Isaiah Berlin's great essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" concludes as follows:
'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, ' and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.' To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, p. 172.)
A marginalium of mine from 1994 reads, "If I think my convictions merely relatively valid, how can I stand for them unflinchingly? Even if this is psychologically possible, it seems to be something we ought not do."
To expand upon my 1994 thought. The liberty of the individual to be free from coercion and obstruction -- "negative liberty (freedom)" in Berlin's terminology -- obviously comes into conflict with other things we deem valuable such as equality, security, and public order.
Consider how liberty and security are related. Liberty worth having is liberty within a context of security, and security is security worth having only if it makes possible a robust exercise of liberty. For example, my liberty to leave my house at any time of the day or night is worth very little if the probability is high that I will be accosted by muggers and other unsavory types when I step out my door. The security of a police state would prevent that but at a cost too high to pay.
So liberty and security, though both values, are competing values. Does one rank higher than the other such that we ought to prefer one to the other? In a concrete situation in which they come into conflict, one must choose. Consider for example a sobriety checkpoint on New Year's Eve when by custom booze intake is high. Such checkpoints involve a clear violation of the (negative) liberty of the individual, and yet they are arguably justifiable in the interests of security and public order.
Now suppose you have a conservative and a libertarian. In conflict situations, the conservative tends to rank security over liberty, while the libertarian does the opposite. They both agree that the values in play are indeed values, but they differ as to their prioritization. Suppose further something that seems obviously true, namely, that this value difference that divides them cannot be objectively resolved to the satisfaction of both parties by appeal to any empirical fact or by any reasoning or by any combination of the two.
Now here's the question. Given that the two maintain contradictory value-prioritization theses, how can either "stand unflinchingly" for his thesis given that each recognizes that each thesis is true only from his orientation, an orientation which rests crucially on his value-prioritization, a value-prioritization that he has no objective reason to prefer over that of his opponent?
I am suggesting that a truly civilized man, one who fully appreciates this predicament he is in, must give up his unflinchingness. He ought to flinch! After all, his opponent has all the same intellectual and moral virtues as he has --let us assume -- is equally capable of reasoning cogently above whatever are the facts, and is equally well apprised of all empirical facts that bear on the issue. Isn't there something "barbaric" about insisting on one's own position assuming that all of these conditions have been met?
I agree with Berlin that it would be "dangerous and immature" to claim absolute truth for convictions that rest on value judgments that cannot be objectvely established. But once we get this far, then unflinchingness must also go by the board: what I recognize as true only from my point of view, I cannot hold in an unflinching manner.
And yet I must act, hold opinions, vote, take a stand, smite my enemies. Suspension of judgment and retreat from the political sphere does not seem to be a viable option -- especially not in the face of a bunch of leftist totalitarians who want to so extend the public /political sphere so as to destroy the private. A hell of a bind we are in: we are essentially agents, hence must act, hence must stand fast, be resolute and smite our dangblasted political opponents -- all the while realizing that we have no justification for our unflinchingness.
The admirable writer Berlin mentions is Joseph Schumpeter.
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