Risto

Accepting that elitist and inegalitarian political hypotheses are facile, preposterous, and juvenile, then the goal of life is not just happiness, but the more inclusive ideal of the "greatest amount of happiness altogether." The greatest amount of happiness altogether differs from conventional happiness (say, for example, pragmatically oriented life directives such as "do what makes you happy") in two important ways: 1) we must critically examine the things that make us happy, and 2) while critically examining our happiness we must recognize and accept that our happiness is bound to the happiness of others, and hence, we must assign great value to the happiness of others. This implies the development and maintenance of an environment that provides a sustainable and enduring quality of life for every person. If we are to live according to this goal, then one significant precondition for living a valuable life is promoting the greatest liberty for the greatest number.

If we accept the statements above, then we must define liberty. A relevant definition of liberty is the "power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice." So, in order to possess liberty, all people must be permitted to control and develop their lives "according to choice." Working from this definition, we can say the task of promoting liberty must be concerned with enabling all people to make their own decisions, and empowering all people to maintain control over their own lives. This requires that all people must be given access to the information they believe is relevant to controlling their lives. All people must be afforded education, whether this means learning how to mend a button, or how to mend an artery. In summary then: the task of effecting happiness entails the promotion of liberty, and the task of promoting liberty entails the provision of education.

A paradox of modern life now becomes apparent: liberty has been an active concept for millenia (hence there is no lack of exposure to the concept), education is a prerequisite for liberty, and education is available in the modern world ad nauseam; however, the promulgation of education has not achieved the promulgation of the greatest liberty for the greatest number. In order to verify this last statement, let us consider an example which definitively supports the argument that the greatest liberty for the greatest number has not been achieved: starvation.

The condition of starvation completely negates liberty. It is inescapably true that a person's "power or right of doing, thinking, [and] speaking ... according to choice" is abrogated by starvation. Even history's most terrible monsters do not deny that "hunger shatters all plans." The reality of starvation is that "963 million people across the world are hungry," and that "[e]very day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes." If we genuinely believe that the goal of life is the greatest amount of happiness altogether, then the statistics of modern starvation on their own are enough to show that we are nowhere near achieving such a goal.

What are the barriers to ending starvation? Are we limited by technology? No. (This response needs no intensive proof.) Are we limited by resources? While over-population is a valid theoretical concern, the combination of modern agricultural methods with the grossly unequal distribution of resources does not permit even minimal confidence in the claim that starvation persists primarily because of resource limitations. Until humanity at large has actually undertaken the project of ending starvation, it is impossible to demonstrate that there are more people than resources. In lieu of undertaking this project, an easy way to justify the claim that starvation is aggravated by limited resources is to assert that the lives of some people are more valuable than the lives of others (though not necessarily using that language), and that for some reason there are people who deserve more resources than others, whatever that reason may be: effort, intelligence, lineage, etc. However, recall the opening sentence of this essay, in which we accepted the claim "that elitist ... political hypotheses are facile, preposterous, and juvenile." In this case, no method exists for justifying the opulent lifestyles and unnecessary wastefulness of first world citizens as somehow valid in the face of the starvation of third world citizens. If the barrier to ending starvation can not be resources, then what can it be?

If education is a prerequisite for liberty and exists in the modern world ad nauseam, then how is it that after centuries of internationalization, and in the midst of so much education, there remains a colossal dearth of liberty on the global scale, as displayed for example by the problem of starvation? If it is true that education and liberty are positively correlated, then could we not expect that increased education would coincide with increased global liberty? Might we not expect that with ever-increasing interrelations between all nations of the world, that fundamental human problems such as starvation should have been moderated across the entire planet? Instead, even in the midst of epidemic starvation in third world nations, business systems and material progress in post-modern first world nations have produced their own peculiar epidemic. "[A]n epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production," and the perhaps even more absurd "solution" of planned obsolescence. Clearly, based on the uneven distribution of resources that persists in the face of mass suffering, we see that any expectation regarding the positive correlation of liberty with education can only be deemed reasonable relative to some systems of reasoning, but not all.

So: happiness requires liberty and liberty requires education, but the propagation of education has not produced the greatest liberty for the greatest number. Something is missing. Does our notion of education require refinement, or is the missing element something other than education? An obvious question that presents itself is the nature of education: what is the purpose of education, if not to develop the greatest liberty for the greatest number? A part of the answer is that liberty is a moral concept of political philosophy (although the study of political philosophy is of course not the sole route to the development of similar conceptions), and as such, the definition of liberty as the individual "power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice" is not inextricably bound to the process of education. To see this, consider military education. "The challenge for the Marine Corps is finding the balance between abusive methods and the need to train an elite fighting force disciplined to fight and die on command." Precisely because dying on command is a command, a person following such a command does not possess the "power ... of doing ... according to choice," and thus that person can not be said to possess liberty in any important sense of the word. It is true that a person may willfully choose to follow the command to enter mortal combat, but that does not terminate this debate -- what developed in the person a system of reasoning that led them to make the one choice that denies them the possibility of making any other choice ever again (and in all likelihood involves imposing the same abrogation of liberty on others involved in the same mortal combat)? "Nor is it possible without letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or, unless his memory be hurt by disease or ill constitution of organs, excellently foolish."

The complexity of the problem is now apparent. While starvation is an obvious abrogation of liberty, teaching a person to willingly follow the command to enter mortal combat is a more subtle abrogation of liberty. Given the current levels of information and technology, the popular method for justifying these abrogations of liberty is through the application of elitist political hypotheses. From this we may conclude that education on its own does not entail the investigation or development of an ethical system that encourages the greatest liberty for the greatest number. If education did aspire to the greatest amount of happiness altogether, then education would not simply be "the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills," but would instead continuously adapt itself toward the goal of effecting the greatest amount of happiness altogether, and thus toward the purpose of solving humanity's most pressing problems as regards liberty. The list of humanity's most pressing problems as regards liberty would be dynamic, but in any case, the problem of eradicating starvation would weigh heavily on the mind of every student, as would the problem of eradicating social environments that can find justification for training people to die on command.

If we can agree that the existence of starvation is appalling, while at the same time agreeing that both the resources and technology exist to mitigate it, then the question remains: why does starvation persist in the midst of plenty? What about other impediments to liberty? What is it that prevents realization of the greatest liberty for the greatest number? These questions are not entirely insoluble, and many of the answers lie inside our social instincts, and consequently inside of our social institutions.

The next blog in this series will build on the discussion of liberty from this article, and move on to discuss the danger of institutional normalization from a more general perspective.