My Life Would Not Be Very Interesting if Everyone Agreed With Me

Roger Donway has written a reply to my “Capitalist or Socialist” post that you can find here.  I’ll ignore the name-calling, except for the assertion that I engage in “superficial scholarship” when I critique the statement that “[e]veryone should be free to do as they choose, so long as they don't infringe upon the equal freedom of others” without acknowledging that the slogan is not intended to serve as “some sort of self-defining axiom.”  In fact, my point is precisely that the slogan fails qua slogan because definitions of infringement and “equal freedom” can vary so widely.  To be fair, Donway goes on to opine that I am also wrong to assert the statement is empty in this way because it does in fact imply equality before the law.  However, this seems to be a non-sequitur because the slogan is often trotted out as part of a defense of what the law should be.

Donway goes on to critique my questioning of property rights as being properly justified on the basis of the individual having “earned” the assets they possess.  He suggests that while it may be true in some “absurdly broad context” that if I trace the dominoes of cause and effect back from my acquisition I will eventually find that I am soon out of the picture, I have contributed “intermediate ingredients” that should be respected.  None of this, of course, answers the question as to why those inputs should justify anything approaching exclusive ownership, and Donway conveniently forgets to mention that I acknowledge that there may be very sound utilitarian arguments for recognizing some version of property rights consistent with libertarian mores.   I believe my acknowledgement of the power of utilitarian arguments also addresses the myriad of questions Donway poses in challenging the “puppy-bowl theory of wealth.”

Finally (at least in terms of addressing criticisms), Donway seems particularly frustrated by my daring to assert that there may be no such thing as free will.  Suffice it to say that it is quite possible that more philosophical ink has been spilled on this point than all the above combined, and I seriously doubt that I can add much to that debate here.  I recognize that in this day and age there may be no more sacrilegious assertion than that there is no such thing as free will.  That doesn’t mean the assertion is false, it just means I don’t expect to convince anyone of the possibility.

On a more positive note, I must commend Donway for his overarching point that philosophy matters to business law.  He writes:

One firm belief that I bring to the Business Rights Center is this: Philosophy matters. Without a theoretical defense of the fundamentals—individual liberty, private property, freedom of contract—exposés of alleged injustices against businessmen will not be highly persuasive. Readers may concede that, yes, here was an act of prosecutorial misconduct, and, yes, there was an instance of taking the “insider trading” doctrine too far. But the reader’s reaction to such unjust prosecutions will be limited and spiritless, unless he believes in the right of businessmen to conduct their businesses as they see fit, free from all limits but a ban on force and fraud. Absent that, the reader will naturally think that such injustices are but minor missteps in a crusade that is fundamentally beneficial.

While no one should be surprised to hear that I likely would have used different examples to make the point, I believe the point is spot on.  I likewise agree with the suggestion that to the extent my arguments are bad (and I certainly am under no delusions regarding the vastness of my room for improvement here), I may suffer from not having “discovered satisfying refutations of them.”  I’ll leave it to you to guess whether I consider Donway's critiques to provide some.

SJP