 is because our speaker is an individual of few words that's a few words at a time but his message is always one of the most stirring and important messages that we libertarians can hear and over the years he has continually addressed us to sharpen our thinking and as a small group trying to find our way in the whole the stalt of American politics and American morality and American culture in order to do something effective we need all the guidance that we can get the speaker was our first presidential candidate ran in 1972 when it was really was a tiny group he was the author of our statement of principles which is excellent statement of principles that has withstood the test of time he's a distinguished professor of philosophy and a wise and kind man John hospice thank you head ladies and gentlemen there are lots of social and political issues on which we've all been involved in discussions at different times punishment welfare war and peace mistreatment of children and so on on some of these though not all there is a distinctively libertarian position and what okay what has struck me many times in trying to develop that position is that I find different views emerging under the same libertarian label first there are those who take certain principles not always the same ones but principles they believe to be the libertarian ones and they attempt to rigidly deduce consequences from those consequences for conduct that apply strictly and without exception this alcohol pure libertarianism pure as the driven snow there are also those who either interpret the principles more liberally or permit some greater latitude in their application especially when the pure view departs somewhat from what's vaguely called common sense and this we may call without being judgmental about it impure libertarianism pure as the driven snow just drifted a bit now what the pure and impure variety say differs from issue to issue and one could be a pure on one topic and impure on another and I want to trace through three kinds of examples of this in this in this talk let me begin with an example though first a pure libertarian is very likely to take as an important premise I ran's statement that no human beings life should be a non voluntary mortgage on the life of another this is one of her brief seminal mind-blowing statements that changes everything you've ever heard if you understood if you understand and it has vast implications for instance that no one may deal with another person by force for force is opposed to voluntariness another implication is that there should be for instance no government welfare programs because such programs do cause the life of one person to be mortgage to another but now as to what should be done about it whether this principle should be implemented immediately that's a matter of disagreement a pure libertarian would say that government welfare payments are evil and should simply be stopped period stopped the non voluntary mortgage at once a less pure libertarian would be likely to agree with ran's principle but not put the draconian change into effect right away after all many people might starve there'd be riots in the cities would take more money to quell that then the welfare would cost or it would be unfair to terminate something on which people's expectations depend and suddenly pull the rug out and so on so it's all right to be pure but don't go pure right away no matter what the conditions and that could be applied to different issues like foreign aid and a whole bunch of other things now I want to point one thing out none of these neither of these alternatives is a strict consequence of the Randian principle from the fact that statement that nobody should be a non voluntary mortgage on another person's life it doesn't follow that you should stop welfare at once or only that in the ideal system this would be done and none should have started it doesn't really tell you specifically what to do once a mistake has been made and how you correct it the Randian premise doesn't logically imply either that you should put it to practice at once or that you may wait a while and have a waiting period or whatever so other premises are required to derive that conclusion there are lots of other examples the pure libertarian is not likely to accept matching funds during the presidential campaign for example I remember during my own abortive presidential campaign in 72 I did get one letter which said just in case you win the election remember you must not take one cent of pay that money was stolen from the taxpayers the person who wrote this was doubtless a pure libertarian is money not get not given with consent is stolen money and no one should knowingly take stolen goods a pure libertarian position but that takes us to the first of the three topics I want to discuss briefly today consent the California LP requirement for membership is that you not advocate force or fraud in achieving your goals except in retaliation now besides being rather vague and it doesn't define what fraud is or retaliation it is negative a positive one might be what we call the principle of consent I ran said here's again one of those brief trenchant statements of her in any enterprise involving more than one person said I ran the voluntary consent of all parties is required we constantly employ this principle in our dealings with other people in daily behavior also in law if you take someone's belongings without their consent that's theft if voluntarily it's given to you then it's a gift consent transforms stepped into a gift consent is what transforms rape into ordinary sexual intercourse similar cases and this this libertarian principle is very common sensical so far is it okay for me to play a tape continuously in your bedroom while you're asleep without your permission no you didn't consent you might not have okay to divest is it okay for you to irradiate your dinner guests to with your new and useless but harmless cancer cure no they didn't know about it and even if they're not harmed they did not consent and so on for lots of cases consent in law to usually does the trick except in cases like murder where even if the person consents to be killed that by our present law doesn't work that that indeed may change at any rate problems now occur consider it just this the murderer didn't consent to be tried or imprisoned perhaps we should put in a qualification unless he violated the rights of others and then we keep the principle intact but then we have to go lengthily into the subject of rights and what constitutes the rights violation and whether why force and fraud do constitute that and other things don't and so on more on this one in a minute but a much larger objection emerges to not only did the murderer not consent to be punished he didn't even consent to the system of law by which he was arrested and tried he didn't consent to the government under which he lives and neither did you or I we may have voted for the candidate who came in first but there are endless aspects of rules that govern us that we didn't consent to or even know about we may approve of having a legislative judicial and executive branch but I don't remember being asked about this or consenting to it and neither of course did we consent to the majority of the conditions under which we live for that matter like being born at this place and this time of these parents under these social conditions or indeed to be born at all it would be absurd to require consent to all these things most of which happened totally without our control we only demand to consent to those conditions or actions which would otherwise be forced on us by other people thus giving us a choice we would have or we wouldn't have one otherwise this is the old problem that in essence that is divided libertarians from the start following the principle of consent strictly the only pure libertarians would be advocates of anarchism because government violates the principle of consent and thus the advocates of libel government would either be impure libertarians or consigned to be non libertarians in spite of their saying that they are let me mention just in passing two ways to get around this to try to get around this one what one could say we that there is implicit consent now it's true there is such a thing as implicit consent and we sometimes give it if you knew that your next door neighbor was dropping his excess soil onto your yard from his own and you saw him do it and didn't do anything to stop him not even saying a word one might well say you implicitly consented to his doing it if you hire somebody to mow your lawn every Saturday and you've paid the person regularly for three months every week after he's finished and today he goes ahead and mows the lawn when you're not at home and asked for his money and you say I didn't consent to it this Saturday he might well say that you implicitly consented because a pattern has become established every week even nothing was stated explicitly however most cases of implicit consent aren't that clear cut that's the problem with the government lock thought that continued residents in a country implied consent and surely the residents however at least Berlin didn't consent to being there when the wall kept them from moving west and did you implicitly consent to support your children by the act of having them the law says you did did you or if a man and woman live together for years though not married and ten years later he finds another woman and kicks her out couldn't she go to court and claim that although they never discussed this possibility there was an implicit agreement that the income they earned together belong to them jointly it's not entirely clear exactly what the implicit agreement was supposed to be after all it was never made explicit and my only point is that implicit consent is very touchy you can't just say there was implicit consent there are plausible cases of it but in the critical case consent to government itself implicit consent doesn't seem to me very plausible at all secondly though you can take another line you can agree that the state violates the principle of consent and then argue that this is not the only principle with which our moral arsenal is stocked that one of the things we have to do is adjudicate different principles that come into conflict for instance the harm principle like not knowingly harm others or the principle of justice treat others in accord with their dessert or the principle of fair play that Rawls makes so much of that is the consent principle is not sufficient by itself thus the justice principle might required that murderers be punished in some way regardless of consent or lack of consent on their part alright so that's a second way to go to say the principle consent is fine but it's only one of several ones that have to be integrated with each other and that's a very promising line which hasn't been sufficiently developed all right there's not my purpose though to enter into the well-trodden area of government versus limited government versus no government what I want to do in the remainder of my time is to devote about 10 minutes to each of three topics illustrating pure and impure libertarianism I'll assume that there exists some system of law but I want to ask with specific cases what it should and shouldn't be and why I'll do this briefly in these three areas the one consent continuing that third second privacy and the third endangerment or risk on each of these there's a lot of conflict within the libertarian camp and I will try to bring out alternatives rather than try to decide for you what I think is correct the ideal case one might think of consent that occurs in contract that draw both parties voluntarily consent if they don't if it's not voluntary if it's forced then it's not a not a valid contract but some problems which we hadn't anticipated as anybody knows who's done contract law arise even here where consent doesn't seem to be always necessary let's try a couple of simple cases and then get to a more complex way first example Smith sells a violin to Jones Jones thinks it's a strativarius so it pays a lot of money for it Smith makes no claims for it later Jones discovered it's not a strativarius asked for his money back no dice if Smith had made this claim for it the contract would have been fraudulent but that's not so in this case Smith is not obliged to return the money second example white sells black a house black buys it because it's next to a vacant lot has a nice view and later white who also owns the vacant lot decides to build on it black sues him saying he wouldn't have bought the house except for the vacant lot next door black has I would say no come back here the vacant lot was no part of the agreement an oil company buys land from a farmer at a thousand per acre the farmer willingly sells later it turns out that there was oil under the land and he claims the land was worth at least ten thousand an acre the old company concealed this information but on the other hand the farmer didn't ask for it no fraudulent claims were made it was only a concealment of information or lack of giving it on the whole I'd say there was no contract violation here though some of us might feel a little bit more uncomfortable about this example than about the earlier ones now three more complicated cases and I go on here's a case which rests on a misunderstanding a contracts to ship for be a cargo and these three cases are actual ones I'm putting you can get from the law books on the ship peerless and he does country but unknown to either of them there are two ships with the same name a shipped on one ship and be expected the shipment on the other one and nothing in the contract allowed for this much of this understanding now it had the case had to be adjudicated somehow but it couldn't be by by consent because neither of them consented I mean they were they were just going in different directions with this thing a somewhat different kind of case impossibility a contractor agrees to build an apartment building at a certain location yet he encounters very swampy terrain he almost completes the building it collapses he starts again it collapses again finally he throws up his hands and says look it's impossible to get a building started in this site the owner of the land then sues him saying he didn't live up to the contract the judge goes along with the contractor saying that he's excused from the terms of the contract because it was impossible to live up to its terms and impossibility renders the contract void though it didn't agree to do this this was not consented to by both parties but that's the way the judge decided and one could ask how else could he really have decided penalize someone for not doing the impossible here here's a case and again actual case that occurred around 1890 Philadelphia a railroad company ordered a shipment of railroad ties from Scotland via the nearest port which was Glasgow the ship this was in the contract that it had to be shipped from there the shipper can't ship from Glasgow because of a strike so he shipped it from Aberdeen instead and instead of he absorbed the extra cost of the extra transportation and he did deliver the ties on time but the railroad company who by that which by that time didn't want the ties anymore sued for a breach of contract saying it was in the contract it had to be shipped from Glasgow and it wasn't so the contract has been violated and the court decided that the agreement that the contract had been observed in spite of the fact that the Glasgow clause had not been observed simply because this was in the presumed intent of putting it in Glasgow was to get the ties at the minimum possible time and that indeed was done so that aspect that clause in the contract was simply overridden and this wasn't consent by both parties but it was seems a wise judicial decision now before we leave contract before we leave the topic of consent a little bit more they're pretty hairy cases that make us really wonder here's a person with violent epilepsy caused by a brain condition which can be seen on the x-ray an operation would correct it if he says yes no problem if he says no libertarians I think would still say no problem we don't operate on him without his consent isn't that general the libertarian position now many doctors would favor operating on him anyway saying he doesn't realize how much freer and happier he'd be after the operation and he'd lose all this tendency toward violence the correction of the patient's organic condition will give him more rather than less control over his own behavior writes dr. Vernon mark in the in an article called brain surgery and aggressive epileptics it enhances and does not diminish his dignity and humanity I think the libertarian position so far is don't operate even though we all know he'd be happier better off after the surgery it's for him to decide okay so far so good or maybe not so good yet but now try this I know this is the following case of a pedestrian who suffered extensive brain damage when the car ran over his head the insurance company contacted him and he agreed to settle the case for a thousand dollars but he didn't have much of a brain left with which to make the decision would appear libertarian still say well it was his decision and he consented so that's final and then a person may be considering other cases insane literally not know what he's doing or he might just be extremely stupid and not able to anticipate or control events in his life when I go through the various legal definitions of insanity I keep always keep thinking that they all apply to stupidity just as well and what if somebody who suffers from a senility or advanced Alzheimer's disease and here people are declared mentally incompetent without their consent and now libertarians are right to object to this in lots of cases injustice is done people lose their bank account their homes their rights under the law because the judge makes a declaration but then there are also cases which we mustn't just necessary quickly align with the first ones where the person literally has no idea who or what he or she is and can't make any decision anymore than a newborn infant can the idea of letting one person make a judgment about the disposition of another person's fate is very upsetting to libertarians it strikes at the vital center of this personal responsibility concept but what if there isn't much of a be to make a decision about his or her life one does this all the time in the case of small children parents protect them from danger by force if necessary the old lady has rather lost her moorings and she sits alone in her apartment and she thinks she's somewhere else and she doesn't recognize her children and on her own she couldn't possibly survive but she won't leave she wants to stay in her house of 40 years but there's no way to enable her to do this if others don't make a decision for her she dies there are lots of cases of this kind I'll omit some of the more interesting ones for the sake of just getting on with the with the next part I'll come back to consent and connection with the other two but meanwhile a related thing not quite the same where again there's a difference between pure and impure it doesn't always operate in the same way let's talk a little bit about privacy it's central to libertarian thought although the term may not be often mentioned the Constitution doesn't mention privacy at all but some of the amendments in the Bill of Rights do address it the First Amendment protects free association protecting your private space against those who would invade it the Third Amendment protects against quartering of soldiers in private homes the Fourth Amendment protects privacy very clearly by prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and so on the importance of privacy having some kind of space that is our own and nobody else's it's intricately bound up with our dignity as human beings so their respect owed by people to each other Charles Fried in his book and Adam E of values writes this these two sentences privacy provides us with the context for our most significant ends like love trust friendship respect it's a necessary element in these relations without privacy they're inconceivable threat to privacy is a threat to our integrity as persons and privacy is a necessary atmosphere for these attitudes and actions as oxygen is for combustion unquote now there's some disagreement as to how privacy should be defined some authors of illegal textbooks believe that what defines privacy is that there are limits to the excess others should have to perceiving you for instance somebody may not without your consent take a picture of you and then feature it on the cover of a magazine the following week this is an invasion of your privacy more usually however privacy is defined in different terms in terms of information about you when about when you may not want others to possess things you don't want other people to know unless you give them permission now invasion of privacy must be distinguished from libel and slander that is defamation in defamation a person must purposely and maliciously say or write something false about you and cause you damage in invasion of privacy nothing false need be said for example a millionaire tried in Los Angeles to keep his wife's suicide out of the newspapers the newspapers said no because they said news comes first a father's six-year-old daughter was mangled by a passing car he tried to keep the picture out of the paper news comes first it didn't succeed but six years later when an organization devoted to automotive safety used the same picture on a poster to warn pedestrians he sued them for invasion of privacy and one now some would say that privacy should be legally protected only when it's already covered by another kind of law namely protecting property thus your someone can examine your private papers by breaking into your home and so on I doubt however that this will do you can now find the contents of confidential papers and oral conversations without ever coming on somebody else's premises you can tap their phone without without the phone being off the hook you can hear what's going on in the in the house by the whole being many many feet outside and in fact judge John Marshall first justice of the Supreme Court remarked the following in 1820 ways will one day be developed by the government without removing papers from secret drawers they will be able to reproduce them in court and will be unable to expose the most intimate occurrences of the home advances in psychological psychological and related sciences will bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs and thoughts and emotions can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasion of individual security that's what he asked 150 years ago now the main thing that places in legal limitations on your privacy is the safety of others being subjected to electronic surveillance is surely an invasion of your privacy perhaps as much as having the IRS read your checks at the bank yet it's legally approved to some degree depending on the state of the US that you live in if your telephone is tapped your house is bugged by hidden electronic equipment so everything is overheard surely it's a clear violation of privacy but before we get to that the pure libertarian position one pure libertarian position I'll outline another one in a second is that this is always an admissible invasion of privacy however suppose that your life hung in the balance there was a plot to murder you and the only way to uncover the people who were doing it would be to tap their phone would you granted that's maybe an extreme situation but you might consider your life more valuable than their privacy and vote in favor of the surveillance I don't know this is this is where the pure and impure certainly get distinguished but let's see for a minute before we leave this topic how privacy operates in the legal system it's a chaos right now you can find out who's in jail by dealing by dialing a certain phone number you can find out what they're accused of when they're to appear in court that's public information even though they don't want it and they don't consent that's public it's considered important for anyone who wants this information can have it and it helps guarantee against secret trials it's a little bit different with psychiatric information you want to find someone someone who's in the mental institution it's not that easy as a rule what a defendant says to his attorney is legally privileged it's protected he can confess to murders and the attorney keeps quiet his position is like that of the priest and confessor what's more controversial is whether the relation between physician and patients should be like that and that's still in controversy today new york was the first state in 1828 to guarantee the confidentiality of the physician patient relationship the theory was if the patient was not guaranteed that his communication with his doctor would be kept confidential by the doctor the patient would then stay away from doctors and his health might suffer that view 1828 was never more appropriate than in today's controversy about requiring doctors to report AIDS cases however in 34 states the physician patient communication is privileged the doctor may not reveal in court what he learned from the patient professionally and so when a passenger in a new york taxi cab falsely claimed whiplash and sued the taxi cab company the physician was not permitted to testify although one sentence from him would have turned would have thrown out the whole case that sentence was i've been treating this man for sciatica for three years in new york the relation between patient and his psychologist is also privileged in new york dentists are privileged as well none of them are in arkansas but nurses are privileged there in new jersey physicians are not privileged at all and they must answer court questions but newspaper reporters are privileged and don't have to in georgia and tennessee physicians must tell all about their patients in court but psychologists may not do so and so on now a minute more on privacy condensing this a politician can claim and can't claim invasion of privacy because he sought an asked for the job which involves publicity he can sue for libel if somebody says something false about but not if they don't but here's a former opera superstar whose voice has declined with the years and she no longer wants to be listened to and she sings only behind closed doors and her neighbor trains an amplifier on her apartment door and listens and records in the theme of it is she ain't what she used to be now this may all be true question now are you quite sure that you want her to have no recourse against such things perhaps not perhaps her life is fair game for others it hardly seems fair to her if you can of course say those are the breaks but could you say that too if she'd been you could say that too if she'd been stolen from raped or murdered the question is should she have legal protection and on this privacy issue pure libertarians can take two opposed views depending on whose interest they most wish to protect if you have a right to privacy the person who invades it the privacy of the opera star is a rights violator you protect a person's privacy and no one may cross that invisible line sacred on the other hand you might see the issue from the other person's angle he can say whatever he likes about the opera star he can even record her decaying voice without her permission and sell the unauthorized recordings and all these are a part of his freedom to act in accordance with his own judgment and if her feelings are hurt and her previous privacy invaded well that's tough luck the impure variety will as always say that the answer lies somewhere in between that depends on the individual case and so on exactly where you can't state in advance you have to learn the specific details of the individual case before you take a position make a judgment and this is messy and the truth often is messy but that's the line the impure libertarian will take on this type of case not one extreme or for that matter the other one this is unsatisfying to pure libertarians but anyway that's i think that that's the way the ball bounces on this issue finally one the third topic risk and endangerment to live at all as a risk you take a risk when you cross the street we don't sue people for risks we sue them for damages when damage or injury has occurred to sue or prosecute for what might have happened but didn't would fill the court dockets much more than they're filled now besides being impractical we'd also consider it improper procedure in morality we may be to blame for creating risks but just the risk alone isn't enough to receive damages or so the pure libertarian says no fine and no punishment unless damage or injury has actually been inflicted at least i know some people who view themselves as pure libertarians and that's that's that's the watchword the impure libertarian however may say not so fast it should also be punishable to engage in very dangerous activities even though you may not sue for this there should be laws against such behavior now it may seem as if this move by this move we're muddying the clear waters of our thought aren't we opening the floodgates to almost everything when we say that not only damage or actual injury but the danger or risk of it should be prohibited maybe so our instincts certainly go along here so far with the pure libertarian we don't want to ban dangerous activities i mean a woman is like mountain climbing woman is walking along the street there's a man following her she turns the corner he follows her she turns another corner he follows her again she'd like to call the police on him for on what charge i mean harassment there hasn't been any yet besides libertarians don't like i'll ask for harassment laws uh he has the same rights to walk the streets that she has maybe he was going the same way maybe he was just going to ask her for the time who knows nothing has happened yet no charge so far let's think about this one it's illegal to drive on the left side of the road you can be arrested for doing it on a two-lane highway in the states or to drive a hundred miles per hour in a residential zone to do these things is very very risky so they're prohibited i think most people are sort of glad they are would you really prefer it if starting today people could drive on whatever side of the road they pleased aren't you glad that if the bridge is out there has to be a warning of this and that there have to be signs of railroad crossings and that the use of dangerous but necessary chemicals like those infumigation are rigidly controlled and that some like the plastic bombs that cause the destruction of pan m103 are prohibited entirely and there's also this question what if at unsuccessful attempts he planted the bomb but it didn't go off under today's law he can be arrested for attempt now many pure libertarians like randy barnett do not believe in laws against uh prohibiting attempts say if no harm is done then forget about it of course you may by preventing it now you may prevent a successful attack later well all right that may be the case what about somebody who shoots another but unknown to him somebody has substituted blanks for real bullets so no harm is done it was certainly an attempt and the question now is should attempts be uh prohibited i mean the pure libertarian is inclined to say no like marnett and impure to say yes they should be because of what they can prevent later similarly with conspiracy here's a conspiracy to commit a crime you plan a crime like charles manson without actually wielding the knife you inspire those who do or you're the victim of a conspiracy to kill you you didn't happen to be around just at that moment so the conspiracy failed uh would you rather have your would be assailants arrested or wait for them to try again there's all kinds of problems here you see i want to keep your mind sort of divided between saying yes risks should be prohibited certain risks if they're very extreme and by saying no you only punish for actual events one or two more cases then i'll close having guns is dangerous you might shoot somebody in haste or while drunk and somebody might take your gun from you and do it to you or a child might use it all the familiar stuff but of course this is also a double knife if someone is threatening to use force against you threatening that person with a gun may be the only way to stop him from killing you and it's for that reason that the founding fathers guaranteed the right to bear arms nobody should be a sitting duck in the faces of some face of someone else's violence that's the situation that still leaves most questions unanswered you have a right to keep and bear arms only in your home or anywhere you happen to go someone else's property perhaps and which arms may we have does the constitution entitle you to a Saturday night special or a semi-automatic or just some means to defend yourself maybe just a butcher knife maybe just a karate chop it doesn't say is it okay to make small nuclear bombs in your basement carry them around maybe in your briefcase so that in case someone bothers you too much you can eliminate him immediately i think the pure libertarian position is this you can have any weapon provided you use it defensively i mean they mentioned this sorry i'll mention this to me i'll be about three minutes more but you may use may not use any weapon not even a butcher knife offensively of course you have to be quite sure what's to count as defensive and offensive and unfortunately the same things that can be used for defense can also be used for offense and that's very very embarrassing and it makes things very very difficult anyway that's the the pure line we also have this with product liability cases is the pinto too dangerous to be allowed on the road and so on and so on lots of cases of that kind but i conclude there's one example i'll comment on it and then conclude this from a case history sometimes i think that what i really want to do is kill people and drink their blood dr allen wolf looked at the young men in the chair the face was round and soft and innocent looking like that of a baby but the body had the powerful shoulders of a college wrestler there was no doubt that hell crane had the strength to carry out his fantasy any people in particular girls about my age in the early 20s but nobody you know that's right just people i see getting off a bus i have a tremendous urge to stick a knife into them and feel the blood on my hands but you've never done this no but i might dr wolf considered him a paranoid schizophrenic who might act out his fantasies he was a walking time bomb would you be willing to take my advice and put yourself in a hospital for a little while i won't do that i won't be locked up like an animal but you don't really want to hurt other people do you i guess not i haven't done anything yet but you might he said you might kill someone well that's just the chance people will have to take isn't it i i told you i'm not going to let myself be locked up like an animal and that's it i have several comments and just one will do let's suppose for a minute that psychotherapy would resolve cranes internal conflict and cure his condition but that he won't consent to it are we perhaps entitled to use it on him anyway for his sake and for ours remember if he's cured he saves himself and who knows how many others who might be as victims the pure libertarian says no we may not do it we can't even offer him the choice psychotherapy or detention he'd be foolish to turn it down of course but if he does he still has no we still have no right to impose it on him against his will not even if what we demand is one hour of therapy a week and that no matter how dangerous he is that's the pure libertarian view he wants it all though no psychotherapy and no detention should we give him all of that that's protecting him by endangering ourselves that's the question how do you balance danger to us against freedom for him now i raise these questions including here not to really to get you to accept certain solutions but to get you in the habit of viewing an issue in its full complexity before opting for some neat formula that sounds attractive and that will make thought unnecessary after that this is a false comfort i don't want to leave i want you to feel uncomfortable about these cases especially when you push them to borderline areas and not to give in to the tremendous temptation to refer all specific questions to some slogan it's a pity that reality defies our neat and tidy categories but that's the way reality is and premature assurance premature codification into a slogan and then using the slogan to obtain quick converts that only gives us fair weather friends anyway those who give verbal assent and then don't try to understand add nothing they may find an inadequately comprehended slogan attractive on tuesday and then drop it for another inadequately comprehended slogan on wednesday there is no shortcut we have to be careful we have to be always probing always trying to think of counter examples to facile and tempting formulations and this will help us not only to be thorough but to be undeviatingly honest in what we present and what we say only then will our movement become what anatole france once once described in another context as a moment in the conscience of the human race thank you very much