A Brief Reflection on Ancestors and Descendants

When we reflect on the past, we are admonished not to judge our historical forebears by the moral standards of our own time. It sometimes cannot be helped, however. We recoil at those who took part in the institution of slavery, or the subjection of women, or any number of crimes against humanity, and we disdain those who stood by in craven or complacent acceptance of the practices we now rightly abhor. We imagine ourselves placed within their milieu, thinking to ourselves, “If I had been in Germany during the war, I would have resisted. I would’ve been like Oskar Schindler.” and “If I had lived in antebellum America, I would’ve been an abolitionist.” Would we have indeed?

Many of us who’ve spent time researching family history, especially those Americans of European heritage from the southern part of the country, will be familiar with the unsettling experience of browsing records of wills and finding that an ancestor had bequeathed human beings as “property” to their children. To us this is heinous. To them it was banal. Many younger Germans must have no doubt experienced similar feelings regarding relations who lived during the time of World War 2.

We may look askance at these ancestors, wishing they had instead been more of a Garrison or Schindler, standing firm against the immorality of their time, or at least wishing that they had not been active participants in it. But they were who they were—common folk who perhaps simply did what their peers did, without stopping long to reflect upon the ethics of the common institutions or practices of their time. Or, perhaps they recognized these moral wrongs, but for lack of certain personal virtues remained complicit, or remained silent.

Would we have done any better in their shoes? Would we have had the courage to stand against heinous moral wrongs when they are commonly accepted and normalized? Would we even have had the capability to recognize them as such? The truth is that these questions are poorly framed. They are not really counterfactuals after all. We should rather ask, “Are we doing any better? Do we have the penetration to recognize what is unethical within our society's common practices, and the courage to do something about it?” For history has not ended, and good has not triumphed over evil. The history of the future is being written now, and we are the ones writing it, with our own contributions, large or small.

It bears considering what future generations of humans will make of us. What sociocultural institutions and practices of today will our descendants look back upon with similar regret? When family genealogy albums are perused by our great-great-great grandchildren, and they read out what remains of the records of our doings, whose foresight and moral rectitude will have stood the test of time and ethical progress? One thing is certain—if we wish to become the good ancestor, we will have to do the intellectual work.

The Animal Holocaust

It was once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. How much less morally comprehensible is the statistic of hundreds of billions of deaths? How do you even make something like that real to the mind? Current best estimates have it that humans slaughter over 70 billion land animals per year, not including marine animals or male chicks slaughtered by egg-laying hen hatcheries. This number is an order of magnitude greater than the total human population of Earth. With marine animals and chicks included, the yearly kill count easily exceeds the sum total of humans who have ever lived on Earth at any time in history—over 120 billion. Year after year this continues, and year after year the number grows larger.

The vast majority of these animals lived out their short lives on factory farms, where outright abuse is common, and which are, at best, overcrowded, filthy prisons where animals are either virtually immobilized in small cages or crammed together in large warehouse-like barns. All of them end up in the same place, the slaughterhouse, where they will be killed in one of several ways. They are marched to the "kill floor," stepping through the blood of their predecessors, coaxed by yelling men with electric prods or giant swatters, where they will then either be electrocuted, or bolt gunned in the head, or simply have their throats slit without any such "stunning" in the case of kosher or halal slaughter. Some are forced into gas chambers filled with concentrated CO2, which burns the lungs and mucous membranes.

For smaller animals like birds, they're killed on an even more efficient, industrial scale, in what can only be called "death machines." They're hung by the legs, alive, on an ever moving conveyor, which first drags their heads through an electric bath meant to stun them. Many survive this step by lifting their heads or are otherwise simply ineffectively stunned. On the next step along the conveyor their necks are dragged against automated circular saws to bleed them out. Some are cut ineffectively and still alive reaching the last step. This final step is another bath, this time in boiling water, to remove their feathers. And these are the accepted, "humane" methods in which humans convert other animals into chops, cutlets, and drumsticks. The death machines will never be featured on "How it's Made" but they hum away with the regularity of any factory floor, that number constantly ticking upwards.

If, as Descartes thought, animals are mere automata, without experiential consciousness, then these statistics are only trivia, bereft of moral significance. But if, on the other hand, each of the beings killed did have experiential consciousness, its own subjective experience of life, the issue takes on such a weight of moral significance that it is scarcely comparable to anything else. What does modern science have to say about the question of animal consciousness?

In 2012, a group of cognitive scientists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, and other related specialists gathered at Cambridge University for the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-human Animals to review the bulk of contemporary research on the neurological substrates of conscious states and emotions in humans and other animals. The conference resulted in a joint declaration that became known as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Among the consensus findings, the declaration included the following:

We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

It’s worth pausing to ask what we mean here by ‘consciousness’ and what its significance is. When philosophers and cognitive scientists speak of animals being conscious in this manner, they mean experiential consciousness, subjective experience, or as Nagel put it, that there is something it’s like to be that individual animal. Consciousness no doubt takes many forms, but there is at least one feature of conscious experience of the sort that animals, including humans, possess that makes such consciousness morally salient. Valence encapsulates the notion that conscious experiences can be positive or negative for the being that experiences them. Among negatively valenced experiences would be included such states as pain, fear, hunger, unfulfillment of preferences, etc., and among positively valenced experiences would be classed states like joy, comfort, safety, fulfillment of preferences, etc.

Even without lengthy explanations, we intuitively recognize consciousness and valence as morally relevant features when we consider the difference between someone kicking a rock and someone kicking a dog. There is nothing it’s like, either good or bad, for the rock to be kicked. The rock has no experiential consciousness at all. The dog, on the other hand, experiences both pain and emotional distress from being treated in an abusive manner. So, too, do pigs, cows, chickens, some fish, and many other animals subjected to the processes and practices of animal agriculture. Each one added to the tally of the dead was an individual, a subject of a conscious life. Perhaps not one quite like ours, without the same complexities of language and abstract thought, but nonetheless one with its own set of pleasures and pains, joys and sorrows, victories and defeats. Each life had its own story, its own set of unique experiences in the world. Each one was once an individual being, reduced to a number, then a barcode on a package to be purchased for the fleeting pleasurable experience of a human.

Many might acknowledge the mass mistreatment and slaughter of non-human animals as a great tragedy, but nonetheless think there is nothing for it. It’s simply a fact of life that humans need to eat meat, eggs, and dairy, right? Well, no, it isn’t. Not only is a well-planned plant-based diet healthful, it may also reduce the risk factors for the top causes of human mortality. The position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that:

appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.

It goes on to note that:

Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity.

It is ultimately a false choice between the ethical treatment of non-human animals and the pursuit of human health. The real choice, at least for all of us living in the relative affluence of developed countries, is rather between the ethical treatment of non-human animals and the fleeting satisfaction of a particular taste preference. We make this fateful choice every time we go to a market and choose between the products of humanity’s unethical treatment of non-human animals and alternative products.

As of now, there is a large and ever-expanding range of such alternatives, not to mention whole food staples, with enough culinary variety to satisfy all tastes. So, it is also a false choice between taste pleasure and animal ethics. It does not require a grand sacrifice or the fortitude of a saint, merely a conscious choice to learn, to change ingrained habits, and a willingness to experiment to find new favorite foods and develop new dietary habits. Where do the ethical scales balance when the cost of the temporary, one-time inconvenience of learning new dietary and culinary habits is weighed against the suffering and death of the numerous animals that would otherwise be consumed over the future time-course of a person’s life?

Many ethical questions are difficult, if not nigh intractable, with good arguments that can be adduced for each side, and with each position often involving uncongenial tradeoffs that leave their proponents only partially satisfied in their conclusions. This, however, is not among those difficult questions. A clearer, more one-sided issue could hardly be found among the issues considered in applied ethics. Despite this, habit, culture, and status quo bias are powerful forces indeed, and so the death machines hum on.

On Rationality, Correctness, and Expertise

The confusion between rational justification and truth or correctness is common enough in public discourse that it need be noted that beliefs that are rationally justified sometimes turn out untrue, and beliefs without rational justification occasionally turn out to be true. Similarly, the most rational decision is not guaranteed to be the correct decision, and not all decisions that turn out to have been correct were rational decisions. Where this confusion becomes most pernicious is when members of the public run afoul of it when determining what to believe and in whom to place their trust. Take a case wherein we have a preponderance of scientific opinion in favor of the truth of a certain claim X, but there are some outliers who take the heterodox view that X is false. In the fullness of time, X turns out false. In situations such as this, many people are apt, with the bias of hindsight, to imagine that this shows that the heterodox opinion was the most rational, and that those who held it the better judges of truth. In both respects, this line of argument is mistaken.

To truly determine the rationality of a claim, one must examine the quality and weight of the arguments and evidence for and against it in order to reach some idea of the probability of its being true. Likewise, to determine the quality of the judgement of those who make a given claim, one must also examine the evidence and arguments they proffer in support of the claim. Suppose that, according to sound reasoning on the basis of the best evidence available at the time, the probability of X being true was somewhere in the neighborhood of 80%. There’s still a roughly 20% chance that X will turn out false. One can hold the most probable belief on the basis of the most sound reasoning and highest quality evidence and still turn out to be wrong. On the other hand, one can hold the least probable belief on the basis of poor reasoning, based upon slim or no evidence, and nonetheless turn out to be right. That’s how probability works, contra certainty. Scientific work involves calculations of error and degrees of confidence, and are always subject to potential falsification in the future by more or better data. The rational belief to hold is the one that, at the time, is more probable given the best available evidence. The fact that people who bet on the improbable will sometimes turn out, in hindsight, to have been right is not a vindication of their rationality or judgement.

We have heard that a broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn’t mean one should trust a broken clock as a generally reliable source of time. The judgement of those whose beliefs or decisions turned out to be correct, even in salient cases where much was at stake, should not be held in esteem merely on the basis of the correctness of their belief or decision in a particular instance. Rather, their judgement should be evaluated based on the rationality of the decisions or beliefs in question. By this metric alone can we ultimately establish the likelihood of sound judgement going forward.

One problem we face, when it comes to claims of interest to the general public that reside within special sciences or otherwise highly technical or specialized fields, is that members of the general public, or even experts within unrelated fields, are often not equipped to evaluate such highly technical or specialized evidence and argumentation. Even if, given enough time and effort, a person could amass the proficiency and knowledge needed to evaluate claims in a particular specialized field, this process would be prohibitively time-consuming if attempted for all domains of importance in making decisions in personal and political life. Given this, where one cannot evaluate claims directly, one must ultimately rely upon trust in the testimony of others who are experts within the relevant specialty. But how does one rationally determine in whom to place this trust?

The various methods of evaluating in which expert opinions to place ones trust are somewhat less well defined than those for evaluating claims directly, but there are analogous features, and they ultimately result in a similar assessment of probability. One might start by noting that an opinion held by one expert in the relevant domain is generally more reliable than one held by a non-expert, an opinion held by multiple experts yet more reliable, and an opinion held by a majority of experts more reliable still. Other factors also bear upon reliability of the expert opinion. Is the opinion held by a body or organization of experts that has objective standards, methods, and procedures that serve as both a rational process of arriving at truth, and as checks and balances to keep the experts honest? These features would include such things as methodological standards of scientific inquiry, judicial standards of evidence, competition between different opinions or adversarial processes, peer review, codes of ethics, etc. These and other similar factors jointly contribute to bolster the reliability of expert opinion.

Despite this, just as the most probable claims can nonetheless turn out to be false, the most reliable expert opinions can sometimes turn out to be wrong. Additionally, the most reliable expert opinions sometimes turn out to be spectacularly wrong on issues which are of great importance and consequence. Does this mean that these experts should not be trusted, or that other experts who don’t have the hallmarks of reliability previously mentioned, but who happened to be right on some salient issue, should be trusted over those who do? No, for the same reason advanced above in the case of the probability of claims themselves. That the more reliable expert opinion sometimes turns out wrong and the less reliable opinion sometimes turns out to be right is not an argument for the rationality of choosing the less reliable expert opinion. The important question is not whether the best available expert opinion will never turn out to be wrong. The important question is whether it is the most generally reliable source of truth amongst all necessarily imperfect sources. In consistently accepting the most reliable expert opinions, one will not always turn out to be correct, but one will turn out to be correct more often than if one does not consistently accept them.

The search for truth and the process of critical decision making are both inherently imperfect tasks that involve imperfect reasoners working from imperfect and incomplete experimental and observational data. Given this, the best that can be done to navigate these sometimes dangerous waters is to hold to what is most probable given sound reasoning from the best available evidence, or in cases where specialized expertise is needed, hold to what is likely the most reliable expert opinion given the sorts of objective considerations previously mentioned. The more this is put into practice, the more rational our worldview will be, and the better our decisions, both individually and collectively.

Liberalism: What it is and Why it Matters

Note: The following has been adapted from an original post by the author on The American Liberal

Liberalism has often been considered the most successful political ideology in modern history, coinciding with vast and measurable improvements in human welfare, but recently new threats have arisen in the form of various anti-liberal populist and nationalist movements, which have gained some notable victories in liberal democracies in Europe and America. At the same time, some who self-apply the label ‘liberal’ have at times advocated decidedly illiberal ideas and policies, making the job of those who would defend liberalism from its critics that much more onerous. In the wake of these upheavals, we liberals must cogently recapitulate the core principles of our philosophy and contextualize its role in contemporary society in order to defend it both from the external and internal challenges it faces.

First, just what do we mean by ‘liberalism?’ It should be noted that what we mean here is not identical with the more narrow colloquial use of the term common in America, often referring to anything that happens to be advanced by the Democratic party, or a different but similarly constrained usage prevalent elsewhere in the world referring to a more conservative take on market economics. Liberalism is considered here as a broader, more comprehensive philosophy of government from which both of these more narrow traditions sometimes borrow.

Liberal philosophy has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment, but has precedents reaching as far back as ancient Athens. As with many broad ideological categories, liberalism is not so much a single philosophy as it is a family of philosophies united by their possession of some number of shared principles. Liberal philosophers have given different accounts of these principles and come to divergent conclusions about their particular implications. It would hardly be possible to do justice to them all. As our aim is not historical study but defending the liberal tradition, I shall simply try to articulate a broad, non-rigorous bird’s-eye-view conception of liberalism worth defending today.

One of the most central and foundational principles of liberalism involves a general consideration from moral philosophy about what sorts of things matter ethically. Liberalism takes the individual to be the primary object of moral concern. This is not to be confused with egoism or opposition to community and collective action. What is meant here is that what ultimately matters is the good of individuals—those autonomous, sentient beings who have the capacity to experience happiness or suffering, rather than such alternative candidates for moral ends as “The good of the party,” “The will of the king,” “The faith,” “The race,” etc. Liberalism takes as a fundamental principle that the greatest moral good is the flourishing, well-being, or happiness of sentient individuals, and that just political systems are established to further this end.

Next, we come to the namesake of liberalism. Liberalism holds that liberty is necessary for, or at least strongly conducive to, the individual’s achievement of happiness. Just as happiness or well-being is the primary moral good, freedom is the primary political good. Any political system calculated to improve the flourishing of its citizens must secure the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness. This principle is immortally enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, in the phrase, “inalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

From this very general principle, many particular consequences follow, though exactly which liberties count as legitimate or important is a subject of dispute. Liberal societies have enshrined various freedoms into their constitutions and political cultures, but a few are largely agreed upon, such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to vote for one’s leaders, freedom to own property and to engage in commerce.

Of these, the freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It was considered of such great importance by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill that he wrote, “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Free expression holds the place it does in liberal philosophy precisely because it creates the framework wherein debate can occur from which truth can be uncovered and by which other freedoms may be argued for and gained. It was this particular feature that Martin Luther King extolled in his “Mountaintop” speech calling for America to live up to her promises when he said, “Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.” Despite the brutal violations of this right by Bull Connor and others, its existence as a norm enshrined in the constitution and in the body politic allowed for King to make this argument, to organize, and to march on Washington in protest. Likewise, the success of numerous other reform movements has been predicated upon the right to freedom of expression.

Notions of equality are also central to the liberal project. Though individuals differ in myriad ways, in natural endowment of abilities, in wealth, ethnicity, or circumstances of birth, we are all alike in the way that matters most, our ability to experience happiness or flourishing on the one hand and suffering on the other. All have an equal stake in the achievement of happiness, thus all ought to possess equal rights under the law and equal access to public opportunities.

The principle of secularism, or separation of state and religion holds an important place in liberal government as well. Government should not impede the private practice of religion, nor should religious dogma impede the public practice of good governance. Reason and empirical science form the basis for good government policy capable of bettering the welfare of citizens.

Another important feature of liberalism is skepticism. Knowledge of the fallibility of human reason entails that previous errors must be able to be corrected by amendments to the constitution and the laws. Skepticism regarding the accumulation and concentration of power means that distribution of power is an important element of the liberal theory of government. Separation of governmental powers among different institutions, with each forming a check to the others, is one practical instantiation of this principle which serves as a safeguard to the freedom of the individual and a bulwark against government corruption. Democratic accountability in the form of representative, deliberative legislative bodies guards against the the tyranny of the few over the many. Constitutionally enumerated civil liberties, along with independent courts capable of striking down laws which violate them, guard against the tyranny of the many over the few.

Another notable feature of the liberal ethos is the open, pluralistic society. What binds a liberal society together is not base tribalism, or ethnic or religious nationalism, but a notion of civic virtue underpinned by a shared commitment to the principles previously enumerated. Liberal patriotism is a patriotism of ideals, capable of extending beyond the boundaries of race, religion, or national origin. Trade and immigration are not seen as threats to a nation’s greatness, but only serve to enhance the overall prosperity, knowledge, and cultural wealth of a nation.

One oft noted characteristic of liberalism is its generic or abstract character. Liberalism has been criticized on this basis as being sterile, cold, not respective of cultural distinctions and notions of group belonging, but I believe this generality in fact to be one of its greatest benefits. Liberalism at its root seeks to understand political freedom with respect to a notion of the individual, abstracted from all morally irrelevant particulars. This conceptualization is intentionally thin, meaning to capture the idea expressed above—that it is the sentient individual which is the seat of moral concern.

Liberalism intends to set out a framework for the freedoms of individuals purely in virtue of their moral status as sentient individuals such that, from these general conceptions, questions of freedom in more particular circumstances can be adjudicated. A woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, for example, can be said to be a special case of the individual right to bodily autonomy. Not all individuals are women, or are capable of pregnancy, but all individuals have the same stake in bodily autonomy. Similar situations obtain for other rights. Defining liberalism in generic terms, in virtue of something all individuals share, allows liberalism its ethical universality and provides a unifying message that cuts across race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and other such factors ancillary to one’s core nature as a sentient individual of moral value, and unrelated to one’s moral character.

This family of principles thus forms a certain framework through which particular policy questions can be answered, and a set of general premises upon which one can base public policy arguments. We can ask, does a proposed policy tend to enhance the freedoms and opportunities available to the individual citizen? Does a proposed structural government reform promote the sort of governance necessary to reliably and sustainably effect these ends?

Within this framework, the question of what sort of general freedoms apply to individuals as such is debated. One purported distinction which forms the basis of much of the debate is that between negative rights and positive rights. While there are various definitions available, negative rights can be understood as those rights which impose a negative duty on others, i.e. a duty to refrain from doing something, while positive rights are those which impose a positive duty on others, i.e. require something to be provided. Examples of the former are rights like the right to life or the freedom of expression, which require that others refrain from killing or censoring. Examples of the latter would be your right to an attorney or the right to healthcare, which require that the government provide counsel or healthcare for the indigent.

The distinction itself has been questioned both on theoretical and practical grounds, but it does help to illuminate a bifurcation within the liberal tradition between what could be termed its “right” and “left” wings. There are those who accept negative rights but who are skeptical of positive rights, often on the basis that the imposition of the taxes required for the state to provide these rights entails a weakening of the negative right to property. This group comprises various libertarian and fiscally-conservative-but-socially-liberal types. As one moves further leftward within the liberal tradition, more positive rights are included in the canon and property rights are not conceived as absolute, but amenable to exceptions in cases where other rights conflict. Most liberal democracies have in fact enshrined examples of both sorts into their constitutions or statutes, and the unconditional enforcement of many of the standard fare negative rights as a practical matter requires the provision of a system of courts, police, and lawyers—effectively a positive right.

There are as many positions as to the taxonomy of rights as there are liberal philosophers, none without objections. I do not intend here to provide such a comprehensive taxonomy, but to sketch a general framework, a manner of thinking that serves to approximate what I think to be a more promising understanding of individual rights. It begins not with an abstract notion of rights and duties, but with an understanding of freedom based on the first-person lived experience of individuals.

Freedom, from this perspective, is the real ability to choose those things which one values and to live the life one desires, not merely the absence of interference. In order for the freedom to do X to be of any tangible value in the lives of individuals, achieving X must be a real opportunity or power, or capability for that individual, otherwise one might well say that Tantalus is free to drink from the water whenever he likes, or that one is free to sprout wings and fly, provided no other individual or state power is preventing them from doing so. Interference from others can thwart an individual from achieving their desires, but so can structural or natural impediments. Little can be done about the latter, but structural socioeconomic impediments can in many cases ameliorated by political action. An attempt to understand freedoms as real capabilities has been undertaken by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who provides a non-exhaustive list of candidate capabilities in her Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, an interesting and worthwhile read for those interested in liberal theory. These understandings of freedom point us in a more leftward direction, seeking to liberate the individual not only from unfreedom imposed upon individuals by state power, but also from unfreedom imposed by private powers or by the consequences of poverty or other structural impediments to self-determination.

A system of political rights can be assessed on this basis by empirical means. Measuring things like freedom and well-being across nation-states is a necessarily imperfect science, but a nonetheless valuable one in which political scientists have made great progress. Various indices such as the Human Development Index, the Freedom in the World report, and others give us means of comparing political systems, and more targeted research into the individual conditions of well being give us better ideas as to what core human freedoms should be valued most highly as political ideals.

The process of refining our understanding of freedom and well-being is a deliberative human process, always imperfect and subject to error, which highlights the importance of the interacting liberal principles previously enumerated—the skepticism of power, deliberative, participatory legislative bodies, checks and balances and the rest. The process of liberal reform is sometimes gradual and imperfect, but tangible and durable over time.

This is precisely what we’ve seen through the history of liberal thought and reforms. To borrow an idea from Dr. King, the moral arc of liberal societies is long, but it bends toward freedom and justice. Once a society enshrines in its character and constitution liberal norms, it affords itself the levers by which generations of reformers to come will be able to effect change. America is a good case study in this phenomenon. Certain basic liberal ideals were enshrined in its constitution and founding philosophy: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “All men are created equal,” the freedoms of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and petition, the right to privacy, trial by jury, and other protections. Though these principles were not all implemented at the time of their adoption, and are not perfectly realized even now, they have formed the basis for the great reform movements that have defined successive generations of American life. Similar trends have been seen in other countries adopting liberal constitutions, from Western Europe to Asia.

It is a testament to the power of these core liberal ideas that the greatest liberatory reforms in our history have come about not by overturning these fundamental principles, but by recapitulating them, calling out the hypocrisy in the failure of government to live up to them, and taking them to their logical conclusions, thus enlarging their reach. It was thus that Frederick Douglass argued against slavery, excoriating the hypocrisy of a nation who would proclaim liberal principles of equality and liberty while allowing bondage and subjection within its borders. King did the same in the next century, saying:

All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.

Likewise Susan B. Anthony on women’s suffrage:

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.

In the great progressive leaps forward of both the distant and recent past, from abolition to civil rights to the rights of women and LGBT individuals, we find appeals to liberal principles at the very heart of the rhetoric of these reform movements.

Though we have come far from where we started, we have many mountains yet to climb. A thoroughgoing liberalism along the lines expressed above can make the case for continuing radical changes to the status quo, including sweeping criminal justice reform, drug legalization, universal basic income, universal healthcare, humane immigration reforms, sex workers’ rights, death with dignity, as well as structural government reforms such as electoral system reforms, an end to the practice of gerrymandering, and more. The core principles of liberalism thus provide us with a map of unrealized and partially realized reforms, and a flexible but powerful blueprint for continual progress toward a freer, more just, and happier world.

Basic Income and the Future of Work

There was a time when the word “computer” referred not to the silicon-based digital computer that has revolutionized work in the last half century, but to flesh and blood employees hired to perform rote mathematical calculations. NASA once employed rooms of them to calculate flight trajectories for the emerging space program. These positions disappeared with the advancement of digital computing technologies capable of performing the same calculations with exponentially increasing speed, reducing a bustling warehouse full of employees to the small handful of programmers needed to encode the guidance problems for a digital computer to solve.

Compare any auto factory today with those of yesteryear and you find a similar phenomenon—robots have replaced a sizable chunk of the human workforce. The same is true of many mining and agriculture jobs. Computation, automation, and robotics have reduced the need for menial and sometimes dangerous human labor across broad swaths of the economy, while increasing production efficiency and vastly reducing costs to the end consumer.

With these revolutions has come a crisis of work which has still not reached its peak. Automation is taking the place of human laborers in areas of the economy once insulated from these effects. Self checkout kiosks have become more and more commonplace, reducing cashier staff in supermarkets and big box stores. Self driving vehicles are just around the corner, threatening to displace some 3.5 million trucking jobs. Chatbots are becoming increasingly more powerful and ubiquitous, reducing the need for call center workers. The A.I. revolution will not only affect low-skill jobs, but also make incursions into more repetitive cognitive tasks now performed by human workers.

Stated thus, the prognosis for the future of remunerative work looks bleak indeed. But there are also positive consequences and opportunities to be found in this technological revolution, as well as mitigations to the negative effects of the displacement of workers brought about by it. One proposed response to these trends is a universal basic income, or UBI, an unconditional payment issued regularly to all citizens.

UBI is an old idea, extending at least as far back as the American Revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who suggested in Agrarian Justice that a land value tax should be assessed on property owners and paid out in the form of a citizen’s dividend and old age pension. Similar proposals have been advanced since, but none have yet been enacted on a national scale. Mainstream interest in the idea has recently been rekindled largely through the presidential candidacy of Andrew Yang, who has made a citizen’s dividend funded by a value added tax his signature issue. Another candidate, Pete Buttigieg, has proposed a similar citizen’s dividend funded by a carbon tax.

As will soon become evident, the proposal of a universal basic income has many merits, extending far beyond its mitigating effect on the labor market displacements brought about by the A.I. and automation revolutions. The idea has faced much backlash, however, often being met with <incredulous look>, “Free money?! That’d never work.” <scoff>. As it turns out, many pilot studies have been done, in a variety of nations, localities, and cultural contexts, with results that may surprise the scoffers.

A common worry people seem to have in response to the suggestion is that giving people money with no strings attached is likely to encourage loafing and laziness. This intuition is quite strong in many people critical of the proposal, but the mass of empirical data we have seen from these multifarious pilot studies suggests that it is largely erroneous. Not only do we not see laziness as a result of receiving unconditional payments, the opposite seems to be true in many cases. Entrepreneurship, career and educational attainment, along with other measurable factors of economic and social well being have been shown to increase under these programs.

A Finnish study on basic income undertaken over 2017-2018 in fact found a slight increase in the number of days in employment by basic income recipients with respect to the control group not receiving payments:

The experiment did not have any effect on employment status during the first year of the experiment. The number of annual days in employment for the group that received a basic income is on average about half a day higher than for the control group. Overall, receipt of any positive earnings or income from self employment, either from the open labour market or the subsidised labour market, is about one percentage point more common in the treatment group.

Another pilot study in Uganda found that unsupervised grants as part of a youth opportunity program had the result of increasing the entrepreneurship and productivity of those who received them:

Grant recipients invest some in skills training but most in tools and materials. After four years, half practice a skilled trade. Relative to the control group, the program increases business assets by 57%, work hours by 17%, and earnings by 38%. Many also formalize their enterprises and hire labor.

One study of a Canadian basic income pilot did note a reduction in work, but primarily in two groups—new mothers and working teenagers still in school. It seems the worry that people will simply quit working when provided with a basic income is overblown. It’s also worth remembering at this point that one of the chief motivations for a universal basic income in the first place is the steady reduction in the need for human labor across the economy. It is not a shortage in the supply of labor we should be worried about, but a shortage in the demand for it.

Economic factors aside, one key takeaway from these basic income studies is the beneficial effects that the additional income had on several factors of well being among the people receiving it, including in areas which might seem unrelated at first glance. Such outcomes as fewer hospital visits, higher life satisfaction, more confidence in the future, increased ability to concentrate, and even increased trust in other people were noted as compared to controls in these pilot studies.

One of the most crucial, but often overlooked benefits of a universal basic income is its ability to enlarge the fundamental freedom of the citizenry. Proponents of capitalism often idealize the relationship between employer and employee as a mutually beneficial contract entered into freely among equals. This does not align with the economic reality faced by many, however. Franklin Roosevelt articulated this point in his Second Bill of Rights address, saying:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.'

If one is necessitous, one is thereby under duress in making employment decisions. If one must agree to whatever employment is presently available, no matter how disagreeable the conditions, or face destitution, homelessness, starvation, and hopelessness, one is no less coerced than if one were to have a gun placed to the temple. Lacking the ability to say “no” is a pernicious form of unfreedom, and leaves one exposed to all manner of exploitation. A universal basic income would provide for the most basic needs, preventing this coercion of necessity and allowing people to more freely choose a means of income they find meaningful and worthwhile.

At this point one might be thinking, “What about existing welfare programs? Don’t they provide for these needs as well as a basic income would?” There are several issues with welfare as it currently stands. One is the “poverty trap” effect. Because many existing welfare programs are not universal but means-tested, as recipients make more money, they can lose these benefits. This creates a perverse incentive such that improving one’s career leads to making less income overall, in turn leading to a vicious cycle that encourages the working poor to remain at the poverty line. A universal income, on the other hand, does not go away as one makes more income from other sources, meaning that there is no disincentive to career advancement or entrepreneurship, and no poverty trap as a result.

Another benefit of basic income over traditional welfare is the flexibility it affords to individuals and families. The no strings attached nature of a basic income allows people to spend or invest their money where it will benefit them most. The one-size-fits-all welfare programs that restrict expenditures to one class of expense, such as food or medical care, don’t allow this sort of flexibility, preventing the creative use of capital among recipients.

Perhaps some believe that restricting welfare recipients in this way serves to prevent misuse of funds, not trusting them to make wise economic decisions. It turns out, however, based on the experiments that have been run, that when you entrust people with the budgeting of their own basic income, they don’t spend it all frivolously, but instead invest it in their own present needs and in their future. The particular economic situations individual people and families face are not easily amenable to one-size-size-fits-all policies proposed by politicians or bureaucrats far removed from their particular circumstances.

The “universal” quality of UBI is also politically important for another reason. Traditional welfare has always been vulnerable to political attacks along class lines. Those who oppose welfare have too easily been able to exploit this class division, driving a wedge between those who receive welfare benefits and those who don’t by presenting those beneficiaries as '“takers” leeching off the hardworking taxpayer. By making basic income available to all citizens, this political weakness faced by traditional welfare programs is eliminated, turning what was once a source of division into a source of unity.

At this point, a skeptic might be saying “All this is well and good, but how do we actually pay for such a program? One thing to note is that UBI would allow the consolidation of other welfare programs under its own mantle, with its relative simplicity reducing bureaucratic overhead substantially. As for the general funding mechanism, several different proposals are on offer. Yang has proposed a European style value added tax as the primary source of funding, with other supplemental measures such as taxes on market speculation and polluters. A land value tax has been favored by others, starting with the first American to propose a citizen’s dividend, Thomas Paine. Buttigieg has proposed a carbon tax and dividend. Each has its own particular merits, and they can be combined to produce the level of revenue needed. Using some combination of these proposals, a modest basic income could be provided to all Americans. If we are willing to move beyond the constraints of the Reaganomics era, back to the sort of tax policy that prevailed over the American boomtimes of the 20th century, we could potentially provide much more than that.

Proponents of UBI can sometimes sound like doomsday prophets, heralding the collapse of vast sectors of the labor economy under the weight of A.I. and automation, and the wealth inequality that such a collapse would likely produce. There is another way to view these technological advancements, however, which involves rethinking our preconceived notions about the status of work in human life.

We are facing a future in which much of what humans now call work will be far more efficiently performed by robots or computer programs. This could be a bad thing, or a very good thing, depending upon how the fruits of this technological leap forward are distributed. On the one hand, it could lead to a situation in which the lucky few owners of the infrastructure of automation and A.I. become incredibly wealthy, while the bulk of the people suffers from the lack of market demand for their labor. On the other hand, the reduction in the need for manual, repetitive human labor created by this confluence of technological innovations could be one of the most liberatory advancements in the whole of human history.

In a world where immense economic value is generated without much need for human labor, humans are thereby freed to spend time in pursuits they find meaningful and worthwhile, rather than engaged in the drudgery that has been the lot of the average human laborer from time immemorial. Though there are those lucky few who have made careers out of doing something they truly love, the things most people today do for money are not particularly edifying or intrinsically valuable to them. Most people, out of the necessity of earning a living, sell their precious time and labor to others, in pursuit of ends that are not their own. Automation and A.I. may eventually offer us a future that currently seems Utopian and unattainable, if the wealth generated by these technologies is shared broadly—a future in which one’s life’s work is a labor of love rather than merely laborious.

Such a future may seem far removed from present experience, and skepticism is warranted, particularly within a political status quo that seems unwilling to grapple with any of the defining crises of our time, whether climate change, the ever widening wealth gap, the threat of anti-democratic forces around the world, or the emerging A.I. and automation revolution. The future, however, waits for no one. The automation of human labor is going to continue and accelerate. Whether we take action now to bend the future to our benefit, or by our inaction cast ourselves into the arms of a cruel fate, is a choice we must make.