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Thursday, October 21, 2004
Vices Are Not Crimes, But They’re Still Vices
The mailbag here at Eternity Road produces a lot of interesting material. Much of it is food for thought, and much of it is scathing. The scathing notes usually come from others of the pro-freedom persuasion who agree with me on political topics, though a significant percentage of them seem not to know it. Their general thrust is as follows: How can anyone who speaks as harshly as you do about homosexuality, promiscuity, drug abuse, vulgar entertainment and so forth as you do call himself a libertarian, whether conservative, constitutionalist, or some other flavor?
The answer is quite simple. It’s the title of this post.
Pascal and I have been batting the problem of moral relativism back and forth for a long time now. The phrase might not be perfectly engineered, but once divorced from its political associations, its meaning is adequately clear. It’s the conviction that “what’s right is what’s right for you,” or alternately, that there are no reliable guides to personal choice that apply broadly across all persons, places, and times.
To which your Curmudgeon deposeth and sayeth:
Moral relativism is an implicit claim that Man has no consistent and enduring nature. But this is so easily proved false that not even those who believe it will say it in public.
A creature with a nature must logically have survival needs, and beyond those, requirements for thriving and perpetuating its kind. It will also have antagonists: dangers in the natural world, whether animate or not, and practices to which it might succumb that would vitiate it, prevent it from thriving, and leave it effectively lifeless.
There has never been a person to whom dissolution was a good thing. It contradicts the essential needs of the human organism: self-defense, the sense of worth and growth, acceptance by the enveloping society, sometimes even life itself. All of the things your Curmudgeon decries are vectors to dissolution.
A practice that, by undermining the natural needs and vitality of the practitioner, militates toward his dissolution is a vice.
Drug abuse is a vice. Promiscuity is a vice. Homosexual behavior is a vice. Submergence in the vicarious enjoyment of properly private acts is a vice. These things are all vectors to dissolution. Those who surrender to them have asked for oblivion, and it is in the nature of Man that they will get it.
Please be quite clear about this: vices are not crimes. The heavy hand of the law can improve matters such as these in no way whatsoever. In fact, the attempt to redress them by law usually makes their effects worse. The practice of vice is driven by human desires that are inadequately disciplined by the practitioner. The law can attempt to impose a cost for such indulgence, but it is also in the nature of Man that he will apply a maddening ingenuity to circumventing such laws. The inevitable result is black markets, underground societies, disrespect for all law of any kind, and chaos.
But if we cannot oppose vice through the force of law, we can still deplore it as private parties. We can still withhold our approval and our association from those who wallow in dissolution. We can still teach our children—candidly, accurately, without hyperbole or overwrought prognostication—what the consequences of their surrender to vice would be.
The consequences of a vice are an objective matter. They don’t spare those who “see no harm in it.”
Are there gray zones? Of course. This is always the case; the desires that, when allowed to run wild, produce the vices are also the very things that make life worth living. A drink or two in the evening is not drug abuse. A one-night stand is not promiscuity, though a succession of them would be. A little porn to rev the engines of desire...well, perhaps we shouldn’t go there. But above all such things rises the standard of temperance: Have you mastered your desires, or have they mastered you?
Stay on the right side of that question, if you value your life and your soul.
Certain turns in philosophy and epistemology, particularly when coupled to fashionable currents of thought about divergences among cultures, have propelled the concept of moral relativism in our time. Your Curmudgeon will get to these in a future screed.
Comments
Moral relativisim. Well, that’s a fine oxymoron for today!
Posted by og on 10/21/2004 at 09:56 AMIndeed. I would hope that libertarians would be among the first to exclaim “Hold on there before you spoil it for the rest of us.”
Or have their ranks been so overrun that they’ve permitted themselves to become indistinguishable from libertines?
The statists LOVE IT, even promote it, that a few should so overindulge in vices that they become a threat to others, providing them the next excuse they’ll latch upon in their ongoing quest to curtail the liberties of the rest of us.
Libertarians should be wariest of all about providing fodder their political adversaries. “A word to the wise.” is one of the phrases that PC and moral relativism seems to have successfully quashed. I can’t remember the last time I even heard that phrase. Some days I am convinced that the libertarain community does not have a single individual left within it that even understands the concept that “a word to the wise should suffice”?
Instead, what you get is things like:
I am the one who the state will presume guilty before I can prove my innocence because of vices that should be criticized and ostracized BEFORE the Leftists get enough votes to pass the next bill encroaching on my rights.“Who are YOU to question another’s choice of behavior?”
In my piece Are You Suicidal? Many Haven’t Caught On that I hope inspired you today’s screed just as you inspired me to it, I observed
“In spite of [Statists being delighted when we indulge to excess], most of us who are anti-self-destructive are foolishly waiting for the state to step in rather than we dare speak up about what we see is wrong. Like the subjects are too tacky. Or too close to home.”
Well, in that piece I promised to look at on another day why and how we must reverse the gains of the moral relativists. Thank you for starting us on the path to understanding both.
Posted by pascal on 10/21/2004 at 02:05 PMO.T.
Trackback seemed to be easy to use once, being only a little different from adding a comment. Now it needs special tools? Really, or can the tool’s function be duplicated another way?Will someone who’s used it please demonstrate how to make Trackback work?
Posted by pascal on 10/21/2004 at 02:21 PM
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