Right Reason

MLK and Natural Law

 

Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is one of the natural-law classics of our time. If you have not read the letter, I highly suggest that you do so. Bombastic in style, the letter asserts one of the principal theses of natural-law thought: That an unjust law is no law at all. Natural law argues that there is a higher law than those of human nations and that, ultimately, our conduct should be evaluated by that standard. King’s life is a witness to how powerful that idea can be.

From a natural-law perspective, one of the more noteworthy aspects of King’s “Letter” is his reference to St. Thomas Aquinas:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

 

The part of Aquinas’ philosophy that King argues from can be found in Aquinas' Summa Theologiae I.II.96.4 ad 3:

This argument is true of a law that inflicts unjust hurt on its subjects. The power that man holds from God does not extend to this: wherefore neither in such matters is man bound to obey the law, provided he avoid giving scandal or inflicting a more grievous hurt.

That Dogs Have Personalities

From “Man’s best friend”:

Past experiments have hinted that animals can feel sympathy. Rats and monkeys had been found to forgo food to avoid delivering electric shocks to relatives. Similarly, apes have recently been documented consoling one another after conflicts. However, all these experiments and observations were demonstrating an animal's sensitivity to distress in other members of the same species. Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer of Goldsmiths College, London, set out to see if dogs could detect the emotional state of humans.

To do this, Dr Custance and Ms Mayer conducted an experiment to study the response of dogs when a nearby human suddenly began to cry. The researchers knew that interpreting responses would be difficult, since dogs tend to whine, nuzzle, lick, lay their heads in laps and fetch toys for people in distress. Although such actions hint at a dog wishing to offer comfort, they could also be signs of curiosity, or suggest that a dog is simply distressed by seeing its master upset.

….

Dr Custance and Ms Mayer suspected that if exposure to crying led dogs to feel distress, then regardless of who was crying, the dog would go to their master to seek comfort. They also theorised that if curiosity, rather than empathy, was the driving force, then the humming would cause dogs to engage with people.

As they report in Animal Cognition, “person-oriented behaviour” did sometimes take place when either the stranger or the owner hummed, but it was more than twice as likely to occur if someone was crying. This indicated that dogs were differentiating between odd behaviour and crying. And of the 15 dogs in the experiment that showed person-oriented responses when the stranger cried, all of them directed their attention towards the stranger rather than their owner.

As a dog-owner, I'm consistently entertained how these kinds of experiments experiments (I’ve seen others about whether dogs have personalities, which they do) only show what any dog-owner already knows as a matter of daily experience. Yes, the last line of the article does hang a lampshade on a dog-owner’s disbelief that any peer-researched article is necessary to establish that dog’s respond to emotional cues, but still I must laugh that we’re still at this stage of understanding the psyche of man’s best friend.

Charles Darwin frequently used dogs to illustrate the way that animals would express their emotions in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He plainly understood that emotions and personality were not limited to human beings. Being a man who had quite a fondness for the animals, Darwin frequently wrote quite warmly about the canine emotional life:

But man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master. Nor can these movements in the dog be explained by acts of volition or necessary instincts, any more than the beaming eyes and smiling checks of a man when he meets an old friend. (Darwin1890:11-2])

For Darwin, the humble dog was man’s reminder of his lowly origins. That such an animal, stooped on all fours and incapable of arithmetic, could express emotion was a daily corroboration of the animal origin of his moral nature.

We Need Edifying Characters, Not Mary Sue's

 

From “Rey Was Comic-Con’s New Favorite Cosplay, and We’re Loving It”:

Over the course of the con it felt like you couldn’t swing a lit lightsaber and not hit someone dressed like the Force-sensitive young scavenger from Jakku. And considering how important Rey’s character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was to an entire generation of young female Star Wars fans, it was a wonderful thing to behold. 

There's good fantasy and then there's bad fantasy. Fantasy is not just escapism. It is the telling of myths. 

 

Good fantasy teaches us about virtue and inspires us to pursue it. Both Faramir's refusal of the one ring and Princess Leia's willingness to carry out dangerous espionage for the sake of others' liberty are edifying examples that teach the audience about the excellent conduct we should strive for and the sacrifices necessary to achieve it.

The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars alike are modern myths that will, much to the exasperation of their critics, live on as among the supreme cultural works of our era. Both will be read and watched in a thousand years—as long as our species survives that long, that is. They provide their modern readers with the myths to make sense of the ethical questions defining our lives in a similar way that the Illiad served for classical readers. To provide their readers with guidance, those myths need virtuous characters, such as Faramir and Princess Leia, through which their audience can understand their own lives and come to transcend their own vices by empathizing with the heroes of their myths.

 

Bad fantasy is simple wish-fulfillment and the desire to be the center of attention. It is when we write ourselves into our favorite stories as the all-powerful hero everybody loves. These characters do nothing but allow for us to indulge in our own narcissistic impulses. They teach us that the world, and all its inhabitants, shall always revolve revolve around our own particular plot-lines. Rather than pointing its audience to virtue, these myths teach them to worship themselves.

Rey is bad fantasy incarnate, a specimen of that Mary-Sue trope best relegated to fan-fiction than actually written into a serious narrative. The character was written for the sole purpose of the audience, especially the girls of the audience, to identify with her, and yet her only quality is the plot serving her every. Critics of previous stories are right to point out that women have rarely held the role of main protagonist. However, it is equally sexist to not critique a female character by the same standards as a male character.

 

Every event Rey is involved with in The Force Awakens only serves to give her an opportunity to display how perfect she is. Does a starship need to be piloted? Well, Rey has those skills? Does Rey need to escape from what I can suppose is one of the most fortified compounds in the universe? Rey has suddenly learned jedi mind tricks. And on, and on, and on. The invisible hand of Providence serves to guide her every move into making her appear a heroine, without all of the sacrifice that being a heroine entails.

 

The celebration of her character is little but the the egotistical desire to be the plot's preferred (female) character. Rey being a favorite just tells us how shallow people are in their love of characters—and that should not be praised.

So no, I for one am not loving that she is a Comic-Con favorite, and I think an attraction to her character reveals moral dystrophy: The desire to have the fruits at the end of the hero’s journey without the journey, to jump ahead to the confident Luke Skywalker who walked into Jaba’s palace as a Jedi without starting as a whiny farm-boy from Tatooine.

Economic's Cosmopolitan Scope

 

All too frequently, economics is demonized of as a discipline that legitimates greed and other nefarious aspects of human nature. Not too long ago Evonomics published an article that claimed that the salient feature of studying economists is that it makes its students greedy. One needn't search to hard on the internet to see similar opinions. 

Whatever may be the truth of the claim, there is another salient feature of economics: It takes everybody into consideration. Economics generally doesn't care if one is rich or poor, American or Chinese, gay or straight. The opportunity costs of a policy or action remain constant. Economics therefore teaches its students to think in a cosmopolitan manner, to take into account costs and benefits for all, rather than to a privileged sect.

Currently, political discussions of trade revolve around the benefit of a privileged sect: Americans. The student of economics can utter the defense of trade that no one else will mutter: That trade leads to overwhelming benefits to all, not just within America, but across the globe. Jordan Weissman makes such a case in "Bernie Sanders is the developing world's worst nightmare":

It is one thing to argue that we should not do business with nations that actively manage or manipulate their currencies, as Sanders sometimes does, since exchange rates are supposed to be the market's main mechanism for balancing trade. It's also entirely reasonable to support workers' rights to unionize abroad or push for stricter environmental protections. Indentured servitude and slavery, which are more widespread than many realize, need to be wiped off the face of the earth. Those are all issues that trade pacts should absolutely address.

But a blanket rule against trade with low-wage nations is different. The entire point of trade is that countries have to play to their strengths, which makes the entire global economy more efficient. If you happen to have a highly educated population, thriving capital markets, and lots of high-tech expertise—like the United States or Germany—you're going to export high-end services like banking and advanced manufactured goods like cars and airlines to the rest of the world. On the other hand, if your only advantage is an abundant pool of relatively unskilled labor willing to work 65 cents an hour, then you can probably carve out a niche in textiles and electronics assembly, then gradually build know-how and work up to something more lucrative. But if the United States comes along and says, "Sorry, Vietnam, we're not going to buy another T-shirt unless your people start earning $5 or $7 an hour," factory workers in Hanoi aren't suddenly going to get a raise. Factories are going to close, and businesses will move their operations to a country where employees are productive enough to justify developed-world wages—which typically means the developed world. The U.S. will have just undercut Vietnam's only relative strength.

If Bernie Sanders were to single out, say, American gays and lesbians as a class that could justly be burdened with the costs of a policy, he would be branded as a bigot. But because he claims that dreadfully poor non-American workers can suffer the overwhelming costs of American trade policy, he is a hero of the working class. 

Ecce! The Preachers of Tolerance!

Following the resounding success of the Conservative party, many British social democrats have been left a wee bit frustrated. Events weren't supposed to go the way they did. The party that brought on austerity was supposed to be out of power for a generation. The pollers forecasted that the Conservatives would be neck-and-neck with Labour. These thoughts and more must have compounded their frustration. That frustration shouldn't be maliciously mocked. After all, Tories wouldn't have been so pleased if the tables were turned. However, there are proper ways of being frustrated and there are petulant fits. 

In "If you're a Conservative, I'm not your friend," Rebecca Roache, posting on nothing less than a blog flying Oxford University's proud seal, exemplifies the latter of those approaches. In a vitriolic post illustrating zero capability of passing an ideological Turing test, Ms. Roache writes about purging her Facebook account of any friends that had liked the pages of the Conservative Party or David Cameron:

One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life is too short, I thought, to hang out with people who hold abhorrent political views, even if it’s just online.

This marked a change of heart for me. Usually, I try to remain engaged with such people in the hope that I might be able to change their views through debate. (Admittedly, I don’t always engage constructively with them. Sometimes, late at night, when my brain is too tired to do anything fancy and I spot an offensive tweet by a UKIP supporter, the urge to murder them in 140 characters is too difficult to resist.) Did I do the wrong thing? Should I have kept my Conservative friends?

I’m not so sure. I am attracted by the view that we should all keep the debate open, discuss our political views, take other people’s views into account, and revise and improve our own as we all benefit from this dialogue. I’m attracted by the view that there is such a thing as progress in politics. But—depressingly—I’m far more sceptical than I was yesterday about how much of a difference we can make with political debate. There are several reasons for this.

One is that, in much of British culture, people are uncomfortable with debate about politics. It would, in some circles, be rude to raise the topic of politics over dinner, and to try to change someone’s mind about their political views—well, that’s frankly out of order. We’re much more comfortable talking about the weather, who might win the X Factor, or Kim Kardashian’s arse. The British unwillingness to discuss politics was illustrated today by the sway of the ‘shy Tories’: the people who voted Conservative, but who kept quiet about it in the run-up to the election, and certainly didn’t tell the opinion polls.

Another reason is that the voice of the Murdoch-owned, pro-Tory press is much louder than the voice of reason. Sure, social media can be a powerful and unregulated force for good, and we can all share our views through Facebook and Twitter—but, given that people tend to follow those who roughly share their views, we’re preaching to the converted. My Facebook feed today is full of posts and debates by compassionate, liberal people. The rest of the country isn’t.

Life is too short to not be willing to doubt oneself. If a Conservative friend of mine had done this with his Twitter followers, I would've met the axe since I do follow the Labour Party's page, even though my politics are anything but Labour. To think, Ms. Roache is one of the lefties who thinks herself as preaching toleration to society. A society she cannot help but fundamentally abhor and view as irredeemable. 

Shaftesbury on Practice in Ethics

From his "Letter Concerning Ethusiasm" in  Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions Times: 

'Tis not the same with Goodness as with other Qualitys, which we may understand very well, and yet not possess. We may have an excellent Ear in Musick, without being able to perform in any kind. We may judg well of Poetry, without being Poets, or possessing the least of a Poetick Vein: But we can have no tolerable Notion of Goodness, without being tolerably good.

If there is one thing I abhor about how ethics is taught today in universities, and as I experienced it in the classes I took myself, is how ethics is reduced to questions of marginal importance to daily life. Yet how can one possibly reason well about abortion or vegetarianism if one doesn't recognize the good? They're a terrible place to start the discourse! How can we expect people to make tolerable decisions about those issues if they weren't already living virtuous lives? 

 

Daenerys Targaryen is Evil

 

 

 

In an interview about the second episode of Game of Throne’s sixth season, David Benioff argues that Daenerys Targaryen is facing the difficulties that differentiate ruling from conquering. During an interview he states: “There always seem to be the sensor manifest destiny with Danny and that she was going to take was hers by fire and blood. And she has. But there's a difference between taking and keeping, and there's a difference between conquering and in ruling. And she's finding out that the latter is much more complicated.” Alas, he couldn’t be more wrong. It takes a long time for a conqueror to be a ruler and the problems that Daenerys has experienced thus far in the series are those of a conqueror, not a lawful rule.

 

Queen Daenerys Targaryen on the March by Rene Aiger

 

Daenerys isn’t a ruler, she’s still a conqueror who is subjugating a foreign people to her will. For whatever talk she may have of an impartial law in the series, the only laws that she obeys are those that she likes and she demonstrated that when she sacked Astapor, in flagrant opposition to the laws of that city.  

To be a ruler, someone has to rule according to the rules of the society she finds herself in. Those laws are then what give the person legitimacy. Yet,  even though Mr. Benioff speaks of Daenerys ruling, she has no legitimacy according to the laws of Meeren. She is fundamentally still a conqueror subjugating a population. The only source of legitimacy that Daenerys has is her army and a cult of personality that has surrounded her ever since she established herself as the breaker of chains. Her illegitimacy is reflected in the fact that if she were to leave Meereen, all of her work would be undone as the natural order of that city, however unfortunate it may be, would reassert itself. 

 

Centuries of tradition that are integral to a society cannot be effectively undone by a conqueror. As the name of the region implies, slavery is an integral part to the society around Slavers’ Bay, where Astapor and Meereen are found. To destroy slavery in those nations would be to destroy their political order. Whatever one may think of slavery, a just war cannot be executed to change a fundamental part of a foreign society. Just wars have to be fought with an attainable goal. A foreign conqueror arriving in a strange land with a super-weapon cannot suddenly change the fundamental order of a society. Daenery’s motivations are tainted with hubris. However much one may despise slavery, to think that one can end it by being a foreign conqueror is can be described little more than a sin of pride and that thought cannot lead to a just and lawful war, let alone a just and lawful rule.

  

It’s a running theme in Game of Thrones that morally decent people cannot rule. The same theme is found in the books and George R.R. Martin is conscious in writing that theme into his story. Every decent person to hold power is caught up in political machinations that result in their ruin. 

But let’s not fool ourselves, Daenerys isn’t a good person. She’s someone who gleefully pushed the first domino in a series of events that might burn down an entire nation. The problems that she has met with in Meereen aren’t those that would face a benevolent stateswomen. They are the problems that creep in when a conqueror places herself above the law of the country she occupies.  As Cicero said, laws are truly silent among arms. And silent they are in Meereen. 

Behind the glitter of girlish good intentions is someone who regards herself as a god walking the earth. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die because Daenerys wanted to be a savior and was willing to kill innocents to be one. That certainly isn’t virtuous statesmanship, as Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France: 

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

 

Daenerys Targaryen is a force for evil in her world who has established a cult of personality around herself that can, really, only lead to the ruin of those who follow her. Perhaps she can be nothing else, but, contra Mr. Benioff’s assessment, of all of the problems of subjugation she is solving in Meereen, none can be deemed to be about good statesmanship. A good statesman would never have used violence to impose his will on Slavers’ Bay. By choosing to do so, Daenerys slaughtered the rule of law and now she must face the consequences, those being the consequences of a subjugator, not a lawful ruler. 

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

 

In "What Really Scares the New Atheists", John Gray argues that Friedrich Nietzsche represents the type of morality that New Atheists haven't really dealt with. Unlike the New Atheists today, who absurdly argue that science can support a liberal morality, as a classical scholar, Nietzsche recognized the imprints of Christianity on liberal morality and, from that recognition, created a scathing critique of both Christianity and liberalism. Mr Gray writes:

The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

It’s a familiar question in continental Europe, where a number of thinkers have explored the prospects of a “difficult atheism” that doesn’t take liberal values for granted. It can’t be said that anything much has come from this effort. Georges Bataille’s postmodern project of “atheology” didn’t produce the godless religion he originally intended, or any coherent type of moral thinking. But at least Bataille, and other thinkers like him, understood that when monotheism has been left behind morality can’t go on as before. Among other things, the universal claims of liberal morality become highly questionable.

It’s impossible to read much contemporary polemic against religion without the impression that for the “new atheists” the world would be a better place if Jewish and Christian monotheism had never existed. If only the world wasn’t plagued by these troublesome God-botherers, they are always lamenting, liberal values would be so much more secure. Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged. Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values.

 

Bill Vallicella has a worthwhile commentary on this specific point, "Nietzsche and the New Atheists", at Maverick Philosopher. The challenge that Nietizsche presents to atheists, New and otherwise, is that they have to be careful about how they talk about morality. In the West, people take a Christian framework for granted and don't realize that terms like 'rights' or 'equality' are nonsense sans God. The challenge isn't an argument for God's existence; rather, a call for atheists to take the nihilism that their worldview implies seriously.

Lent and the Monkish Virtues

 

The life of a monk ought at all times to be Lenten in its observances but because few have the strength of this, we urge that in LEnt they should maintain a life of complete purity to make up, during these holy days, for all the careless practices throughout the rest of the year.- St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict

 

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season for Western Christians. For those who are unaware of the nature of the liturgical season, the discipline of Lent is characterized by penance, abstinence and alms-giving. In general, Lent is reorientation one’s life towards God in preparation for Easter. 

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume rails against the monkish virtues behind the fasting tradition of the Lenten today. He characterizes them as worse than useless, but genuine vices that don’t encourage what is good and proper in human life: 

Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? (EPN: IX.9) 

On the issue of the monkish virtues, Hume swings and misses. His treatment completely whiffs the issue. He entirely misses the point and, in missing the point, helps to set up two hundred years of similarly missing the point, especially by philosophers of the analytic tradition. Without the monkish virtues, which focus on what we center our attention around, ethics becomes merely about the rules of social interaction. That grand tradition of missing the significance of the monkish virtues culminates in Peter Singer’s imbecile claim that “sex raises no unique moral issues at all.” 

The monkish virtues have nothing to do with being a valuable member or society or in enjoying a glass of wine. The monkish virtues are about orientating our lives in their proper directions. When a Catholic abstains from a hamburger on Ash Wednesday, he isn’t doing so out of some sorry sense of self-loathing or out of a notion that hamburgers are bad on certain days of the year. If he were to reach for one in a buffet line and then remembers, “It’s Ash Wednesday!”, he is doing neither. What he is remembering is that, though hamburgers (when properly prepared at least) are certainly something that are good, that they are not the good that he should orientate his life around. 

 

 Human life is characterized by fragility. Memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. Time will break everything around us, be it our laptops or pets, and eventually it will break our mortal coil. To orientate our lives around fragile things is to tie ourselves to ashes and dust. Although, as part of this impermanent world, we need to live our lives within it, we ought not base our lives around something as impermanent as food and drink, other people or our pets. We can bring out the full Platonic beast and question the reality of this fragile world, but that’s not a direction I’m all that interested in traveling down.  

Hume might retort that death and fragility doesn’t matter. That it’s an event that should have no impact on our lives and that we should be therefore not care abut it. C.S. Lewis responded wonderfully to such a mindset in “A Grief Observed”:

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death.And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Death does matters. We need to therefore be mindful to what we cleave to. The monkish virtues help us to remember that our habits bind us to fragile. As Pope Clement exhorts the Corinthians in his letter to them: “Let us keep our eyes firmly fixed on the Father and Creator of the whole universe, and hold fast to his splendid and transcendent gifts of peace and all his blessing.” The monkish virtues help us to break away from that which is fragile in the world and to look towards that which is ever-lasting. 

Working Mothers and the Freedom of Association

 

 

In a recent post at the New York Times’  “The Upshot”, “Why U.S. Women Are Leaving Jobs Behind”, Claire Cain Miller and Liz Alderman explore why American free-market policies have led to American women leaving the workforce in order to care for their children. At the political heart of Mses. Miller and Alderman’s remarks about the place of American women in the workforce is the question of whether or not regulations should be written that make it easier for women to juggle life in the workplace and life at home. It’s certainly not the only question to be brought up, but it’s a question that shall always be on people’s minds whenever ‘women in the workforce’ is mentioned in a political question. As the authors note: “The free market leaves many families, particularly many women, struggling to find a solution that combines work and home life.”

 

Here, I must disagree with how Mses. Miller and Alderman frame the issue. If we may speak of the free market as existing for any final cause, it doesn’t exist to actualize people’s desires, it exists to actualize human cooperation. Sociability, not identity, is the principle of human nature that the free markets relate too. The free markets, along with the freedom of association that defines them, aren’t about people being able to make what they want of themselves, or being able to do what they want in life. Market forces care nothing for people’s identities. Instead, the free markets are about people being able to put themselves in a position to best serve one another and to profit from those good offices. In short, sociability, not identity, is the principle of human nature that political debate about working mothers should be concerned with.

The case of maternal care is then a question over whether governments will place people’s desired identities above other people’s freedom to associate with whomever they please. The “ long preferred flexible labor markets” mentioned by the author in American aren’t simply about “job growth”. There is a moral, as well as an economic, concern at play here. The liberty principle, that each may do as she pleases insofar as she does’t harm another, is also at stake as much as any GDP figure. Insofar as regulations require family-leave policies, they violate the employer’s freedom of association since they have no choice whether they would like to have family-leave policies in the contracts they negotiate. 

 

It’s not the free market that “leaves many families, particularly many women, struggling to find a solution that combines work and home life.” Instead, it’s the fact that women can’t both spend a lot of their time at home, and still be competitive employees. The fact is that juggling both identities is a demanding task that everyone cannot do. The euphemism that it’s ‘the free market’ that does X conceals what’s really happening here. There’s a reason why the equilibrium condition for wages are an employee’s marginal productivity. To be hired one needs to be useful to one’s employer, and needing to spend time with childcare reduces that utility. It’s not a matter of the market as a whole, it’s individual human beings figuring out if they want to associate with each other.   

Again, the question shouldn’t be a matter of identity — with what people want to do with their won lives — it should be a matter human sociability, and the constraints upon it. The demand that other people esteem one’s decision to take periods of extended leave to care for children and keep one in their employment, though, would violate the liberty principle. Whether that violation is worthwhile is a decision people can come to on their own, but they have to deal with the fact that regulating maternal care is restricting employer’s liberty. 

After all, equality before the law does not require equality in hireability. Employment, after all, isn’t about identity and wanting to be employed; instead, it’s about being serviceable to other people, and any sober view of raising a child would realize that caring for a child is a task that makes one less apt to service others in the job market.