Ross Parish Essay Competition
‘Is there a legitimate role for the government in shaping the values and attitudes of its citizens?’

Greg Roebuck and Philip Elias respond
Click here for PDF version

The annual Ross Parish Essay Competition, open to young people aged between 18 and 30, for 2005 asked the question: ‘Is there a legitimate role for the government in shaping the values and attitudes of its citizens?’. Most political attention goes to governments directly exercising their power, through laws and financial incentives. But governments are also active in persuasion: don’t smoke, don’t drink too much, don’t bash your wife, have safe sex, put on sunscreen, don’t be racist, care for the environment, save water, and so on. The CIS decided to see what young people thought of this kind of government action, and the essay competition question reflects this.

In the end, the judges were torn between two essays that were very different in both style and conclusion. Philosophically, the essay by Greg Roebuck was closest to the liberal view most in the CIS support, but Phillip Elias has written an intelligent and lucid conservative case for government’s role in shaping values. It was decided to award two first prizes, with the prize money for the first and second prize split between the two winners. They two essays are published below.—Andrew Norton

The ‘no’ case, argued by Greg Roebuck

Introduction

The question of whether the government may legitimately shape the values of its people bears upon the most basic assumptions of political philosophy, on how values and governmental legitimacy are understood. This short essay presents the issue in very precise terms, and argues that, within this limited context, there is absolutely no role for the state in shaping the attitudes of its citizens.

Elucidating Values

What are values? Tautologically speaking, one might describe them as those propositions, declared or tacit, with normative import. Definitions of this ilk however risk vagueness, question-begging, or worse, regress. Probably the most lucid account of values yet is that given by David Hume in his seminal work A Treatise of Human Nature. [1] There, the distinction is first made between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements—between propositions referring to the world as it is, and those referring to the world as it should be. This is, in essence, the age-old division between fact and value, but with a philosophically and syntactically rigorous description of both.

Importantly, Hume goes on to argue that one can never infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. That is, that values—unlike facts—have no rational basis, and cannot be deduced from the state of the world. They are, rather, relative to a particular person, and, as such, entirely arbitrary. In the words of Stephen Law, it is as though we each wear a particular pair of ‘moral spectacles’ through which the world is interpreted. [2] For the purposes of this essay, Hume’s analysis (and his moral relativism) shall be accepted, and the question at hand reformulated to whether the government may legitimately act to cause its citizens to believe certain ‘ought’ statements. [3]

Two Important Distinctions

Before the development of any substantive arguments, our inquiry should be further delimited in two vital respects. Firstly, a distinction must be made between the indirect, secondary consequences of enacting a particular piece of legislation, and the government’s actual, principal aim. Given the oft-purported moral authority of law, it may be quite common that the unintended, ‘second-hand’ effects of legislating include a general change in moral perceptions. For clarity’s sake, however, this essay shall confine itself to considering only those (hypothetical) acts of the government which deliberately and purposively set out to influence citizens’ values.

Secondly, it must be emphasised that the state may, of course, always legitimately intervene in public debate in order to create rational discourse. This is because the promotion of rationality and truth is ultimately the domain of ‘is’ propositions—of facts, and even those facts that appear intimately, and, indeed, inextricably connected to values are the subject of Hume’s distinction. So, for instance, legislation may require that the health consequences of tobacco consumption are publicly disseminated. [4] It is quite a different matter however to advise the populace that they ought not to suffer these consequences, although this additional proposition may appear self-evident to some. Thus, the price of conceptual purity is that the Humean is/ought division may occasionally appear spurious in practice. [5]

Values, Relativism, and the State

Having properly refined the issue, we are finally able to discuss whether the government may in fact legislate with the intention of shaping the values of its citizens. Probably the most powerful argument against this proposition concerns the moral relativism alluded to earlier. If values are not objective or universal—both in the empirical and epistemic sense—then the state should be utterly incapable of providing rational grounds for the endorsement and promotion of any particular set of values. In the absence of such grounds, and assuming that the mere possession of certain values cannot cause harm--it is difficult to imagine that the mere possession of an opinion could be harmful--governmental interference represents an unjustified intrusion on personal liberty. Historically, it has certainly been the hallmark of unduly oppressive regimes that they have sought to control and manipulate the attitudes of the general populace. In the discourse of rights, freedom of belief represents a more fundamental individual right than even freedom of speech. This reasoning is, in essence, equivalent to J.S. Mill’s classic argument for the separation of Church and State, and may even be regarded as the central justification for liberalism itself. [6]

Democratic Legitimacy

There is, however, a deeper reason for which the state should not attempt to shape the values of the people. In liberal democracies, the legitimacy of the government is vested in, and dependant upon, the democratic process. This process is, after all, the only absolute guarantee that the laws enacted will reflect the ‘general will’ of the populace. H.L. Mencken summarised this justificatory notion as ‘the idea that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard’. [7]

If the basis of governmental legitimacy however lies in the state’s expression of, and accountability to, collective popular values, then it would appear that governments must not under any circumstances attempt to manipulate these values. The law of non-contradiction, and, indeed, hierarchical logic in general, prohibits element A from influencing B, where A is purportedly a reflection of B. [8] As a matter of political philosophy, the state cannot control that which it is properly supposed to reflect. Such control would not only undermine, but directly negate the foundations of state legitimacy. Moreover, in equitable terms, it represents the unjustified, paternalistic imposition of the particular values of a small group upon a much larger group. The government therefore cannot have a legitimate role in shaping the values of the general populace, because its legitimacy is lost at precisely the moment that attempts are made to influence the normative attitudes of the general populace.

Classical Foundations

Debate concerning this last idea has a long and rather eminent philosophical heritage. In classical times, the standard comparison was between Plato’s conception of rule by elite ‘philosopher-kings’, and Aristotelian support for what are essentially modern democracies. Both political perspectives were, needless to say, driven by vastly different worldviews. Platonic epistemology accepts the idea of an objective ‘good’—discoverable by philosophical inquiry—which justifies the (in)famous ‘noble lie’. [9] In the empirical Aristotelian tradition, such idealism is considered fanciful, and, if applied to the existing political reality, utterly unrealistic, as it seems to invite the abuse of power. [10] Indubitably, in today’s post-enlightenment age, it is Aristotle’s more scientific and liberal outlook which has ultimately prevailed.

Objection Number 1: People are Fallible

The most common and, in truth, probably the most significant response to this analysis concentrates on the imperfections of humankind. Surely, it is argued, people are capable of getting it wrong sometimes. The general populace may be uninformed irrational, and susceptible to persuasion by rhetoric rather than rigorous argument. We are, as humans, utterly fallible—especially when it comes to forming values. A society which, for example, endorses the gratuitous torturing and mutilation of defenceless children is clearly worse than one which does not. Less hypothetically, a society in which racist or other discriminatory beliefs are prevalent is quite obviously wrong in its values, and deserving of governmental reform. The state must have, therefore, at least some role to play in correcting popular error, and improving the values of its citizens.

 The validity of the above reasoning, and in particular, this last inference, may be objected to on a number of grounds however. Firstly, as previously mentioned, in the context of a factual inquiry, governments certainly can—and should—legislate to correct error and public misconceptions. Thus, to the extent that dubious ethical beliefs are underpinned by factual misapprehensions, they may already be remedied. To return to the example of a society in which racist and other discriminatory beliefs are widespread, the government may legislate in order to educate its citizens as to the consequences of racism, and the generally incorrect factual convictions upon which it is founded.

Secondly, under liberal democratic principles, the state does not possess an independent conception of the ‘good’. That is, governments exist merely to reflect and express the will of the people. They cannot therefore correct those popular values which they perceive to be ‘wrong’, since, as far as the government is concerned, what is wrong (and right) is determined precisely by popular values. Finally, and most importantly, even predicating properties such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of ethical propositions misunderstands the nature of the question addressed. It either presupposes a moral truth, against which values may be measured—belying the relativism earlier assumed as axiomatic, or it describes the worth of a particular proposition. In the latter case, this simply represents another value, a meta-level value, [11] to which the assumed relativism applies—thus begging the very question to be answered! The objection cannot survive this analytical dilemma, and, as such, must be rejected.

Objection Number 2: The Demands of Functionality

A second important argument against the reasoning adopted in this essay contends that in order to function properly, governments must act according to their own values. Clearly, it is not practicable to ascertain popular views on every state policy. As a result, it is argued, governments necessarily shape popular values and attitudes by making decisions that are based on their ‘own’ values, the collective values of those individuals that compose the government.

This line of reasoning is patently false however. Besides misinterpreting the actual question under discussion, [12] it ignores the fact that the only basis for governments acting on their own values is that they do not interfere with those of their citizens. Ultimately, popular values will be expressed through the democratic process, but the legitimacy of this process depends implicitly upon a lack of state influence. In other words, while it is correct to say that governments must act on their own values, we cannot infer from this that they may legitimately influence the attitudes of the general populace.

Objection Number 3: The Relativists’ Revenge

The deepest, most difficult and final objection to the above analysis also represents the greatest challenge to liberalism itself. It is, in a philosophical nutshell, the notion that liberal principles are inherently self-defeating because they are premised upon an excessively broad relativism. For example, if values are indeed relative, then this essay would appear rather pointless—and contradictory—as it purports to argue that the government ought not to influence the values and attitudes of its citizens. Evidently, this value (or ‘ought’ proposition) might simply be rejected as arbitrary and irrational. Similarly, if we accept the moral relativism at the heart of liberalism, then why should we accept liberalism in the first place?

In response, it is wise to consider two related matters. Firstly, this essay, and, of course, liberalism as a political theory does not attempt to portray itself as a harbinger of moral truth. Rather, it explores a consequentialist view of normative theory, arguing in favour of moral consistency. That is to say, it attempts to explore the consequences of a particular value, without accepting that value itself as indisputable fact. [13] Secondly, the relativists’ objection, whilst accurate in theory, seems to disregard the general, if not universal, consensus when it comes to foundational values in practice. So, despite the arbitrariness of morality, there is, in reality, substantial popular agreement with most of the core liberal values: harm prevention, personal liberty, and democratic government. Exploring the logical consequences of these shared values has been the central purpose of this essay.

Conclusion

It is clear that our present inquiry forms part of an even more profound question in political philosophy concerning the ultimate role of the state. Arguably, this is the most profound question in political philosophy. As a consequence, to complete this discussion, it must be placed within that broader context. Typically, the liberal ideal in this regard is of the minimal state, which exists to prevent harm—but no more. Individual freedom is primary. As J.S. Mill affirmed in his celebrated dictum, ‘[t]he a priori assumption is in favour of freedom’. [14] Within this conceptual framework then, the government plainly does not have a legitimate role in shaping the values of its citizens. Such influence represents the unjustified erosion of individual liberties, an intrusion into the privacy of personal beliefs, and is thoroughly undemocratic.

Greg Roebuck is a second year Arts/Law student at the University of Melbourne.

[1] D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (Oxford Philosophical Texts), edited by D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1740]), Book III, Part I, Section I.

[2] S. Law, The Philosophy Gym (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2003) , p. 218. Law is responsible (at least in part) for the recent popularisation of philosophy and philosophical concepts such as moral relativism.

[3] Careful readers will note that this reformulated question is itself an ‘ought’ proposition. Namely, whether the government ought to cause its citizens to believe particular ‘ought’ statements. For a full exposition of this idea, see the section entitled ‘The Relativists’ Revenge’.

[4] See the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 (Cth).

[5] This is not intended as ammunition for pragmatists, but rather as recognition of borderline cases (and, of course, vagueness in general) where the distinction is fine and a careful analysis is required.

[6] See J. S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’ in John Gray (ed), On Liberty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press (1991 [1859]).

[7] H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major (1916) p 45.

[8] ‘ Hierarchical logic’ here refers to any deductive system in which objects and propositions are ordered in levels to avoid the paradoxes of self-reference.

[9] In The Republic, Plato described a city whose inhabitants were organised into categories: the rulers, auxiliaries, farmers, etc. The rulers, he said, must tell the people of the city the ‘noble lie’—that the aforementioned categorisation was in no way due to circumstances within the people’s control or upbringing. Rather, it was the result to God’s intervention, who, the lie went, had put gold, silver, and iron into each person’s soul, and accordingly determined the category to which he or she belonged. See Plato, The Republic (London: Penguin Classics, 1955).

[10] Certainly, those states founded on, for example, Marxist doctrine—with its epistemologically independent ideological foundations—have, (at least historically) been the subject of substantial abuses of power and consequent oppression. See E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London: Abacus, 1994).

[11] For example, the proposition: it is wrong to believe that we ought to euthanise the terminally ill, if interpreted in the second sense, is roughly equivalent to: one ought not to believe that one ought to euthanise the terminally ill.

[12] The question addressed here is whether or not the government may deliberately act to influence the values of its citizens, and not whether the government’s decisions are based on its ‘own’ values.

[13] If, for example, one believes that an event is wrong if it causes harm, and also that event A is an instance of causing harm, then by logical consequence, one ought to believe that event A is wrong.

[14] J. S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’ in J. Gray (ed), On Liberty and Other Essays (1991), p. 471.

 Other References

J. Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York: Random House, New York, 1973).

F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1993)

The ‘yes’ case, argued by Phillip Elias

The answer for most individuals in Western democratic nations is a resounding ‘no’.

‘There is no such thing as a good influence Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral— immoral from the scientific point of view.’ [1]

We generally acknowledge the reign of individual self-interest in market matters, and equivocally hail the private conscience in moral matters. We are ‘moral sovereigns’. We have crowned ourselves. Like Napoleon at Notre Dame, we have wrested this title from temporal and spiritual authority.

In this short essay I will attempt to replace our spontaneous ‘no’ with a qualified ‘yes’. I question the viability of a social order that upholds the person as absolute individual, its values as absolutely personal and its freedom as absolute autonomy. Firstly, I question our ability put these theoretical absolutes into practice. Secondly, I think in the extent to which they are practiced, they are creating what Anne Manne calls ‘the shadowland of moral chaos’: increasing suicide rates, depression, drug and alcohol abuse and the breakdown of marriage and families.

Our ‘no’ rests on the philosophical presumptions of the Enlightenment. Since then, society, values and freedom have been considered as ‘accessories’ to the human person, rather than as constitutive elements. As a result, our concept of the human person has been losing weight. We are at a stage where Milan Kundera can talk bout ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.

Thus my focus is not political, juridical or sociological. It is fundamentally about the philosophy of the human person. I believe that by reviving an Aristotelian conception of the human person, its natural rights and the natural law, we will have a basis for answering ‘yes’ to our original question.

The role of government in shaping the values of citizens depends very importantly on how one understands the relationship between the individual and society. Socialism claims that the individual can be fulfilled only by dissolving into the projects and aims of the state. In this scenario the values of the government are those of the individual. Liberal thought has resisted socialism over the past century by reasserting the human person’s individuality and rationality. It draws upon the definition of a person given by Boethius: an individual substance of a rational nature. There will be no end to the need for this insistence. It is the basis for Kant’s categorical imperative. A human person must always be treated as an end in itself, never as a means to an end.

The problem for liberalism has been how to join individuals into an authentic social unit. [2] The theory of the social contract contains some anomalies that I believe are closely associated with our current moral crisis, and may explain our philosophical inability to reconcile the state and the individual.

Firstly, if our rights in society are governed merely by the social contract we happen to be a party to, what is the basis for so-called human rights? For example, if a particular society values the circumcision of women, do other societies have any right to interfere? Human rights, or natural rights, are rights that we have by virtue of our humanity. And as Roger Scruton succinctly points out, ‘natural rights lie outside the social contract’. [3]

Secondly, does the exclusion of government from our values-choices automatically make these choices autonomous? [4] We are influenced by and draw our ideas from a multiplicity of social settings. Among these upbringing, education and the media are probably most significant. These influences can be positive or negative.

Finally, are we really satisfied with a social contract as the basis for our being governed? In the postmodern West we are witnessing what Scruton calls a ‘culture of repudiation’. [5] It is the consequence of an inadequate anthropology. We espouse a quasi-anarchism while almost unconsciously being supported by the structures of government. In our fixation with the idea of a voluntary contract we forget that ‘obedience is part of life for people who think themselves autonomous’. [6]

Aristotle’s concept of the human person as a ‘social animal’ provides a better basis for understanding the relationship between the individual and society. Social organisation is not a piece of inventory we have voluntarily picked up at some tage in our evolutionary history. Rather it is a dimension of the human person itself; it is constitutive of our being. [7]

Humans have biopsychological as well as rational reasons for forming societies and for being governed. Writers such as Virginia Held have demonstrated the complete impropriety of a social contract model for understanding the first human society—the family—and in particular the relationship between mother and child. [8] Roger Scruton points out that even on a larger scale, there is a need for a precontractual ‘we’ before any semblance of a contract can be formed. [9] Phenomenologically, our social nature can be studied in the various formal and informal associations that we create. If social contracts involve obligation, would it ot be rational to minimise our participation in them? The consequences of a deprived social nature can be examined in the ‘shadowland of moral chaos’: in the psychological trauma of solitary confinement, in the yearnings for sociability that drive much drug and alcohol abuse and in the depressive effect of an intense but impersonal urban lifestyle.

By understanding the human person as a social animal we remove the wedge between the individual and society. Our bond to others, and hence our bond to government, transcends the agreed upon terms of an economic transaction. And the assertion of inalienable, common rights hints at the possibility of common goals. We can approach the concept of a natural law.

The operative word in our original question really is ‘values’ and up to now I have not defined this term. The modern usage of this word is best understood by examining its historical development since the Enlightenment. Hume’s dichotomy between what is and what ought drained values of their metaphysical content. It was a great aim of the Enlightenment project, in fact, to explain all ‘oughts’ in terms of ‘ises’. The project was given added impetus by the logical positivists at the start of the 20th century, who explicitly established an epistemological dichotomy between facts and values.

I think that today values are popularly understood in this positivist tradition. We pay lip service to them, as Hume would have, and there is a general appreciation that certain values are necessary for the cohesion of nation-states. [10] But values are things that we can choose to pick up and carry around. They are optional and intensely personal. We expect that public policy will be ‘fairly values-neutral’. [11] In the dichotomies proposed between State and Church, fact and opinion, empirical reality and belief, objective and subjective, values stand squarely in line with the latter.

But are these real dichotomies? Does objectivity mean divesting ourselves of values? Max Scheler, who built his whole moral philosophy on the foundation of values, thought not:

‘To conceive the world as value-free is a task which men set themselves on account of a value: the vital value of mastery and power over things.’ [12]

Postmodern philosophers have further questioned the distinction between fact and value, sometimes to a radical degree. Can we really talk about ‘facts’ independent of their value-context and the personalities that produced them?

What I believe all this points to is another key aspect of the human person forgotten by the Enlightenment. Unlike animals, we are not defined by our biological need to feed and reproduce. The things that we are most concerned with are those ‘ought’ statements. We are moral beings. We seek a normative dimension to our actions and our lives. Values are an important part of who we are, and any pretensions to ‘values-neutrality’ should be seen merely as the expression of another value.

Then what is the origin of our ‘oughts’? One possible answer is given by the concept of natural law. This proposes that there are certain ‘values’ that human beings hold by virtue of their being human. I believe that the study of the morality of different cultures, rather than negating this idea by its variability, rather enhances it by its consistency. Everywhere we see some evidence of certain values; that it is wrong to violate or take innocent human life, to steal another’s property or to lie.

In the light of this, a role begins to emerge for governments in shaping the values of citizens. In the first place, we cannot continue to pretend that there is such a thing as values-free government. It would be a mistake, for instance, to view the abortion debate that is so topical now as a conflict between the ‘fact’ of a woman’s right to choose, and the ‘religious value’ of the dignity of human life. Rather, both sides present certain facts, and both rest these on particular values. We need the ethical tools to evaluate these values.

On another level, there is the need to recognise those values that arise simply from our human condition. These must be separated from other values over which there are grounds for discussion and debate. The government can realise its role in treading that line between upholding the natural law and allowing for a legitimate plurality of values.

Critics of this view may fear from it a ‘return to the Dark Ages’ or simply the first steps down a slippery slope to tyranny. However I think we should reflect on our own society and consider that, in many ways, this is in part what we already allow. We forbid murder, rape, robbery, stealing and so on, and rarely consider why. They are based on more than positive law or common sense. The challenge for governments in the 21st century is to identify those aspects of natural law we have ceded to plurality. We will probably find that they are at the epicentre of our moral chaos’.

What we are trying to grapple with here is essentially a question of the meaning of human freedom. In the West, ‘freedom is the value by which all other values are measured’. [13] No word is more important to the Enlightenment, no word is more important to postmodernism and no word, in both contexts, is as poorly understood. Lord Acton rightly pointed out that freedom, or liberty ‘is an idea of which there are two hundred definitions’. [14]

We protect our freedom like a possession. Our greatest fear is that it will be interfered with by others. We make a contract to ensure the safety of our freedom and that of others. But this is a rather limited view of freedom. It is a negative freedom: a freedom from inhibitions, including duties, obligations and others. I prefer to see it as something that we share with all persons for all time. I do not have freedom, I am free.

At the same time we are inherently limited beings. We have physical, psychological and intellectual limitations. We have social and moral limitations, also. Beyond the rhetoric, this fact is often recognised. In the context of the individual and society, attempts have been made to rationalise these limitations to freedom. The most famous is John Stuart Mill’s principle of ‘harm’; we are socially and morally free, so long as we do not harm others. [15] Government has a role in dealing with a person’s crimes, but not with his or her vices.

Such a morality is remarkably pervasive in our society. But the dichotomy identified is again problematic. The Millsian concept of ‘harm’ does not allow for psychological harm, which is something that a litigious society such as ours must increasingly come to terms with. It doesn’t account for the harm occasioned by neglected responsibilities. Does a drunken father cause harm to his family simply by being unable to support them? Nor does it allow for moral harm. Scruton rightly asks ‘in particular, am I harmed by those things which disturb and upset me, and which perhaps tempt me away from the path of righteousness?’ [16] Couldn’t the very expression of ‘freedom’ be at times the occasion for moral harm for those whose value-systems differ from ours? Is it a satisfactory solution simply to ask these persons to abandon their ‘scruples’?

In a globalised, multicultural West it is possible that this negative, individualistic freedom will become a new form of slavery. Perhaps this is already happening with the demands for political correctness made, for example, by the EU. It is here that the concept of natural law again begs discussion. An authentic freedom must be a perennial freedom, and we cannot guarantee freedom to future generations unless it is anchored to some evergreen moral philosophy. Human freedom in matters of law and government must be viewed with reference to the natural law. Freedom by itself is self-defeating; we could do well to take warning from Scruton: ‘If all that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilization bent on its own destruction.’ [17]

There is a famous cartoon from the French Revolution depicting a peasant bent over under the weight of the privileged estates. In a sense, it could represent the human person in the West in the 21st century: stooped, malnourished and burdened with the triple weight of our society, values and freedom. Didn’t Sartre say ‘We are condemned to freedom’?

I believe we are in a position, taking on board postmodern criticisms of the Enlightenment project, to recognise the weightiness of the human person. Our freedom, values and society are not excess baggage. We are not lightweights who need be afraid of being pushed around by governments. We need not necessarily be antagonistic to government at all. Given the presence of a natural law inscribed in our being, both government and individuals may ‘shape’ each other’s values with a view to the same end.

 Phillip Elias is an Arts/Medicine student at UNSW. He completed Honours in History last year.

[1] O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter II.

[2] In this essay I use the term liberalism to denote a political philosophy based on absolute individualism. While in a certain sense this is a caricature—such ‘liberal’ states do not exist today nor did they in the nineteenth century—I believe it is the philosophy that informs the kind of moral autonomy we espouse. I take ‘liberalism’ to be the on the opposite extreme to socialism. Both err, to borrow a device from Aristotle, in considering the person solely as an economic animal.

[3] R. Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (London: Pimlico, 2004), p.434 .

[4] When made, this assumption is indicative of what Kleinig calls ‘the liberal preoccupation with the relationship between the state and the individual’. See J. Kleinig, Paternalism (New Jersey, Rowman & Allenhead Pub., 1984), xi . While I disagree with the hermeneutics of suspicion employed by postmodern thinkers such as Foucault, I think they are right in claiming that the structures of power and influence can subsist in much more subtle forms than state control.

[5] R. Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (London: Pimlico, 2004), p.67

[6] D. Mixon, Authority and Civilization: Authorized Crime and the Normality of Evil (London: Pluto Press, 1989), Preface.

[7] Some writers have criticised the Aristotelian view on the basis of its perceived naturalism. Richard Taylor explains that ‘bees and ants are social by nature, not by choice’. See R. Taylor, Freedom, Anarchy and the Law (New Jersey: Prentice-Hill, 1973), p.3 . However Aristotle’s position, taken up by Aquinas and by the School of Salamanca, has nothing to do with biological determinism. It has a lot to do with a profound understanding of the human person as a complex of determined biological and psychological factors, but endowed with rationality and free will.

[8] Held’s work is reviewed in A. Manne, ‘In freedom’s shadow’, The Australian’s Review of Books (July 1998), p.4.

[9] R. Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the TerroristThreat (London: Continuum, 2002). pp.11-12.

[10] Take, for example, the list of values given by Martin Krygier: ‘tolerance, civility, decency, responsibility, nationality, pride & shame.’ See M. Krygier, Between Fear & Hope: Hybrid thoughts on publicvalues (Sydney: ABC Books, 1997), p.1. Today the connotation the word ‘values’ carries in most contexts is at worst a negative one. At best, values are a nice thing one teaches one’s children, like tolerance, respect and preserving the environment. They are empty categories, exemplifying the loss of meaning in our moral terms described by A. MacIntyre in After Virtue: A Study in MoralTheory (Indiana: [2 nd ed.] University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

[11] This comment was made by Rosemary Davis, the head of the PDHPE school curriculum, with reference to the sex education syllabus compiled by the NSW Board of Studies [‘It [the syllabus] is fairly values-neutral…Parents can back that up with their own values.’] Health & Science SMH Aug. 19 2004 p.4.

[12] Quoted in Mixon Obedience and Civilization p.159.

[13] Zygmunt Bauman quoted in Manne, ‘In freedom’s shadow’, p.1.

[14] Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p.36.

[15] This is essentially also Lysander Spooner’s thesis: ‘vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property…crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.’. See Lysander Spooner, ‘Vices are not Crimes’ in the Lysander Spooner Reader ed. George H. Smith (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1992), p.25.

[16] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, p.585.

[17] Scruton, The West and the Rest.

Other references:

T. G. Palmer, ‘The Literature of Liberty’ in The Libertarian Reader, edited by David Boaz (New York: The Free Press, 1998).

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