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.

On the Worst—and Best—Rising to the Top

When initiated coercion is legalized, it attracts those who are willing to use it.*

Those who are more willing to use legalized, initiated coercion than those who are hesitant will advance faster in the system. Eventually, the more willing rise to the top. The more willing, then, use the initiated coercion against those they have bypassed and anyone else who gets in their way.

This in essence, though not his words, is the identification made by F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top”).

The identification explains how and why an interventionist, increasingly bureaucratized government becomes a dictatorship.

The way Hayek put it is that “democratic statesmen” expect citizens to approve of their coercive policies peacefully through discussion and majority vote. As this does not work, and leads to chaos, those with “lower moral and intellectual standards” step in to take over. They appeal to the “docile and gullible,” uniting them with a “hatred of an enemy” and “envy of the better off.”

A casualty along the way is language, meaning the rise of Goebbelsian propaganda, with the word “liberty” being the first to go, or rather, turned on its head, Orwellian fashion, into its opposite.

By “democratic statesmen,” Hayek means the democratic socialists who thought they could avoid a Marxist violent revolution by voting their brand of initiated coercion into power. Instead, they paved the way for the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Hitlers of the twentieth century.

The “docile and gullible” in today’s political climate are the patsies of the socialist/fascist left. They are those alleged victims who in reality are beneficiaries and opportunists of our entitlement culture. They are the ones who clamor for coerced handouts and privileges in the name of reparations for past discrimination and in the form of protections and other initiated coercions against the hated enemies, their alleged current persecutors.

The “hated enemies” of today have congealed around several targets. Historically, ever since the rise of the early Progressives from their democratic socialist beginnings, and continuing in the present, the favorite Marxist whipping boy has always been, and still is, big business—“America’s Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand so aptly put it.

Other hated targets include white straight males and, of course, our current president, and anyone who dares to disagree with the socialist/fascist left’s mantra.

Envy of those “better off” targets is the motivation of our contemporary “democratic statesmen” and their “docile and gullible” followers.

Envy—not a self-confident, self-responsible, and independent psychology.

The way, indeed, is being paved for a modern-day . . . well, who knows what.

In contrast to the upward mobility of the worst in government, the most competent and able, self-responsible, and independent individuals—the best—rise to the top in free-market businesses.

When ability is recognized and rewarded, as in a private, profit-making business in a totally free market, which means where there are no interfering regulations imposed as a result of initiated coercion, the most competent at identifying what will improve human life and most able to deliver created goods and services to their customers will advance.

In business, competence and ability are rewarded. In a bureaucratized government, willingness to develop new laws and regulatory rules and the desire to execute them, which means more opportunities to coerce, is the criterion of advancement.

In business, the criterion and means of success, and therefore the means to high profits to sustain and grow the business, is customer satisfaction, that is, making products better than the competition to meet the objective needs (the requirements for an improved life) and wants (optional tastes) of the customer.

The day to day work, whether by employee or entrepreneur, entails a myriad of detailed communications, both outside the company, with customers and suppliers, and within the company, to employees in the various departments necessary to run the business. All of this “myriad detail,” then, must be coordinated to produce and deliver the product in a timely, need- and want-satisfying manner.

Those who possess the greatest ability to communicate with others and to motivate them in a positive way, and who can retain the greatest detail, which includes surveying the company for means of improvement and, especially, the market for opportunities, will be the ones to advance.

Today, however, we do not have the kind of freedom I have described above. Today, we live in a “mixed economy,” which means a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Business people today are harassed by thousands of regulations—legalized, initiated coercion—that deflect attention from the proper operation of their companies.

As a result, the incentives become mixed. Some incentive of customer satisfaction remains, but much of the time today is spent on compliance with the regulations, many of which conflict with customer satisfaction.

Increased prices is the most obvious conflict, but reduced supply and elimination of some products from the line also follow the increased regulation.

In heavily regulated industries, the “best” who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who are good at working with regulators, complying with the rules. In such industries, the business has become so bureaucratized that it operates much like a government bureau—meaning incompetent and indifferent to customer needs and wants.

It’s not uncommon for “successful” bureaucrats in these businesses to join government agencies to become regulators themselves and administrators of legalized, initiated coercion.

This is where we are today. Only time will tell how far the socialist/fascist left pushes us.


* “Legalized, initiated coercion” is the pernicious opposite of the constitutionally valid and rights-based self-defensive use of force.

The Deference to Authority Studies

Psychological independence, or more specifically independent judgment, means that one’s self-esteem, integrity, and courage, should be sufficiently strong to resist outside pressures for conformity.

Independent judgment should be a fundamental aim of parenting and teaching, but, unfortunately, is not.

A number of well-known studies from the twentieth century, however, have examined, albeit superficially, the relationship between independence and conformity.

Solomon Asch in the 1950s explicitly approached the issue in terms of independence versus conformity, and even referred to Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People and Ibsen’s notion of a conforming “compact majority.” Ibsen’s protagonist, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, stood uncompromisingly to his judgment while one by one losing nearly all who were supposedly his friends. In fact, they were the compact majority.

Asch’s studies exposed a group of subjects to four straight lines on a card. The group’s assignment was to judge which of three lines was equal in length to the fourth; only one of the three was equal. All subjects but one were confederates of the researchers and were instructed to give identically incorrect answers. The test was to determine how independent the lone, unaware subject would be against the pressures of the group. A number of trials with variations was also conducted.

On average, two-thirds of all naïve subjects, in at least one of several trials, did not conform to the majority. Twenty-five percent did not conform at all in any trial.*

What does this prove? Not much. It does show the serious shortcomings, especially the contrived nature and shallowness, of the “experimental-positivistic-behavioristic” methodology, to borrow Abraham Maslow’s apt description of the epistemology used in psychology for the last one hundred years (Toward a Psychology of Being, pp. 7-8).

The studies only establish that some people are independent, at least in a perfunctory sense, and others are not, though, as Asch points out, there are “individual differences” in the behavior of all personalities. Follow-up interviews provided some, but not a lot of, insight into the thinking of test subjects.

Because of the absence of any further probing into the thinking, especially of the subjects’ “core” and “mid-level” evaluations, to use Edith Packer’s terms (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 1) for the fundamental thoughts or conclusions that determine our character, personality, and motivation, the concept of independence used in these studies must be described as existential, not psychological.

Existential independence is sound, not independent, judgment (Applying Principles, pp. 206-08). It is sensible decision making that looks at externals, such as straight lines on a card. Without further in-depth inquiry, there is no way to determine whether or not independent judgment or psychological independence was exercised. (Sound or existential judgment usually refers to people who are responsible in an external or existential sort of way, that is, by paying their own bills when leaving home and not remaining dependent on their parents or anyone else to support them.)

Subsequent studies have shown results similar to those of Asch, namely that some people are independent, and others are not, and that the shallowness of the methods used provides no comprehensive understanding of the participants’ psychologies.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience-to-authority studies, under a pretext of being studies of learning, asked “teachers” to repeatedly increase the voltage of electrical shocks to a “learner” (who was a confederate of the researcher). The shocks were not real, but the teachers initiating them did not know it.

Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment divided students into “prisoners” and “guards” in a mock prison situation for several days. Realistic submissiveness and depression of the “prisoners” and aggression and sadism of the “guards” caused the intended two-week experiment to be shut down after six days.

These studies may be interesting to read, but they still only confirm the obvious, namely that some people are independent and others are not.  They provide existential—historical, not theoretical—data about how different people may behave in different situations, but that is all. Not everyone increased the voltages in Milgram’s studies, and not every prisoner in Zimbardo’s study was submissive or depressed, nor was every guard aggressive or sadistic.

Psychologies differ—and it matters. Psychologies were hardly examined. This reveals the fundamental flaw in logical positivism and its so-called scientific methodology, especially as it is applied in the human sciences.

Every subject in these studies is viewed not as an individual exhibiting universal traits or universal core and mid-level evaluations or various levels of self-esteem, but as a member—a single unit—of a statistical group that enables the researchers to calculate averages and percentages, and to compare the subjects to hundreds or thousands of others before “projection by successive approximation” can be made (Applying Principles, pp. 322-24).

Viewing people as members of a statistical group in order to calculate averages and percentages and make projections strips them of their individuality and collectivizes them. At the same time, it abdicates the scientific search for universals, the search for answers to such questions as, “Why do some people go along with the group and others do not?”

These deference to authority studies were motivated in part by a desire to understand the Holocaust of World War II, to understand, for example, why some people would hide and protect an Anne Frank, others would tolerate the hiding but not do it themselves, and still others would inform on the protectors.**

A clue comes not from one-dimensionally descriptive surveys or ostensibly causal studies, but from the scientific observation of Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 36). As a concentration camp prisoner, Frankl observed with his eyes and through communication with his fellow inmates. Although he did not use the term, self-esteem was what enabled prisoners of “less hardy make-up . . . to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.”

A “life of inner riches and spiritual freedom” is how Frankl put it.

Self-esteem, integrity, courage, and psychological independence are what give us that inner strength—to withstand evil or to go against a compact majority.


*S. E. Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” in Readings in Social Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), 2-11. Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 70, no. 9 (1956), 1-70.

**Milgram, of course, refers to his studies as research on “obedience to authority,” but historian Christopher Browning says obedience means compliance with commands, whereas deference is the more correct term. Deference means submission to superior claims—of the researcher, in the case of Milgram’s studies, and others. The “deference to authority” studies are not Nazi-style situations of obedience backed up with a gun pointed at you. Consequently, agreeing with Browning, I have used “deference” in the title of this post. Christopher R. Browning, “Revisiting the Holocaust Perpetrators: Why Did They Kill?” (lecture, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, October 17, 2011). Why did the perpetrators kill? First, they dehumanized the victims, then they followed the crowd. Independence, if ever present, was jettisoned, though some in at least one battalion were allowed to opt out by their commanding officer. Others who had no choice would misfire, aiming above or to the side of the victims. Even in the Holocaust, some were independent, some were not.

The Meaning of Free Society

A free society is a political association of individuals in which each possesses the identical protection to act without being coerced—by anyone, but especially the government—to work cooperatively via the division of labor to produce prosperity and peace.

Association is entirely voluntary between self-interested consenting adults who exercise their capacity to reason to produce values that are traded with each other to acquire spiritual and material benefits. The result is enhancement of each other’s lives. Spiritual benefits include friendship, love, and other non-material values that are not exchanged on the market for money. Material benefits, however, most often are so exchanged; they include the production of wealth through the creation of capital goods, which in turn create consumer goods. A rapidly rising psychological and physical well-being is consequence of this voluntary and self-interested consent.

The free society is a liberal society. The term used here refers to the institution of classical liberalism, the product of Enlightenment values and benefactor of human life over the past two hundred years that has brought humankind out of abject poverty to a life of luxury unimaginable in earlier years.

The free society is a social system called laissez-faire capitalism. It is based on individual rights, those freedoms to take action that are requirements for survival and comfort. Rights derive from and are inherent in the nature of humans as rational beings. Freedom to take action means, in Ayn Rand’s clarifying formulation, no one may initiate physical force against anyone else; everyone receives identical protection from such initiated coercion and is therefore equal before the law. Freedom to take action, finally, means the right, through trade, to acquire, use, and dispose of property as one sees fit. Property rights are the implementation of the rights to life and liberty and constitute the foundation without which a free society cannot flourish.

Rights, freedom, equality, and property—these are the essential concepts.

The free society more specifically rests on a theory of human nature that acknowledges the supremacy of reason to know reality and to guide our actions. It assumes that as beings who possess the capacity to reason, we must each independently exercise that capacity to produce and acquire values for our own self-interested gain. All physically healthy adults who possess normal brains are capable of making this choice and are therefore capable of supporting themselves. Those who do not make the choice are consenting to become dependent on others to provide for them.

Errors made during the Enlightenment failed to give reason, egoism, and individualism their full due, thus allowing ancient hostilities to self-responsibility to emerge and intensify under the new banner of statism, by shifting obedience to authority from a god or gods to a collective or the state. The theory of human nature that reason is limited and incapable of perceiving reality correctly, or directly, and therefore cannot guide actions in a reliable way, meant that humans cannot be independent or self-responsible. They must be provided for, led, and coerced by an elite who knows what is best.

The Hobbesian leviathan states, or rather, omnipotent governments (1, 2), of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were the result.* Enlightenment errors allowed religious virtue to become secularized as political and psychological dependence. Statism became the social system of choice to modernize, and rationalize, self-sacrifice and coercion as a way of life. Government became our god and we must now bow down to it as our master and friend.**

Historically, freedom meant, and today still means, capable of acting without being controlled by others, especially church, king, or state. In history, one of the ironically sad problems classical liberals faced when arguing for a free society was that many serfs and slaves resisted being freed. They feared how they would take care of themselves and many apologists for the authoritarian state, because of their theory of human nature, agreed that serfs and slaves were incapable of independence. (See Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, chap. 1.) 

In the era of the Soviet Union, there were stories of Russian citizens who were allowed to leave for a visit to the West but chose to return, because the totalitarian paradise of communism felt safer than freedom. The same can be said about many victims of controlling and abusive personal relationships; aside from fear of reprisal for walking away, many of these victims simply do not have the strength to leave.

The strength I am talking about is psychological. The essential mental requirement for a free society is a strong personal identity manifested as a high level of self-esteem. The free society cannot survive or grow without a sufficient number of citizens who possess the psychology of independence and moral virtue of independent judgment.

Free citizens—who intend to keep a free society—must be the boy in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes.


* Statism is the broader concept that subsumes communism and socialism, on the one hand (left?), and fascism, on the other (right?), as well as monarchies and other authoritarian states. Statism is the exact opposite of free society, or capitalism. In today’s context, I suggest that the term be brought back and made prominent in political and philosophical discussions. It may help ease the confusion over “left” versus “right.”

** And the “obligation of the nobility,” or noblesse oblige, became transferred from the titled aristocracy to a titled bureaucracy.

Do We Have to Die to Maintain Our Independent Psychologies?

Socrates was an independent personality in ancient Greece, much like the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Socrates said too many prominent citizens were scantily clad.

As a result, he was convicted by democratic vote in an Athenian court on charges of impiety and corruption of the youth. He was also then condemned to death by democratic vote.

Democracy, it would seem, killed Socrates, though some would say it was his obstinate insistence on remaining independent.

The question arises, must we die for our independence? Doesn’t life require compromise?

The concept of rights in Socrates’ time was extremely limited and applied only to Athenian citizens, which meant men. Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens were excluded.

Socrates was a citizen, so he was entitled to a trial. Plato’s dialogue Crito tells the story of Crito’s offer to finance Socrates’ escape into exile. Socrates rejects the offer. His argument is familiar still today.

Socrates said that it would be unjust for him to break the laws of Athens that he has agreed to obey. The citizens’ relation to the state, he said, is the same as that of a child to a parent or slave to a master. This is an appeal to the omnipotence of the state and an implicit social contract that binds citizens to the laws of the land.

The answer to Socrates comes from the modern tradition of individual rights as defined by John Locke and clarified by Ayn Rand, especially Rand’s principle that no one may initiate the use of physical force against anyone. This especially applies to governments to whom one’s rights have been delegated for protection.

This also means that if laws are unjust, by initiating force against citizens, retaliatory force in self-defense can be supported.

For example, it is morally just for a citizen to break an unjust law—provided one is willing to accept the consequences, as in civil disobedience, or is willing to live in exile, as occurred during the Vietnam War era when young men moved to Canada to avoid the military draft’s involuntary servitude. In extreme cases it is just to start a revolution, as occurred in Colonial America.

In contrast, blocking entry to a venue to prevent patrons from hearing a lecture is not civil disobedience. It is criminality.

Socrates should have gone into exile. The state is not our master and the social contract is only a metaphor, a bad one at that.*

Thus, we do not have to die for our independence. Nor do we have to compromise our principles or sell our souls to the devil to live and prosper.

We have no moral obligation to tell the truth when our privacy or other rights are being threatened. Living under a dictatorship with secret police and civilian informants is certainly initiated force. Surviving under such conditions where truth telling can result in jail or execution requires ingenuity. In the Soviet Union, some families resorted to speaking to each other in a foreign language to avoid being misunderstood by spies and snooping neighbors.

Even in a semi-free country as the United States where education is dominated by government-initiated coercion, encouraging students to “give teachers what they want” and then to study on their own to develop ideas that may not be acceptable to the government-controlled schools is just.

Free expression and free thought, contrary to pretensions otherwise, are not endorsed by our government citadels of reason. Ludwig von Mises (pp. 81-83) has taught us that academic freedom originated in European universities and today still means freedom to agree with the government.**

And Ayn Rand has taught us that “morality ends where a gun begins” so where the gun begins, we can lie our heads off. The issue is a practical one. If lying to a thief who demands our money could lead to harm or death, because the thief does not believe us, it would be unwise to practice the deceit.

The same applies to government initiators of coercion. Compromise of principles is unethical, but when under duress, as the Anglo-American legal system allows, self-defense becomes the guiding principle.

On the other hand, making concessions in a business negotiation is not a compromise of principles, because both parties have accepted the principle of trade. Nor is it a compromise to accompany one’s spouse to attend an opera, though you may not like opera. The mutually accepted principle is one of love and shared values.

Life does not require the compromise of principles. We compromise only in areas that involve moral options.

The challenge in living under duress, in a dictatorship or attending coercive government-controlled schools, is psychological. The challenge is to maintain one’s independence while putting on a front for protection. This means maintaining one’s conviction to understand thoroughly the facts of any given situation—or in a student’s case, the facts and truth of an assignment—while on the surface seemingly making concessions to the dictatorship or government school.***

Galileo recanted to the Inquisition, but did not sacrifice his scientific convictions. Faust, on the other hand, made a compact with the devil—and lost his soul.

Did democracy kill Socrates? Yes, but so also did his false premises about obedience to the state and what it means to remain independent.

In a truly free society that respects individual rights, democracy is not as powerful as it was in ancient Athens. Today, democracy is, or should be, relegated to procedural functions, such as selecting our leaders.


* Social contract was an attempt to explain the origin of the state, but it is a fiction. More likely, powerful nomadic tribes conquered the weaker ones to establish control, and later the settled farmers. The state holds the monopoly on the use of physical force. Its origin is in violence and coercion, not agreement. The aim of rights theory was and has always been to restrain and delimit government power. See Oppenheimer on the state’s origin and Hamburger on our current administrative threat.

** Some teachers, of course, are fair so this is a judgment call for students. If a teacher is fair, students should strongly express, argue, and defend their views. If a teacher punishes students for disagreement by giving lower grades, students must do what they have to do to survive.

*** The same advice applies to students attending private schools, as private schools also operate in the government’s coercive environment and must obey its regulations. Free speech, free expression, and academic freedom are rarities in academia today.

Independence and Certainty

In our age of post-Kantian skepticism and relativism, it follows, according to the skeptics and relativists, that anyone claiming epistemological or ethical certainty is either a deluded fundamentalist or a wannabe or actual dictator.

Inquisitors and jihadis are certain of their convictions and maim and kill those who do not agree with them. Hitler was certain and viciously imposed his will on his own citizens and the world and, of course, the Jewish people. The implication is that Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers are selfish, independent personalities.

The argument often does not go this far, though it is implied, and some, including Holocaust scholars, have said as much.* After all, this train of thought continues, no one is omniscient, and because of our inherent fallibility, we must allow freedom of speech. This is what makes a society free.

Lack of omniscience means inability to be certain, which means we must invite and relish criticism to clarify our thoughts, and perhaps gradually get closer and closer to the truth, though absolute truth can never be attained.

This is what logical positivism and its offspring have taught us. Claims of certainty are dangerous. We have to talk things over and aim for consensus, sometimes through voting. This in essence is the epistemological justification of democracy.**

In other words, anyone who believes in absolutes believes in absolute authority. The independent personality is one who asserts facts as absolutely true, and that is what is dangerous.

So does this mean the boy in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes should request a vote before speaking up, assuming the emperor is tolerant of critics(!)? In addition to the self-contradictions of skepticism and relativism, this question is a reductio ad absurdum.***

It does not follow from human fallibility that absolute certainty is authoritarian or that strong, independent personalities are actual or wannabe dictators. Nor is the argument from fallibility the fundamental defense of freedom of speech and the free society.

In a single sentence, the answer to the issue is a sound, objective theory of universals that allows the identification of sound, objective values, which in turn defines social relationships in terms of individual rights, that is, freedoms to take action without coercion, including the freedom to express oneself on one’s own property or on that of someone else with whom one has contracted to make that expression.

Freedom of speech presupposes property rights, and democracy, if it is not to be a form of dictatorship—democracy, remember, killed Socrates—presupposes and is restrained by all individual rights, which therefore means democracy in a free society is demoted to the relatively minor function of selecting our leaders, along with other non-rights-violating details.

Democracy is not the arbiter of truth (or “approximate” truth) or of ethical or legal behavior.

The sound theory of universals is Ayn Rand’s (1; Applying Principles, pp. 322-24). It is a theory based on the contextual nature of knowledge that allows certain truth to be asserted as absolute within a specified context. Because knowledge grows over time, adjustments to earlier absolute certainties may have to be made, as Newton’s theories were adjusted by Einstein’s.

Incidentally, something over the years must have been right, true, and certain about Newton’s and Einstein’s ideas, because in the use of both theories, spaceships have gone to the moon and back.

Truth and certainty—by peaceful, independent-minded, non-authoritarian scientists—do seem possible.

Yes, we are fallible and not omniscient, which means we must submit our expressions to evaluation and criticism and be prepared to defend them, but this is not a justification of freedom of speech.

In order to survive and flourish, humans must exercise their inborn, volitional capacity to reason. Because this exercise of reason is not activated by our genes or environment (Applying Principles, pp. 315-18), we must be left free to choose—that is, it is right or moral for us to be free from the coercion of others, especially the government—to allow each of us as individuals to generate and sustain action to achieve our chosen values. Trade is our means of social cooperation.

The source and justification of individual rights is our nature as rational beings. It is right and moral to be free of any initiation against us of the use of physical force.

Thus, whatever we say or write, either on our own property or on that of the others cooperating with us, is, at least sometimes, an assertion of truth and certainty. It is right and moral for us to make these assertions, first, because our freedom of expression is consonant with and required by our human nature and, second, because our speech, writing, and expressions derive from our rights to life, liberty and property.

Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers of the world, in contrast, do also make assertions of truth and certainty, but they back up their assertions with a gun. Their expressions are not open to evaluation and criticism because they tolerate no disagreement.

They are the authoritarians, the dictators, who at root, as Stanton Samenow demonstrates, are criminal personalities. As liars and cheaters, they are not the least bit interested in perceiving and asserting facts as facts. They most certainly are not independent personalities; they are among the worst of the dependent.

Brandishing and using guns, as they do, is anathema to our rational nature. Their goals and accomplishments are to silence our reason. Their “truth” and “certainty” lead to wanton destruction of humankind and civilization.

Talking and voting does not make any individual more or less independent, and it is not the means of preventing another Holocaust. Lack of certainty may indicate insecurity or insufficient knowledge to make a decision with confidence.

To link certainty to dictatorship is the red herring of all red herrings, brought to us by post-Kantian agnosticism, both in epistemology and ethics.

It is time to restore certainty to its proper place in knowledge and values.


* Years ago, I heard a Holocaust scholar say that the Nazis were certain of their convictions; therefore, it is good that we not be.

** The argument is John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian defense of free speech, restated in Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Rauch in 1993 was responding to an early wave of censorship by political correctness.

*** Here are the self-contradictions: skeptics assert as an absolute certainty that certainty is impossible and the relativists claim absolutely that all claims are relative. Cratylus, the Greek skeptic who stopped talking, is another reductio.

Statements of Independence

Independent judgment is both a personality trait, a distinctive way of thinking and acting, and a character trait, a moral conviction in the face of opposition or indifference to stand by one’s beliefs and values. A number of writers in their own nuanced ways have captured the gist of these traits.

The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, offers in his Stanford Commencement Address of 2005 (1, 2) an eloquent statement of independence:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Follow your own thoughts and emotions, Jobs is saying. Don’t give in to the edicts and requests of others.

Psychiatrist William Glasser in Positive Addiction (p. 3) ties independence to happiness:

As we grow, we should learn to judge for ourselves what is worthwhile, but it takes a great deal of strength to do what is right when few people will agree with us for doing it. Most of us spend our lives in a series of compromises between doing what we believe in and doing what will please those who are important to us. Happiness depends a great deal on gaining enough strength to live with a minimum of these compromises.

It is these compromises to please others, Glasser says, that create unhappy relationships and lead us to seek compensating behaviors, such as anxiety and depression, or worse. Strength to say “yes” to ourselves and “no” to possibly too-demanding and probing others is the path to happiness.

Daniel Greenberg, founder of  the Sudbury Valley School, ties independence to the free society (The Crisis in American Education, p. 54):

Dependence, not independence, is the quality most suitable to authoritarian states. . . . The hallmark of the independent man is the ability to bear responsibility. To be responsible and accountable for one’s actions. To do, and to stand up for what one has done. Not to hide behind “superior orders,” not to seek shelter in group decisions, and to take strength from some heroic figure—but to be one’s own man.

The self-reliant and self-responsible individual, Greenberg is saying, does not unquestioningly take orders from authority. The citizen of a free society exhibits a healthy distrust of anyone in power.

Ayn Rand, by way of Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019), places the source of independent judgment in one’s own mind:

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life . . .

No one, in other words, can get inside our heads to make us do our own thinking or, for that matter, make us not think. Perception, judgment, decision making, and action all originate within our minds. Control of our lives, then, is internal. Letting others “pinch hit” for us is to allow them to do our thinking.

What encourages us to become independent? How can our children develop it? Perhaps Summerhill School founder, A. S. Neill, states the conditions best (Summerhill, p. 9):

Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.

By “free child,” Neill means one whose rights as an individual are respected by other children and adults in both home and school, and one who respects the rights of other children and adults in both home and school. Otherwise, the child is free to do whatever he or she desires, that is, is free of authoritarian edicts and bossing and bullying by others. Not surprisingly, Neill also ties independence to the free society as an essential requirement.

Independence and happiness require freedom because freedom produces independence. And independence makes happiness possible.

Sound or Independent Judgment?

Sound judgment means sensible—i.e., rational or considered, not impulsive—decision making. Many parents and teachers value this process as a primary skill that children and students should possess upon reaching adulthood.

In contrast, independent judgment, which presupposes sensible decision making, is not often cited as a valued goal of either education or adulthood, yet this is the personality and character trait that should be exhibited by all citizens of a fully free society. Independent judgment, and its practical consequence, independent action, should be a fundamental aim of both parenting and education. What is independent judgment and why is it not encouraged by parents and teachers?

Independence is the more common term that parents and teachers use to describe what they think children should achieve as adults, but this usually means the ability to pay one’s own bills, by providing one’s own food, shelter, and clothing without parental help. The mental act of asserting something as fact and doing so entirely on one’s own is independent judgment. The willingness to act on what one has judged to be right, in the face of disapproval and opposition, is independent action. True independence is the ability and willingness to see and say that the emperor has no clothes.

In history, both Socrates and Galileo exhibited this true independence, both to their detriment. Socrates (1, 2) could have bowed to the will of the majority and stopped upsetting the Athenian elite, but he chose not to and was put to death for his independence. Galileo (1, 2) did capitulate to the Inquisition, but nonetheless was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. In literature, Henrik Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People (1, 2) stood steadfastly to his judgment while one by one losing nearly all who were supposedly his friends. Independent judgment and action are not well tolerated by those who are not themselves independent.

Some advocates of sensible decision making may argue that Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann, by stirring up the hornet’s nests in which they were trying to work, were not being reasonable. But there are two issues here: are the advocates of sensible decision making saying that these three men should have given up their judgments in order to conform to the majority? or are they saying that independent judgment does not require sacrifices when under duress? The principle of self-defense indeed does say that it is morally equivalent to fight or flee when threatened with force. Rejecting self-sacrifice as a noble ideal, as I do, Socrates probably should have escaped to live in exile. Ibsen’s Stockmann remained to fight partly because he assumed that many of his so-called friends were on his side but mainly because fighting was the right thing to do. Giving in as a pretense, which is what Galileo did, is a third option. Abject conformity or sacrificing one’s independent judgment was not considered by any of these men.

The problem with sound judgment as a goal of education is that it often becomes interpreted as conformity or conventionality. A free society requires rebels—people like Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann whose independence leads them to see and say what the majority cannot. People with independent judgment are the innovators and entrepreneurs who move economies and societies forward. They rock boats, not necessarily on purpose, but because they see things others do not. The challenge is, can independent judgment be taught? and can every person possess such a trait? My answers are: indirectly and yes.

Independent judgment is first and foremost the correct perception of reality that is not influenced or contaminated by the perceptions of others. Misinformation is not a goal of education, so teaching facts is a start, but encouraging children and students to pursue their own goals and ideas without commands, criticism, and ridicule is better. This will enable them to develop the conviction that they can do anything they set their minds to—regardless of what others say or do. Freedom and nurture in the learning process, not coercion or neglect, are two requirements for instilling an independent and confident spirit in the child and student.

So can everyone in adulthood possess this childlike independent and confident spirit that says “the emperor has no clothes”? Why not? That many adults today do not possess such a spirit indicates only that something is terribly wrong with our educational system such that it kills the spirit.

By about the fifth grade, according to John Holt (p. 263).