Quotes XXVIII
Quotations about
FREEDOM and RESPONSIBILITY
and
LIBERTY and JUSTICE
LIBERTY AND JUSTICE ARE THE KEY 'LEGITIMIST'
VALUES IN POLITICS: PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSEDLY ENTITLED TO BOTH OF
THEM JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE PEOPLE (AND NOT SO
AS TO ACHIEVE ANY PARTICULAR, FORWARD-LOOKING OR 'UTOPIAN' GOAL-EVEN
THE GOAL OF THEIR OWN HAPPINESS). YET DO HUMAN BEINGS HAVE THE
BASIC FREEDOM OF AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS THAT
WOULD SEEM A PRE-REQUISITE FOR THEM TO RECEIVE ANY MEANINGFUL
GRANT OF LIBERTY OR JUSTICE?
APPARENTLY, SOMETHING DEPENDS ON LEVEL OF INTELLIGENCE: PEOPLE
OF LOW MENTAL AGE ARE COMMONLY EXCUSED FROM CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY;
HOWEVER, LIKE COMMUNITY AND EQUALITY, LIBERTY AND JUSTICE MAY
TEND TO BE OFFERED TOGETHER, IN A PACKAGE, PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY
CRUCIALLY REINFORCE EACH OTHER.
Further to 'equality' and 'community' (see Quotes XXVII),
'liberty' and 'justice' are two key political ideals towards which
people and nations strive. What liberty and justice precisely
involve have long been matters for debate. Notoriously, politicians
of all colours claim to be in favour of liberty; but it soon turns
out that they disagree amongst themselves as to whether to make
people free, first of all, from the pressures of foreign enemies,
from home-grown moralists, or from local or national tax-men.
Justice, likewise, is widely valued -even (and perhaps especially)
by young children. Yet, as an adult political aspiration, is it
to be the justice of 'getting what one deserves', of 'giving others
their due', or the 'social justice' of being ascribed rights that
carry no notable attendant duties?
Beneath such uncertainties, however, the relevant psychological
issues are perhaps quite easy to see. Liberty and justice are
the social forms and practices in which personal freedom and personal
responsibility find their expression and precisification. A
society that values and provides liberty and justice will be one
that assumes that its citizens are by-and-large-if perhaps with
some welfare help from society-free and responsible. By contrast,
if people are considered little more free or responsible for their
behaviour than are animals, then a nation's political life can
resemble nothing more than the affairs of a committee of zoo-keepers.
(To provide opportunities and kind treatment to animals is not
to assume they are free or responsible: to
show liberality to a tortoise is not to assume that the animal
could ever be properly 'punished' for 'misdeeds'.)
Unlike the problem of whether to believe in and pursue human
equality and fraternity, the problem of whether to acquiesce in
most people being treated as free and responsible-thus enabling
societies to advance the causes of liberty and justice-has not
been central to differential psychology. Yet probably it should
be.
As yet, the theoretical arguments of moral and jurisprudential
philosophers have provided no compelling and simple answer to
the question of whether we all are, as human beings, free and
thus potentially accountable for our actions. Outright avoidance
of the question of how human freedom is possible has typified
academic psychology this century-as was first remarked by Wlliam
McDougall (e.g. 1934, Religion and the Life Sciences).
Yet everyday law and practice in human societies must, of necessity,
provide some kind of answer. This practical answer is to impute
legal responsibility (mens rea) quite widely-chiefly absolving
from it just one main group of people: for
no civilised society today holds young children or mentally handicapped
adults fully responsible (i.e. imprisonable or executable) under
its criminal code. It is as if countries today basically
allow that a low Mental Age (whether qua low chronological
age or qua low IQ) must prevent a person's being severely
punished as a criminal (or even tried on a capital charge in a
court of law); and, on top of this, mens rea is also suspended
in the case of the rarer endogenous infringements of rationality
that occur in madness, epilepsy or unusually grave neurotic disability.
What these practices acknowledge is that the attribution of distinctly
human freedom is dependent on our attributing to a person at least
sufficient intelligence (operative at the time of the alleged
crime) to appreciate both common-or-garden reality and the relevant
social conventions. As was decided in the case of England's most
famous paranoid schizophrenic, M'Naghten, in 1837, criminal guilt
requires the convict 'to have known what he was doing, and to
have known that it was wrong'. [In addition, conviction on a serious
charge will usually require that the person was not a 'non-insane
automaton' (in the grip of epileptic seizure) or acting under
extreme duress, provocation or overwhelming impulse (e.g. sexual
jealousy). However, people are exonerated in these ways only very
seldom-and virtually never, in Britain, under the formula of crime
passionnelle.]
In the light of such a common-sense understanding of freedom
and responsibility, it is no wonder that Britain's leading jockey
over many years, having amassed a multi-million pound fortune
with the help of tax evasion (and supposed miserliness), pleaded
quite unsuccessfully at his trial that he had a low IQ
as a result of brain-damage from excessive dieting and frequent
falls from horses. Nor should it be a surprise that the multiple
murderer, the Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted, despite
much psychiatric testimony at his trial to his insanity (supposedly
a form of paranoid schizophrenia-about which experts themselves
remained agreed for years afterwards): the jury at the Ripper
trial was doubtless as impressed as was the general public by
the Ripper's skilful evasion of detection over many months during
which he continued to murder prostitutes and other women. Reasonable
intelligence is apparently held to be a necessary and a largely
sufficient condition of mens rea. It is virtually as simple
as that.
Of course, such practices may be all wrong. Perhaps, in some
way, a high-IQ person is just as 100% 'determined' as is the most
insane 'automaton'? Indeed, this may seem
positively likely when we consider the substantial contributions
of genetic factors (and perhaps of yet-to-be-discovered environmental
factors) to our natures....; and when we think of the wonders
that twenty-first-century science will surely have in store. However,
human abilities, needs, temperaments, personalities, attitudes,
interests, principles and sensibilities are not the same as 'actions'.
Our actions flow, by all means, partly from such relatively enduring
features of ourselves; yet 'action' (as distinct from reflexive
movements and certain chemically induced moods) requires also
the moment-to-moment input of our appreciation of immediate reality
and convention, and of feedback on our response-so-far, and thus
of our conscious intelligence. Our genes do not set up specific
'actions'-though they may well set up the degree of intellectual
guidance of our moment-by-moment choices. The fact that people
of unremarkable intelligence can talk the language of freedom-sensing
that they are free in some matters, yet less free in others (e.g.
as to how they would react to suffocation, their spouse's adultery,
or their child being sexually abused)-is itself enough to establish
a workaday concept of freedom that no theoretical determinist
can undermine.
If adequate functioning intelligence is necessary and virtually
sufficient to be deemed free, perhaps people are not really
free unless they are endowed with yet other resources? - Notably
with money: for the rich clearly have more options than the poor.
Sometimes this point is phrased in Sir Isaiah Berlin's terms (1958,
Two Concepts of Liberty): that, in a law-governed country,
we may all enjoy many 'negative' freedoms (e.g. from our neighbours'
covetousness); but that some of us may currently enjoy more 'positive'
freedoms (e.g. to own a yacht). Yet, distinguishable as
such two types of freedom are, perhaps neither is the real McCoy.
Our freedom, in a psychological sense, is not that of being provided
with options, rights or privileges, but of our sensing, within
whatever constraints of tyranny or anarchy, that there are indeed
options that we have or that we can or must create. No
matter what options a slave may actually have, if his master's
tyranny prevents him even conceiving of escape we surely
withdraw blame for his actions at his master's behest-though,
here again, we are likely to take such a slave's intelligence
into account in deciding whether he could reasonably have been
expected to do anything other than obey orders.
Whether psychologists and social scientists have really wanted
to expand attributions of freedom and responsibility-or to strive
to create the human conditions in which such attributions become
eminently reasonable-is a moot point. Like other social scientists,
psychologists (notoriously, the behaviourist leader, B.F.Skinner)
have sometimes seemed to relish the creation of well-run holiday
camps over which they would preside, manipulating the reinforcement
schedules or the supply of social workers so as to optimize and
equalize people's scores on some hedonic calculus-all the while
reducing the intelligent choices that campers will need
to make. Yet such ideas now belong to the ancient history of behaviourist
and environmentalist enthusiasm that denied both the importance
of biologically-based individuality and the continuing need in
human societies for people whose intelligence will not only contrive
sixth-generation computers and hermeneutic text-analysis but will
also cry out to be recognized as free and responsible beyond the
dreams of utopian planners. Such a cry is not for any pseudo-freedom
to behave randomly-'undetermined' by individual personality. Rather,
it is for the exercise of intelligence that allows behaviour-though
it is guided and even partly 'caused' by personality-to be a rational
reaction instead of being an automatized and robotic response.
It is a cry that cannot be answered by the well-meaning provision
of the cosy 'situations' and sheltered environments that utopians
might envisage. Moreover, such freedom not only admits of personal
responsibility, but positively demands it: for few worthwhile
freedoms would remain in a world in which constraint and the taking
of responsibility were not generally expected. The Quotes thus
include consideration of the interdependence of freedom and responsibility;
and of the possible role of the State in giving expression to
both of them by its own support for intelligence, liberty and
criminal justice.
For more coverage of the interface of politics
and psychology,
especially in relation to the study of intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political
hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging
and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists".
This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn,
in April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, NewsLetters
concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his
popular exposition of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
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INDEX to QUOTES XXVIII
Page
(i) ARE people properly thought of as 'free'?
7 Or are we fully determined automata, or computers
with
hard-working randomizing devices?
(ii) SHOULD we be treated as free?
13 Are we truly free when we are free from others' physical
coercion
and thus able to make and act on plans of our own? Or must we
first be somehow released from the restrictions of poverty,
ignorance and ill health?
(iii) CAN we anyhow be made free(r)? 17
Are there ways of liberating us into insight and understanding
that
do not make undue demands of others' behaviour and generosity?
(iv) ARE we properly held to be accountable for our actions?
18
Which of us can properly be blamed or praised in virtue of
our
typically having mens rea ('the mind of the thing')-i.e.
being responsible for our actions? And when?) and 'punishment'
and towards a utilitarian handling of offences so as simply to
produce more all-round happiness and 'social justice'?
(vi) CAN we be more responsible than we currently
are? 22
For example, should secular rises in IQ-type intelligence
lead us to think of lowering the age of criminal responsibility?
(vii) The inter-dependence of freedom and responsibility,
and of liberty and justice, whereby each tends to require
the other. 25
(viii) Does the State have any distinct role in furthering
freedom, responsibility, liberty and justice? 29
{See also Quotes XX-Psycho-social Engineering.}
*********************************************************************************************
(i) ARE people properly thought of as 'free'?
"....we are born Free as we are born Rational; not
that we have actually the Exercise of either: Age that brings
one, brings with it the other too."
John LOCKE, Two Treatises.
"It seems [to John Locke] that no one could ever be in a
position consistently to assert, much less to know: either
that there is no such thing as unnecessitated choice; or
that there is no such thing as practical necessity. For it appears
that choice and necessity are two opposites of such a kind
that each can be explained only by pointing to actual specimens
both of its own and of the other sort. Thus anyone
able to understand either of those two [above] notions must have
been acquainted with some specimens of both of the two
sorts of realities to which they positively refer."
Antony FLEW, 1986, David Hume. Oxford : Blackwell.
"We know our will is free, and there's an end on't."
JOHNSON, quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson (10 x 1769).
"I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing
resistance of the ego to the world."
William JAMES, in his diary, cited by G.A.Wilson,
William James. New York : Viking, 1967.
"[Galton's] introspections revealed to him that his mental
reactions were nearly all conditioned. Suppose that he had concluded
that all were somehow conditioned, what conclusions should we
draw about the freedom of the will? No certain conclusion would
emerge, for Galton's observations tell us nothing about the sources
of the impulses which are themselves being fashioned or conditioned.
The energy of a waterfall may be harnessed (or conditioned) to
perform many tasks the mechanisms of which we can understand well
enough without in the least comprehending the nature of gravitation
which makes the water fall."
C.P.BLACKER, 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After.
London : Duckworth.
"A.N.Whitehead [the philosopher, 1861-1947] pictures the
mind as a society of free agents. Each agent, itself a society
of lesser agents, specializes in a certain type of decision. In
a timeless moment the whole society of the mind (as Marvin Minsky
calls it) weighs its options, and satisfies its aims by choosing
just one target. In so choosing, the subject must sacrifice an
infinite number of might-have-beens."
Richard LUBBOCK, 1989, The Idler (Toronto), No. 23, v/vi.
"Born in 1865, W.B.Yeats inhabited a world in which, according
to the evolutionists, social theorists and, later, psychoanalysts,
a man's destiny was determined by factors beyond his control.
Against such reductivism, Yeats set the liberating energies of
the imagination and passions; for him, as for Blake, the road
of excess led to the place of wisdom."
John KELLY, 1989, Sunday Times (Books), 29 i.
"....the physicalist doctrines of present-day behaviourists
are based not so much on the empirical study of the brain or of
conscious behaviour as on purely a priori considerations.
[Thus] originated Watson's famous manifesto, which declared that
henceforth the genuinely scientific psychologist should banish
'metaphysical' terms like consciousness, sensation and mind, because
they were not part of the 'accepted scientific framework'. Watson,
he tells us, was brought up on the late-nineteenth-century textbook
of Tait and Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) which put forward a simple
and attractive monistic theory of the universe. There was only
one type of substance, namely matter; one type of agency, namely
energy (capable of transformation); both were strictly 'conserved';
space and time were absolute; and all action was to be pictured
in terms of a mechanical model.... [However] as a universally
valid world-view, this nineteenth-century conception has now been
rendered wholly out of date by the revolutionary changes in twentieth-century
physics-by the theory of relativity, the quantum theory, and above
all by researchers into the inner structure of the atom.... The
alleged causal laws turn out to be merely approximate statistical
laws. Neither space nor time is absolute. Matter is not indestructible.
The observer can no longer be ignored. And the principle of indeterminacy
is universally accepted."
Sir Cyril BURT, 'The soul in 1966'.
Reprinted in C.Burt (ed. Anita Gregory),
ESP and Psychology. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
"Man is ultimately self-determining.... What he becomes within
the limits of endowment and environment, he has made out of himself.
In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory
and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our
comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man
has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized
depends on decisions [and] not on conditions."
Viktor FRANKL, 1959, Man's Search for Meaning.
Boston : Beacon Press.
"To describe a person as 'an ENTP type' (one of the
sixteen 'Jungian' classifications to which testees are assigned
by the personality questionnaire called the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator} is in no way to infringe his right of self-determination.
He was exercising his right of self-determination when he chose
to be Extraverted, INtuitive, Thoughtful
and Perceptive. When one aims, in dealing with an ENTP,
to remember that he is ENTP, one is respecting not only
that individual's abstract right to develop along lines of his
own choosing, but
also the concrete ways in which he is and prefers to be different
from others." Isabel Briggs MYERS, 1962, The Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator. Palo Alto, Ca. : Consulting Psychologists
Press.
""If you think we are waxworks," said Tweedledum
to Alice, "you ought to pay." And J.B.Watson has had
to pay a heavy price for his adherence to mechanistic principles.
It makes nonsense of every form of applied psychology. Educational
psychology, vocational psychology, criminology and psychotherapy-all
become quite impossible if we are to look upon men and women,
patients and pupils, as mere automata, alike devoid of reason
and feeling."
Sir Cyril BURT, 1975, ESP and Psychology.
London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Edited by Anita Gregory.)
"Efforts to explain human action by the discovery of natural
laws or other non-human 'mechanical' processes are doomed to failure."
Vernon REYNOLDS, 1980.
"Agency, volition and social determination are all important
aspects of human behaviour, which is not mechanistic and cannot
be predicted purely on a biochemical or scientific basis."
C.GOSTIN, 1980, New Society.
"The opposite of freedom is not predictability but slavery
of various kinds, whether to an outside master or to inner impediments
such as sloth or habit, which inhibit rational activity.
If there are no such inhibitions, we call the choice 'free', regardless
of whether somebody could predict it. It is in fact quite easy
to be unpredictable, if you don't mind acting crazily. But freedom
does not require craziness.... ....The vices are the defects of
our qualities. Our nature provides for both. If it did not, we
should not be free."
Mary MIDGLEY, 1984, Wickedness. London : Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
"....if I have the capacity to discover what makes me 'me',
I have also the chance of deciding, at least to some extent, what
I shall make of what is making me and, therefore, what I shall
make of 'me'. Freedom, as an emergent possibility, seems to be
thrust upon men, and along with freedom, responsibility.... the
debate about the ways in which human beings are determined is
really a secondary debate about how we are to understand our make-up
and situation in order to play a creative part in them."
D.E.JENKINS (Bishop of Durham), 1985, What is Man?
"According to compatibilists, free will consists not
in having an undetermined future but in having a future that is
determined in a special way.... Very roughly speaking, compatibilists
identify free will with being determined in a reason-sensitive
way."
P. van ILMWAGEN, 1986, Contemporary Psychology 31.
(Reviewing D.C.Dennett, Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free
Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT)
"No one could even understand what is meant by contrasting
'necessitated' with 'chosen' behaviour unless they had themselves
had abundant experience of both."
Antony FLEW, 1987, 'Evil: the knee-jerk reaction'. The Times,
10 i.
"If a man should talk to me of "a round quadrangle",
or "accidents of bread in cheese", or "immaterial
substances", or of a "free subject", or "free
will", or any "free" but free from being hindered
by opposition, I should not say he were in error, but that his
words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd."
Thomas HOBBES, Leviathan, Chapter 5.
"Negation of free will is the necessary condition of all
sociological theory and practice."
Enrico FERRI.
"A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous
man and turns the control he has been said to exercise over to
the environment."
B.F.SKINNER.
"The hypothesis that man is not free is essential to the
application of scientific method to the study of human behaviour."
B.F.SKINNER, 1953, Science and Human Behaviour.
New York : Macmillan.
"The idea of liberty in itself is an invention of the ruling
class."
Michel FOUCAULT, c. 1985, in a televised discussion with
Noam Chomsky.
"There was a time when the division of mankind
into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of
slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural,
and the only natural, condition of the human race. No less an
intellect [than Aristotle] held this opinion without doubt or
misgiving, and rested it on the same premises on which the same
assertion in regard to the dominion of men over women is usually
based, namely that there are different natures among mankind,
free natures and slave natures.... the law of force itself, to
those who could not plead any other, has always seemed the most
natural of all grounds for the exercise of authority."
J.S.MILL, On Liberty, Representative Government and the Subjection
of Women. Oxford University Press, 1987.
"By and large, the more significant the question is, the
less capable sociology is of giving an answer. And that inability
has a great deal to do with the partially indeterminate, or self-determined
character of human behaviour."
Pierre van den BERGHE, 1975, Man in Society.
"Watching sociologists grappling with the existence of free
will is a harmless source of malicious amusement, like watching
blindman's buff, or apple-bobbing."
D.SEXTON, 1984, The Spectator.
"Few psychologists have articulated the friction between
behaviourism's overtly deterministic approach and the notion of
free will that is central to Christian faith. However, at least
two eminent psychologists have clearly done so, and have suggested
that a resolution to this problem may be forthcoming from the
cognitive revolution we have witnessed in psychology over the
past two decades (Bergin, 1980, J. Consult. & Clin. Psychol.;
Sperry, 1988, Amer.Psychologist)."
K.J.TIERNEY & J.A.SMITH, 1990, Irish Journal of Psychology
11.
"...the mechanistic determinism of science is, in the end,
inadequate to the task of social prescription. Political science
has no account of why people vote; psychology has yet to identify
the material basis of religious exhortation; economics can say
only that people give to charities because it makes them feel
good to do so. No analyst predicted that the people of Eastern
Europe would, in Vaclav Havel's memorable phrase, rise to achieve
"a sense of transcendence over the world of existences."
With the understanding of causality in social science so limited,
and the importance of matters of the spirit so palpable, one might
expect a bit of humble circumspection from analysts who presume
to pronounce upon what is possible for human beings to accomplish."
Glenn C. LOURY, 1994, National Review 46, 23, 5 xii.
"A philosopher who was talking about twins said that maybe
it's freedom that makes identical twins different. Frankly, I
don't believe that for a minute. It could be freedom that makes
them alike. I think freedom means something about the capacity
of the human organism not to be pushed around by external circumstances.
I would argue that evolution has given us our freedom, that natural
selection has placed in us the capacity to stand up and transcend
the limitations of the environment. So I think the quest for freedom
is genetic."
Lindon J. Eaves, 1995, talking to Lawrence Wright.
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.
(ii) SHOULD we be treated as free?
"The greatest and most dangerous lie of our time is that
we are solely the result of our upbringing, our milieu,
our physical surroundings, our schooling, our degree of affluence
or poverty, our employment prospects, our social or familial relationships
and our sex lives, along with the weather, the threat of war,
other people's smoking, Sellafield and the Freemasons. I said
that is the most dangerous lie; wherein is the danger? In the
determinism to which it leads; the effects of that determinism
can be seen all round us, and the most pernicious of its effects
are the condonation of guilt and the dismissal of responsibility."
Bernard LEVIN, 1986, The Times, 24 xi.
"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing
our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to
deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it....The
only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over
any member of a civilized society against his will is to prevent
harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not
sufficient warrant."
Alain de Botton, 1993, Essays in Love. London : Macmillan.
"C lassical music, posh school,
L ots of money, home swimming pool.
A person with nothing but an old shed.
S odden clothes and he needs a new bed.
S ave this society for some people's sake!
W as this the way God meant to take -
A conflict of races, classes and creed?
R ise up, the people, stamp out the greed!
In an anthology of children's poems on the theme of 'Freedom',
published by the Inner London Education Authority, 1987.
"It is only by developing policies which ensure good quality
education and training for all; which provide housing at the right
price and place for young couples, and single persons; which create
conditions in which young people can establish their own businesses;
which prevent discrimination against young people in relation
to claiming benefits; and which offer a wide range of available
recreational and leisure pursuits, that we can talk about providing
opportunity and choice. Such a range of choice and opportunity
can never be provided by this government with its support of the
individualistic market: it is in securing maximum freedom that
socialism always has the advantage."
Derek FATCHETT, 1988, New Socialist, x/xi.
"The quality of community life and concern for human dignity
are not just balancing factors to be set in the scales against
unrestrained freedom. They are essential to freedom itself on
any but the most superficial view of it."
Dr John HABGOOD (Archbishop of York), 1988, The Observer,
29 v.
"My view is that, step by step, we must abandon this moral
hogwash which is known as capitalism.... Free will and free enterprise
are part of the same myth.... Only by providing more public goods
can we subdue human acquisitiveness, and encourage the more desirable
qualities of creativity and friendship."
Ed BROADBENT (Leader of Canada's National Democratic Party),
quoted by G.Caleval, 1988, 'Canada's N.D.P.: Prairie socialists
on the march'. International Freedom Review 1, 2.
Washington, DC 20002 : International Freedom Foundation.
"The best bit of being a socialist was joining hands and
singing 'The Red Flag'. Wasn't it great?
"The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead;
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their red blood stained its every fold."
Capitalism, on the other hand, is totally uninspiring as a rousing
idea. ....Even capitalism's strongest intellectual suit-liberty-is
underplayed and easily mocked by talk of the liberty to dine at
the Ritz."
Mary KENNY, 1988, Sunday Telegraph, 27 iii.
"....assumed freedom of will is altogether too convenient
a device for letting us justify the belief that equality of
opportunity is all that should be required of an equitable
society."
Rodney COTERILL, 1989, No Ghost in the Machine: Modern Science
and the Brain, the Mind and the Soul. London : Heinemann.
"The talk around the coffee tables [at the National Conference
of Priests] was of how to resist the New Right, individualism
and the Enlightenment view of personal freedom; and of whether
and to what extent Protestantism, the Prime Minister and the supposedly
individualistic ethic of the Old Testament could be blamed."
Clifford LONGLEY, 1989, The Times, 9 ix.
"As J.Raz (1986, The Morality of Freedom, Oxford,
Clarendon) has shown, rights are never fundamental or primordial
in political discourse or political morality. Claims about rights
are intermediary or conclusionary claims about the relations between
the interests central to the well-being of persons and the obligations
generated upon others by these interests."
John GRAY, 1992, The Moral Foundations of Market Institutions.
London : Institute of Economic Affairs.
""We may react to [determinism] with dismay or intransigence
(denying that determinism makes any real difference). But [Ted
Honderich, 1994, How Free Are We?] thinks these reactions
are superficial and proposes that we react "affirmatively",
taking heart in the compensations determinism offers."
Robert KANE, 1994, 'Freedom in a determined world',
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 14 x.
"Many reformers have as their basic objection
to a free market that it frustrates them in achieving their reforms,
because it enables people to have what they want and not
what the reformers want."
Milton FRIEDMAN, 1976, quoted by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's
Book of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner,
1978.
"On a theme of 'Freedom' [in ILEA's anthology of children's
poems {above)] there is no caged hamster, or budgerigar (briefly
let free, perhaps), no description of the pleasure of being released
from school, the relief of Saturday, no revelation of the real
life of a child whatsoever.... These children have been got at....
....the anthology, for the most part, bears hardly any relation
to poetry at all."
P.J.KAVANAGH, 1987, The Spectator, 17 x.
"Democracies produce wealth in abundance as a by-product
of their liberty. "People's democracies" [by contrast]
fail to produce the butter that alone would justify the [communist]
system; but they are never short of guns to turn on their own
people {as in the Chinese People's Republic's Tiananmen Square
massacre}. The failure of repression to produce the economic goods,
and the success of freedom in doing that very thing, is the fundamental
reason why communism is finished."
Editorial, The Times, 11 vi 1989.
"....while Roy Hattersley {above} believes, or claims to
believe, that (for Britain) "greater freedom comes from greater
equality", Janos Berecz, the ideological king-pin of the
Hungarian Communist Party, now openly says that one of his party's
"greatest errors" has been that it "took the path
of egalitarianism instead of freedom"."
David SELBOURNE (for many years a lecturer at Ruskin College,
Oxford), 1989, Sunday Times (New Society), 26 ii.
(iii) CAN we anyhow be made free(r)?
{See Quotes X, XVIII and XX.}
"....until we are truly equal, we will not be truly free."
Roy HATTERSLEY (Deputy Leader of the British Labour Party), 1987,
Choose Freedom: the Future for Democratic Socialism.
London : Michael Joseph.
"We owe it to others to assume that they need as much freedom
as we do, and so must help them have as much opportunity as we
have of using freedom intelligently."
Richard HOGGART, 1988, The Times, 11 vi.
"....autonomy, if it is to be meaningful and valuable, requires
not only capacities for choice on the part of the individual,
but also a span of worthwhile options in his cultural environment.
In the absence of this, autonomy wanes, and the lives of individuals
become the poorer, however many choices they make. Autonomy is
not worth much if it is exercised in a Hobbesian state of nature."
John GRAY, 1992, The Moral Foundations of Market Institutions.
London : Institute of Economic Affairs.
"It is clear that some are by nature free, and others
by nature slaves. ....There is an interest in common between slave
and master....when they are by nature fitted for this relationship,
but not when the relationship arises out of force."
ARISTOTLE, The Politics.
"....although he supports the institution of slavery,
Aristotle distinguishes between natural slavery and conventional
slavery, recognizing that many foreign people are enslaved purely
as a result of accidents such as shipwreck, kidnapping, or being
captured in wars. Aristotle makes a crucial distinction between
free men who are capable of being citizens and slaves who are
by nature incapable of assuming personal and civic responsibilities."
Dinesh D'SOUZA, 1995, The End of Racism.
New York : The Free Press
(iv) ARE we properly held to be accountable for our actions?
"Among the oldest records in western jurisprudence is the
homicide law of Draco, setting forth the punishments faced by
offending Greeks of the 7th century B.C. The very beginning
of the statute refers to homicides committed unintentionally
(ekphronoias). From the outset, attempts to understand
reasons for actions have grounded our evaluations of the actions
themselves."
D.N.ROBINSON, 1993, Theory & Psychology 3.
"Roman law developed extensively between the first codification
in about 450B.C. and the re-stating and reforming under the reign
(ending in 565A.D.) of the Emperor Justinian. ....Developments....led
to allowance for irresponsibility due to age in criminal matters.
According to Buckland, intellectus came to be "material
in respect of liability for wrongdoing" (criminal responsibility);
and an infans (that is, one incapable of speaking) necessarily
lacked intellectus. A child's incapacity to make intelligent
decisions was considered substantially like that of an insane
person.... ....The laws that evolved in England....were summarized
in the mid-eighteenth century by Blackstone [1765]: "....By
the law, as it now stands, and has stood at least ever since the
time of Edward the Third, the capacity of doing ill, or contracting
guilt, is not so much measured by years and days, as by the strength
of the delinquent's understanding and judgment. ....A girl of
thirteen has been burnt for killing her mistress; and one boy
of ten, and another of nine years old, who had killed their companions,
have been sentenced to death, and he of ten years actually hanged,
because it appeared upon their trials that the one hid himself,
and the other hid the body....""
A.BINDER, 1987, in H.C.Quay, Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency.
New York : Wiley DePublisher.
"In....1923, I suffered much religious doubt, and it was
caused by the writing and thinking of J.B.Watson, founder of the
psychology school known as Behaviourists. It challenged my notions
of the self, of the possibility of its sovereignty, and therefore
of the whole concept of using one's life, by conscious resolve,
for the service of God and man. I did not hold any extreme dogma
of free will, but I felt that I, and I alone, was responsible
for my actions. If I felt that I had done wrong, I would not have
blamed my parents or my home or my school or my country, even
though I would have acknowledged that all these agents had helped
to make the self that is I. It was this conviction of my responsibility
that finally made me reject the dogma of behaviourism. I do
not regard this as a scientific refutation of behaviourism: I
regard it as an act of choice on my part, that I did not choose
to lead my life believing that I was nothing more than the product
of a hundred external forces over which I had no control, and
that the concepts of purpose, morality, responsibility were unnecessary
to the understanding of life and behaviour."
Alan PATON (South African novelist, author of Cry, the Beloved
Country), 1981, Towards the Mountain. Oxford University
Press.
"We are all responsible for everything of importance that
happens to us." Bernard LEVIN, 1980.
"If we believed Freud {absolutely}, we would empty all our
prisons and turn them into mental hospitals. We do not do this
because we suspect that there is a moral element in human beings,
and that sometimes people are free and responsible for what they
do."
Peter MOREA, 1990, Personality. Harmondsworth, Mddx. :
Penguin.
"R.F.Schopp (1991) develops an insanity defence test which
calls upon the jury to decide whether the defendant had the capacity
to function as a practical reasoner: that is, to form and select
an action plan which produced the conduct constituting the offence.
This test, he claims, overcomes all the problems implicit in the
unsatisfactory M'Naghten criteria..... [Schopp claims his test]
would correspond with common moral intuition of free will as evidenced
by psychological capacity."
M.KING, 1993, British Journal of Psychology 84.
"With increasing scientific understanding of the
genetic basis of personality, the absurdity of passing moral judgements
on people for acts we abhor but which we know to be the result
of, say, some scientific abnormality in their chromosomes, will
become more obvious."
W.BECKERMAN (Balliol College, Oxford), 1986, 'The problem of
judging evil'. The Times, 17 xii.
(v) SHOULD we be treated as responsible for our actions
-and thus as capable of behaving justly or unjustly?
"Many current ways of thinking tend either to make individuals
vanish into their groups, or to reduce them to their physical
parts. Both these processes make it seem as if they had no real
identity or control, and so suggest that it does not matter what
they do."
Mary MIDGLEY, 1984, Wickedness. London : Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
"Justice is an essentially backward-looking notion
concerned with people getting and being able to keep their general,
and presumably often different deserts and entitlements-deserts
and entitlements we have antecedently acquired by being what we
are and have been, and by doing or refraining from doing what
we either have done or have refrained from doing. The Procrustean
ideal, on the other hand-the ideal of a universal equality of
condition necessarily enforced and manifested by an all-intrusive
socialist state-is, equally essentially, forward-looking.
Regardless of what people are or have been, or have or have not
previously done, their future condition is to be made (ever more,
if never perhaps perfectly) equal. ....Protagonists of this Procrustean
ideal would, if they were both clear-headed and frank, sacrifice
the propaganda advantages of presenting it as a kind of justice
[i.e. as 'social justice']. Instead-and taking a leaf from the
book of the orthopsychiatrists and other self-styled penal progressives-they
would mount a bold and radical onslaught on the very notion of
justice, denouncing the whole business as antique, gothic, reactionary
and-what is the truth- irreducibly backward-looking."
Anthony FLEW, 1986, 'Enforced Equality - or Justice?'
Journal of Libertarian Studies 8.
"The psychopath may well prove to be the thin
end of the wedge which will ultimately shatter the whole idea
of moral responsibility."
Barbara WOOTON, 1959, Social Science and Social Pathology.
London : Allen & Unwin.
"Don't talk to us about individual responsibility. Talk to
us about rice and schools. We don't believe in individual responsibility.
We believe the individual is precious only when he is part of
the family, only when he sublimates himself to his parents and
grandparents, and loses himself in the larger concerns of the
people of his own blood."
General KY (Prime Minister of South Vietnam), 1965.
"Those who conceived of the Welfare State and brought it
into being thought they were creating the New Jerusalem. They
were. The National Health Service is not the last bastion of civilisation;
it is quite probably the first."
Anne SMITH, 1988, The Observer (Scotland), 9 x.
"B.F.Skinner's eco-politics [in his Upon Further Reflection]
decree that well-meaning governments should treat their citizens
just like [Skinner's] idealized house-mouse: creating for these
beneficiaries of Utopia such simple, quasi-natural 'contingencies
of reinforcement' as to make frustration unthinkable, surprise
impossible and reflection superfluous."
C.R.BRAND, 1989, Behaviour Research & Therapy 27.
"The corrosive ideal of 'social justice' has been etched
on to the psyche of the British so that it has become the good
that is the sine qua non of all other goods. If society
is unjust, anything goes. The assumption of personal responsibility
can be postponed until social justice (always defined by its absence,
for defining it positively is rather difficult) has been attained.
In the meantime, one can behave abominably, yet feel aggrieved."
Theodore DALRYMPLE, 1991, The Spectator, 21 ix.
(vi) CAN we be more responsible than we currently are?
"Despite their radical evil, human beings are 'respectable',
[Kant] believes, by nature. Their humanity is their holiness.
They are essentially free and genuinely responsible, he believes,
and they should become more so."
B-A.SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The Philosophers. Oxford : Blackwell.
"One of the causes of the downfall of Rome was that people,
being fed by the State....ceased to have any responsibility for
themselves or their children, and consequently became a nation
of wasters. They frequented circuses, where paid performers appeared
before them in the arena, much as we see the crowds now flocking
to look on at paid players playing football...."
R.BADEN-POWELL, 1908, Scouting for Boys.
"According to our view, the strict determinists who consider
all human activity to be a process of cause and effect are not
so very wrong. But causes can change, and the results of experience
acquire entirely new values, when the powers of self-knowledge
and self-criticism are alive and functioning well. The ability
to know ourselves increases with our ability to determine the
origins of our actions and the dynamics of our minds. Once someone
has understood this, he has become a different person and can
no longer escape the inevitable consequences of his knowledge."
Alfred ADLER, 1927, Understanding Human Nature.
Oxford : Oneworld Publications, 1992.
"Have we thought sufficiently of the rights of children-of
their rights....not to have a retarded parent? ....Can we reasonably
and humanely oppose such rights of millions of children as yet
not born?"
A.R.JENSEN, 1969, Harvard Educational Review 39.
"[One] single mother {appearing on the writer's T.V. programme}
thought she was entitled to a home and income, provided by the
state, and scoffed at the old-fashioned view that she should not
have had children until they could be afforded. There are a lot
more like that. But many have known nothing else. Their entire
adult life has been spent on the dole. They left school, married,
had children, and bought houses while dependent on state benefits.
It's not surprising that they think the state owes them a living.
It is this mentality and the demands and expectations that go
with it that are far more dangerous than a few militant feminists.
And it's the present government that's responsible."
Robert KILROY-SILK (a Merseyside Labour M.P.), 1987,
The Times, 24 x.
"To many thousands of non-communists like me, and to a great
many communists too, the Prague Spring was less about reforming
communism than about resurrecting the concept of citizenship,
with its rights and, perhaps even more importantly, its responsibilities.
It was about turning a corrupt conglomerate of mere subjects into
a diligent, honest, creative civil society, irrespective of the
political system-though 'democratic socialism' had certainly seemed
a decent enough system to start with."
Zdena TOMIN, 1988, Sunday Telegraph (Colour Supplement),
21 viii.
"After numerous reversals, the "responsibility system"
[of agricultural production] was finally accepted and established
as the official policy [by Teng Hsiao Ping, as he set out to achieve
free-market-style economic reform of Mao's China], [thus greatly
boosting] the farmers' incentive to produce. From 1979 to 1984,
according to official data, the total value of agricultural output
increased one hundred per cent."
Ming CHU-CHENG, 1988, Free China Review 38, xi.
"We are preparing for the future when [genetic] tests for
[likelihood of future] breast cancer, colon cancer, heart disease,
Alzheimer's disease, manic depression and schizophrenia might
well be available. For a while we may have the worst of all possible
worlds-limited or no treatments, high hopes and probably unrealistic
expectations, and insurance repercussions: everything to challenge
our inventiveness and stamina. But these ingredients will be,
I hope, catalysts for change. The stakes are high; the payoff
is high. I am reminded of a line by the poet, Delmore Schwartz:
"In dreams begin responsibilities"."
Nancy WEXLER, 1992, in D.J.Kevles & L.Hood, The Code of
Codes.
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
"The truth is stranger than fiction. Sutcliffe {the Moors
murderer} was a very disturbed man. Sutcliffe was an arsehole.
How tapped was that cunt. Some things you can never understand,
some things don't lend themselves to reason, to rational analysis
and explanation. I've started on Mother Teresa's biography, but
I can't get into it. I don't really have much time for her; she
seems a bit fuckin loopy tae me. She claims God tells her tae
dae the things she does; it's got fuck all tae dae wi her. This
is precisely the same argument Sutcliffe uses. That's all jist
pure shite; people should take on a bit mair personal responsibility."
'Brian', the central character of Irving Walsh's novella, A
Smart Cunt, part of The Acid House, 1994. London :
Jonathan Cape.
"Individual initiative, personal responsibility,
private property, savings and productive investment - those strongholds
of the adolescent mentality, all of which found their ideal system
in Capitalism, and which contributed noticeably to an increase
in the standard of living in a material sense-are slowly disappearing.
What happened? Why did a system like Capitalism, which created
such wealth and improved material conditions for so many, start
to become unpopular? In my opinion, significant changes took place
over the last 160 years. Improvements in the standard of living,
hygiene, medicine and social assistance started producing a new
humanity, an ever-increasing number of old people. This
growing element began to change the age structure and the mentality
of European society. ....Old age has produced a new vulnerability,
caused by the feeling of un-self-sufficiency and social dependency.
....Socialism is a result of the wishful thinking of those who
are frightened by their inability to cope with a life of competition
and the rat-race of Capitalism."
Branko BOKUN, 1986, Humour Therapy. London : Vita Books.
(vii) The inter-dependence of freedom and responsibility,
and of liberty and justice, whereby each tends to require
the other.
"All men believe that justice means equality in some
sense.... The question we must keep in mind is, equality or inequality
in what sort of thing."
ARISTOTLE, Politics.
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion
to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites;
in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity;
in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding
is above their vanity and presumption; [and] in proportion as
they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and
good, in preference to the flattery of knaves."
Edmund BURKE, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.
"Freedom incurs responsibility; that is why so many men fear
it."
George Bernard SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists.
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but
man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."
Reinhold NIEBUHR.
"A lot of the English....have left behind the challenging
rocks of discipline by circumstance, yet cannot reach the shining
plateau of self-discipline, and their freedom only entangles them
with whims and fancies, silliness and self-indulgence. Unless
a fairly large section [of our people] makes some attempt to arrive
at self-discipline and a sense of responsibility towards the community,
our country can stagger into bankruptcy and lose the very liberty
it has guarded for centuries."
J.B.PRIESTLEY (1894-1984), Prescription for Our Time.
"If some control is unavoidable, it is better that it should
be through known laws rather than through exhortation or arm-twisting
or through giving quasi-governmental powers to the CBI or the
TUC"
Samuel BRITTAN, Government and the Market Economy.
London : Macmillan.
"J-P.Sartre argues [e.g. in Existentialism and Humanism]....that
the central fact about human beings is that they have no nature
(or 'essence') but only existence. Hence there is no natural law,
and no objective morality. The individual is alone in the world,
burdened by a freedom which he cannot shift, since it is the precondition
of all his acts, and for which he must take full and elaborate
responsibility. At the same time there is no responsibility outside
the act of commitment.... For Sartre....existentialism is, in
the last analysis, only an 'enclave within Marxism'."
Roger SCRUTON, 1982, A Dictionary of Political Thought.
London : Macmillan.
"In Soho, you can be what you like. Within limits, of course.
But there's none of the bullshit. If you wanted to, you could
treat yourself as a total blank and completely re-invent yourself
from the toes upwards. You feel that free. ....So the violence
is always there, running along under the surface, but it's always
ready to break out, and you never know when or where; and living
with that 'not knowing' is very wearing. The only way to cope,
really, is the booze. That was the only way to make it bearable.
Given that, you could have a great time. An explosive mixture."
'Richard', Soho stage-manager, interviewed in Nickie ROBERTS,
1986, The Front Line. London : Grafton Books.
"To say that selfishness will lead to a situation in which
everybody realises that freedom is the best organization of society
- securing the greatest chances for each and every one to reach
self-determined aims - is very unrealistic. ....the libertarian
needs two virtues: selfishness and a passion for
justice."
Stephen BLANKERTZ, 1986, Historical Notes 1.
London, W.C.2 : Libertarian Alliance.
"A philosopher who was talking about twins said that maybe
it's freedom that makes identical twins different. Frankly, I
don't believe that for a minute. It could be freedom that makes
them alike. I think freedom means something about the capacity
of the human organism not to be pushed around by external circumstances.
I would argue that evolution has given us our freedom, that natural
selection has placed in us the capacity to stand up and transcend
the limitations of the environment. So I think the quest for freedom
is genetic."
Lindon J. Eaves, 1995, talking to Lawrence Wright.
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.
"There must be constraints on liberty before any of us, even
the libertarian elite, can enjoy its fruits. Confronted by the
criminal and hooligan classes generally, one's libertarian passions
begin to cool."
Auberon WAUGH, 1987, The Spectator, 4 vi.
"Liberalism without natural rights....taught us that the
only danger confronting us is being closed to 'the emergent',
the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be
paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined
men to live according to them. ....Civic culture was neglected.
And this turn in liberalism is what prepared us for cultural relativism."
Allan BLOOM, 1987, The Closing of the American Mind.
New York : Simon & Schuster.
"....liberation and "alienation" are the reverse
sides of the same capitalist coin. The liberation of the individual,
which capitalism in the West has fostered, must be "contained"
within structures of community if it is not to liquidate itself-be
it in the anarchy of hyper-individualism or in a network of ever
more constraining entitlements. Capitalism depends on this balance."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution.
Aldershot, UK : Gower.
"An understanding of the human individual as a social artefact
shows inequality to be natural, power to be a good, and constraint
to be a necessary ingredient in the only freedom we value."
Roger SCRUTON (Professor of Philosophy), quoted by B.Morton,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 22 vii 1988.
"....sensation-seekers [in my study] tend to endorse the
concept of individual responsibility. [Similarly] Zuckerman (1975)
found, using Jackson's personality scale, that sensation-seekers
tend to score high on autonomy."
R.E.FRANKEN, 1988, Personality & Individual Differences
9.
"The foundation of our democracy is justice and the rule
of law; the liberties of the people thrive in such soil and will
thrive in no other."
Vincent MASSEY (one-time Governor General of Canada), quoted
by
E.Leather, The Times, 11 x 1988.
"....our Western scepticism today [about communism] pales
before the truly oceanic revulsion for their own political systems
that is sweeping through the 'people's democracies'. This is one
of the greatest reversals of the twentieth century: the longing
of Russians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese and Vietnamese for what
Peking scathingly calls 'bourgeois liberalism'-the bundle of rights,
liberties and laws which distinguish Western democracy."
Jonathan MIRSKY, 1988, The Observer, 5 vi.
"The rise of capitalism without religion - that is what
is happening here [in Britain] today. ....One could wish that
education reform had been placed higher on the Thatcherite agenda,
since a nation without either faith or knowledge, religion or
education, is in a bad way."
Peregrine WORSTHORNE, 1989, Sunday Telegraph, 9 iv.
"Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the
law that gives freedom."
James ii 12.
"....'social' justice as conceived by socialists and social
democrats is no more a kind of justice than 'positive' freedom
is a kind of freedom or imaginary dollars are a kind of dollars.
For the key phrase in every traditional definition of 'justice',
from Book I of Plato's Republic through the Institutes
of Justinian and up to but excluding John Rawls' mistitled A
Theory of Justice, was suum cuique tribuere - understood
as a matter of allowing to each their several (and in fact often
extremely unequal) deserts and (not necessarily deserved) entitlements.
The rules of justice....require not that everyone be treated equally
-the convicted in the same way as the acquitted-but only, like
all other rules, that all relevantly like cases be treated alike."
Antony FLEW, 1992, Laissez-Faire 1, 4.
"Society is our frail barrier against nature. ....Nature
is a hard taskmaster. Perfect freedom would be to die by earth,
air, water, and fire. ....Freedom is the most overrated modern
idea, originating in the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois
society. But only in society can one be an individual."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from
Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"The reasons for Western hegemony are complex, but essentially
the rise of Europe is connected to the evolution of three systems:
science, representative self-government and capitalism."
Dinesh D'SOUZA, 1995, The End of Racism. New York : Free
Press.
(viii) Does the State have any distinct role in furthering
freedom, responsibility, liberty and justice?
{See also Quotes XX-Psycho-social Engineering.}
"Aristotle's ideal of justice is not difficult to understand,
and his defense of it is intelligible as part of the whole way
of life he is advocating, and also as a defence specifically of
justice. This way of life, and this moral ideal, have as their
centre the development of superior character and superior intelligence,
and a superior political organization as the supreme priorities.
Other virtues must be sacrificed to these ends, and a particular
ideal of justice is required if these ends are to be obtained:
unequal advantages to persons of unequal quality."
S.HAMPSHIRE, 1983, Morality and Conflict. Cambridge,
MA : Harvard University Press.
"The man who is guided by reason is far more free in a State
where he lives under a general system of law than in solitude,
where he is independent."
Benedict SPINOZA, Ethics.
"In a free nation, it is very often a matter of indifference
whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that
they do reason: hence springs that liberty which is a security
from the effects of these reasonings."
MONTESQUIEU, De l'Esprit des Lois. Paris : Garnier, 1961.
"Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion,
and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition."
Edmund BURKE, 1775, cited by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's
Book
of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner.
"A mixed government is not the most favourable to action;
but, in their old age, nations have less need of acting. [Representative]
government is the one which most aids production, and which
procures to man the greatest amount of prosperity. It is, above
all, the one which imparts the highest activity to mind within
the sphere of practical ideas. In short, it renders the citizen
independent, not by the elevation of sentiments, but by the operation
of laws. Assuredly these are great compensations for great
disadvantages."
Marquis de CUSTINE, 1843, La Russie en 1839.
New York : Doubleday (as Empire of the Czar), 1989.
"After the means of subsistence are assured, the next in
strength of personal wants of human beings is liberty; and (unlike
the physical wants, which as civilization advances become more
moderate and more amenable to control) it increases instead of
diminishing in intensity as the intelligence and the moral faculties
are more developed. The perfection both of social arrangements
and of practical morality would be: to secure to all persons complete
independence and freedom of action, subject to no restriction
but that of not doing injury to others.... ....The only real moral
worth is in choice and spontaneity: government action destroys
choice and therefore destroys moral worth."
JS MILL, 1852, Principles of Political Economy, Book II, 3rd
ed.
"....the [nineteenth-century British] liberal synthesis
was less doctrinally consistent than Liberals (with a big 'L')
liked to suppose. There was always some tension between the over-riding
force of Gladstonian moral imperatives and the ordinary Liberal
belief in trimming back the functions of the State."
Peter CLARKE, 1992, A Question of Leadership: from Gladstone
to
Thatcher. Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin.
"The assertion that free competition is the final form of
the development of productive forces, and thus of human freedom,
means only that the domination of the middle class is the end
of the world's history."
Karl MARX, in D.McLellan, Marx's Grundrisse. London, 1971.
"The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the
religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests
an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral
duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral
freedom, responsibility and opportunity; the new duty which is
supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition
to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavour
to further evolution, especially that of the human race."
GALTON, 1883, Inquiries into Human Faculty.
"It is still consistently assumed by the privileged classes
that, when the state stays its hand, what remains as a result
of such inaction is liberty. In reality, as far as the mass of
mankind is concerned, it is not liberty, but tyranny."
R.H.TAWNEY (1880-1962), The Radical Tradition.
"Rousseau's spirit, Rousseau's trick, [his] horrifying
adulteration of the word "liberty", his argument leading
to the conclusion that the citizen must find his liberty in the
submission of his will to the State-to the democratic State, it
is true, the State founded by the surrender of each to all-this
Rousseauan doctrine has become the property of quite a school
of thought, and it has come to the Russians {i.e. to the USSR}
via intermediaries."
Pieter GEYL (Dutch historian and patriot, 1887-1966),
Encounters in History.
"In a country in which the sole employer is the state, opposition
means death by slow starvation."
Leon TROTSKY, 1937.
"The basic trouble with the modern world is the intellectual
fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. ....If you
were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would
restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you the
freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion
is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two
are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve
total freedom."
'Ellsworth Touhey', the villain of Ayn RAND's The Fountainhead.
London : Cassell, 1947.
"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs
of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own
affairs."
Walter LIPPMAN (American journalist, 1899-1974),
An Enquiry into the Principles of a Good Society.
"State intervention should be limited to what is really
necessary for the protection of freedom."
Sir Karl POPPER, 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
"The constitutions and bills of right do not create
freedom. They merely protect the freedom that the competitive
economic system grants to individuals against encroachments on
the part of the police force."
Ludwig von MISES, quoted in M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's
Book
of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman Turner.
"Every Marxist knows-it is a pity that many non-Marxists
appear to have forgotten-that economic pluralism is the essential
precondition for political pluralism."
Robert MOSS, Freedom and Subversion.
"Whether in Belfast or London, there is no liberty without
law, no freedom without order-only intimidation and oppression."
John BIGGS-DAVIDSON, 1976, quoted by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan,
Bachman's Book of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman
& Turner.
"When the State itself is in danger, our cherished freedom
may have to take second place, and even natural justice itself
may have to suffer a setback."
Lord DENNING, 1977, The Observer ('Sayings of the Week'),
3 iv.
"The challenge is to build a society which combines freedom,
enterprise and incentive with social justice.... If liberal democracy
should fail, no return match would be permitted by the type of
regime which would replace it. Thus its defence is the most important
political and educational task for the last quarter of this century."
K.W.WATKINS, cited by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book
of
Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner.
"The spirit of man is not some social endowment."
Editorial, The Times, 21 xi 1983.
"....the provision of many collective goods is constitutive
of the very possibility of autonomy." Joseph RAZ,
1986, The Morality of Freedom. Oxford : Clarendon.
"Rights to freedom of thought, speech and action, to security
of person and property, provide a basis for the kind of deliberative
and reasoned choice that defines people's interests and
that thus permits us to say that some actions are 'for'
and others 'against' those interests. Rights to food, shelter,
medical care, and other guaranteed material benefits-which purport
to serve people's actual interests-are too often supposed to be
achieved through systems of state control that destroy the possibility
of free choice, and thus undermine any possibility of defining
what is or is not in people's interest. ....The proof of concern
for people's interests is generally the willingness to get them
to choose whether to accept or reject proposed 'aid' or 'guidance'."
W.H.STODDART, 1986, Philosophical Notes 8.
London, W.C.2 : Libertarian Alliance.
"The post-industrial revolution is based on knowledge, individual
initiative, and a high sense of personal responsibility. None
of these things can be attained by central control, much less
by repression."
Milovan DJILAS (Yugoslav politician), 1988, Encounter 71.
"Since the market is the only reliable source of information
about prices, its abrogation means that prices must be arbitrarily
set by various bodies in the planning machinery. This means, briefly,
that nobody knows the real cost of anything-which inevitably results
in a shortage of almost everything....(except in the highly privileged
and much less bureaucratic military industry). Chronic shortages
are not a temporary ailment of the Communist anti-market economy,
but are its essential characteristic. {In a command economy}
there are no economic reasons why production should respond to
demand; managers are responsible for fulfilling quotas
arbitrarily established by their ministries, and not for satisfying
the customers."
Leszek KOLAKKOWSKI, 1989, Encounter, vii/viii.
"There is no political freedom without economic freedom."
Miguel OTERO (of Chile's National Renovation Party), 1989.
Reported by M.Morrison, American Spectator, v 1989.
"As experience has everywhere demonstrated, no society can
preserve its freedom if private property is abolished on a substantial
scale and individuals forced into dependence on the State-even
if this process is carried out democratically. Neither can free
elections or a free press survive if, as a result of nationalization,
there are no private companies left to finance opposition parties
and newspapers."
Philip Van Der ELST, 1989, The Threats to Our Freedom.
London SE1 7JB : The Freedom Association.
"If nothing else, the history of the twentieth century ought
to have taught us that individuals can sometimes behave badly,
but that they can never behave as badly, or as destructively,
as governments can."
Ruth COWAN, 1992, 'Genetic technology and reproductive choice:
an
ethics for autonomy'. In D.J.Kevles & L.Hood, The Code
of Codes:
Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project.
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
"The hegemony of the discourse of rights in political life
has among its consequences a culture of endemic legalism and the
political corruption of law-as in the United States. Rather than
attempting to fix political discourse within the illusory constraints
of legalism, we are on firmer ground if we direct political discourse
towards the conditions of individual well-being, the content of
basic needs and the depth and limits of the common culture, and
the inherently public goods it contains....
....It was, in fact, one of the central insights of the German
social market model....that the free market requires more than
non-intervention by government to preserve competition-it requires
a competition policy, as recognised in the Düsseldorf
Principles enunciated by the Christian Democrats in 1949, which
stipulated 'competition guaranteed by control of monopoly.' The
recognition that governmental intervention may be a necessary
precondition of market competition is one of the essential features
of the social market economy model."
John GRAY, 1992, The Moral Foundations of Market Institutions.
London : Institute of Economic Affairs.
"In The Bell Curve, we {Murray & Richard Herrnstein}
are matter-of-fact about the limits facing low-IQ individuals
in a post-industrial economy; but we also celebrate the capacity
of people everywhere in the normal range on the bell curve to
live morally autonomous, satisfying lives, if only the system
will let them. Accepting the message of The Bell Curve
does not mean giving up on improving social policy, it means thinking
anew about how progress is to be achieved-and even more fundamentally,
thinking anew about how "progress" is to be defined."
Charles MURRAY, 1995, Commentary 99.
"[Rousseau,] more than any other philosopher, puts feeling
ahead of reason...."Man is born free, and everywhere he is
in chains." ....{Yet} man is born a baby; and what baby
was ever free?"
Gore VIDAL, 1995, Palimpsest. London : André Deutsch.
Epilogue
"Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, an unctuous compassion-sweepstakes,
into which real workers or peasants never penetrate....The signal
failure of the academic Marxists is in their obliviousness to
the transformations of modern labor.....Capitalism, whatever its
problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet devised
to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number. Because
I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism,
I am the freest woman in history."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex, Art, and American Culture.
New York : Random House (Vintage Books).
"Sappington (1990, Psychol. Bull.), in a review of
the free will versus determinism, concluded that the issue cannot
be decided without proving the negative of one of the terms-a
task which is not logically possible. The terms are, in short,
metaphysical."
M.R.LEVENSON, 1993, Theory & Psychology 3.
"....ancient theories [of morality] have a very different
focus from modern theories, which are expected to generate answers
to tricky dilemmas about what to do in particular situations.
For the ancients, the entry-point into ethics was a question about
the shape of one's life as a whole: "What should my life
be like?". Almost all of them answered by assuming that one's
life was to be shaped by adopting a single over-arching goal,
eudaimonia, often translated as "happiness" {but
applying to a whole life}. Beyond this, their initial notion of
happiness was indeterminate, and the task for their ethical theories
was to make it less so.... The differences between these philosophers
arose from the various ways in which they tried to keep the three
key notions-happiness, concern for others and virtue -in balance."
Dominic SCOTT, 1994, 'Virtuous reality',
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 14 x.
FINIS
(Compiled by C.R.Brand, Department
of Psychology, University of Edinburgh.)
For more coverage of the interface of politics
and psychology,
especially in relation to the study of intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political
hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging
and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists".
This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn,
in April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, NewsLetters
concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his
popular exposition of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
A reminder of what is available in other Sections of
'P, B & S.'
Summary Index
for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about
individual and group differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh
University Psychology Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index,
indicating key questions in each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements
in the study of Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to
human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic
approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology
of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature
and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics
of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing-especially, the role of g in 'life-span
development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they
exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles'
and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political
aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political
aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage
out'?
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