The Hypocrisy of the West’s Abandonment of Universal Values

Finn Andreen recently wrote a Mises Wire article arguing that the values characterized as universally-applicable to all mankind by Enlightenment-era philosophers—notably political values like juridical equality, political freedom, natural rights, and religious tolerance—are not universal at all, but rather are mere expressions of Western culture, thus making assertions of such universality (and thus any claims of moral superiority in terms of implementing such values) hypocritical. According to Andreen, Western states have been particularly egregious in such hypocrisy by invoking universal values as a moral justification for their colonization of non-Western societies that are seen as primitive or backward, and by their tendency to flout individual rights at home, giving rise to fascist tendencies across the West.

Citing Isaiah Berlin’s work summarizing three prominent 18th-century critics of Enlightenment philosophy, Andreen explains the supposed flaws in assertions of universal values:

Briefly, Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) did identify universal human patterns, but with the insight that different societies express them differently. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) argued that truth is always local, particular, and rooted in language, arguing against a “universal reason” that exists apart from specific cultures. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) considered that humanity rises through the flowering of individual civilizations, followed naturally by the inevitable cyclical withering. All three thinkers rejected the Enlightenment’s universal yardstick, as expressed by 18th century thinkers in Paris and London.

Curiously—one of the sharpest 18th-century critics of universal values—David Hume, wasn’t mentioned here alongside Vico, Hamann, and von Herder. Hume is important because he claimed that reason can only be used for identifying values that are instrumental to optimizing a higher value one has already chosen, not for identifying the highest value that forms the foundation of one’s ethical system. Though Hume is widely considered to be a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, his skeptical assertion that one can’t rationally derive an “ought” from an “is” did much to undermine the allegiance of post-Enlightenment Western philosophers to natural rights. Even post-Enlightenment liberalism (as I have previously noted in another Mises Wire article concerning Ludwig von Mises’s rejection of ethical collectivism) usually attempts to defend liberty and pluralism with instrumentalist utilitarian arguments that embrace Hume’s ethical skepticism, not with Enlightenment-style natural rights.

The hypocrisy of Western states can be explained in another way—not as any inner contradiction of Enlightenment ethical doctrines concerning liberty and private ownership being desirable for all human beings, but rather as Western elites embracing precisely the sort of amoral cultural relativism, linguistic relativism, and fatalistic historicism (championed by Vico, Hamann, and von Herder respectively) and Humean ethical skepticism to rationalize their own shabby conduct among themselves even while mendaciously telling everybody else that they favor liberal values without really meaning it.

Another point to consider is that Enlightenment natural rights philosophers were by no means a liberal monolith with respect to how they conceived of human nature and its political implications. Words like “democracy” and “freedom” have radically different meanings in the liberal political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson versus what they mean in the undeniably illiberal political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both obviously can’t be correct in their contrasting understanding of human nature, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that both are incorrect. The core issues here are: do human beings have a specific nature that constrains their choice of values in spite of whatever differences of personality, culture, etc. exist among them (i.e., was Hume wrong about the is-ought problem)? If so, what does this human nature consist of and what are its political implications? Enlightenment philosophers had sharp disagreements with each other about such questions.

It should also be observed that traditional Western thinking about naturalistic ethics has much deeper roots in equally-contentious and divergent schools of ancient Greek philosophy. With respect to ideas about private ownership and accountability of state rulers to the people, the most influential school was that of Aristotle, which as Murray Rothbard explained, was transmitted in a Christianized Scholastic form in the 1200s by Thomas Aquinas and ultimately contributed to the foundations of economics as well as to the natural rights views of Enlightenment liberals.

While Aristotelianism has its strengths, it has its illiberal weaknesses too. One of the problems is that Aristotle’s view of human nature gives ethical primacy to man’s rationality above all else, which just raises the question of which facts about man imply a preference for a particular final end (the precise issue about ethical foundations that Hume raised). Aristotle’s teleological theory of causation simply assumes that every entity in the universe came into existence with a particular final end already directly or indirectly programmed into it by an external agent (an “intelligent design” theory of causality) and discernible through conceptual analysis, but a robust ethical naturalism must identify universal human attributes that constrain man’s choices, particularly in view of the widespread modern understanding of natural causality that rejects the universality of Aristotle’s teleological model.

Another problem with Aristotle’s school, which afflicted the Platonic and Stoic schools as well, is that once we privilege a particular final end as being uniquely rational in some sense, how do we cope with deviants who choose values that are incompatible with that final end, and with all the diverse natures and circumstances subsisting among individual humans in spite of their common rationality? In his Republic, Plato frankly advocated that a commune of philosopher-kings should impose a severe dictatorship upon their intellectual inferiors.

Aristotle responded with his Politics, which reads like a utilitarian manual on how to engineer an alleged “common good” for all citizens of a city-state via carefully-constructed city-state constitutions and laws, not as a treatise on how to derive a political order from a principled defense of individual rights. Aristotle appears liberal only by comparison to the egregiously totalitarian Plato.

The Stoics—the school that originally coined the phrase “natural law” to describe universal virtues—were more extreme in viewing all of humanity as belonging to just one political community and as having just one correct set of values applicable everyone, thus taking universalism in ethics and politics to a radical extreme of not only ignoring all differences in personality, culture, etc., but viewing beliefs and values based on such personal differences as being positive evils.

Thus, several Western ethical traditions that have remained highly influential since antiquity do not unconditionally affirm individual liberty, notwithstanding them otherwise stressing the value of individuals becoming virtuous, making use of their rational faculties, or even (as in Aristotle’s system) supporting private ownership.

Even the Spanish Scholastics of the 1500s (who were highly praised by Rothbard) did not, notwithstanding their sophisticated understanding of property and markets, break free of Thomistic religious intolerance. Founder Francisco de Vitoria could only feebly protest against the forcible conversion of Native Americans on the grounds that some tribes hadn’t yet denied Spanish missionaries and merchants the opportunity to peacefully win them over, while conceding that such a denial would be grounds for a just war against them.

Meanwhile, a contemporary of Vitoria at the University of Salamanca, Professor of Canon Law (and eventually University Chancellor) Fernando de Valdés, served for fifty years on the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition, including nineteen years as the Inquisitor General. The torturing and burning of heretics in Spain was by no means contradicted by Scholastic ethics as understood by the Salamancans. Such religious intolerance was a source of a great deal of the illiberalism and cultural hubris of Western colonialism, not to mention giving rise to a proto-fascist royal absolutism in a number of Western nations as Catholics and various Protestant sects strove to exterminate each other while their monarchs took advantage of the resulting chaos to attain political and economic supremacy.

Given this illiberal aspect of the older natural law tradition, how did the liberal strains of the Enlightenment ever manage to combine notions of individual autonomy, consensual governance, religious tolerance, etc. with older Scholastic notions of natural law? For example, how could a liberal founding father like John Locke repeatedly cite the fiercely anti-individualist Richard Hooker (as Rothbard noted) from a century earlier as his natural law forerunner?

Western culture is not, in fact, a unitary entity, but has always harbored clashing ethical principles; the West appears hypocritical only if one assumes that the West speaks with one voice, which clearly isn’t the case. As I pointed out in my analysis of Mises’s opposition to collectivism in ethics, there is another significant ancient Greek school affirming a naturalistic ethics, namely that of Epicurus, which addresses the core issues mentioned above in a decidedly more laissez-faire manner. While the full story of how a natural rights liberalism emerged during the century separating Hooker and Locke still needs to be written, Mises pointed out that an Epicurean revival was a factor, an ethical system that also informed his own understanding of acting man. Overcoming hypocrisy will require Western culture recovering these philosophical foundations of its Enlightenment liberalism.