Guest Post: Why David Hume Defended the Rights of 'Seditious Bigots'

by Dan Sanchez

Some can’t imagine a downside to punching Nazis, or otherwise obstructing their spewing of hate. How could the world not be a happier and sunnier place after the forcible removal of such a spiritual pollutant? In the face of such an obvious potential pragmatic benefit to society, isn’t concern for the rights of Nazis so much fussy, abstract philosophizing?

David Hume shed some light on this problem, explaining way back in 1738 the pragmatic utility and public interest in granting even “a seditious bigot” his rights.

The Case of the Robbed Nazi
In his Treatise on Human Nature Hume wrote:

“A single act of justice is frequently contrary to public interest; and were it to stand alone, without being followed by other acts, may, in itself, be very prejudicial to society. When a man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and laudably; but the public is the real sufferer.”

Many would consider “seditious bigot” a perfectly apt term for the Nazis and white supremacists now seizing public attention. Let’s say, following Hume’s hypothetical, a Nazi, who had grown rich through honest business, had been robbed of a “great fortune”: let’s say a collection of antique German coins. Then, a person “of a beneficent disposition” who believes in the human rights of all (in other words, someone who is quite the opposite of a Nazi) somehow came into possession of the pilfered coins, and returned the fortune to the seditious Nazi bigot.

This, according to a strict application of property rights, would, as Hume put it, be a “single act of justice.” The Nazi’s fortune was his property by right, so restoring that property was indeed a single act of justice.

But what will the Nazi do with his restored fortune? What if he uses it to finance web sites and Twitter bots broadcasting hate throughout the Internet? Clearly, in that case, “the public is the real sufferer” as Hume put it.

The human rights champion who returned the fortune might even personally suffer. Maybe he individually, or a group in which he is a member, will be one of the targets of the Nazi’s campaign of hate. By striving to act with strict integrity, he may have hurt his own interests. As Hume wrote:

“Nor is every single act of justice, considered apart, more conducive to private interest than to public; and it is easily conceived how a man may impoverish himself by a single instance of integrity, and have reason to wish that, with regard to that single act, the laws of justice were for a moment suspended in the universe.”

Now, take the above thought experiment, but replace one matter of rights with another. Instead of the Nazi’s ownership right over external property, consider his right of self-ownership, which includes his right of free speech.

Let’s say that this right too is defended by a champion of universal rights, namely a libertarian: someone whose credo is the furthest conceivable thing from that of a Nazi.

Again, such a defense may seem contrary to the public good, since the Nazi’s message accomplishes nothing but evil. It may even seem contrary to the libertarian’s personal interests, since collectivist, particularist Nazis often rightly recognize individualist, universalist libertarians as their antithesis and as their most dangerous ideological nemeses.

The Pragmatism of Principle
But such regrettable results are not the only consequences of affording the Nazi his rights. We must consider Frederic Bastiat’s “unseen” as well the “seen”: namely the wider ramifications of maintaining a universal principle: a general rule. As Hume continued (emphasis added):

“But however single acts of justice may be contrary either to public or private interest, it is certain that the whole plan or scheme is highly conductive, or indeed absolutely requisite, both to the support of society, and the well-being of every individual. It is impossible to separate the good from the ill. Property must be stable, and must be fixed by general rules. Though in one instance the public be a sufferer, this momentary ill is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule, and by the peace and order which it establishes in society. And even every individual person must find himself a gainer on balancing the account; since, without justice, society must immediately dissolve, and every one must fall into that savage and solitary condition which is infinitely worse than the worst situation that can possibly be supposed in society.”[1][2]

Once you start making exceptions to a universal principle/general rule, you begin to undermine it; it becomes easier to make further exceptions. If the hate speech of Nazis are to be restricted, why not the hate speech of traditionalist conservatives? If the violent, seditious rhetoric of Nazis are too dangerous to allow, why should the violent, seditious rhetoric of communists be tolerated, or any fundamental criticism of the government?

As Jeffrey Tucker recently wrote:

“Once you pick and choose the way you want rights exercised, you threaten the very idea of rights and make them all contingent on political expediency.”

And Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action, granted that, in the single case of ads for quack remedies, it might do no public harm…

“…if the authorities were to prevent such advertising, the truth of which cannot be evidenced by the methods of the experimental natural sciences. But whoever is ready to grant to the government this power would be inconsistent if he objected to the demand to submit the statements of churches and sects to the same examination. Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop. If one assigns to the government the task of making truth prevail in the advertising of perfumes and tooth paste, one cannot contest it the right to look after truth in the more important matters of religion, philosophy, and social ideology.”

As Hume said, the more you erode the universality of rights, the more society devolves toward the “anything goes” law of the jungle. And it is precisely Nazi-like brutes who thrive under such conditions, at the expense of the civility-minded.

It's about More than the Nazis
When libertarians and other sincere defenders of the freedom of speech, like a great many in the ACLU, defend the free speech rights of Nazis, their greatest concern is not the defense of Nazis as such, but the defense of a vitally important principle and general rule.

Such a defense is especially vital in a world in which it is quite possible for the reins of government to be seized by violent bigots themselves. This idea has been vividly expressed in the 1960 film Man for All Seasons, in an exchange between Sir Thomas More and another character:

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Now read the above again with “Nazi” substituted for “Devil.”

This is the pragmatic rationale behind taking the stance of the early champion of free speech and tolerance Voltaire, which was encapsulated by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as follows:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

******
[1] Hume traces the rise of property and justice themselves to this individual recognition of the personal benefit of rigorously applied general rules:

“When, therefore, men have had experience enough to observe that whatever may be the consequence of any single act of justice, performed by a single person, yet the whole system of actions concurred in by the whole society is infinitely advantageous to the whole, and to every part, it is not long before justice and property take place. Every member of society is sensible of this interest: every one expresses this sense to his fellows, along with the resolution he has taken of squaring his actions by it, on condition that others will do the same. No more is requisite to induce any one of them to perform an act of justice, who has the first opportunity. This becomes an example to others; and thus justice establishes itself by a kind of convention or agreement, that is, by a sense of interest, supposed to be common to all, and where every single act is performed in expectation that others are to perform the like. Without such a convention, no one would ever have dreamed that there was such a virtue as justice, or have been induced to conform his actions to it. Taking any single act, my justice may be pernicious in every respect; and it is only upon the supposition that others are to imitate my example, that I can be induced to embrace that virtue; since nothing but this combination can render justice advantageous, or afford me any motives to conform myself to its rules.”

[2] Henry Hazlitt, in his book The Foundation of Morality, characterized Hume as the originator of the ethical tradition of “rule utilitarianism” as distinct from the “act utilitarianism” often associated with Jeremy Bentham.

Dan Sanchez is Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writings are collected at DanSanchez.me.

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

From the Archives: Is 'income inequality' a serious problem?

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 7, 2010. 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.

This was my third article published on Examiner.com. Eventually I wrote about 500 articles that appeared on the now defunct news site over the six years between April 2010 and June 2016.

Is 'income inequality' a serious problem?
April 7, 2010 6:02 PM MST

One doesn’t expect The Sabre, a web site devoted to sports at the University of Virginia, to be a place to find long discussion threads about political and economic issues. Yet on March 30, a lively exchange of ideas ensued when one of its contributors posted a quotation from former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan: “Income inequality is where the capitalistic system is most vulnerable."

In his 1996 book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, legal scholar and economist David Friedman wrote:

“When a psychiatrist wants to get his audience’s attention, he talks about sex. Economists talk about the income distribution. In both cases the audience’s interest is prurient (what are other people doing?), puritanical (that they shouldn’t be?), and personal (how am I doing?). In both, there is the thrill of violating taboo; although sex is gradually becoming an accepted topic of conversation, asking how much money someone makes is still beyond the pale.”

Though asking about someone’s income is still not permitted in polite conversation, it is not forbidden in political discourse. Members of Congress and political candidates talk about it all the time, sparking the question: Is “income inequality” something that should worry us?

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen put the question in perspective in the New York Times. “What matters most is how well people are doing in absolute terms,” he wrote. “We should continue to improve opportunities for lower-income people, but inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated.”

Fears about income inequality stem from a pre-modern understanding of economics, in which because some people “have,” others “have not.” In the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist world, this was largely true. If Midas had a lot of gold, it meant he was taking it from his subjects, who had no gold.

But the fabled Midas hoarded his gold; he neither spent it nor invested it. Today’s affluent people both spend and invest their earned incomes. They don’t hide it under their mattresses. As a consequence, they create products that fulfill our needs and wants, hire workers, and make other people wealthy in the process – or at least more wealthy than they would have been in the absence of spending and investment.

In his magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote:

“The inequality of incomes and wealth is an inherent feature of the market economy. Its elimination would entirely destroy the market economy.

“What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does not suggest a curtailment of his own income for the benefit of those 95 per cent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.”

In other words, “more wealth for me, but not for thee” is the principle at play.

Redistributing unequally distributed wealth would require one of two things:

One option is passing laws that forbid businesses from paying their employees – including high-level management, rock stars, and Oscar-winning actors and actresses – what they (the businesses) and the market think they are worth. That is, set ceilings on earnings.

The other option is to establish a system of confiscatory taxation that would take earnings from the person who earned it, in order to bring their income beneath an arbitrary ceiling, and give it to the government, which in turn will spend it on goods and services provided by other rich individuals and the companies they own. That is, rob Peter to pay Paul.

Commenting on the “economic consequences of confiscatory policies,” Mises wrote that “in the long run such policies must result not only in slowing down or totally checking the further accumulation of capital, but also in the consumption of capital accumulated in previous days. They would not only arrest further progress toward more material prosperity, but even reverse the trend and bring about a tendency toward progressing poverty.”

Put more simply, by constricting the capacity of the rich to create jobs and buy things, one ends up creating more unemployment and ultimately punishing the poor and middle classes.

In a PBS documentary film about his life, The Power of Choice, the late Milton Friedman said, “The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”

That is a lesson well-learned by policymakers in Washington and in Richmond.