Who are the Moral Free Riders?

In economics and political theory, free riders are people who benefit from actions of others, without doing anything to merit it. I asserted in The Moral Free Rider Problem that liberal-socialists are free riders on the social order of Western civilization, which they did not create and do not support.

Western civilization is founded upon the moral rules of conduct deriving from our Greek philosophical and Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Atheistic and agnostic liberal-socialists are moral free riders who benefit from living in a society ordered by the morality of spiritual religion, while sneering at spiritual religion and moral codes as simple-minded ignorance. At best, they do nothing to contribute to social order. Too many of them do everything in their power to discredit or to destroy the very source of social order. Without Judeo-Christian morality, they would be in the position of scientists and scholars in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: working under orders for the collectivized National State.

To this, a reader retorted that it is conservatives and moralists who are taking the free ride. Liberals contend that all of what we consider to be modern society, with its vast improvements of living standards, is exclusively the product of the rational human mind, in a world of secular materialism and moral relativism. Progress toward human knowledge therefore is diverted by concerns about unreal things like God and moral virtues.

Liberal dogma comes from a very ancient philosophical position, first articulated in classical Greece. Plato, in the Theaetetus, quotes Protagoras as having said that man is the measure of all things, meaning that there are no such things as God, morality, or eternal truths. Each person is governed only by his pursuit of sensual pleasure and his avoidance of sensual pain. Each person makes his own standards, based solely upon the perceptions of his physical senses.

Plato, of course, takes the opposite position: the physical senses are no guides at all to truth, which exists in Ideal form, manifested only as indistinct shadows in our physical world.

Obviously, if Protagoras is our guide, the reader's retort is correct. Conservatives and moralists really would be taking a free ride on secular society and in so doing making life more difficult for everyone. Religion and morality, far from being a force for social good, would oppress human freedom and oppose scientific knowledge.

This is the message given to American students for the past century. As William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale described it, most textbooks espoused socialistic and secular doctrine, and most social sciences professors at Yale in 1951 were socialists and either agnostics or atheists. The same was true of other elite universities and had been so since the first decades of the 20th century. Professors in the social sciences don't hesitate to dismiss spiritual religion as ignorance and, in the physical sciences, to dismiss morality and religion as value judgments having no place in science.

Everything we know of history tells us that this is a false view. How then did religion and morality come to be identified with oppression and ignorance?

The first answer is the brutal Thirty Years War (1612 – 1648) that devastated Europe during Galileo’s and Newton’s era, when rival Protestant and Catholic princes fought for political control of Western Europe. This mass slaughter and destruction led Voltaire, in his 1766 satire Candide, to attack Christianity as the enemy of the people and the senseless cause of European warfare and strife. The Thirty Years War, however, was only nominally about religious differences. Fundamentally it was a struggle for political power, as modern nation-states took shape.

French intellectuals nonetheless identified the Church with autocratic political rule and suffering of the masses during the Thirty Years War. Cardinal Richelieu served as French Minister of Foreign Affairs and War early in the 1600s, and Cardinal Mazarin, as first minister in the middle 1600s.

A present-day variation on this theme is the belief of some feminists that religion was fabricated by men to subjugate women.

The second factor was French Revolutionary philosophers’ assumption in the 18th and 19th centuries that they could discover secular and materialistic laws controlling social behavior and political activity that would be analogous to Newton’s laws of gravity governing the motions of planets. Among them, Saint-Simon and Comte claimed to have discovered the Immutable Law of History that predicted inevitable historical Progress away from the age of spiritual religion and into the new scientific age of secularity, rationalism, and socialism, which Comte called The Religion of Humanity.

History tells a different story. The popular idea that religion prevented scientific inquiry is simply not correct. Ironically, the Catholic Church's preservation of learning after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was all that kept scientific inquiry alive.

The Renaissance, beginning centuries before the 18th century Enlightenment, was preeminently a period when all of the talents and energies of poets, architects, builders, sculptors, and painters were focused on glorifying God. It was the Renaissance’s flowering of new perspectives in art and literature that led to renewed interest in nature and the beginning of the physical sciences.

The most widely known and admired person in this humanist revival was Erasmus, a devout Catholic priest. One of his closest friends, humanist scholar Thomas More, died to defend his Catholic faith.

The greatest leaps of knowledge in mathematics and the physical sciences occurred in the 17th century, many decades before the revival of Greek sophists’ secular materialism by French Revolutionary philosophers. It is from this period that liberals build their religion vs. science case. Galileo is usually the only exhibit entered in evidence.

Despite the generally propagated myth, Galileo got into trouble with the Church, not because he advocated the theory that the earth revolves around the sun, but because he was a man with a colossal ego and a startling lack of judgment.

For a number of years the Church had raised no serious objections to Galileo’s heliocentric theory, so long as he expressed it as one of the several theories explaining movements of the planets and did not present it as the only true doctrine. But for Galileo this wasn’t enough.

In 1623, Galileo's long-time personal friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. Barberini had always championed Galileo’s right to express his theories and gave his blessings for Galileo to publish a discussion of the theories of planetary motion. Galileo then repaid his friend’s support by ridiculing him publicly.

Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It is cast as a conversation among three gentlemen, one of whom is given the name Simplicio (or simpleton). The arguments, even the exact words, attributed to Simplicio were known to all as the arguments advanced by Galileo’s old friend Barberini. Galileo was, in effect, declaring to the world that the new Pope was a fool and that the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church was ridiculous nonsense. He had punched the Church in the nose and dared the Church to hit back.

Unfortunately for him, Galileo’s ridicule came at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was under attack, and Europe was ablaze with the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic states. His action was comparable to France’s diplomatic stab-in-the-back of the U.S. at the United Nations after Al Queda’s 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center buildings.

Given the prevailing state of war and its struggle for survival, the Church was remarkably restrained in giving Galileo a choice between excommunication and cessation of further writing on the subject. Galileo accepted the ban on writing and remained a Catholic until his death.

As a final note, at the time, Galileo had no conclusive evidence to support the view that only the Copernican theory was correct. A rival theory by noted astronomer Tycho Brahe had as much evidence in its favor and was as accurate in its predictions as Galileo’s. We now know, in fact, that Galileo’s assertion that the planets travel in circular orbits was incorrect.

Note also that the greatest of all the 17th century mathematical geniuses was Isaac Newton, whose laws of motion and the equations for predicting gravity’s effects on movements of heavenly bodies, not to mention invention of calculus and the physics of optics and light, were the foundations of modern science. Newton was a life-long, devout Christian who never questioned the existence of God. Nor was publication of his work proscribed by the Church.

Liberals can only make the case that believers in spiritual religion have argued against secular materialism, not that religion has suppressed scholarship or scientific investigation. Today the shoe is really on the other foot. It is liberals who attempt to suppress spiritual religion and personal morality.

A final point of considerable importance is liberal-socialism’s antagonism toward private property and corporate enterprise. Think, for example, of the knee-jerk reaction from liberals that the Bush administration invaded Iraq solely to enrich corporations like Halliburton. It is impossible to reconcile this with my critic’s assertion that the great successes of modern economic and technical society are the product of liberal-socialist rationalism and its amorality.

Since the early 19th century, especially in Karl Marx’s works at mid-century, liberals have preached that private property and Big Business are oppressors of the workers and are the chief bulwarks against perfection of human society in a socialist political state. Wars, crime, poverty, and other social ills are said to be the product of private business activity, whose profits represent the stolen part of labor’s full wages.

Moreover, liberal-socialist theoreticians like Max Weber and R. H. Tawney have linked the rise of capitalism (taking that term as a synonym for private property and corporate enterprise) to what they term the Protestant Ethic. This Christian ethic is criticized by liberals, because it is highly individualistic and thus at odds with socialist collectivism.

The facts, of course, are that the industrial revolution was just getting a full head of steam at the time that Saint-Simon and Comte were promulgating the secular religion of socialism. From that time forward, the living standards of the whole world, especially of the West, have risen far faster than ever before in history. And that improvement, until after World War II, was overwhelmingly the result of individualistic initiative by entrepreneurs in Christian societies. Far more than half the world’s industry and commerce in that period was accounted for by the two greatest Christian nations, England and the United States.

Contrary to my reader’s retort, demonstrating that secular materialism has benefited humanity, let alone that it is the sole source of scientific knowledge and economic well-being is an impossible task.

The bitter fruit of liberalism's secular materialism has been, not social harmony and prosperity, but the mass murders of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Russia, Hitler's National Socialist Germany, Mao's Red China, and Castro's Cuba. Without the moral restraints of our Judeo-Christian heritage, on rulers and ruled, there would be precious little science and improvement of living standards. The implosion of Soviet Russia and the slow withering of socialist France and Germany make this clear for all who will see.

Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns. His website is The View from 1776.

This is where I disagree. Many of the tenets of morality actually restrict us from behaving in ways that we might find more satisfying. Keeping promises when they are inconvenient, denying sexual gratification, honesty, etc. All of those require that we give up something that we might want at the moment. What tangible reward do I have for not sleeping with an available partner, especially if we are careful to avoid pregancy and STDs? None, on this Earth. So, if I were to go the way of "behaving that way is the surest way to a satisfying life," I might very well not be behaving morally (as defined by a society that believes in marriage and fidelity).

So now you are asking for a reward, rather than avoiding punishment? The reward is avoiding the downside. If there is no downside to an action then it is not immoral.

Morality is not the justification of what we want; it is the denial of what we want but what centuries of experience and tradition have told us we should not have...

I guess the question is whether you are smart enough to understand the consequences of your actions and accept them. If you are, then you can safely do things that people 100 years ago would have considered insane or immoral, like jumping off a cliff. I have made the jump many times.

Denial is interesting. One of the driving human forces is the desire to have what we don't have. Many childless couples want a baby more than anything, sick people want to be well, poor want to be rich, rich people want freedom and time, unloved people want to be loved. The trick to a good life is accepting who you are and understanding the costs of your actions. Everything you do has a cost and a reward

The reward is avoiding the downside. If there is no downside to an action then it is not immoral.

No. The problem is that no human has the mental capacity to see all possible downsides. That is why the accumulated knowedge of the ages is far superior to the limited product of one mind. That is why capitalism is superior to socialism, and why tradition is superior to pure rationalism. There is a place for rationalism, but only when we understand its limits.

To define "moral" as "lacking a downside" is the height of hedoism. It is also very dangerous. If I can kill someone I hate with an absolute certainty of getting away with it, is it moral? Of course not. The lack of a downside is not what determines morality, because no one is qualified to determine there is no downside...

Who said anyone had to see "all possible downsides"? Simply understanding most of the downsides is all that is necessary. I would also argue that capitalism is superior to socialism precisely because it does not follow tradition and instead innovates at every point. I do agree that we can learn from our past, but if we blindly follow tradition we are doomed to repeat it.

Interesting misuse of logic here. First you say that doing something with absolutely no downside is immoral and then you say that it is impossible to determine whether or not there is a downside. You can't claim that there is no possibility of a downside and then claim that there is a possibility of a downside.

Trying to make a good post after KDD is a very difficult task. But there are some angles that I wish to offer in reply to you, Michael, that I feel are needed.

First of all, I think it is useful to point out that the old Traditional Conservative Russell Kirk had modified his view on this issue ever so slightly over the years. In the first 30 years after The Conservative Mind he would state the first principle of conservatism as "belief in a Transcendent Moral Order." by the Nineties however, he he was citing it as "a Belief in an Enduring Moral Order." I would like to think that like many on this forum he had met many "old whig" style conservatives that he fully agreed with that he knew were fully in agreement that Moral Principles were constants and not situational and he felt that as Prudence was the first virtue of conservatives, common bond should be acknowledged.

Few can read Hayek and not get the understanding that while not a religious man by any means, he supported religious morality as an anchor to society and as a foundation for the state. He held with Adam Smith that for mankind in general, religion was the most reliable transporter of morals, in a solid sense, from generation to generation.

I have met many here that hold few religious views and yet appear to agree that morals are constants and not the realm of schemes and metaphysics based upon rationalistic formula.

The real dread that this author's instructor, Voegilin, had as I understand it, was fear of those holding that government could give us paradise on earth, instead of in heaven. Voegilin held that this was "immanitizing the symbols of Transcendence". Instead he reminded us that Man is imperfectable and as such, he and his constructs can't be made to substitute for salvation, regardless of whatever form of "grace" one understands. This is what the Rationalists from the Communists to the leftist/capitalists of today don't believe.

As Sowell says, they want us to follow the "vision of the anointed" and turn over to central control all the big issues of each era because they frame them all as problems or worse yet, crisis.

As Burke said, it is all in the particulars. If your principles give you morals that meet the criteria above, I join with you in general conservatism and look for something more tangible to agree and disagree on other than your personal religious beliefs. I have met many. so-called religious people that fail to see their belief in God as anything other than a platform for enlightenment sentimentality and social schemes.

Simply understanding most of the downsides is all that is necessary.

Says who? And who can say that the downsides you don't see aren't going to be the most catastrophic of them all? The capacity of the human mind is limited, and thus the product of the experiences of the millions of those who have gone before dramatically overwhelms the product of the "rational" individual. But thank you for proving my point. Your definition of "morality" is hedonism, as it is based in the shifting desires of the individual. It is precisely the ability of tradition to present the accumulated wisdom of the ages that the individual mind cannot mimic. And the reverence of the power of tradition is the basis of conservatism/Old Whig liberalism.

As for capitalism being "anti-traditional," you must first warp the definition of tradition into a caricature first. Whence comes the common law that makes freedom and capitalism possible? Whence comes the institutions, both social and economic, that provide its foundation? Name the man who invented them! They are all evolved traditions, and they operate based on the individual choices of groups of human beings, transmitted through the politic, social, and financial institutions of our nation. How is it that you belief that you can, like a petulant child, ignore all of the thousands of years of social progress that it took to build these institutions, and simply assume that what exists now has always been, and can be manipulated in whatever way your "reason" tells you.

Oh, and to touch on another point proven so deftly by Hayek, be careful in your disdain for tradition. For reason is a product of tradition. It developed as a consequence of human tradition, not as some isolated or sui generis creation. It was the traditions of the Western world than enabled what you revere as "reason" (and what Hayek terms Cartesian rationalism) to develop in the first place.

First you say that doing something with absolutely no downside is immoral and then you say that it is impossible to determine whether or not there is a downside. You can't claim that there is no possibility of a downside and then claim that there is a possibility of a downside.

Actually, it is YOU who claimed that an action without a downside is moral. That claim posits two things. First, that there is such a thing as a choice without a "downside." I refute that in the second part of my statement. As human beings are incapable of seeing all ends, either your entire formulation is wrong, or you must mean by "an action without a downside" an action that the individual cannot rationally see has a downside. Secondly, if that is the case, I point out that some actions that are clearly immoral can be framed as not having a "rational" downside to an individual. Thus both of your claims fail. This is not contradictory... simply an advance refutation of the defense that I knew you were going to make (and did with your "Simply understanding most of the downsides is all that is necessary" comments)...

The whole of what we call "morality" and even "ethics" is rooted entirely in a belief in God.

Let's back up a second. You may be having this debate because some here disagree on what your terms mean. I am assuming we mean when we say "morality," any doctrine or system of moral conduct, any particular set of moral principles or rules of conduct. "Ethics" is often used interchangeably, but ethics are simply the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.

You assert that God is necessary for BOTH of these. Do Buddhists have no morality, then? Did Soviet Russia have no morality whatsoever? In my experience, Buddhists have a sense of duty and obligation far above that of the common Christian. The Soviets had no compunction about dismissing Western morality in pursuit of their goals, but they almost never allowed Western capitalism or religious thought to openly exist, unless they were desperate--which to me seems like a basic set of principles without the involvement of a higher power.

While YOUR ethics may be tinged with and wholly based upon your belief in a higher power, one may develop principles in the absence of divine inspiration but out of pure self-interest (say, the law of the sea, or the diplomatic practices and immunities), AND one may have beliefs as to good or bad based wholly upon a vision of right conduct not inspired by God but by peaceful coexistence with one's fellow man.

Any secular source that you can find traces its premise back to a belief in God.

"Secular source" meaning...what, exactly? If you believe that everything comes from God, NOTHING could have happened without God and there is no such thing as a "secular source." Worse, you haven't chosen anything but a "higher power" as your source of morality. That could be interpreted to be almost anything, as could morality. These are words rife with interpretive difficulty. Did John Wayne Gacy's morality come from God? How about Charlie Manson's? They both certainly had their own beliefs as to what was moral and immoral. I don't think a higher power inspired them in developing their morality.

So if you remove the premise of the existence of God the entire foundation upon which morality is defined collapses.

YOUR morality, you mean. Others may well have developed a moral code that does not include such lofty aspirations as doing right before God. I think for your dramatic language to be true, you must assume that there is some sort of higher power holding back the folks who believe in that morality, ala the Island of Dr. Moreau. Unfortunately, there is no House of Pain around the corner every day for humans. There is no such higher power wielding a whip for the whole of humanity on a daily basis. There MUST be other justification for many.

Not to take you too far off the path here, but is it impossible that one leads a life in accord with a higher power's wishes, and die, then go to heaven or nirvana, without knowing that higher power exists?

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.

Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must inevitably have some civil effect; and as soon as it has such an effect, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign even in the temporal sphere: thenceforce priests are the real masters, and kings only their ministers.

Now that there is and can be no longer an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship. But whoever dares to say: Outside the Church is no salvation, ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince the pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a theocratic government; in any other, it is fatal. The reason for which Henry IV is said to have embraced the Roman religion ought to make every honest man leave it, and still more any prince who knows how to reason.

Jean Jacques Rousseau:Civil Religion

He says this about Hobbes:

Of all Christian writers, the philosopher Hobbes alone has seen the evil and how to remedy it, and has dared to propose the reunion of the two heads of the eagle, and the restoration throughout of political unity, without which no State or government will ever be rightly constituted. But he should have seen that the masterful spirit of Christianity is incompatible with his system, and that the priestly interest would always be stronger than that of the State. It is not so much what is false and terrible in his political theory, as what is just and true, that has drawn down hatred on it.

One basis for building a moral society can be drawn from conventions built over time in said society. The duty of the conservative is to conserve societal conventions that have proven over time to be just and equitable to the greater part of civil society. In matters of State; reason should rule. I tend to agree with Albert Einstein when he said, "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

Thanks! I wish it was a little sharper in coding, and it probably will be as I get better at HTML, but it's been fun putting it together.

BTW, you might enjoy the links page as well, if you didn't get a chance to look at it. I haven't lurked over there recently, but your link to infidels.org is a nice reminder it is out there for consideration by all, even those believers who simply wish to challenge their own theistic views.

My morality is of my own choosing, and I accept that many may believe in a different one. My view of God is my own, too. And I will be damned (pun intended) if I will be told that morality cannot be without God, when I know lots of moral folks who would not believe in God if He personally took a holy dump on their doorstep.

You make a number of assumptions about MY ethics and MY morality which are not correct and miss the point.

If you believe that there is no such thing as absolute right or absolute wrong than you are a moral relativist and we have an irreconcilable difference that cannot be resolved.

If you believe that there are absolute rights and wrongs, then the question is what is your basis for declaring these absolutes if it is not a Creator, a Higher Power, God.

While YOUR ethics may be tinged with and wholly based upon your belief in a higher power, one may develop principles in the absence of divine inspiration but out of pure self-interest...

Many "ones" have done so with and without claims of divine inspiration. The Taliban, the Saudi Government, the Nazis, Al Qaeda, the Soviets are among them. What is your basis, if any, for declaring the actions of these groups to be objectively and inherently wrong?

You will find that every "moral" basis to objectively condemn such groups traces its roots back to a belief in a Higher Power. Absent this existence all moral judgments become relative. If you know of a reasonable basis for absolute moral judgment absent a Higher Power, I'm all ears.

Personally, it matters more to me how someone lives their life than whether or not they engage in philosophical reflections on the meaning of life. The reality on the ground is that atheism as a belief system is being imposed on all the citizens of this Country. Atheists are demanding that monuments of the Ten Commandments that were donated by Hollywood to promote the film "The Ten Commandments" be torn down, and that crosses over War Memorials be removed, and that the Pledge of Allegiance be altered, and a slew of other things that can only be achieved by colluding with activist judges to subvert the due process of this representative Republic.

I think a detailed discussion and analysis of their "belief system" is more than in order. I happen to be willing to give them everything they believe in-- nothing.

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