Opponents of the idea of an objective morality commonly charge that moral theory functions as a tyranny over the individual. In philosophy, in economics, in social analysis, we are beginning to see that the tossing aside of moral rights was not the brave new world it once seemed-but rather a long and disastrous detour in political philosophy, which is now fortunately drawing to a close. We are now beginning to recapture the once-great tradition of objectively grounded rights of the individual.
And yet now, a century later, it is the latter's once fashionable nihilism and tough amoralism that strike us as being empty and destructive of the very liberty they all tried hard to bring about. With his emphasis on cognitive moral principles and natural rights, Spooner must have looked hopelessly old-fashioned to Tucker and the young anarchists of the 1870s and 1880s. And yet, Spooner knew that this was no foundation at all for the State is far mightier than any individual, and if the individual cannot use a theory of justice as his armor against State oppression, then he has no solid base from which to roll back and defeat it.
Tucker, all proclaimed arbitrary whim and might-makes-right as the foundation of libertarian moral theory. Yet, even in his own anarchist movement Spooner was the last of the Old Guard believers in natural rights his successors in the individualist-anarchist movement, led by Benjamin R. Spooner knew that the foundation for individual rights and liberty was tinsel if all values and ethics were arbitrary and subjective. Not only had natural law and natural rights given way throughout society to the arbitrary rule of utilitarian calculation or nihilistic whim, but the same degenerative process had occurred among libertarians and anarchists as well. For Spooner was the last of the great natural-rights theorists among anarchists, classical liberals, or moral theorists generally the doughty old heir of the natural law–natural rights tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries was fighting a rearguard battle against the collapse of the idea of a scientific or rational morality, or of the science of justice or of individual right. We are all indebted to Carl Watner for uncovering an unknown work by the great Lysander Spooner, one that managed to escape the editor of Spooner's Collected Works.īoth the title and the substance of "Vices are not Crimes" highlight the unique role that morality and moral principle had for Spooner among the anarchists and libertarians of his day.
0 kommentar(er)
