 My name is Brian Mikkelthwaite, I work at the Alternative Bookshop and for the Libertarian Alliance. These gentlemen here, one of them is the first speaker, the other three will later on in the morning be responding to what the first speaker has said that that's who those people are and I'll be introducing the other three so to speak later on. The main speaker to begin with is Dr. Norman Barry or as he now is Professor Norman Barry, Professor of Politics. I think there's some idea is getting around that he's the Professor of Political, of philosophy, some sort of philosophy but I'm afraid this is not quite true, he's the Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham which for those of you not familiar with the British academic scene is a somewhat interesting university because it's it's the first post-statist university you might say in Britain. It has all kinds of intellectual problems of people who haven't really quite taken in that that's what it is but I'm sure we can rely on Professor Barry to change that atmosphere as we will be hearing today. Now just another correction I'd like to make is that in the written notes one of Norman's publications is incorrectly described. It is said to be the political and social philosophy of F.A. Hayek. That's wrong. It's the political and economic philosophy of Hayek. That's wrong as well. What is the correct one? It doesn't matter. It's a social and economic philosophy of F.A. The social and economic philosophy of Hayek is the correct title and without any further confusions may I hand over to Professor Barry. Thank you. Thank you Brian. I knew libertarians were gluttonous for truth but I didn't think you went as far as correcting errors this late in the day. It doesn't matter about the title at all. I want to talk this morning about an issue that does concern libertarians and that is the question of the foundations of their doctrine. Basically the philosophical foundations of libertarianism or classical liberalism. Is that better? Okay. I wish to talk this morning about the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism and libertarianism. I'm sure we're all aware of the distinction between the two so I won't labour that. What I'm concerned to do is try and look at some of the differing foundations that have been given to various doctrines of liberty and a particular aspect of the foundations is important is I think the concept of nature and human nature because all political philosophers are concerned with trying to establish a consistency between their normative doctrines and some view of man. This despite the depredations suffered by naturalistic philosophers from positivists this century it is said that because of the promiscuity of the concept of nature which fixes herself permanently to know one doctrine realist and skeptics deny that nature therefore has anything to do with normative values. I myself think however that the coherent political theory must reflect certain views about the person about autonomy and rationality even if we can't agree on some one unique doctrine of human nature. For example one common complaint against Robert Nozick's right-based theory of the minimal state is that since there is no sustained attempt to derive a compelling naturalistic foundation for those rights there is no reason why one should accept this substantive conclusion of his reasoning despite its undoubted ingenuity. Furthermore neither such ingenuity nor the extended use of the criteria of universal right of ability have proved sufficient to save theories of ethics and politics from the charge that they evade the fundamental issues of man and society. Now liberals are themselves concerned about the paucity of their doctrines of human nature so I want to really to look at what they have done about this particular problem. However I want to make an initial distinction between two sources of capitalism one that makes little use of human nature and one that makes little use. One I will call the deontological view and the other what we call a teleological view. Now the Kantian or deontological case of freedom is based upon there being simply side constraints on what one person may do to another. This is Nozick's view. In respect of your view of the person there are certain things you cannot do to people to quote Nozick. Political philosophy is concerned only with certain ways that persons may not use others primarily physically aggressing against them. A specific side constraint upon action towards others expresses a fact that others may not be used in specific ways that the side constraints exclude. Now this lack of dependence on a particular concept of the person that a Kantian liberalism has is illustrated very well by the fact that Nozick himself argues that such side constraints limit what we may do to non-humans i.e. animals. Nozick shows for example an intellectually persuasive and I think morally quite uplifting passage that such considerations i.e. side constraints should govern the way we treat animals. We should not do certain things to animals. In other words, liberalism in his view does not limit itself to the protection of human interests. I mean libertarians do not regard that there are such side constraints on where we treat animals because you can't hear. You can't hear. Slow down a little bit. Okay. It's the echo. I'm trying it like this. Now what I have called is fairly rare in the history of liberal thought. Right-space classical liberalism of the un-Nozick in kind has normally depended on some concept of nature if only to establish the identity of those whom the doctrine classifies as persons i.e. quite often to exclude animals from their right. Moreover, the more common liberal tradition is not even a right-space one at all but is utilitarian in which rights play only a secondary or at best derivative role. In its purely ethical considerations, the utilitarian are more concerned with certain sorts of values that we attach to what they call natural social processes. Now utilitarianism by dispensing with notions of rights still has some notion of the person but that notion of the person derives from its understanding of human social spontaneous processes and the concept of nature in utilitarianism relates to natural social processes rather than rights that accrue to natural entities called humans. Now the first of the utilitarian natural processes I wish to discuss derives from Hume, Adam Smith and in the 20th century F.A. von Hayek. Of course the idea that there are natural processes in society predates Hume and goes back to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees where he explains how vice does in fact do natural processes produce accidental benefits for society. Now the use of the word nature in this utilitarian view is best explained by contrasting it with the word convention. Now we sometimes think of laws, states, institutions as being conventional because they could be altered by man. They aren't natural like the weather. We think of natural phenomena as being indeed things which are unalterable like the rocks, the movement of the oceans, the movement of the planets, these are unalterable. What certain sorts of naturalistic libertarians want to do is to find a kind of a third way or a third world of processes which could include laws and economies. Now these are not natural like the weather because they do come from men's actions but they're not conventional either that is alterable at will. In other words if we consider a society to be a natural process we think of it as emerging when individuals are left to spontaneously generate those institutions which in the utilitarian sense proved to be valuable. And here classical liberalism derives from natural social processes rather than from natural rights of individuals. Now if we go back to the history of the subject of course we'll find Hume, Smith as being the main thinkers in this particular social philosophy. But before I say something about Hume and Smith I'll just simply contrast this view of nature with a more radical perhaps revolutionary one where libertarianism is derived from certain concepts of the person. Obviously in the case of Locke we have a natural rights philosophy whereby limitations on the state are derived not from an inquiry into the benefits of spontaneous social process so much as from an inquiry into rights that men have either by God or by nature. And this goes right through to the 20th century too with 20th century libertarian rights theories. But also there's a slightly underworld and certainly in the common intellectual world less known view of natural man which underlines, I should say underlines, classical liberal philosophy. And this is a kind of Aristotelianism which we find in Ayn Rand and to some extent in Rothbard in which a concept of the person is so structured that it will be to deprive him of his personality to make him an instrument for the ends of society or especially the state. This is a natural rights view but it derives not from God or reason so much although it does derive from reason but it derives from a certain Aristotelian concept of self-development. Capitalism is the only doctrine consistent with man's self-development. And I'll come back to that a little bit later. I want first to discuss in some detail the naturalistic view of classical liberalism which bases its arguments on spontaneous social processes. But it's important to stress this aspect as being anti-rationalistic i.e. reason isn't used very much to construct desirable social systems but natural spontaneity is left to take its course. This contrasts with all of the rights view which do indeed use reason in the positive substantive sense to construct classical liberal doctrines. Let's first look then at the example of David Hume as a theorist of natural processes. Hume was concerned to stress the irrelevance of reason for the determination of our values. Hume's argument for the subjective nature of morality is well known. Morality is a matter of feelings and emotions. It is these that move us to action not reason. Reason is limited to the manipulation of vanity truths and the cool evaluation of empirical data. The ends that men ought to pursue are entirely a product of their subjective decisions. The very famous quotation Hume once said, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of my finger. Now, if all our moral and critical judgments rest ultimately on sentiment, how on earth can you construct any kind of political philosophy at all? And indeed the amazing thing about Hume is that while accepting that morality and politics are subjective, he nevertheless constructed quite a systematic and quite a convincing classical liberal doctrine, sometimes taken to be conservative but I think in many ways it contains the basic elements of classical liberalism. While also saying that we can't derive values from nature, Hume nevertheless does construct his liberalism on some doctrine of human nature, which I'll briefly explain. He regarded the nature of man as more or less unchanging and argued that plans of government that presuppose a great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary and argued that all our ethical and critical rules must be founded on the fact that men cannot change their natures all they can do is change a situation and render the observance of justice the immediate interest of some particular person. You can't change people's attitudes or opinions or natures. You can simply alter institutions in which their unchanging natures are allowed to operate. What Hume wants to show then is that a proper understanding of manatee is and not some chimerical notion of manatee might be must lie at the heart of correct social theory. What are these facts then on which Hume wants to found a correct and as I think I shall be able to show a liberal theory? What are these facts? First, men show a natural partiality to their own interests. This is not a statement of a Hobbesian egoism which would imply that the natural world is a war of all against all out of which men can only escape by reason and artist, but merely an empirical statement to the effect that while men have a capacity for benevolence that's too weak a sentiment on which to find a social order. The second universally true feature of man that Hume locates is the fact that men have a tendency to promote their present to their more remote interests. They're likely to be blind as to the value of the future. They discount the future very highly. There's one passion might directing for long term interests others will quickly divert it to immediate satisfaction and Hume with this argument was to show how a state could be justified to produce public goods which have long term benefit which would not be produced by private individuals. Thirdly, a universally true fact of man and society is scarcity. It never changes and because of scarcity there must be always some property laws to locate entitlements to this or that. Now, how do men come to terms with these unalterable facts? Well, Hume's liberal state of society emerges when he shows how men hit upon conventional, but not arbitrary, conventional rules which prevent their natural passions damaging their long term interests. But they're of course not arbitrary these rules. He does speak of them as sometimes as being the product of reflection but they aren't really the product of reason either. They are accidental. They come about through men exchanging and hitting upon certain ways of doing things. One example are the rules of commutative justice described in the phrase stability of possessions its transference by consent and the keeping to promises. These provide for the unchanging facts of limited benevolence and scarcity. In modern language, Hume's commutative justice are simply the rules of justice that allow people to exchange. It is not a state of social justice which pinpoints some total desirable set of income and wealth arrangements. Now, the rules of the commercial society are held to be superior in a utilitarian sense to other rules for example, egalitarian rules because not because they are the product of some higher reason but because they meet most effectively the fundamental features of the human condition. Indeed, these rules also emerge through the operation of personal self-interest. The rules, property, right and obligation are determined by individuals motorized by self-interest but they have an evident tendency to promote the public good. For Hume, therefore, liberalism is utilitarian. The rules of justice and property are not designed for protection of rights for which reason can provide no grounding but emerge naturally for the benefit of anonymous member society, member society taken at large. And Hume claims that though the rules of justice be artificial they are not arbitrary nor is the expression improper to call them laws of nature if by natural we understand what is common to any species. Now, in fact, many people today of the non-libertarian persuasion regard Hume's rules of justice and Hume's view of human nature as simply relative to 18th century Scotland. Alasdair McIntyre, a leftist philosopher, said exactly that. The interesting thing is that many liberal philosophers might very well say the same thing and say that there is no real foundation of morality for rights and therefore the claim that capitalism is of utilitarian advantage is merely provisional. It doesn't prevent the possibility of some other system being used if it could be shown that that system itself had a better today in case. It doesn't in fact protect rights. Now, Adam Smith Hume's close friend had a similar view of grounding liberalism on natural processes but I think took the argument a little bit further and showed that there was some slightly more substantive founding for freedom than merely in the operation of a market and in the observation of the benefits of such markets. He had in fact a theory of ethics which was more favorable to a rights theory than was Hume's. Nevertheless, he starts off from a clear anti-rationalist position. He says in the three more sentiments, it is altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from reason and he frequently criticised the rationalist philosophers for attempting to rearrange the world according to some neat and some geometrically harmonious plan. Indeed, the division of labour on which Smith's deterrence depends was not a product of man's reason but a gradual consequences of a certain propensity in human nature to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another. When Smith talks about nature, his whole argument is suffused with the idea of natural liberty as the source of value. Men should be left perfectly free to pursue their own interests in their own way and bring their industry and capital in competition with those of any other men. Social systems are self-correcting mechanisms and because they are self-correcting, if left alone, they are, to that extent, natural. Although most attention in a history-recoming political thought has been directed towards Smith's economic arguments for natural processes, I want to talk a little bit more now about his explanation of ethical processes in basically natural terms. In Smith's morality, the pursuit of self-interest is not itself immoral. It is only immoral, in a sense, when self-love is uncorrected and unrestrained by other sorts of natural processes. We have a natural partiality and interests, but this natural partiality is only harmful when it's uncorrected. Smith does, in fact, regard self-deceit as, ultimately, the fatal wings of mankind, but this can be avoided if we allow for certain sorts of checking mechanisms and liberalism, as a morality, depends upon these checking mechanisms to self-interest. The checking mechanism that Smith talks about, first of all, is propriety or the sense of rightfulness. Inborn in people is a sense of rightness. We know something's right or wrong when we can ally our decision of its rightness to certain natural habitual judgments. Men, in fact, like to be well thought of, and because they like to be well thought of, they will adjust their selfish behaviour in accordance with this desire to be well thought of. He talks briefly, therefore, of sympathy in the process of moral evaluation. Part of a moral judgment, part of the process by which we eliminate self-interest, is to sympathise, not in altruistic sense with others, but in an understanding sense. We understand another person's point of view, and any moral system must depend upon a widespread notion of sympathy, or what we might today call empathy, an understanding that right and wrong depends upon not our judgment alone, but upon our understanding of other people's judgments. In a similar way, he talks about the notion of an impartial spectator as being a checking mechanism. When you make a judgment, we have in our mind the opinion that would be given by somebody unconnected with the particular argument or dispute, the particular dispute of contract or promise. And this is the notion of an impartial spectator, which lies behind rules of justice, a further attempt to eliminate the pure notion of self-interest, a view really of detached opinion. Furthermore, the further checking mechanism is what Adam Smith calls the voice within, or conscience, that we make judgments about issues we are ultimately guided by, a certain kind of inner conscience, which is natural to all men. And he argues that the principles of justice are imprinted on the human personality. They're not the conclusions of our reason. But also, we know what these things are in advance of their utilitarian advantages. Unlike Hugh, who saw that justice was merely shown to be beneficial, Smith sees that we all have implanted in us some notion of just rules. Now, spontaneous social process therefore does produce moral harmony just as much as it produces economic harmony. We're more familiar, of course, with Smith on economic harmony than we are with him on moral harmony. I'll briefly mention Smith's view of a natural economic harmonious process. In a utilitarian sense, the system of natural liberty leads to better outcomes than a planned system. The efficient order of the market is brought about naturally through the interaction of the participants in their endeavours to better themselves. Any intervention is, in fact, self-defeating. No regulation of commerce can increase the quantity of industry in any part of society beyond what its capital can maintain. It can only divert a part into a direction which it might otherwise not have gone. It's a very famous Smith quotation. And indeed, search and harmonious order can function with the minimum of morality. In fact, the rules of just conduct imposing negative obligations is all that the commercial society requires. It merely requires those rules to be enforced. All other moral values, such as benevolence, are, in fact, entirely self-generating. Now, in this natural process, there seems to be little about individual rights, which is a dominant feature of post-Hume, post-Smith liberal philosophy. Or indeed, any view other than economic freedom benefits anonymous members of the public. Now, these considerations are thought to render Smith's argument entirely utilitarian. His naturalism relates not so much to persons, but to the processes which economic systems of free enterprise bring about. However, I think Smith goes a bit further than Hume in reconstructing a basic moral philosophy for all libertarians. Could not the notion of propriety and the role of the spectator constitute more substantive ethical principles? I think, in fact, that this is so. For example, although in the wealth of nations, apprenticeship laws, laws limiting movement of labour, although apprenticeship laws are refuted on utilitarian or efficiency grounds because they distort price signals in the labour market, they're also condemned by Smith as a, quote, manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of both the workmen and of those who might be disposed to employ him. Now, the word is not just that they need to misallocation, but they, in a sense, violate the personalities of individuals who should otherwise be allowed to simply express their natural liberties. The problem, however, is that in Smith, the rules of natural justice and even the sacred rites of man, which he occasionally talks about, may very well be rhetoristic things, particularly to the 18th century and not having any foundation in any universal concept of man. There might be thought to be the an early version of the views of the man on the Clapham Omnibus, a familiar figure to English legal theory, rather than expressing the immutable standards of right and wrong. In Smith's own legal theory, he does regard law itself as a product of natural processes, if not quite in a natural law sense. He regarded it as being natural, mainly in contrast to the positivist tradition of law. In the positive tradition of law, law is seen to be the command of a sovereign. All law is seen to be designed by some omniscient supermind. Smith, in anticipating much of Hayek's work, has shown that a legal process embodies much more wisdom than a statutory process, and the common law system itself will better harmonize men's interests than could an omniscient statute system. So in that sense, Smith certainly has a view of nature which helps to understand the basic elements of a market society and goes a little bit further in saying how we can speak of certain universally true features of the human condition which might be used, whether not by Smith, which might be used to found a natural rights doctrine. Now why do people these days think that the Hume-Smith view of natural processes is somewhat inadequate to found a proper doctrine of classical liberalism? I think there are a number of objections to this spontaneous process view that libertarians especially and indeed some classical liberals have always made. The first and obvious objection is that the whittling down of the role of reason, and we should know that both Hume and Smith are at one, in whittling down the role of reason, could lead to the disintegration of liberalism into traditionalism, conservatism, and simply accepting that which has occurred as being right merely because it has occurred. In fact, this charge could be leveled at the foremost contemporary exponent of the Smithian approach, that's the essay von Hayek. From Hayek's later work, the doctrine of spontaneity has become a kind of neo-Darwinian theory of culture evolution in which the mere survival of an institution appears to guarantee its appropriateness. The limitations of reason dictate that quote, all progress must be based on tradition. Furthermore, in Hayek's view, all rules and moral principles are relative to particular stages of evolution, and our capacity to alter them is really limited by the fact that we can never know the consequences of such alteration. In fact, Hayek goes further than Hume down the conservative path because at least in the latter's persistent skepticism, he viewed even rules that have survived. On Hume's limited view of reason, even rules that have survived would have no particular case to be any more than prejudice, any more than more orthodox natural law situations. I mean, Hume is completely skeptical about all our moral rules and values. That's the conservative objection to the spontaneous order approach to liberal theory. The second objection is that this form of utilitarianism leaves open to doubt claims to property. Since as a matter of logic, an exchange process must begin with objects that are themselves not the product of exchange, some moral grounding for entitlement is required. Clearly, a utilitarian demonstration of the benefits of exchange is inadequate. Hume has a complex state of entitlement to property, but ultimately, it has a marked bias towards present possession. In respect of how you possess your mansion, there's an a priori claim to have your mansion given to you because you are, in fact, in present possession, even though your great-great-great-grandfather might have stolen it from somebody else. This comes merely from Hume's cautious skepticism about any kind of change. This, of course, would preclude the contemporary locking view of entitlement to property, which does locate property claims not merely in present possession, but in terms of there being some moral right to that possession, use of labour, inheritance, gifts, market exchange, and so on. Now, the third objection to this utilitarian version of liberalism is based upon the idea that it's rather work-a-day empirical conception of man may itself be destructive of the liberal order. If we think of man as he simply is, selfish, partial, and so on, rather than man as he might be, then this might undermine the institution of a free society. This is because the economic and political advantages of a free society have public good characteristics. The benefits of the market system for international trade, private property, and the rule of law accrue to the anonymous members of the public at large. It therefore does not pay one person to actually promote them. It in fact pays persons and groups to evade the implications of them. If you are in receipt of some government privilege, then according to the humane conceptual nature, you can't be blamed for hanging on to that government privilege, even though the proliferation of such government privileges, as we know in Britain, ultimately leads to the collapse of the free society. So, the problem is, with the empirical conception of man as he is, and with a liberal order being good, then it seems to be difficult to persuade people to actually act for that system, which would undoubtedly benefit them all in the long run. This problem, I think, entirely follows from the minimalist concept of man, which the orthodox classical liberal tradition stresses. Now, in these, in light of these considerations, I want to look at the other views of naturalism in liberal theory, and these other views of naturalism have a clear rationalistic foundation. Unfortunately, they are not so clearly set out as the Hume-Smith Hayek views are. I'm going to have to hunt around, in the history of thought, to find a more rationalistic, natural liberalism. As I said earlier, the rationalistic philosophical arguments are either in order to determine rights between we have rights, or they are some kind of neo-Aristatelian naturalistic theory. Both, of course, would fall foul of Hume's strictures. Hume would say that no arguments can be produced if we have such rights, and also that no facts of human nature can be used for which we can derive evaluative or moral judgments. Now, I look first, nevertheless, despite human strictures, at the natural rights, lock-in type rationalistic liberalism, and I look a little bit later at the Aristatelian view. Now, the natural rights and natural law tradition is normally associated with lock, but it is possible to suggest that the foundations were laid by Grotius, a great international lawyer of the 17th century. Now, Grotius was a Christian, but nevertheless presented an essentially sexual and rational theory of natural law. And although he wrote principally about international law, his theory has direct application to social philosophy and indeed to liberal philosophy. All rational beings are capable of discerning the elements of law, law not in a positive sense, but law in the sense of a body of internationally appropriate rules of conduct. Among the things that rational beings can discern with their reason, the binding nature of promises, the non-aggression principle and a fairly strong right to liberty. Interestingly enough, in an early work, Grotius attempted to demonstrate that no state could legitimately own the sea. Natural law decreed that individualistic competition should prevail in the oceans. Part of his argument was that universal rules of natural law would in fact guarantee the right of individual appropriation of the sea, in the sea, and states should be forbidden from preventing individuals themselves from taking the benefits of the sea. Now, the philosophically cynical point here is that the principles of law which he described were firmly implanted in human nature and superior morally to any positive law. And they were not the rules of 17th century or 18th century society, they were not the particular values that have grown up, of man's ability by the use of his reason to directly perceive appropriate rules of conduct. In fact, they were not the accidental outcomes of self-interested action, what I've called the third world phenomena in Smith, Hume and Hayek. The rationale of which lies in a certain kind of experience but these rules really rely upon no experience at all but merely upon the ability of individuals to determine by the use of their reason rules of just conduct. And this, of course, is a potentially evolutionary doctrine. The Hume-Smith Hayek liberalism is in a sense unrevolutionary because the bulk of its arguments rest upon experience, the growth of knowledge, spontaneous order. And because of the limits of our human reason we must be very careful in altering the flow of spontaneous orders which should be careful about any kind of reform because our limited knowledge prevents us predicting in advance what the consequences of that kind of reform will be. Now the origins of what I would now call a revolutionary classical liberalism lie therefore just in those rationalistic natural law doctrines of which Hume and Smith were so scathing. For the idea that reason can determine law poses a threat to all existing legal systems. This notion, this potentially revolutionary notion was given a specifically individualistic twist with the Lockean idea of self-ownership quote, every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. They were taken by later radical libertarians at the definitive and indefensible objection to all forms of interventionism since these necessitate the direction of the actions of one person by another who cannot be his natural owner because we ourselves are natural owners. Such an objection is held to hold irrespective of any collective welfare or user-toned advantage that may accrue from intervention. However, irrespective of the conceptual difficulty surrounding self-ownership it is not clear in a substantive sense that it is sufficient to generate a liberal society. The strong sense of a right in the sense of ownership lies surely at the heart of the Hobbesian structure of an authoritarian society. Because what I may own I may freely contract away the Hobbesian men freely contract away that which they own and construct, therefore, unwitting, if you like an authoritarian society. Indeed, does not this strong sense of ownership legitimise slave contracts? If these are invalid because one cannot orientate the person then does it not follow from this that one does not fully own the person? What is implicit in the Lockean and all natural law classical liberal positions is the concept of an equal liberty. That the only mole justification of the limitation of a person's liberty lies in the existence of a like freedom of action of others. Thus only a strictly limited government is possible because only then would this freedom of action for everybody not be violated. The notion, therefore, of welfare rights must be legitimate because this involves the forced redistribution link which violates the equal rights of the rich. However, this desirable constrained morality of liberalism is surely only one of the possibilities that may emerge from the concept of natural man as a natural owner. The Hobbesian one is surely logically possible. Nevertheless, we must look on to derive the idea of property from the right to self-ownership because the idea of property is fundamental to all forms of liberalism. Again, to quote Locke, what a person removes out of the state that nature has provided and left in, he has mixed his labour with and joined to it something that is his own and thereby makes it his property. Thus property precedes law and, of course, the right to property holds independent contract. As the late 19th century French laissez-faire economist Bastiat put it, life, liberty and property do not exist because men have made laws, on the contrary it was the fact that life, liberty and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. A similar view, of course, is held by contemporary libertarians such as Rothbard and so on. Note here that Bastiat combined rather nicely a straightforward uterity economics with an actual law of domestic theory of personal liberty. Now what would people like Hume and Smith say of all this? It is not easy to substantiate the claim that mixing one's labour with a previously unowned object should establish a right to it. Hume argued that there are several kinds of occupation where we cannot be said to join our labour to the object which we acquire as when we possess a meadow by grazing our cattle on it. If we sense in a piece of land do we own the land that exists just below the area of the fence like a square inch, or do we own all the land which the fence encloses? It seems to me that the right to property argument as expressed through self-ownership and first possession is ambiguous on these points. Because of this, doubts about the viability of such natural law claims people like Hume would dismiss such appeals and their arguments are ultimately conservative. The rules of property cannot be determined by an unedited reason and their authority established by a different appeal the appeal to the sympathy and the imagination. People tend to approve a private property and their rules that back it up on the grounds of its general utility not on the grounds of some fundamental right. The Utitarian, Humean, Hayekian classical liberals simply do not regard questions of original entitlement as important, at least not in comparison to the question of the overall stability of the property system. In fact the natural law and natural rights locking liberals are more consistently individualistic since they are more concerned with the question of who owns what than with a slightly different issue of determining those systems of the rules from which honest persons may benefit. This latter is still a Utitarian proposition despite the prohibitions on interpersonal compatibility which is utter as place. Nevertheless, I think it's true that nature does not provide an unambiguous or convincing theory of property entitlement and the idea that there can be legitimate property independently of the law as Bastiat and Locke thought there could seems to me to be only plausible if you take law to be statute law or positive law. It seems to me that the notion of property without the notion of law is confused and ambiguous. As long as you can see for there being natural legal processes, i.e. laws exist independently of states and sovereigns then law and property do indeed go together. Now the empirical common sense notion of man as he is has proved to be an extremely servicable one in the history of liberal thought. As well as being highly appropriate to economics it is itself an economical concept that makes few demands on our philosophical resources. However, as I suggested earlier not only is the concept of selfish man inappropriate for communist idealists but also paradoxically it may be destructive of the selfish or liberal order itself. This is the public good point. Selfish men assume describes them propensity not to see their long term interests. In Smith's argument for morality doubts are clearly expressed about the viability of selfishness and there is more than a suggestion of Aristotelianism. Indeed the full moral development of a person for Smith requires that the narrow confines of mere economising be transcended. Smith's frequent illusions to the notion of self-command as an ethical aim and his consequentiation of self-deceit suggest a moral idealism that contrast sharply with the customary soulless calculation of orthodox classical economics. In other words, Smith himself felt that there has to be some other more expanded concept of natural man if we are to bring about a free society. However we have to turn to more recent exponents of classical liberal philosophy to find a fully developed Aristotelianism being used to underpin market economics and to justify the fundamental features of possessive individualism. I will take simply one example of the attempt to build a structure of man that transcends economising is in the work of Iron Rand. Now in Iron Rand's novels and essays he pleases to know if you like systematic philosophy in the conventional academic sense but there are clearly implications of a strong kind of a fully fledged philosophy of man. I want to contrast that with in Iron Rand's philosophy there is a strident rejection of the humane antirationalist defence of the market. She isn't interested in exploring the application of a spontaneous process and seeing its accidental but unperceived advantages. Quote, the moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature and it protects man's survival for man. And that its ruling principle is justice. This is no gaunt and fleshly deontology. Since the virtue of capitalism lies precisely in the fact that it fulfils man's natural purpose. It's not a psychic instinct doctrine like Nozick is. Nozick says nothing really about man except what he may not do to him. Rand's betters her philosophy on a naturalistic moral purpose. The moral purpose that natural man has is egoism. Thus it is not that descriptively man is selfish. Indeed, Rand regrets that this is not in fact the case. He just wishes people weren't more selfish. It's not descriptively that man is selfish but that in her view he ought to be. Thus selfishness is not merely a means to an end as in Smith's famous observation that quote is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interests but for Rand it is the rational end for man itself. Smith's justification for self-interest was that it benefited people. Not that it made you a better person. For Rand, the starting point is self-interest is consonant with man's true nature. What saved this doctrine from a collapse into nihilism when anybody literally doing whatever they like what saved it from a collapse into nihilism is the absolutely binding nature of rights and their universalizability. They're not restricted time and place. They're constant features of the human condition. Thus selfishness is not doing anything but rather true selfishness is recognizing the right of others to be selfish themselves. Now how can one appeal to selfishness for the solution to the liberal dilemma posed above when surely it is that selfishness that caused the difficulty in the first place. I said the difficulty was that the Smithian man as he is view echoed by Schumann Hayek has difficulty that leads to a public good problem. No one given that view of man is going to act for a liberal society. Well how can Rand solve that problem when she in fact praises the virtue of selfishness? Well it is not mere selfishness to which Rand appeals but an form of egoism which condemns living off government and one fellow citizens as a perversion of man's true nature. So it's like a kind of moralized view of nature. Human nature is selfish but true selfishness recognizes the right of others to be selfish and that indeed precludes living off their income living off the government and all the other features of interventions such as society. From this it is easy to see indeed how a liberal regime might well be imposed by force. If there is an objective morality capable of being rid off from man's nature then this would surely sanction the removal of all existing social and ego impediments to the full flowering of that nature. This contrasts sharply with the conservative utilitarian traditional classical liberalism from Hume to Hayek which proclaims the inability of an active reason to discriminate so clearly between different possibilities of social and economic organization. We can't abolish them all overnight all our inefficiencies, interventions we can't abolish them all overnight because we cannot know the consequences of such abolition. Also we have no personal justification for saying that the natural law foundation of such abolition has any appeal to our intellects. Indeed the use of the concept of nature could not be more different. In utilitarian liberalism rational economic institutions emerge accidentally from the actions of individuals possessing little moral equipment. In the Alcatelian version they appear to be a direct product of virtuous men. In the Smith-Hume-Hayek tradition it is not business men that are virtuous Smith himself as we all know stresses constantly the fact that if you get too much of this together they will combine to a big price. It is not their virtues that brings about the natural spontaneous harmonizing market. It is the accidental outcome of their basic natural nature. And it is the rules and institutions that have grown accidentally to protect individuals that have natural value. In the Randian view of the world it would appear to be the case that the institutions of a liberal economic society come directly from men's virtues. Admittedly they ought to be selfish but in her view since substance is a virtue then virtue the deliberate propagation of virtue if you like under lays her idea of a liberal order. From that of course it follows an extreme rationalistic approach to the structure of government. The idea that can sit down and use our reasons to determine the appropriate economic and social institutions. Again this contrast with the specifically anti-rational approach of the Hume-Hayek tradition which because faces so little faith and reason trusts to spontaneous processes. Now I do not say the Arctilian version of liberalism is correct or that all liberal intellectual resources shall be invested in encouraging its development from what is at the moment an ambionic state. I don't think either that we should discard that minimalist concept of man that has proved to be so fruitful in development of classical liberal thought. It's important however to appreciate the crucial importance of the concept of nature in the variety and complexity of liberal thought and to understand how different are the foundations of classical liberalism no matter how similar may be our particular policy views. If we are to have a coherent and well thought out adoption of liberalism we must decide whether we want to trust to natural processes in the social sense of spontaneity and hope that they will not disintegrate into a kind of traditionalism or conservatism and they may do that because of the limited use that reason has but trust being that view or the heavily rationalistic view which sees certain immutable features of the human condition which it uses to found liberal institutions and to take that view we have the problem of not persuading people that reason can discern so clearly such ruled institutions and also the problem of incorporating those into a social program which doesn't wipe away or develop naturally in the vague illusion that something better may come out of the process.