Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli

To celebrate its fiftieth year in print, The New York Review of Books is reprinting excerpts from some of its more notable pieces. Here, Isaiah Berlin reconsiders the place of Machievelli in the larger contexts of moral debate and political philosophy.

Machiavelli’s cardinal achievement is his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, the planting of a permanent question mark in the path of posterity. It stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality or accident or error—the clash of Antigone and Creon or in the story of Tristan—but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.

For those who look on such collisions as rare, exceptional, and disastrous, the choice to be made is necessarily an agonizing experience for which, as a rational being, one cannot prepare (since no rules apply). But for Machiavelli, at least in The Prince, The Discourses, Mandragola, there is no agony. One chooses as one chooses because one knows what one wants, and is ready to pay the price. One chooses classical civilization rather than the Theban desert, Rome and not Jerusalem, whatever the priests may say, because such is one’s nature, and—he is no existentialist or romantic individualist avant la parole—because it is that of men in general, at all times, everywhere. If others prefer solitude or martyrdom, he shrugs his shoulders. Such men are not for him. He has nothing to say to them, nothing to argue with them about. All that matters to him and those who agree with him is that such men be not allowed to meddle with politics or education or any of the cardinal factors in human life; their outlook unfits them for such tasks.

I do not mean that Machiavelli explicitly asserts that there is a pluralism or even a dualism of values between which conscious choices must be made. But this follows from the contrasts he draws between the conduct he admires and that which he condemns. He seems to take for granted the obvious superiority of classical civic virtue and brushes aside Christian values, as well as conventional morality, with a disparaging or patronizing sentence or two, or smooth words about the misinterpretation of Christianity. This worries or infuriates those who disagree with him the more because it goes against their convictions without seeming to be aware of doing so—and recommends wicked courses as obviously the most sensible, something that only fools or visionaries will reject.

If what Machiavelli believed is true, this undermines one major assumption of Western thought: namely, that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the church or the laboratory, in the speculations of the metaphysician or the findings of the social scientist or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution of the question of how men should live. If this is false (and if more than one equally valid answer to the question can be returned, then it is false) the idea of the sole true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles. The very search for it becomes not merely utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent….

 Read the excerept (with link to the original article in its entirety) here.

Philosophical Roots of Our Political Divide

In keeping with the season, Steven Pinker wonders why our nation looks like this...

Conservative thinkers like the economist Thomas Sowell and the Times columnist David Brooks have noted that the political right has a Tragic Vision of human nature, in which people are permanently limited in morality, knowledge and reason. Human beings are perennially tempted by aggression, which can be prevented only by the deterrence of a strong military, of citizens resolved to defend themselves and of the prospect of harsh criminal punishment. No central planner is wise or knowledgeable enough to manage an entire economy, which is better left to the invisible hand of the market, in which intelligence is distributed across a network of hundreds of millions of individuals implicitly transmitting information about scarcity and abundance through the prices they negotiate. Humanity is always in danger of backsliding into barbarism, so we should respect customs in sexuality, religion and public propriety, even if no one can articulate their rationale, because they are time-tested workarounds for our innate shortcomings. The left, in contrast, has a Utopian Vision, which emphasizes the malleability of human nature, puts customs under the microscope, articulates rational plans for a better society and seeks to implement them through public institutions.

Cognitive scientists have recently enriched this theory with details of how the right-left divide is implemented in people’s cognitive and moral intuitions. The linguist George Lakoff suggests that the political right conceives of society as a family ruled by a strict father, whereas the left thinks of it as a family guided by a nurturant parent. The metaphors may be corollaries of the tragic and utopian visions, since different parenting practices are called for depending on whether you think of children as noble savages or as nasty, brutish and short. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that rightists and leftists invest their moral intuitions in different sets of concerns: conservatives place a premium on deference to authority, conformity to norms and the purity and sanctity of the body; liberals restrict theirs to fairness, the provision of care and the avoidance of harm. Once again, the difference may flow from the clashing conceptions of human nature. If individuals are inherently flawed, their behavior must be restrained by custom, authority and sacred values. If they are capable of wisdom and reason, they can determine for themselves what is fair, harmful or hurtful.

Read the full column here.

Hobbes on Comedy Central

Andrew Napolitano channels The Leviathan to explain the Libertarian view of government. Watch The Daily Show interview here.

The Moral Case for OOD

Jerome Slater, a research scholar at the University at Buffalo, argues the moral justification for intervening in Libya:

A common fallacy among those who regard themselves as hardheaded “realists” is to dismiss the role of morality in foreign policy decisions and claim it is all about narrow interests, especially economic interests, and most especially, oil interests. Such cynicism, however, is itself a kind of naivete, a reductionism unequal to the complexity of war-and-peace issues.

In the Libyan case, the argument that it’s all about oil is particularly unpersuasive. First, only a very small amount of our imported oil comes from Libya, and in any case for many years Gadhafi has been a reliable supplier, both to us and to our NATO allies. Moreover, in recent years, he has played a valuable intelligence-gathering role in the war against terrorism, especially al-Qaida. So if narrow self-interests really explained the U. S. intervention, we should be fighting to save Gadhafi, not to overthrow him.

In short, there is every reason to believe that genuine moral concerns were an important component — probably the most important component — in explaining the administration’s decision to intervene in Libya.

Read the column in the Buffalo New here.

Science & Religion on Morality

Just in time for our section on religion and ethics, the NYT has published a review on Sam Harris' new book, How Science Can Determine Human Values. The review takes issue with Harris' position, that science can uncover the source of human morality, but along the way it provides a fair mapping of what's at stake in the larger debate, as well as tying in strands from realism, relativism, and utilitarian theory.

Recap – Lessons 5-6

We looked at the arguments made to justify the invasion of Iraq with an eye toward whether or not they were good, i.e., persuasive. That led to a discussion about what happens when a military officer disagrees with the stated policy of our civilian leadership and the decisions of our Commander-in-Chief. Pretty clear consensus that once those decisions are enacted in the form of directives from senior military leadership, we either follow orders or resign. Then we took it a step further: what about those officers who stay and obey yet still disagree? Do they get to state their opinion – privately – to family, friends, or subordinates? Mixed feelings on this, with many of you thinking we should suppress our opinions and toe the line, period-dot. Others observed we can’t help but form opinions, and suppressing them when someone asks would be tantamount to BS. In both cases, the effect on the morale of our subordinates was the primary motivator: toe the line so as not to discourage our Airmen, vs. be honest, because our Airmen will recognize BS.

Following Martin Cook’s comparison of two superpowers – the United States after the Cold War and ancient Athens after the Persian Wars – we explored some analogues between the Peloponnesian War and OIF. We looked at the difference between preemptive and preventive justifications for going to war (jus ad bellum), at the types of coalitions each conflict spawned, and at the harsh realism of the Athenians vs. the false dilemma embedded in our own policy, both of which resulted in a “with us or against us” stance toward other nations.

We also talked about the effects of war. For Athens, the Peloponnesian War ushered in the end of her domination of the Greeks, the “brief, shining moment” that marked the beginning of Western culture. The effect of OIF on the U.S. is still unwritten. As Secretary Gates recently told reporters, “the problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid — that is, Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.” He added, candidly: “It will always be clouded by how it began.”

History will clarify what good comes out of OIF. From the Peloponnesian War, one positive outcome we identified was the re-focusing of philosophy into ethical realms of inquiry. Philosophy had already existed in an early form prior to the war. Its path out of the ancient Greek religion, what we now call mythology, appears when the earliest philosophers, the pre-Socratics, sought naturalistic explanations for life’s everyday challenges. They formed explanations based on their observations of nature, as opposed to relying on the presence of gods and the gods’ interaction with humanity to explain how and why the world worked. Even then, the pre-Socratics couldn’t wholly escape the religious context of their time, and many of their explanations retained mythic qualities. It wasn’t until Socrates developed his style of street philosophy that the ancient, mythopoeic ethic (based on punishment and reward) would begin to be challenged.