Flashback: Right Choice on Philosophy | Eastern North Carolina Now

   Publisher's note: The article below appeared in John Hood's daily column in his publication, the Carolina Journal, which, because of Author / Publisher Hood, is inextricably linked to the John Locke Foundation.

    I'm focusing most of my attention this week on completing the final two chapters of my forthcoming book on North Carolina's economic prospects. Therefore, today I offer the first in a series of columns from 2006 that lay out the fundamental principles of the John Locke Foundation.

    RALEIGH - Is there a role in political debate for philosophy?

    For many practitioners of politics, the answer to this question is not so much a "no" as an impatient, dismissive wave of the hand, often accompanied by a snort. During two different debates in which I was a recent participant, a local study of capital-spending needs for Wake County and a state effort to reform North Carolina's ethics and lobbying laws, it became evident that many elected officials and political activists were deeply hostile to the idea that basic principles about government and society had any relevance.

    Those who reject philosophy as a guide for policymaking think they are being soberly practical and showing off their worldly wisdom. Actually, they are showing their ignorance. Governments never form and carry out policies that lack underlying philosophical assumptions and principles. The only question is whether these underlying assumptions and principles are ever recognized, discussed, or modified to reflect later insights or experience. Furthermore, there is nothing less practical than an institution - be in a state, a business, or a 4-H club - disregarding its fundamental structure and trying to conduct activities for which it is ill-suited by design.

    Public policy is certainly a realm of specifics - specific programs, specific outcomes, specific data, and specific personnel. But it isn't only that. It is also a philosophical enterprise, a search for the true and the good. Those who dismiss the importance of political ideas, be they on the Right or the Left, usually reveal themselves to be the crudest kind of utilitarian, out to promote the greatest good for the greatest number and totally clueless as to how these goals might be measured and how competing claims of "good" might be defined and adjudicated.

    At the John Locke Foundation, my colleagues and I disagree about many specific applications of political philosophy - and, in some cases, on broader questions about what government should do and how. But we do embrace a core set of principles about how government power - meaning, let's remember, compulsion at the point of a gun - should be exercised in North Carolina and beyond. Years ago, through a group exercise, we came up with four general statements that summarized the founding principles of our state and nation - the principles we sought to elevate and advocate through our work. Over the next few days, I'll discuss each statement in turn and explore its potential applications.

    Here's the first: "We are a land of liberty where natural rights of individuals precede and supersede the power of the state."

    There is no more Lockean idea than this one, straight out of social-contract theory. For centuries, rulers had based their claims to power over individual lives and property on the divine right of kings, the mandate of heaven, or other versions of "because we said so." Beginning with the thoughtful but misguided Thomas Hobbes, and elevated to philosophical poetry by John Locke, the social-contract theorists argued that human rights were not the gift of benevolent despots but instead inherent in human beings, either through the mysterious workings of an impersonal nature or by the design of nature's God.

    You do not enjoy the right to speak, or to seek your fortune, or worship as you choose because a government has given you permission to do so. You enjoy these rights because you are a human being, period. Government can recognize these basic natural rights, but cannot create them. (Governments do create and maintain other categories of rights, civil rights, which are procedural in nature and involve how governmental activities such as voting should be carried out in a just society of equal citizens. These are not, strictly speaking, natural rights because they make no sense in the absence of governmental institutions.)

    We all do give up some inherent rights as a price for living under the protection of coercive governments. For example, we cannot serve as our own judge, jury, and executioner when faced with a threat from a neighbor. And we are duty-bound to surrender some percentage of the fruits of our labors to government in the form of taxes to pay for core public services. But for the most part, we retain our freedom of thought and action, regardless of whether other people will like what we think or how we act. These rights are inalienable from us as human beings (too bad the Founders messed up and used the sloppy term "unalienable," but "inalienable" is what they mean to say).

    I believe that the natural-rights perspective is fundamental. It is the building block of everything else. If you start out believing that individuals or families are simply cells in an organic communal whole, or cogs in a social machine, or whatever collectivist analogy you prefer, then you will come to very different conclusions about the purposes to which government coercion should be put. So, whether you agree or disagree with me, at least start here. Don't jump ahead to particulars just yet.