 I feel more like, to some degree, putting what I had planned to talk about to one side because I was very interested by, I was very struck by the remarks of Angelo Petroni about the justification for rights and the inadequacies of, for example, Robert Nozick's treatment of rights. And I thought I would spend just a little bit of my time talking about that. And whatever time is left over, I'll talk about the subject that I was planning to talk about. And tomorrow I speak again and I'll cover tomorrow whatever I didn't cover today in my talk tomorrow. Angelo said that there is a problem with just assuming rights and moving from there. And obviously I think that there is. I would agree with him about that. But he also suggested that a natural rights perspective would not be the way to go. I want to take some issue with that, but in a way that I think ultimately I might be able to convince him to agree with me about. And this basically is the thesis of the book that Rod just mentioned. It's called The Structure of Liberty. It's a book that I have being published by Oxford Press. It'll be coming out in March or April. And it attempts to explain what I do call there a natural rights approach to liberty. But it's not a natural rights approach of the kind that you may typically hear about. It is, I think, a natural rights approach very much like what the classical natural rights thinkers themselves argue as opposed to what we might call contemporary natural rights thinkers or even 19th century natural rights thinkers. By the way, can everybody hear me all right? All right, good. And this is a kind of argument, which by the way I don't believe for those of you who feel otherwise, I don't believe is the only argument to be made in favor of either rights or liberty. But I think it's an important argument. And it's an argument which in the book I describe as a given-if-then form of reasoning, given-if-then form of reasoning. By the way, I could have presented examples of natural rights thinkers who argued this way. I thought this is what I was going to talk about this morning. But you'll just have to take my word for it that natural rights thinkers did argue with what logically you might call a given-if-then form of reasoning. What given means is that given certain facts of human existence, human features about human beings and the world in which they live, if you want to accomplish certain ends, then you must respect certain principles. That is the kind of reasoning that was used by natural law thinkers, natural rights thinkers. And so it's a natural law or a natural rights type of argument because it is based on the nature of human beings and the world in which we find ourselves. So these are facts of the matter which we can argue about, which we can dispute. But assuming we reach some consensus or agreement about what the nature of human beings are and the world in which they find themselves, then if you want to accomplish certain ends, then you must respect certain principles. And the ends that I assume for purposes of the book is simply that we want a society in which people can live and pursue happiness, peace and prosperity. Now that's a pretty minimal type of commitment in the sense of non-controversial. People can live and pursue happiness, peace and prosperity. Given the nature of human beings and the world in which they find themselves, if you want to be able to have a society in which people can pursue happiness, peace and prosperity, then you have to respect certain basic principles. And that's basically what the book is about. The book is about what are those basic principles that are necessary in order to enable people to pursue happiness, peace and prosperity while living in society with each other, given the nature of human beings in the world in which they find themselves. That's what the structure of liberty I think is about. So I obviously cannot present the entire framework here, but let me give you an example of how I organize the argument in the book. What I argue is that certain rights and also certain principles of legality, which are not principles of justice themselves, but principles of legality rule of law principles you might identify. Certain of these principles are necessary to solve certain pervasive social problems, problems that exist for every society at every time in history. And for want of a better form of analysis, I organize these principles into three categories. I refer to three categories of social problems that must be solved by every society regardless of where they are or when they are. And these categories are problems of knowledge, problems of interest, and problems of power. And within the structure, you're going to find many of the arguments that you're familiar with, including the arguments about social order and other sorts of things, particularly the problems of knowledge. But you also have other arguments about problems of interest. In the book, I identify three problems of knowledge, three problems of interest, and two problems of power. The three problems of knowledge, I'm just gonna list them. I'm not expecting to have a discussion of them, but just so that you know what I'm talking about, because otherwise what I'm saying may sound mysterious to you. The first problem of knowledge is problem of resource use. How to put the knowledge that we all have about how to use resources into effect while taking into account the ignorance we have of everybody else's knowledge. The second problem of knowledge is assuming that we need certain rights to solve the first problem. How do we know what those rights are? We need some way of discovering what rights are and promulgating knowledge of them so people can act consistently with rights. And finally, since I argue that the rule of law is the way we do that, in with respect to problems of knowledge, I also argue there that these rules of law that are necessary to put the principles of justice into effect are conventional in their nature. There are more than one set of rules that could actually do the work. And we have to adopt one set of conventions for a particular society. And the third order problem of knowledge is, how do we pick the convention that is consistent with justice for a particular society such as to address the, so it all addresses the first order problem of using resources and knowledgeably. And the solution to that I argue is a common law, evolutionary system of lawmaking. The problems of interest, I'll just tell you what they are. They're the incentive problem, the partiality problem, and the compliance problem. Incentive problems is making sure people have the incentive to act productively. The partiality problem is the problem that people have a tendency to pursue their own interest at the expense of other people, which normally is okay. But under certain circumstances creates a problem particularly, when people are put in charge of the legal system. And the last problem is the problem of compliance. What happens when people won't respect the principles of justice and the rule of law and want in order to pursue their own interests? The solution to the last problem, as everybody would agree, I think, is the use of force. But however, bringing the use of force into the picture creates two problems which I call problems of power. That's the third order, that's the third set of problems. And problems of power fall into two categories. There's problems of enforcement error, just making mistakes in good faith. You do things, and you can imagine, it can be more serious. The more grave the consequences of using force are, the more serious making a mistake would be, which is why we have all kinds of procedural protections. For example, when you impose the death penalty because the problem of an innocent mistake being made is so much more serious than if the punishment were less than that. So you have the problem of enforcement error, and then you also have the problem of enforcement abuse. That is not a problem that's necessarily based on innocent mistakes, it's actually based on the fact that the people who are entrusted with the use of power will serve their own interests rather than the interests of justice. That's the basic outline of the book. And basically what I'm arguing is that once you understand the nature of these problems, you will see, and the argument is, that individual rights of the kind we associate with classical liberal rights or libertarian rights are necessary, as well as the rule of law, which is a set of values that libertarians have a tendency not to pay as much attention to as other groups sometimes do. But both the justice based on individual rights and the principles of legality based on the rule of law are actually necessary to solve these problems. And here's where I think it gets interesting. Necessary in the very same way that architectural principles and engineering principles are necessary to design a bridge to span a river. Necessary in that way. Given the nature of building materials, given the nature of rivers, given the nature of their width, if you want to have a bridge to span that chasm such that people will be able to walk across it and not fall into the river and kill themselves, then you have to respect certain principles. And those principles are what we might call natural law principles, natural rights principles, natural law principles, not natural rights principles. And these are the principles of bridge building, the principles of engineering. And the argument of the book is that the kinds of rights that we have and the kind of rules of law that we need are of the very same status as the kinds of principles that must be adhered to to make buildings stand, to make bridges stand, to make roads work, to administer medicines properly. These are all what we might call natural laws. And implied in the other contexts are an objectionably referred to as natural laws. It's only when you talk about the principles of society that are necessary to enable society to function as well as a bridge might function or as well as a building might function, then there's some dispute about whether you want to call these natural laws. Well, I say that there shouldn't be a dispute on that. They have the same philosophical status as the other kinds of principles. Now, of course, what may need additional argument, which is not presented in my book and which I'd be delighted to read someone else talk about, is how you argue against someone who does not want a society in which people can pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity. Then you have to have additional arguments about, and they may be based on human dignity and the value of happiness for individuals and why individuals matter as individuals, et cetera. All these arguments that we're very familiar with and which are very important, which I don't mean to exclude, this is not an exclusionary thesis, only that once you reach some common agreement, and this is not based on agreement because it could be based on rational persuasion also, that the pursuit of happiness, peace, and prosperity is a good thing, almost hard to think it's not a good thing, then you must respect these basic principles given the nature of human beings in the world in which we find themselves. This, I think, is what the classical liberal, not classical liberal and also not so liberal natural rights thinkers, this is the form of argument they use. I mean, Gershias and Pufendorf and also American natural rights thinkers also felt this way. Anyway, this is not what I plan to talk about, but I do think it's a way of answering the challenge that Angelo Petrone made, and I do believe it's properly called a natural rights approach because the people that invented natural rights used it. So therefore I think I have a good claim to describe this as natural rights, even if people who came later like Immanuel Kant or other people use natural rights in a different way, or today people use natural rights in a different way. Nonetheless, if the original people who invented the idea for very good reasons used it in this way, I think it's appropriate for us to use it in this way if we want to. All right, well what I had planned to talk about this morning was the problem, this is the last problem I mentioned in my scheme of problems, and that is the problem of enforcement abuse. It's because of the problem of introducing force or power into the equation in order to solve the compliance problem that we introduce a whole new set of problems. In fact, if we could get away without using force, if we could be pacifists, it would be better because using force creates its own problems. I don't believe it's possible to have a society based on pacifistic principles. I think self-defense is legitimate, self-defense is necessary, as well as other uses of force to obtain compensation, to have sanctions for criminal conduct, et cetera. But I would concede the point that if it weren't necessary to have force, it would be better not to have it. However, once you have introduced the use of force as necessary to solve very serious social problems that cannot be accomplished any other way, you have now introduced into the picture a new set of problems that you must take seriously. And this is the problem of enforcement error, which I won't talk about today, and enforcement abuse, which I plan to talk about today. Now the problem of enforcement abuse, the problem of enforcement abuse is simply that the people who are put in charge of enforcement mechanisms will use the power that they are given to serve their own interests rather than the interest at which they were put in charge, the interest for which power was given to them. That's the problem of enforcement abuse. Now, there are different reasons why people essentially believe in something that I'm going to call the single power principle, which is essentially the way some people think we ought to handle the problem of enforcement abuse. But the single power principle essentially is as follows, and this is basically a bit of a digression before I get to the main point. The single power principle basically is the belief that there must be in society some monopoly on the use of force, essentially that there must be a single unit, single institution per unit of geography, which I would call a monopoly, that is charged with authorizing the use of force and that this monopoly must be preserved by force. Now, there are many reasons why people believe in this. I mean, for example, people on the right, I think, believe in a single monopoly on the use of force because they believe in the absence of such monopoly. There will be something that they envision as social degeneration. People will go to hell if they're allowed to. Well, actually, I think if they thought people really didn't go to hell, they wouldn't worry so much about what's happening here on Earth. But that people will act in a hellish manner, turn Earth into a living hell if they're just allowed the natural consequences of freedom, if they're just allowed to make their own choices. People on the left have a different motivation, I think, for why they believe in this principle, this monopolistic principle. People on the left, I think, believe in it because they have some kind of affirmative conception of what they consider to be justice, which cannot be accomplished unless force is used. And over, they have to have force in order to do this. Other people believe in it, I think, because it's a throwback to their childhood. That is, when they had people in charge of them, and mom and dad made everything all right. And therefore, when we grow up, we still need a mom and dad of sorts to take care of us. Other people, I think, believe in it because it's a substitute for an interventionist god. Even people who believe in god don't really believe god intervenes all the time to make sure everything's OK. So we need an interventionist god, and this coercive monopoly of power actually serves that purpose. For whatever reason, actually, I think classical liberals also believe in this, and some libertarians do too, but they believe in it for reasons closely related to the problem I'm discussing this morning, the problem of enforcement abuse. They think that the way to protect us ourselves from the abuse of power, from the abuse that I just talked about, from people using power to serve their own interest rather than the interest of justice, is to create some kind of monopoly and then put constraints on that monopoly. That's what they believe. So in other words, they believe that a monopoly of sorts is the solution to the problem of enforcement abuse. And in this regard, they take the problem of enforcement abuse more seriously than the left and the right does, but I think they're mistaken to do this. And I think the reason they're mistaken is because it's somewhat an unrealistic view of human beings to think that if you put a human being in charge of a monopoly of power that basically enhances the power that the human being has, that they won't then use the monopoly that they've been given to serve their own interests. I mean, this would work all right, I suppose, if there was some other race we could give the power to and say, OK, you exercise this power consistent with justice, and you do so impartially. But given the fact that there is no other race to give the power to, and you have to give it to a human being, if the very problem for which you've invented the monopoly is the fact that human beings will act in this self-interested and corrupt manner, that they will try to take advantage of other people, or that they will in fact abuse power and serve their own interests, then you've given the power, this extra enhanced super duper power, you've given it to the very race of people who are the problem itself, and thereby making much more difficult the problem of enforcement abuse. Well, let me specify four separate problems that arise when, excuse me, all right, well, this is typical of what's happened so far on this trip. So when does that mean I have to quit now? Five minutes. All right, well in that case, I'm going to stop. And the four problems are the selection problem. You have to solve the problem of who is going to get the power. I mean, if you're going to create a monopoly of power, you have to figure out who's going to be put in charge of the monopoly. If your assumption, basically, is everybody is potentially corrupt or advantage taking, and that's why you need a monopoly, you're going to have to pick from amongst the corrupt and advantage taking people to put in charge of this power, and that creates a problem itself. By the way, at that point, the people who believe in this monopoly tend to relax their assumptions considerably, and they send a posit that there are a lot of good people out there you could give this power to, which without recognizing that by relaxing their assumption at this point, they've made less necessary the need for a monopoly of power in the first place. And so that's the first problem, and so it has to be solved. The second problem that has to be solved is what we might call the capture problem. It is assuming that you made all the right choices as to who gets the power in the first place. Having created this locus of power in society that would be the great font of benefits, if you would ever gain control of it, you create a tremendous incentive for people to figure out how to gain control of it. And in some days that might have meant murdering the person who is in power and taking over. In other areas, in other systems, it might mean simply pretending you're a good person and getting in under the rubric of a democratic election and then taking over. That's another problem that is the capture problem, and there is actually a much more serious problem than either the capture problem is, and that is what I would call the corruption problem. And that's a problem I would like to spend more than five minutes talking about, because I think it's an important one, that even libertarians don't emotionally understand well enough. They may intellectually understand it, but they don't really understand the extent to which the holding of power itself changes you inside and turns you into something other than what you were when you started. It's something about it itself. It's like people understand this when they talk about intoxicating drugs, but they don't understand this when they talk about intoxicating power, which for people who hold power is more important, more intoxicating than drugs are. And they won't give up their power. They won't get them grabbing and kicking and screaming to try to get them the way you would expect an addict to be. But of course, they're not addicts. They won't define themselves as that. So you have this corruption problem. And the last problem is the most serious problem, and that is the legitimacy problem that's created by the belief that there must be a monopoly somewhere. Because if you believe there must be a monopoly somewhere in order to solve these very, very serious problems, then you give the monopoly that is created a tremendous amount of leeway to do what it has to do. You believe it's necessary. It gets the benefit of the doubt or what you might call the halo effect. And so people aren't willing to challenge this very essential monopoly or question it too much, certainly not to question its very existence, since it's so, so necessary unless it really, really gets bad. And if you're going to give this group of people who already have a monopoly of power, this extra bone is called legitimacy and the benefit of the doubt, then there's tremendous opportunity for advantage taking, tremendously more opportunities for advantage taking coming from that than there would otherwise be just from them having the sheer power or the physical power itself. So what we need is a way to both have force and still constrain it. And classical liberals have come up with various techniques to do this. And these are the techniques I'll begin discussing in my talk tomorrow morning. I'll talk about the constitutional principles that classical liberals have for several centuries advocated as a way of constraining the use of force, and particularly constraining the monopoly. And then I'm going to argue how each of these principles is our good ones. They are good principles. But the problem is that once you've tried to use them simply to constrain the monopoly without getting rid of the monopoly, they're not good enough. And what's necessary is to have a more strict adherence to these principles, which would mean ending the monopoly and respecting principles of justice for everybody, including those people who are in charge of using force.