Guest Post: Celebrating Cicero's Birthday

by Gary M. Galles

John Adams said of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) that “All ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher combined.” Anthony Everitt called him an “architect of constitutions that still govern our lives.” Thomas Jefferson said the Declaration of Independence was based on “the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”

Cicero was a Roman Senator whose writings, as Historian Edward Gibbon put it, “breathed the spirit of freedom.” Particularly influential was his idea of natural law, echoed by John Locke and other enlightenment thinkers: Human nature included reason, which could discover justice, which was the basis of law. Voltaire said “He taught us how to think.”

Cicero stayed loyal to the Roman Republic against Julius Caesar. Antony had him murdered for his principles, and his head and hands were nailed to the Senate speaker’s podium as a warning to others, making him a model of resistance against tyranny to America’s revolutionary leaders.

Cicero’s ideas, particularly on justice, law and liberty still merit remembering, two millennia later, on his January 3 birthday.

Justice

Justice is the crowning glory of the virtues.
Justice consists in doing no injury to men.
Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.
The foundations of justice are that no one should suffer wrong; then, that the public good be promoted.
Justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Justice does not descend from its pinnacle.
Justice extorts no reward, no kind of price; she is sought...for her own sake.

Law

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application.
The welfare of the people is the ultimate law.
The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.
According to the law of nature it is only fair that no one should become richer through damages and injuries suffered by another.
The strictest law often causes the most serious wrong.
The more laws, the less justice.
The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled.
The administration of government, like a guardianship, ought to be directed to the good of those who confer, not of those who receive the trust.
When a government becomes powerful...it is an usurper which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance for votes with which to perpetuate itself.

Liberty

We are in bondage to the law so that we might be free.
The essence of liberty is to live as you choose.
Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.
Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.
What is so beneficial to the people as liberty...to be preferred to all things.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Only in states in which the power of the people is supreme has liberty any abode.
Peace is liberty in tranquility. Servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.

Cicero was an important influence behind the American Revolution. He symbolized opposition to tyranny and his ideas on justice, law, and liberty inform our founding documents, which is why Jim Powell’s The Triumph of Liberty begins with Cicero’s story. Though he wrote two millennia ago, his understanding of why defending liberty requires tightly constraining government was thoroughly modern: “Never was a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors and thieves.”

If Americans are serious about their liberty, which is defended by treating our founding documents as more than mere words on paper, Cicero merits renewed attention today.



Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: 'The Last Jedi' Resonates with the Lessons of Lord Acton

Power corrupts, regardless of whether you're Jedi or Sith.

by Mateusz Machaj

[The following article contains a few elements of the plot of The Last Jedi, which some may consider spoilers.]

Putting aside the creative and entertaining value of the new Star Wars movie, one major element remains strong with the saga: its warnings about the dangers of power. They actually go even further than they did in the previous installments.

The title itself may be mind-boggling to some of the fans, much as the line we heard in the trailer from the Jedi hero, Luke Skywalker, who wants the “Jedi to end.” Some were wondering what big secret may be hidden in those words, but not the people who paid attention to the messages already present in the previous episodes, especially the prequel trilogy (however imperfect it was). The main protagonist and idealist wants the Jedi to end because the school has become a legacy of failure, hypocrisy, and hubris.

The Role of the Jedi
They were a part of the Old Republic system and served as a special service having superior privileges granted by the government. Besides the legal commands, they had their own education system which raised new generations of followers. Eventually, they failed miserably in training the pupils. One of them even became the leading man responsible for building terror in the evil Empire. Careful observation would lead the viewer to such conclusions – now the main hero states so openly and with merits (it is also a good artistic tool for the character on screen to repeat fans’ views as it happens in the movie).

What Luke offers in his reinterpretation of events (as compared to his personal predecessors) is the more thoughtful understanding of the way world functions. He notices that knowledge and the workings of everything in the universe (the “force”) are not things that belong to one group of people called the Jedi. To argue so is vanity as those things cannot, and should not, be monopolized by one agency — perhaps a reflection that previous Jedi teachers did not see in full picture.

Moreover, that has led to arrogance and blindness to the obvious dangers of political systems, of which they were part. We got to see them training many of the younglings, but mostly in a physical and spiritual way. Nobody was teaching them about social sciences, human relations, and how politics functions — at least nowhere we could see. The downplaying of political economy is what eventually killed them and destroyed the Republic, finally to be substituted by the evil Hobbesian rule of the Emperor.

The Lesson of Lord Acton
Luke learned the hard way what Lord Acton taught us: power is corruptive. Control over other people can easily make one focused only on a particular goal at the expense of the free will of others. Part of the reflection made by Luke can be inferred by historically studying what happened to the Jedi in the past episodes. Luke further learns this in his personal experience: how even a mature teacher can be easily tempted to make wrong and authoritarian judgments about people, leading them to disastrous consequences.

No human agency or real person should have the ultimate power over everyone else’s fate. Such themes were always the main messages of the Star Wars movies that started right at the beginning in 1977. The newest movie makes a shining and almost Tolkienian conclusion reached by simply following the logical inferences. The rule of power applies not only to the people we consider “bad,” “evil,” or “corrupted" because not a single human being is either forever lost or always free from misplaced temptations or free from being prone to failure. Both redemption and temptation are not far away from anybody. Anyone can make a mistake. We should distrust any rules giving too much power to any person or group of people, not just the ones recognized as the “bad guys.”

The original trilogy showed that bad people are also human beings who still can be converted from bad to good. The prequel trilogy showed that good people can do bad things, too, willingly or not. As we further learn from The Last Jedi, corruptive potency hidden in the meanders of power is actually nothing personal.

That is why solutions for efficiently curtailing expansionary power have to be universal and impersonal.



Mateusz Machaj is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wroclaw (Poland). He is the author of Money, Interest, and the Structure of Production. Resolving Some Puzzles in the Theory of Capital.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan explores ethics of voting

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on July 31, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan explores ethics of voting

“Every day you see the same message: ‘get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote,’” says philosophy professor Jason Brennan.

“What if all the sentiments underlying that were just wrong?” he asks. What if they “could be shown to be wrong pretty easily?”

According to Brennan, his new book, The Ethics of Voting, shows those underlying sentiments to be, in fact, wrong.

Brennan, an assistant professor of business and philosophy at Georgetown University, summarized his book at a Cato Institute forum on July 21. After his presentation, he spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about what motivated him to write The Ethics of Voting, how the book has been received by academics, and his new research on private behavior and the common good.

Brennan has long been interested in the topic of the ethics of voting.

Is voting special?

“Growing up,” he said, “I kept hearing, over and over again, the American civic religion [says] that voting is special, that political participation is special, that serving in the military makes you an especially good person.”

These claims were not satisfying to Brennan, he explained.

“I never found myself gripped by that,” he said. “I always wondered: What were the grounds underlying that? Why did people believe it?”

He also discovered, he continued, that “at the same time, there’s a kind of interesting philosophical question about what you should do in situations where we as a group are doing something bad but that your individual input doesn’t make a difference. That happens a lot in politics.”

Those two different but related things brought him to this topic.

Is voting rational?

He had read some of the literature about voter behavior but George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan’s 2008 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, provided extra stimulus to write his own book.

“After reading that, I asked myself, suppose he’s right that voters are irrational. What does that mean about what they should do?”

The answer is not simple, he said. One cannot simply say, “Well, if they’re rational they shouldn’t vote, because individual votes don’t make a difference.” Instead, “it’s actually a real philosophical puzzle as to why it would even matter at all [with regard to] what an individual does and why they should vote well or not.”

Caplan’s book, Brennan said, was “like the last straw” in how it “pushed me over the edge to have to write something more about the philosophy behind” the ethics of voting.

Reaction from scholars

Brennan has received feedback from other academic philosophers, as well as from political scientists. Most of it has been positive.

Jason Brennan at Cato Institute, July 2011

The reaction he has had from philosophers, he said, “has been overwhelmingly very positive. Even if they disagree with the conclusions -- and many of them do -- what they’ve tended to like about it is that it takes on common sense. What it does is start with rather simple, plausible premises and leads to counterintuitive results. Philosophers tend to like that.”

Moreover, he added, “what a lot of philosophers have recognized, too, is that there are just a lot of unfounded assumptions about how politics works and what we should do. At the very least, I’m being a devil’s advocate in challenging” those assumptions, and that challenge makes philosophers “recognize that common sense [claims] about voting need to be justified, if they are justified” at all.

The reaction of political scientists, he said, “has largely been the same,” but faculty in political science departments who do political theory, “which is sort of philosophy but done in political science,” have a tendency “to be more skeptical because they tend to have a much more strongly emotional attachment to democracy than philosophers do.”

Private behavior as a public good

Brennan is now conducting new research on how private behavior contributes to the public good, something “that ended up being a major premise even in this book.”

He explained that “we can express civic virtue anywhere: by running a good business that helps people [and] makes them richer, by coming up with inventions, by making art, and so on.”

All these things, he said, help “promote the common good. They’re doing as much good as politics is doing, perhaps even more.”

The practical effect of this for individuals is that, “if you’re a person who is publicly spirited and you want to promote the common good, that doesn’t mean you have to get out of the market and go to the forum,” Brennan explained. “It might instead mean you should stay in the market and work there.”

Giving two prominent examples, Professor Brennan pointed out that “Thomas Edison did a lot more for us with his inventions than he ever would have done as a voter. Michelangelo did a lot more with his art than he ever would have done as a voter.”

He concluded by noting that “private civil society is really important for promoting the common good. If civic virtue is about promoting the common good, then private civil society might be the way to do it.”

Brennan wrote The Ethics of Voting while he taught at Brown University; it was published in April by Princeton University Press.