the form of government Locke appears to have advocated, namely, a highly limited democracy in which majorities may not violate the rights of members of minorities--that is, individuals. In a state of nature, which is a society that has no such restrictions and limitations, there would be a condition of 'the mighty rule. ' Without absolute monarchy Hobbes thinks people would live lives that are miserable, nasty and brutal and there would be no peace at all, nor prosperity but constant war of everyone against everyone. By communism Marx meant a society that needs no crime fighting, merely a mild bureaucracy, and everyone will love everyone else--be generous and kind and giving toward all--automatically, without need for being induced to be so by the state, so, clearly, without communism a very callous, rough competitive system would exist, with some few companies having reached the status of monopolies. But with Marx there is another matter to keep in mind: he did not think any of this could be avoided--he viewed history as a process leading necessarily toward communism from previous stages that were more and more embroiled in class conflict, starting with the earliest and gradually getting less severe as communism is approached.

Kant's approach to ethics leaves business and most other purposive, end-oriented (or teleological) endeavors without an ethical foundation since for Kant ethics or morality is entirely deontological, resting on pure principles of (formal) reason. For Kant it is always the thought that counts, whether one is intending to do what one does because one is convinced it is the principled thing to do--whether it follows the categorical imperative. Any action aiming for some goal or end or value--such as prosperity, in the case of commercial...