The Meaning of Justice

The challenge of defining justice is that it is both a moral and a legal concept.
 
Reason, courage, integrity, and independence, for example, are moral values with no direct legal counterpart. They each are, to use Ayn Rand’s succinct definition (p. 15), a “that which one acts to gain and/or keep” and derive from the fundamental standard of human life as a rational being. Reason therefore is the highest moral value and standard of ethics. The corresponding virtue is rationality, namely the use of reason as “one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action” (p. 25). The other three virtues, as I have written before, are, respectively, “acting against great odds or opposition, remaining loyal to one’s fundamental values, [and] relying on one’s own mind to perceive reality.”
 
“Value” is what we act to attain. “Virtue” is the action of acquiring and sustaining the value.
 
In that earlier post, I said the virtue of justice means “judging oneself and others by conformity to moral and legal standards.” But there is an acting component to both the moral and legal concepts that I did not include. Justice is not only a matter of judging, but also a matter of acting in relation to the person being judged.
 
Let’s take the legal concept first, as it is relatively easy to explain. Justice in our legal system means judging a person based on existing law and exonerating or punishing accordingly.
 
Laws in the current system, however, can themselves be judged by more fundamental moral principles, such as by identifying whether the laws violate or support individual rights. Thus, we can also judge what should be law in a proper, more rational capitalistic society, then praise or condemn based on projected law. Big businesses, for example, may be praised for all of the wealth they create, rather than condemned by the non-objective regulations, as happens today.
 
Definitions or at least descriptions of justice in the moral sense abound in the Ayn Rand literature. Let’s examine several.
 
Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness (p. 26) writes “that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit.” But aren’t earned and deserved synonyms of, or closely related terms to, justice?
 
In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (p. 51), she writes that justice is “the act of judging a man’s character and/or actions exclusively on the basis of all the factual evidence available, and of evaluating it by means of an objective moral criterion” (Rand’s emphasis). This does not include the component of acting in relation to the person being evaluated. Note that justice is itself a moral value and virtue that requires other more fundamental moral values and virtues as criteria by which a person is to be judged, for example, “That person was not honest with me!” Justice is derivative from those other values.
 
Leonard Peikoff (p. 276) does mention the acting component: justice means “judging men’s character and conduct objectively and . . . acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves” (Peikoff’s emphasis). But, again, isn’t “deserve” a synonym of justice? And we might also ask what does acting accordingly mean?*
 
Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019) implies justice means  “that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero.” Galt here is speaking in elegant, dramatic terms about the principle of trade, which indeed seems to be an acting component of justice.
 
Rand (p. 31), finally, drives the point home: “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.” Trade is an action, so it seems to be the acting component we are looking for.
 
Let us now try to sort out from these various statements what justice is and concisely state its genus and differentia.
 
As in the legal system, justice is a judgment, which means identifying facts about the person in relation to a standard. And as in the legal system, justice calls for action in relation to the person judged. Thus:

Justice is the value and virtue of accurately identifying facts about oneself and others and comparing those facts to the standard of what is beneficial or harmful to human life as a rational being, then when rationally appropriate engaging the others by exchanging value for value or rejecting any such exchange, which can include punishment.**

In short, justice means accurately judging and—when rationally appropriate—praising or condemning. (“Oneself” must be included in the formal definition because we can be just or unjust to ourselves.)
 
“Value” and “virtue” is the genus, judging and acting in a certain way is the differentia. The qualification of “when rationally appropriate” must be included because we judge people, events, businesses, and governments all the time, but do not have a “duty” to praise or, especially, to condemn them. Much of the time we are not even close to the person being judged, such as a talking head on cable news! And as I often told my students—when judging people we are close to, including ourselves, or when judging events, businesses, governments, and talking heads—be sure to dig, dig, dig for the facts. “Do you have all of them?” I would ask.
 
One final moral concept of justice must be mentioned and dispensed with: social justice. I have defined it as the virtue of “accurately judging oppressed classes as underprivileged and granting them restitution” with a variety of handouts taken from those who are morally competent and successful (Applying Principles, p. 96). In other words, from those who have earned their wealth and property. Social justice is the moral, and by extension, legal concept of collectivist victimology.
 
What it really means is to take from the alleged thieving rich and give to the alleged underprivileged poor. It is a dishonest concept and is therefore unjust!
 
 
* “Fairness” is another word that is often thrown in when discussing justice, but it, too, is a synonym.
 
** “Exchanging value for value” is the general meaning of trade, but it is important to note that in economics and business “trade” has a narrower meaning: the buyer values the product more than the money paid and the seller values the money received more than the product sold. In the more general moral sense of the term, the exchange is still a value-for-value trade.

Business Ethics, Moral Values, and the Herd Conformity of Virtue Signaling

So-called virtue signaling means showing off to the significant others of one’s group in order to maintain identity as a prominent and respected member. It is always other directed with eyes on conforming to the herd. “Sucking up” might be a vernacular way of describing the behavior. “Looking good to be good” is another way.

Genuinely virtuous behavior is an expression of one’s character and what others think of us is fundamentally irrelevant.

Ethics (or morality—the two words are synonyms), as Ayn Rand defined it, is “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.” The first part of this definition is the genus and includes not just Ayn Rand’s theory, but the other ethical theories that have been developed throughout history. More importantly to understand, the genus also includes the applied sciences and the many personal values we choose that are morally optional, such as taste in ice cream, choice of romantic partner and career, or the eating of red meat and drinking water out of plastic bottles.

Moral values are universal. Optional values are not, which means they do not have to be accepted and pursued by everyone.

The second part of the definition is the differentia that gives us a standard of moral value, as well as the derivative values and virtues that guide our choices and actions. A value is whatever we act to acquire and enjoy and a virtue is the action to acquire it. Moral values and virtues are broad abstractions and general actions, not concrete objects or specific actions.

Rand’s standard of moral value is human life as a being that possesses the capacity to reason. Her fundamental value, then, is reason with the corresponding virtue of rationality. Deriving from that standard, Rand identifies several other moral values, including honesty, courage, integrity, independence, productive work, and justice, to name several that are relevant for the present discussion.

The corresponding virtues derived from reason and rationality are telling the truth, acting against great odds or opposition, remaining loyal to one’s fundamental values, relying on one’s own mind to perceive reality, purposeful pursuit of a rewarding career, and judging oneself and others by conformity to moral and legal standards, including especially in business by the standard of the ability to do the job. Vices are the opposite: lying, cowardice, corruption, dependence, indolence, and unfairness. Irrationality means placing something higher than reason, such as faith or emotion.

At this point let me highlight the optional values that guide our lives. First, the applied sciences. The engineer has a code of values to guide his or her thinking and development processes of designing and making tools to improve human life. The end value may be to build a bridge; the principles of civil engineering are the guides. We normally do not call the actions of engineers moral virtues and the mistakes vices, unless dishonesty or cowardice is involved. The values and principles of action required of applied sciences, and the behavior of their practitioners, are assumed to be moral unless one has reason to think otherwise.

Our personal values also are assumed to be moral, but just as everyone does not have to be a civil engineer, or an engineer at all, not everyone has to like vanilla ice cream or even like ice cream at all. We all hold and pursue a large number of morally optional or personal values. Choice of romantic partner and career both are extremely personal and optional, but also complicated in the sense of requiring a great deal of thought, planning, and knowledge before making the choice. And both do have moral components, as Rand has discussed extensively (1, 2), but I am focusing here are the optional element.

As stated above, red meat and water in plastic bottles are not moral values and acting to acquire and use both are not vices. Someone putting a slab of red meat over your face such that you cannot breathe would be a moral issue, but then we would be talking about attempted murder!

In a free society, no one will stop you from refraining from eating red meat, if you think that is necessary for your physical health. But it is not a moral issue. Neither will anyone stop you from drinking water out of non-plastic bottles.

Individual rights mean that everyone has the moral right to choose whatever each person wants to eat and whatever container each wants to drink water out of. Preaching a gospel of “immoral” foods and containers is the moralization of concretes that I have written about before. It is rampant in today’s culture and a major source of “virtue signaling.”

It is also condescending and phony, condescending because the signalers are convinced they are right and everyone else is wrong and phony because the signalers are playing at ethics without a clue as to what ethics really is.

Leaders of the intelligentsia, however, do or should know better, especially when they are spewing communist/fascist propaganda, such as: “the United States is systemically racist,” “recent state laws are election suppression,” and the favorite of all Marxists, “capitalism puts profits over people.”*

Such signals as these are either false (the first and third) or highly questionable without further investigation (the second). And all, in contrast to true moral values and virtues, are political catchphrases used as virtue signals to intimidate any opponent into thinking he or she is immoral.**

For business leaders to cite and promote them is not just gutless compromise of the principles of individual rights and capitalism, but their actions bring up 1932 Germany (1, 2) when twenty-two business leaders urged President von Hindenburg (who some said was senile) to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.

The group that today’s business leaders are sucking up to is the communist/fascist left and they, the business leaders, apparently think they will be protected when the left finally takes over the US government. Think again, business leaders, and do your homework about what happened to business leaders in the USSR and Nazi Germany.

Business ethics does not differ from general ethics, as moral values and virtues are broad enough to cover all applied fields. Business leaders, therefore, need to practice Rand’s virtues. Justice is particularly relevant to business ethics and virtue signaling because it means judging each individual person according to the moral standards of honesty, courage, integrity, independence, and productive work and treating each person by his or her conformity to those standards. It does not mean judging one by membership in a group, class, race, or by sex or sexual orientation (i.e., social justice). Individual justice in society means abiding by the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights and treating everyone equally, regardless of group, class, race, sex, or sexual orientation.

All virtue signaling is manifestly unjust because it is a pretension to ethics that does not treat each individual fairly or equally. At root it is collectivist. To some virtue signaling may be a psychological problem, which means they want to be liked, but for the virtue-signaling leaders, especially our business leaders, it puts us on a dangerous path to dictatorship—as in one-party rule, show trials or worse, expropriation of private property, and censorship.

Are we there yet, business leaders?

You and many others in the intelligentsia have become true believers, to borrow Eric Hoffer’s words on mass movements. You seem to be seeking, in your desperate and foolish virtue signaling, to identify with the left’s holy cause (1, p. 12; 2).

Hoffer has many phrases to describe the true believer, but here is a choice one (p. 62): each individual member of the movement “must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness . . .  by the complete assimilation of the individual into a collective body.”

It means conformity to the herd.

In the late nineteenth century an advertising client asked his agent if he had any good ideas for ads. The agent replied, “Try honesty for a change!”

Altering this advice a bit, my suggestion to you, dear business leaders, is to try a genuinely virtuous behavior for a change—especially one of honesty, courage, integrity, independence, justice, and productive work.

A virtuous character is not a signal. It is a way of life.


* The intelligentsia does far worse. Cancel culture, according to David Horowitz, is tantamount to Nazi book burning and should be called what it is. And most or all of today’s leftist leaders are bigoted racists. Their intimidation tactics are right out of the Nazi playbook. Ominous parallels? The problem with conservatives, says Horowitz, is that they want to “play patty cake with the devil.”

** Racism, as Shelby Steele has demonstrated (1, 2), effectively ended in the 1960s with desegregation. What we have now is systemic white guilt. Issues of election irregularities or fraud are factual issues that need to be thoroughly examined, not evaded. And under capitalism, profits are earned through customer satisfaction. They are not deductions from the wages of workers; wages are deductions from profits (1, 2).
 

Why I Self-Publish

Today, Independent Judgment and Introspection, my third self-published book, goes on sale. Why do I self-publish?

In 1981, I bought and read a book titled the Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter. I was intrigued but at the time had nothing to publish!

In 1993, I submitted to five publishers a proposal and three chapters of a book I had titled “Advertising: Beacon of Capitalism.” One called me and offered a contract. Flattered beyond belief, I said, “Where do I sign?” In the course of talking to my editor, he said my title was “too flag wavy” and suggested the current one, In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism.

The editor also made a casual remark that made me a little uneasy, but I did not think too much about it. He said, “With the advent of electronic publishing, books may never go out of print.” In later years, I realized the message was, “Good luck getting your rights back!” I did not know about print on demand (today’s technology of printing one book at a time) and I doubt that my editor knew about it. I was aware that I had signed away all rights, which is what all but the highly successful best-selling authors must do to get a book published. Best-selling authors can negotiate with publishers and even receive a lucrative advance against royalties. The rest of us must take what the publisher offers, which may include copyright in the publisher’s name, not yours.

In 1994, In Defense of Advertising was published by Quorum Books, an imprint of the Greenwood Publishing Group in Westport, Connecticut.* Price was $45, hardcover only, and a lot of money in those years with similar books today going for $180-200 plus. Target market was “scholarly/professional,” which meant college libraries and motivated professors or individuals  who might be willing to pay that kind of money. The book did respectably. Sales in the hundreds, not thousands.

By the early 2000s the book’s sales trickled to almost nothing and I was interested in seeing it in paperback, even if I had to publish it myself. I joined the Author’s Guild, an organization mainly for the Stephen King’s of the world, but one benefit is that members can ask questions of the Guild’s lawyers. I asked for, and got, advice on how to ask for my rights back. I also got a stern sermon on why I shouldn’t have signed away all rights! The advice was to offer to buy all books in the warehouse at cost. There weren’t many, so the publisher accepted and I got the rights back in 2006. I self-published the paperback in 2007.

With the ease of print on demand (lack of need to carry inventory) and electronic publishing, I doubt that publishers today would be so generous in returning rights. In 1992 the same publisher (now under the Praeger imprint) published a scholarly collection that included one of my papers. I was asked recently to include the same paper in a new collection, but the 1992 book is still in print in Kindle and print-on-demand versions. The publisher wanted $1500 for the “privilege” of reprinting the paper. I once again joined the Author’s Guild to ask about my rights. The lawyer said I did sign away everything, but he also thought the publisher was unethical in “ransoming” my paper. He also gave me references to a statutory right of termination for papers in collections. It says I can get my rights back in 2026. If the publisher doesn’t play lawyerly games with me! (Permission to reprint academic papers is always free as long as credit is given—except in this case.)

For two or three years, I submitted my second book, Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, to about fifteen publishers, getting wonderful peer review comments (from a university press) such as “I don’t consider Ayn Rand to be a reference for anything.” (See my comment on the ethics and epistemology of peer review, Applying Principles, pp. 130-32). One publisher was willing to publish the book as is, but the copyright was to be in their name and I had to provide my own typeset page proofs (in Microsoft Word), copy editing (which most publishers provide for authors), and an index (which publishers do not provide). And, of course, I had to sign away all rights. I did attempt to negotiate but only got as far as, “I guess you can have the copyright in your name.” At that point, I exclusively became a self-publisher. Here are my reasons why.

The business model of publishers is much like that of the Hollywood movie studios. They make their money on hits, the best sellers, but it is difficult to predict which books will be runaway best sellers. So they accept as many books as they can handle, spend about three months on each one before publication date and three months after, then move on to the next. If the book doesn’t continue to sell well, it is thrown in the back pages of the publisher’s catalog.

Most of the publishing work, which includes production and marketing of the book, falls on the author. Typically, publishers will copy edit and typeset the manuscript, design a cover, list the book with top wholesalers (which gets the books listed online at retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble). They will send the book to some pre- and post-publication reviewers and put the book in their catalog that is mailed or emailed to the “house list,” an amalgam of past buyers and interested readers. If your book looks like it may sell well, you may be offered a book tour and some ads may be placed. There are no guarantees that your book will end up in a retail store. (Retailers require discounts of 40-60%  and if the books don’t move off the shelf, they are returned for refund and shipped at your cost. Refunds and shipping are deducted from royalties.)

The author must do and provide everything else. The author is asked to provide lists of contacts that might buy the book and possible review outlets. The author must provide an index, which if hired by a professional indexer can cost one or two thousand dollars. (This is the reason many books have no index or a poor one. The author does not want to pay for an index or want or know how to do one.) The author must proofread the typeset page proofs and return them in a short turnaround time, usually within two or three days. Advertising? Book tour? Convincing local retailers to carry your book? The publisher won’t stop you from spending your time and money on any of these ventures, though your contract probably has a veto or approval clause about the advertising!

So how many books actually get sold? Nielsen Bookscan in 2004 tracked 1.2 million books. Ten books sold more than a million copies, 500 more than 100,000, and two percent (or 24,000) more than 5000. Ninety-seven percent, however, sold fewer than 1000 and 80% fewer than 99.** The numbers are sobering and I doubt that they would be much different today, perhaps worse considering how many self-published books are on the market now.

The advantage of self-publishing is, in one word, control. I have total control of my books and my heirs can keep them in print after I’m gone. In the old days traditional publishers would just let books go out of print, often with excess copies destroyed (“pulped,” in the publishing lingo). Now they probably will never let them go out of print, making it difficult, if not impossible, to get your rights back. The drawback to self-publishing is that you have to do all the work yourself, although there are many advisors and consultants willing to do the work for you and gladly take your money, which can quickly add up to thousands of dollars that probably cannot be made back in sales. Self-publishing is work and you must enjoy doing it. Otherwise, the traditional path is the way to go, with a membership in the Author’s Guild and/or a good lawyer.

Scholarly books, which mine are, may not make the bestseller lists, but they can be discovered by graduate students and professors while browsing the stacks of a library or by noticing them in the bibliographies and footnotes of other books and papers or just by doing a “books-in-print” search on our modern day books-in-print (and not-in-print) database, Amazon.com.

Years ago, I was impressed by the lesson of Hermann Gossen whose book in 1854 was nearly wiped out of existence (most copies destroyed), until discovered in 1878 by a colleague of William Stanley Jevons. Gossen had anticipated the law of marginal utility, as later elaborated by Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras. (See Mises on Gossen, p. 331.)

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, pp. 41-44), I expressed optimism about the future of “good—meaning rational—ideas” (though the leftists have challenged this premise a bit in the past two or three years). I related how in the eighth century BC the Greeks came out of their Dark Age and immediately wrote down their entire oral tradition, which led eventually to the Greek Golden Age. And I noted how Europe in the fifteenth century, with the invention of moveable type, published within a hundred years all extant written work, which gave us the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, and the standard of living we all enjoy today.

In the twenty-first century, the move is toward digitization of all of the world’s literature. Does this mean there will be a new Renaissance?

“Good—meaning rational—ideas” do eventually seem to be discovered and advanced, if they are available in permanent form.


* “Imprint” is the publishing industry’s substitute for brand name. Most publishers, who likely were English majors in college, prefer not to be associated with the Procter and Gamble’s of the world.

** This and other data from the early 2000s can be found in a thinly disguised business case at jkirkpatrick.net/jstpress.pdfhttps://jkirkpatrick.net/jstpress.pdf. It is a thin disguise of yours truly’s experiences at self-publishing. More recent data: brick-and-mortar book store sales, now only 39% of total book sales, peaked in 2008 and are declining slowly. The number of Barnes & Noble stores also peaked in 2008 and have also been declining slowly (1, 2). Independent book stores, interestingly, have grown almost 40% since 2009.

(Cross posted on the books' website.)

Naïveté, Gutlessness, and Concessions: On the Anatomy of Compromise

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” This is the motto of the left and I quoted it in an earlier post.

Its meaning? Say and do whatever will work to achieve power. Cloak your words and actions in “democracy” or, as in today’s “anything goes” cultural atmosphere, call anyone who disagrees with you a racist or fascist or, perhaps worst of all, someone who is deplorably lacking in compassion and, of course, is selfish. When one issue fails to work, move on to the next, with relentless energy.

In our Goebbelsian culture facts don’t matter. Truth and objectivity are out.

BS (Applying Principles, pp. 307-09) is the accepted method of communication, which means: say what sounds good and true to advance your agenda, not what is good and true.

How do we oppose this leftist juggernaut and why do the leftists seem to have so much energy? The answer to the second question, aside from their envy-ridden and hatred-driven motivation, is that the leftists’ most important value is politics and the drive for power and control. The rest of us have lives and careers beyond politics.*

Opposing the leftist juggernaut, in answer to the first question, is more challenging and requires, of course, thorough knowledge to answer any arguments the left may put forth, though intellectual argument today is rare. It even more importantly requires realism not to be naïve in the face of their pretended sincerity, and courage to stand fast against their onslaught. It requires the refusal to compromise our principles.

Insincerity needs to be called out as such, not swallowed as its opposite and taken seriously. Fabricated accusations of all kinds are rampant today and need to be named and condemned with moral indignation, as we would do to any nonpolitical friend or acquaintance who lied to or BS’d us.

Why so much insincerity? It’s built into leftist theory: Marx’s rejection of a universal Aristotelian logic (polylogism, Applying Principles, pp. 309-10), updated today as postmodern group identity theory, and Marx’s premise that anyone who is wealthy, especially business people and their companies, stole their wealth from the group currently held up as having been exploited. No one who is wealthy or a capitalist deserves truth or objectivity, even if such virtues were possible.

To take these leftists seriously makes us vulnerable to compromising our principles. When we compromise, the left moves forward with greater and greater confidence, because they do not compromise. Their greater consistency is precisely what today has moved them further and further left, perhaps too far, having underestimated the “deplorables” of middle America.

Ayn Rand (in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, chap. 14) has provided an interesting “anatomy of compromise” to help us understand what we must and must not do in debates. She suggests three rules (paraphrased): (1) when two people or groups hold the same basic principles, the more consistent wins, (2) when two people or groups collaborate, the more evil or irrational wins, and (3) when opposite principles are clearly defined, the more rational wins, but when hidden or evaded, the more irrational wins.

All three can be seen operating in debates about or with the left. Indeed, the rules have been present and operating in US politics for many decades. The right (conservatives and Republicans), by “me-tooing” and often outdoing the left with leftist policies, are the biggest compromisers.** Both sides accept altruism and self-sacrifice as the correct ethics and both sides accept the use of initiated coercion by the government to violate individual rights as the proper method of governing society.

Let’s look at these premises and apply Rand’s rules. The left is far more consistent (rule one), which is why they are winning. The left wants full (totalitarian) governmental control. The right makes concessions by trying to uphold a mixture of freedom and control, that is, the “mixed economy.”

The right is, and has been for decades, collaborating with the left by granting them sincerity and apologizing for them by saying, “they mean well” (rule two). But they don’t.

And the right is foolish when it thinks the concept of rights used by both sides means the same thing (rule three). Rights to conservatives and Republicans usually means individual rights, but to the left it means group identity. In accordance with rule three, this difference is hidden and evaded. It should be exposed for what it is: group privilege to take wealth away from those who have earned it.

The worst premise accepted by the right is that of altruism and self-sacrifice as the proper ethics of a free society. The left also accepts altruism, but is quite clear about its meaning (rule one): everyone must sacrifice to the state; everyone, especially the well-off, must pay higher and higher taxes so their wealth may be redistributed to the groups that are allegedly less well-off and allegedly have been victimized by those who are wealthy; and the United States must sacrifice itself and its wealth to all other countries in the world, especially those in the so-called third world.

To collaborate with the left by saying, “we are just as compassionate [altruistic] as you are” is a disastrous trap. The left simply responds by saying, “No, you’re not, because we want to do this, this, and this,” that is, move further and further left. Those on the right, as a result, often end up saying nothing, as unfortunately was demonstrated by many congressional conservatives and Republicans over the past two years (rule two).

To fight the leftist juggernaut, conservatives and Republicans must endorse rational self-interest and reject any form of self-sacrifice as a valid morality. They must then explain it clearly and openly (rule three).

Naïveté, gutlessness, and concessions and compromise are not the path to maintaining the freedom and prosperity of this country. The left wants to tear it down. Giving in will only hasten the process.

What is slowing this destruction is the sense of life of our current president and his constituents, the “deplorables” of middle America. As I have written before, sense of life is an emotion, but emotion is not enough to defend the American way of life and Western civilization. Strong, articulate intellectual arguments are needed, as well as realism and courage to stand up to the left.


* There is an analogy between the political and criminal personalities, and no doubt some in politics exhibit a criminal element, because they relish the coercion and control of others. “Take my crime away, and you take my world away,” is what one offender said to Stanton Samenow. Replace the word “crime” with “politics” and you have one explanation of the leftist’s motivation and energy.

** The press and business need to be mentioned. Many journalists blow with the wind and today that direction is to the left. They are not introspective to identify their hidden biases, or, in some (many?) cases, are explicit in their biases and therefore are complicit with the left. And contrary to their pretensions, courage is not a virtue of most of the press. Nor is it of most business people, especially those who cave to the email blasts threatening them with boycotts unless they remove advertising from certain cable broadcasters. Granted that business people are busy running businesses, they need to understand that they are the primary targets of leftist attacks. It would be nice if they showed some spine.

Meanness and the Moralization of Concretes

Many years ago, a friend debated a woman on a radio show about environmentalism. My friend, of course, argued for free markets while the woman argued for the use of the government as solution to nearly all problems.

After the show, I asked my friend what the woman looked like. He said, “She looked mean.”

His statement has stuck in my mind all these years because I think it says something about the motivation of the left, even though judging people by surface appearances can be risky. Just because someone looks mean, or sad, or happy does not indicate the essence of their psychology deep down.

And not all leftists would have the same mean look as this woman. Some are ignorant (of many things, not just the nature of socialism, but also of history). Others may act like our best friends, as con artists are capable of doing, and some may be close relatives.

Be that as it may, meanness is essential to the nature of socialism because government-imposed regulations and laws that violate individual rights are imposed through initiated coercion and enforced through initiated coercion. At some point, punishments of violators of the regulations and laws must increase from fines or minor jail sentences to major imprisonment and executions.

This is where the meanest, or rather, morally worst, as F. A. Hayek refers to them (1; 2, chap. 10), rise to the top of the “compassionate” socialist ladders and become vicious dictators.

In today’s culture with the collapse of epistemology and ethics, intellectual arguments are no longer given for socialism and socialist policies. What passes for reasons why such policies should be followed and approved are, well, “mean looks,” also known as “virtue signaling,” often of a peculiar character that might be called “the moralization of concrete objects and actions.”

Universal abstractions, which are what ethics works with and attempts to demonstrate by reference to an objective standard, have disappeared from discussion. Aside from dirty air and water being declared immoral, today it is likely to be red meat. Or a wall around your home (or country). Or fossil fuels. Or plastic shopping bags, straws, gasoline cans with air holes, many books said to contain “bad” ideas, which, of course, then also means certain ideas, especially those that can be interpreted as “offensive” and therefore “bad,” and so on, ad nauseam. The list is potentially endless.

A universal abstraction says something like “do not lie,” which then applies in all concrete instances in which lying could occur. Or, to state the principle in a less deontological form, that is, allowing for personal consequences, “do not lie unless under threat of physical force or invasion of privacy.” This latter abstraction is what underlies and justifies self-defense in our Anglo-Saxon legal system.

Note that neither principle singles out to condemn as immoral any one concrete object or action. In ethics (or morality—the words are synonyms), broad abstractions are applied to concretes. It is the actions of individuals that can be moral or immoral. The concretes are neither.

Two principles, opposed to each other, do lie behind most discussion today of political issues. The first says: “Objects (usually products) and actions that are inherently harmful or dangerous must be regulated or banned.” The second states: “Acts that initiate physical force against another must be banned, whereas acts between consenting adults that inflict no harm should be legal.”

The former is the Progressives’ guide to lawmaking in the United States, though it probably goes back to the Divine Right of Kings, Roman Emperors, and any chieftain in control of a tribe.

Two questions undercut the universality of this principle: (1) what is meant by inherent harm or danger? and (2) who is going to decide the issue? What one person considers  inherently harmful or dangerous may not be so viewed by another. Think skydiving several times a week versus crossing a busy intersection. People differ in their assessments of potential harm.

In controlled societies, rulers in charge claim to know what is best for their subjects. Chieftains, emperors, kings, and bureaucrats and legislators all decide what is inherently harmful or dangerous. Controlling and banning more and more objects and actions, all of which is accomplished through coercion—because that is the only way to maintain such control—is what eventually leads to dictatorship. Dictatorship by excessive law, or just by fiat.

The second principle above derives from John Locke’s theory of individual rights, as clarified by Ayn Rand. The starting—the beginning, the initiating—of physical force, as opposed to the defensive repelling of an attacking thief or potential murderer, is what must be banned from human relationships.

This universal principle, applied consistently to every area of our lives, gives us laissez-faire capitalism. When all of us are left alone to pursue our own values according to our own judgment, we—each one of us—can then decide for ourselves what is inherently harmful or dangerous. We then—each one of us—can decide for ourselves whether or not to engage in such an inherently harmful or dangerous action.

It is frankly no one else’s business whether we choose to take the easy path or the more challenging one. This is what is meant by a free society.

Now we may sometimes get a mean look from someone close to us, say a relative or spouse, who says something like, “You’re crazy. You can’t do that. It’s dangerous!” But whatever “it” happens to be, the relative or spouse is not likely to be pointing a gun at us.

The mean look of my friend’s environmentalist debater, on the other hand, along with many other of her leftist colleagues, consider their holier-than-thou virtues to be signaling only one thing: “You are immoral—for thinking this concrete object or action should not be regulated or banned. We know best and aim to make it law that you will be fined or imprisoned if you continue to use the object or take the action.”

This is a government gun talking and this is how government guns, when the law is passed, violate individual rights.

Mean looks do say something and do have consequences. Are the people with mean looks well-intended?

The Role of Honor in Moral Revolutions

In her 1974 West Point Military Academy address, Ayn Rand said, “Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.” It is a sense of worthiness and competence that others can see in one’s deportment. It is not pseudo-self esteem that requires praise or respect from others lest an affront occur that demands satisfaction. It is not psychological dependence.

Yet that is precisely what Kwame Appiah in his book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen means by honor. The book is interesting because it chronicles the role of honor, or at least what certain cultures have understood to be honor, in supporting and eventually eliminating the practices of dueling, footbinding, and slavery.

Appiah also suggests a desperately needed role for honor in bringing about an end to the modern, horrific practice of honor killing.

In Praise of Quitters and Failures

“What are you? A quitter??”

These warm words of support, heard by many children, adolescents, and even adults who have dared to vacate an activity, speak volumes about the speaker, not the quitter or failure. The activity left behind may have been the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, a sport, a college, or a job.

Quitting and failing is a natural part of life. Bill Gates quit; so did Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, to mention three notable quitters. And entrepreneurs are notorious failures, failing many times at ventures before, during, and after their successes.

Virulent Absolutism in an Age of Relativism

In today’s world of ethical relativism we seem confronted with the incongruity of a militant and unapologetic self-righteousness.

This should come as no surprise. Relativism argues that there are no objective or universal moral values, because values are dependent on, and therefore relative to, such things as culture, social class, race, gender, ethnic group, or time period. Nothing is absolute and anything goes.

The Triumph of Ethics over Practicality: A Tale of Two Cities

My title this month—the triumph of ethics over practicality—is sarcastic because I believe, as Ayn Rand taught, that the moral is the practical. My reference is to the continued unquestioned acceptance and dominance of altruism as the equivalent of ethics. And just as unquestioned, the premise that self-interest is bad.

The two cities are Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. About a year ago, a month apart, both were hit with devastating tornadoes. A year later Joplin is thriving, largely revived and rebuilt. Tuscaloosa, on the other hand, still has undemolished ruins, vacant lots, and businesses awaiting permit approvals to rebuild.

This is an old story, of course: West vs. East Germany, South vs. North Korea, the US vs. the USSR. Why is the lesson never learned that capitalism works and socialism—central planning of any kind, including urban planning—does not? The answer once again is ethics, especially the primacy of altruism.

The pursuit of profit, the alleged reasoning goes, especially in an emergency situation such as the aftermath of a tornado, is unconscionably selfish and self-evidently harmful. This requires careful thought and planning by experts who know what is best for the public, those poor distraught victims. “It is our duty to serve,” the urban planners and other do-gooding bureaucrats rush in to say, “and serve we will.”

To be more explicit, the reasoning continues, egoism is evil and self-sacrifice is noble, the public servant being the most noble of all. All work and effort is expended for the sake of others, often at great personal sacrifice. This largesse is manifested, as Ayn Rand scathingly pointed out, in “the most wasteful, useless and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 89). Monument builders in return expect gratitude and prestige from their constituents, a form of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

The public monument of these two cities is Tuscaloosa, a “showpiece,” as the city’s recovery plan states, of  “state-of-the-art urban planning,” with “unique neighborhoods that are healthy, safe, accessible, connected, and sustainable,” anchored by “village centers”—and unfinished, one year later. The Tuscaloosa plan, however, the Wall Street Journal comments, “never mentions protecting property rights.” It’s the monument that counts, the “state-of-the-art” plan.

That is because a public monument is always presented as “a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it,” (Virtue, p. 89). In the case of Tuscaloosa the “forced labor and extorted money” was taxation, construction moratoria, and restrictions and regulations that increased the cost of doing business by thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rights were irrelevant.

Joplin, on the other hand, took the free market route by suspending licensing and zoning regulations and allowing home and business owners to make their own decisions as to when and how they were going to rebuild. No monuments were built in Joplin.

What underlies the monument building mentality, whether it was construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt or a military arch in the local park, is a theory of human nature. Egoism assumes that human beings are capable, resilient, self-directing and self-controlling. Altruism assumes that we are weak, inept, and in need of leadership from the more knowing and competent others, a ruling elite. It is not surprising then that a self-responsibility theory of human nature underlies egoism and capitalism. A theory of dependence underlies altruism and socialism in all of its variants. It is what underlies the theory of external control psychology.

The monument builder is the one who vocally preaches self-sacrifice and in the end collects the sacrifices. The monument builder is a public servant who thinks of him- or herself as doing very important work. Practicality is irrelevant. Ethics—the ethics of altruism—is paramount. Thus, monument building becomes self-congratulatory but it often lacks external praise, as from one’s constituents who might not always see the builder’s work as “very important” or appreciate the builder’s “sacrifices” that have been made.

The need to build more monuments becomes significant. More “forced labor and extorted money”—in today’s parlance, increased taxes, more regulations, and elaborate public works programs—become required.

The monument building mentality quite simply is that of a dictator.

The Importance of Philosophy to a Successful Business Career

Understanding the broad abstractions of ethics and epistemology can instill confidence in one’s work life. Such understanding is especially helpful in a business career, not for the purpose of preaching to co-workers, employees, or customers, but to maintain clear thoughts about what is right and wrong in decision making and to correctly perceive facts in complicated situations.

Most ethical issues in business center on honesty. For example, a boss might say to a young worker, “Tell the customer it’s on the truck,” when in fact the order has not yet been processed. The assumption is that the company will scramble to get the order on the truck before a major delay occurs and customer dissatisfaction results. The problem with this stretching of the truth is that as days, weeks, months, and years go by it often gets stretched further and further from reality leading to “what the customers don’t know won’t hurt ‘em.” This can eventually culminate in an Enron or Bernard Madoff scenario. Such is the importance of honesty in a business career.

Telling the truth is the simplest solution to business problems even if it results in being yelled at or temporarily losing business. It is far better than living a life of fakery. The tricky part about honesty is that lying and dishonesty are not the same. Honesty does not require truth telling under threat of force. A misdirection lie to deceive a potential thief of the whereabouts of your money is quite honest and moral. Everyone has a right to self-defense. Everyone also enjoys a right to privacy—no one, for example, has a right to your financial situation. A negotiator might ask, “Tell me the truth. What is your rock bottom price?” or “Is this [specific amount] your final price?” You may properly respond evasively or with an incorrect specific price. This is not game playing or bluffing; it is sound, ethical decision-making.

Bribery is an omnipresent issue in the press and in discussions of business ethics. It also is an issue of honesty—because of the deception that occurs—but it is compounded by its similarity to a number of other concepts that it too often is not differentiated from. Epistemology, particularly the theory of definition, can help clarify this.

Most bribes involve a payment of money or offer of gift to influence others. But so does a perk, a grease payment, extortion, subornation, and a commission or broker’s fee. And then there is the gift of candy to children, often called a bribe, to get them to clean their rooms. How are these to be distinguished from each other? The rules of definition say that our concepts must be classified in terms of genus and differentia, that is, concepts must be put into a broad category first, then differentiated from the other items that are similar to the one being defined. This is the situation we have with bribery.

The genus of all the concepts in the previous paragraph is a payment or gift to influence others. The differentia of each does the clarifying. A perk is an above-board prize that accompanies one’s job, such as a tip or company car. “Above-board” means it is not covert or secretive. A grease payment is a modest incentive to induce foot-dragging bureaucrats to perform their normal duties. Extortion is a demand for payment under threat of force, whereas subornation is a covert payment to persuade someone to ignore or violate the law, rules, or one’s ethics. A commission or broker’s fee is payment for a job well done, such as a closed sale. The candy given to children? It’s just an incentive to action. To call it a bribe is metaphorical extension of the original concept.

So what is a bribe? Most similar to subornation, it is a covert payment designed to undermine a relation of trust. A sales rep, for example, offers an extra payment to a buyer, unbeknownst to the owner of the buyer’s company, in exchange for a contract. The deceit and breach of trust occurs by cheating the owner of the buyer’s company. Bribery is a precise concept that should not be slung around lightly and applied to all of these other actions. It is a specific type of unsavory behavior that, when not understood clearly, becomes applied to and confused with decent, respectable outcomes, such as perks, commissions, and parental management of children. Such is how philosophy, particularly epistemology, can parse complicated issues.

The resulting clarity inspires strength and conviction that paying a perk, commission, or maybe even making a grease payment are not unsavory behavior.

The most important place in which philosophy can instill confidence in one’s work life in business is in the understanding of self-interest as moral and in the guiltless acceptance and promotion of the profit motive of capitalism. For a wealth of resources on these issues, I refer readers to the works of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises.

Ignorance versus Dishonesty

A line from the 1980 movie Coal Miner’s Daughter has the young and upcoming country music singer Loretta Lynn saying something like “I’m ignorant, not stupid.” The distinction—lack of knowledge versus lack of intelligence—is significant not just for the ignorant person’s self-esteem and confidence to move up in the competitive world, but also as a matter of justice in how others, especially the more highly educated, view such a person who arises from humble beginnings. Unfortunately, some of the more highly educated who themselves have come up from within the ranks do not maintain the distinction when judging their former peers who have not become so accomplished.

A similar distinction can be made between lack of knowledge and knowingly and willingly lying or cheating. A similar lack of perspective—or quickness to condemn—among the more highly educated can also be observed when judging the actions of the less knowledgeable. This became clear recently in a discussion thread among professors in response to a Chronicle of Higher Education news blog about plagiarism. The post reported how one university is instituting a grade lower than F, the “FD,” for academically dishonest students. Over 90% of the 46 comments gleefully cheered the toughness and alleged justness of the act, including one, protected only by Internet anonymity, suggesting that the firing squad be brought back.

Whether this last was sarcasm, steam letting, or Internet silliness is not worth dwelling on, as most comments ignored the possibility that some or many students just might not know how to cite, quote, and paraphrase properly when writing papers. This indeed is the conviction of Brian Martin, who wrote in the Journal of Information Ethics, fall 1994, “Students are apprentices, and some of them learn the scholarly trade slowly.” Martin’s conviction quickly became mine several years ago when I began using an Internet-based plagiarism detection service. Students who say, “You mean a reference is needed even though I put the material in my own words?” and “I didn’t know that that needs to be in quotation marks,” are not dishonest. Far from using the service to catch cheaters, I now use it to teach techniques of the “scholarly trade.”

My students may be a special case because many are first-generation college students. They are not as worldly-wise as those who come from more highly educated families, which means many are ignorant of the ways of citing, quoting, and paraphrasing. Not knowing how to do something, however, and proceeding to do it incorrectly does not make one dishonest. That students should have learned the skills, as professors are quick to point out, in some previous course and did not, perhaps earning a passing grade of D- , does not make them knowledgeable and therefore dishonest in the present. It often means that professors are frustrated over not having students who are as knowledgeable as they are and instead of exhibiting the patience to teach them, some professors go on the offensive to condemn.

Such attitudes of professors reminds me of the cartoon showing a boy holding a report card with an F on it and saying to his teacher, “Which one of us has truly failed?” In a free market sales reps are graded by their customers, not the other way around. And since in a free market in education teachers would be sales reps of knowledge and ideas (or peddlers of ideas), the message of the cartoon is accurate. Teachers need to be teachers, rarely moralists.

There are many reasons why someone may not know what is right or wrong in a particular situation. The bureaucratic state that we live in today, including the state-run schools and universities, erects all kinds of unnatural barriers and confusion to the accomplishment of our goals. Its myriad rules and regulations make it nearly impossible to know what is right according to the bureaucrats, and students are caught in the middle of the kaleidoscope.

Throw in psychology, whether it be rationalization or evasion, selective memory and selective perception, exaggeration or literal mindedness, along with the entire cumulative nature of the formation of character, and you have a very difficult task of discerning willful, knowledgeable deceit from ignorance. The ignorance may be self-created, as in a life of evasion, but how can the judge know in the present what is the cause of an action or statement? Due diligence in gathering information and patience before passing judgment seem to be the sensible response.

Someone may step on my toe by accident or on purpose. Either way I am likely to yell. Prudence calls for patience before further judgmental action is taken.

The Ethics of Accreditation

Educational accreditation is unethical because it is government-initiated coercion to control the production and distribution of education. In the United States the control is indirect; in most other countries it is direct. Accreditation also infringes academic freedom, though that concept itself is a mixed product of government involvement in education.

Accreditation is the process of certifying a minimum level of quality in schools and colleges. A first, simple question arises. Who accredits the accreditors? Who certifies the certifiers? Or, as Ayn Rand and others have put it more generally: who protects us from our protectors? The statist assumption is that experts in the government know what is best for us because they are not motivated by the selfish profit motive. As consequence, they should have the final say on quality. This ignores that Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor applies equally, albeit inversely, to bureaucrats who proclaim their goals as serving the “public interest” when in fact the behavior invariably is led “as if by an invisible hand” to benefit the special interests that lobby them.

The first one hundred years of American public education were dominated by one special interest, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, at the expense of Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and, often, women, plus other ethnic groups and religious and philosophical persuasions. Today, public education is dominated by the special interests of political correctness. And it has always been dominated by the premise that the omnipotent government knows best.

Who determines quality in the free market? The market! That is, all the people who participate in the process of producing, buying, and selling goods and services. Ultimately, it is determined by the value judgments of consumers through their repeated buying of products they like and abstention from buying of products they do not like. Entrepreneurial competition and the pursuit of selfish profit over time leads to better and better products that better meet the needs and wants of consumers. The same would apply in a free market in education, if such existed.

Accreditation at the university level in the United States consists of seven “natural monopolies” that regulate higher education in a particular region of the country and many specialized agencies that govern specific programs, such as health or business education. Accreditation is “voluntary” (and therefore indirect) in the sense that no school or program is required to go through the approval process, but not having such approval severely restricts the availability of government money for student loans and other uses. All accrediting agencies must be approved by the US Department of Education. This is what puts them into the government-initiated coercion category. “Cartel” and “licensing monopoly” are appropriate descriptions that come to mind. That most education is provided by the government reinforces the ethical issue. Privately funded and controlled education in other countries is extremely rare, if non-existent altogether.

In contrast, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a market-based means of validating the quality claims of the magazine’s advertisers. Very early, however, the Seal of Approval came under the watchful eye of government oversight. Similarly, Underwriters Laboratories began as a market-based testing and certifying organization, but today its operations must be approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Academic freedom is a pretense at protecting free-speech rights. In a free-market—in education or anything else—the entrepreneur has the right to hire and fire at will anyone he or she disagrees with. The fired employee is then free to hang out his or her own shingle to start a new business. In the practice of government-owned and -controlled educational institutions, academic freedom means the freedom to speak and write within the narrow confines of what the government approves. Accreditation contributes to this narrowness by specifying the requirements of “academic qualification,” such as the possession of certain degrees or diplomas and the publication of a certain number of papers within a certain period of time. That the entire process is one of bean counting and hypocritical is readily acknowledged. That it ignores that science does not progress strictly through one flawed form of publication, such as the peer-reviewed journal article (1, 2), or in five-year cycles is shrugged off as irrelevant.

In practice accreditation is a good ol’ boy network of deans and retired professors. Universities court them, produce enormous mounds of paper every five years, and jump through hoops to win their anointments. Being accredited keeps the government money flowing. That is what accreditation is all about.

The Epistemology of Ethics, Salesmanship, and Basket Weaving

In a previous post I said that teachers are peddlers of ideas who must sell their wares as much as any other sales rep or entrepreneur. The process by which soap and ideas are sold is essentially the same. The method is persuasive communication and the purveyors of both can be honest or dishonest. There is nothing unique to the theory of salesmanship that makes sales reps more prone to dishonesty than teachers, and teaching in a free market is salesmanship.

In this post I would like to make a similarly iconoclastic statement about three apparently disparate fields, namely that ethics, salesmanship, and basket weaving are all applied sciences. The first anomaly, according to many hard core philosophers and scientists, is that I would dare to call any of these fields a science. The second is that I would dare to lump them together with equal epistemological standing. Let me take these one at a time.

In its broadest sense, science studies reality—not just the physical, but also the mental—and aims to describe it accurately and provide guidelines for human choices and actions. In this sense philosophy is the science of all sciences, because it identifies the broadest abstractions about reality and provides the broadest guidelines for the rest of the special sciences. The special sciences, whether physics, engineering, medicine, or basket weaving, must be consistent with the more general sciences, but they in turn describe their own areas of reality and provide guidelines for choice and action to achieve specific goals in those realms.

To explain and predict are said today to be the two aims of science. Explanation, however, implies prediction. If a ball is described as round, for example, the description predicts that the ball will roll. This positivist view of science as explanation and prediction leaves values out completely. Values are guides to action. If a ball is to be thrown accurately to a target, then it is valuable for the hand, arm, and rest of the body to move in a certain way. A scientist of ball throwing prescribes which actions have to be made in order to achieve the goal of hitting a target. To live a healthy and moral life, scientists of nutrition and ethics also prescribe certain actions that must be taken to achieve the respective goals. There are two aims of science, but they are to explain and guide. Guidance specifies a goal and the actions necessary to reach the goal. All value theories are sciences of guidance. This applies equally to ethics, salesmanship, and basket weaving. (For doubters about basket weaving as a science, a Google search generates millions of hits and refers the searcher to an enormous literature describing the principles of basket weaving.)

Value theories are applied “how to” sciences and are just as factual as any so-called hard or descriptive physical science. Value theories describe how to get things done. Ethics describes how to live the good life, salesmanship describes how to sell products, and basket weaving how to make baskets. Nothing could be more factual than that, which makes all of these fields as scientific as physics, chemistry, or biology.

For that matter, epistemology is also a how-to discipline, since its aim is to describe how we know what we know and then, on the basis of that knowledge, to prescribe how to improve our ways of knowing. As a result, there is no difference in essential methodology used by epistemology and ethics, or ethics and salesmanship, or salesmanship and basket weaving. They all use the same approach to identifying the concepts and principles that constitute their particular subjects of study. The only relevant difference among all of these disciplines is level of abstraction. The concepts and principles of epistemology and ethics are far more abstract than those of salesmanship and basket weaving.

Putting on an air of superiority simply because one works in an area of greater abstraction smacks of what Robert Fuller would call rankism (1, 2). Science is science and applied science is applied science. As much can be learned from blue-collar workers who love their jobs and approach them with attention to subtle detail as one can learn from college professors who work in the stratosphere of theoretical concepts and principles. In many cases one can learn more from blue-collar workers than from professors, because the latter are too often caught up in their own jargon to be able to relate it to the lay person. And some professors all too often have no desire to relate their work to the lay person. But everyone today in our knowledge economy holds, or should hold, equal epistemological standing in the generation and application of knowledge.

One does not pay plumbers so much for what they do as for what they know. That makes plumbers, basket weavers, sales reps, and ethicists all fellow professionals.

The Ethics and Epistemology of Peer Review

In a previous post, I argued that academic peer review is a gatekeeping process brought about by the post-World War II growth of government involvement in research and scholarship. Though it may control quality in a narrow, conventional sense, one significant consequence of this process is the suppression of innovation. The present post takes a look at the underlying ethics and epistemology of peer review.

Medical researcher David Horrobin, whom I quoted in the previous post, says that critics of peer review “are almost always dismissed in pejorative terms such as ‘maverick,’ ‘failure,’ and ‘driven by failure.’” Lest those epithets be ascribed to me, I hasten to say that I have had some success in the process and that I am not denigrating anyone who uses it to advance his or her career. The process nonetheless does have serious flaws.

Most significant of its flaws is the view that peer review must be blind in order to maintain objectivity, that is, to prevent bias from entering the process. However, as the British Medical Journal, which has not used blind peer review since 1999, points out, “A court with an unidentified judge makes us think immediately of totalitarian states and the world of Franz Kafka.” Objectivity is the fallacy-free perception and communication of what the object of cognition is, and bias means that some other factor, such as irrelevant preconceived notions, whether formed by emotion or by reason, interferes with this perception and communication. Lack of objectivity stems from a failure to perceive reality accurately.

Neither blind nor open peer review can guarantee this accuracy. Indeed, anonymity removes the need for care and responsibility when commenting on someone else’s work. How many ill-mannered or ill-thought-out remarks would be made about submitted papers if reviewers knew that the papers’ authors will know their names and how to contact them? Being allowed to hide behind anonymity is an invitation to scurrilous behavior. This is why the objectivity of legal systems in free societies demands that witnesses, whether supporters, accusers, or expert testifiers, be identified. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of peer review, objectivity requires at minimum that the process be open.

Objectivity, at root, is an epistemological concept and the failure to perceive and communicate accurately is a function of how one uses one’s mind in the processes of perceiving and communicating. Neither anonymity nor openness will improve this. The most important requirement of objectivity while reviewing someone else’s work is a constant awareness of one’s preconceived notions. The most significant one to watch out for is “This is not how I would have written the paper; it should therefore be changed to . . .”

As one journal editor said, no doubt with some exaggeration, all of his reviewers of so-called empirical papers recommend rejection and those of theoretical papers insist that the papers be “recreated in the reviewers’ own images.” And another editor complained that reviewers have turned into wannabe co-authors, requiring extensive revisions and writing comments that are sometimes as long or longer than the original articles. Clearly, decentering, to use Piaget’s term, meaning the ability to consider other points of view or to appreciate the perspectives of others, is needed by some, perhaps many, reviewers.

Once it has been established that a paper meets a journal’s editorial guidelines and philosophy, that is, that the topic of the paper is appropriate for the journal, then it is the author’s objective that should guide evaluation. Decentering in reviewing, or editing or criticism, means accepting the premises of the author and recommending improvements in execution. The reviewer’s personal preferences on the topic, including agreement or disagreement with the author’s basic premises, should be set aside. The author’s paper is the reality to be adhered to in the reviewing process; interference from irrelevant, previously formed emotional associations and intellectual beliefs destroys the objectivity of the process.

A reviewer, of course, may strongly disagree with the editorial guidelines and philosophy of a journal or with the objective of a paper, but then such a reviewer should either decline to be a reviewer or come to terms with the principle of objectivity. Much suppression of innovation in the peer review process probably stems from the failure of reviewers to distinguish their personal philosophies and preferences from those of the authors they are reviewing. When reviewer and author disagree, the reviewer either demands conformity or recommends rejection.

The issue of objectivity in reviewing (or editing or criticizing) is similar to the so-called problem of taste in art. Is this work of art bad art or is my reaction to it just my taste? Artists have an aim for their art and their execution of that aim makes it either good or bad art. Whether one likes a particular work of art, though, depends on many other factors, including emotional associations and intellectual beliefs. Therefore, as Ayn Rand points out, it is not a contradiction to say “This is a good work of art, but I don’t like it,” and vice versa. The same can be said in reviewing scholarly work, namely, “I don’t like or agree with this paper, but it is well done.”

The reviewer, editor, or critic who can make this last statement is one who exhibits objectivity. When looked at from the standpoint of epistemology, whether the process is blind or open is beside the point.