Divine Law, Congressional Law, and the Law of Identity

The Mayflower Compact, 1620, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, painted circa 1932. Are these people using their rights to create a government, or are they using government to create their rights?

I have yet another new chapter posted at The Prophet of Causation. This is a project that was supposed to be done at the end of last year and got pushed back because of—well, everything that’s been happening. So I’m pushing the rest of it out quickly now before it before my campaign intensifies even more and it gets moved back indefinitely.

If you’ve signed up to get these full chapters as they come out, you may notice that I sent it out originally under a less punchy title but have since changed the main title to “Divine Law, Congressional Law, and the Law of Identity.” Ayn Rand fans might recognize those phrases.

This chapter deals with the foundations of Ayn Rand’s political philosophy. Some of the material on the social contract might be fresh in your memory, since I recently reposted an article on that. But I also went into a critique of the main prevailing theories on the “ontology of rights,” which is where that main headline comes in.

In one of the previous chapters I tried to trace out the connection between Ayn Rand and Charles Darwin, and in this one, I try correct what I think is an injustice she did to John Locke.

She may have superseded his idea of the social contract, but Ayn Rand owes more to John Locke than she acknowledges. She very effusively acknowledges Aristotle as an influence on her philosophy and to a lesser extent the Medieval Aristotelian philosopher Thomas Aquinas. She praises America’s Founders, who were widely and deeply influenced by Locke, but she leaves Locke himself out in the cold

Yet there is one crucial idea in her political philosophy that she must have gotten from Locke. Interestingly, this idea is not in Locke’s main writings on political philosophy or in his argument for property, which we will discuss in the next chapter. It is in Locke’s writings on religion and his case for religious freedom.

Here is the crucial passage from his Letter Concerning Toleration.

[T]he care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgement that they have framed of things….

[P]enalties are no way capable to produce such belief. It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions; which light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.¹⁸

This is a theme that became commonplace in the Enlightenment among the “natural religion” theorists mentioned in the last chapter, and it had an enormous influence on America’s Founders. Ayn Rand took it up as a central theme in her work: You cannot force a mind.

What Ayn Rand added to Locke is the idea that the operation of the mind is one of the necessities of survival. “Inward persuasion” through “light and evidence” is not just necessary to form the correct opinions about religion. It is also necessary to discover the scientific and technological breakthroughs that extend and enhance our long-term survival.

But the most thrilling part of this chapter for me is how it really ties back into and connects together everything from the first half of the book.

In epistemology, we looked at how the Primacy of Existence is fundamentally an assertion of a causal relationship between reality and the mind, the inescapable dependence of the mind on observation and on fealty to reality. Everything we discussed in the first half of this book—the nature of perception, the factual grounding for conceptual thinking, the role of volition—was a facet of this causal relationship between knowledge and reality.

Now we see that rights are an assertion of this same causal relationship. The evil of coercion is that it interferes with the causal relationship between reality and consciousness and therefore imperils human life.

Read the whole thing, and you can always subscribe to that newsletter to get the rest of the chapters as they come out (and all the preceding ones, and the lectures and Q&As on which they are based).