[Note: The Expert Witness series is an occasional Friday feature that allows guest bloggers to write about a topic in which they have a particular interest or expertise. This week's article "Six Principles for a Solid Investing Strategy" is by Austin Pryor from Sound Mind Investing]
A well-defined investing strategy is one of the cornerstones of a successful financial life. While investing techniques vary widely, all good strategies are built on the same foundation. For example, SMI offers two main investing strategies for our readers, Just-the-Basics and Upgrading. Their approaches are very different, but both are built upon six core principles which you should keep in mind as you plan for your own strategy.
Principle #1: Success in investing comes not in hoping for the best, but in knowing how you will handle the worst. Always remember: nobody really knows what's going to happen next. Some things can be predicted; most things can't. Since nobody really knows what is going to happen, your plan must allow for the fact that the investment markets will experience some unexpected downturns every now and then. That's where diversification comes in. The idea is to pick investments that "march to different drummers." This means your strategy involves owning a mix of investments that are affected by different economic events.
Surprisingly, it is possible to assemble some lower-risk investment combinations that give pretty much the same returns over time as higher-risk ones. Both of SMI's core strategies offer you portfolios that combine stocks and bonds in various combinations in order to reduce volatility and risk while still achieving attractive long-term returns.
Principle #2: Your investing plan must have easy-to-understand, clear-cut rules. There must be no room for differing interpretations. You must be able to make your investing decisions quickly and with confidence. This means reducing your decision making to numerical guidelines as much as possible. A strategy that calls for a "significant investment" in small company stocks is not as helpful as one that calls for "30% of your portfolio" to be invested in small company stocks.
As much as possible, your strategy should not only tell you what to invest in, but also how much to invest and when to buy and sell. SMI can help you know exactly where you stand and what you need to do to stay on course via monthly updates in our newsletter and on our website.
Principle #3: Your investing plan must reflect your current financial limitations. Your plan should prevent you from taking risks you can't financially afford. Every day, people who mistakenly thought "it will never happen to me" find just how wrong they were. Investing in the stock market is not a game where gains and losses are just the means of keeping score. Money is not an abstract commodity. For most of us, it represents years of work, hopes, and dreams. Its unexpected loss can be devastating.
That's why the sound mind approach sets getting debt-free and building your emergency reserve as your two top priorities. Only then are you financially strong enough to bear the risk of loss that is an ever-present reality in the stock market. Other than your IRA/401(k) contributions, we encourage you to not invest any discretionary funds in the stock and bond markets until your debt and savings goals are fully met.
Principle #4: Your investing plan must keep you within your emotional "comfort zone." Your investing plan should prevent you from taking risks that rob you of your peace. Consider the four investment temperaments profiled here. The amount of risk you take should be consistent with your temperament. You shouldn't adopt a strategy that takes you past your good-night's sleep level! If you do, you will tend to bail out at the worst possible time. A useful investing strategy needs to reflect both your investing personality and current season of life.
Principle #5: Your investing plan must be realistic concerning the level of return you can reasonably expect. We receive letters asking us to recommend safe investments that will guarantee returns of 12%, 14%, and more. If by "safe" they mean there's no chance of the value of the investment falling, then we don't know of any investments like that. Investments that are "safe" in that sense usually pay much less than 12%.
The reason any investment offers a higher rate of return is that it has to in order to reward investors for accepting a higher level of risk. SMI's goal is to help you incur the least risk possible that will still get you to your destination safely. In order to let readers know ahead of time what expectations are reasonable, our performance history is available for review.
Principle #6: Your investment plan must allow you to begin investing in small amounts so that you can get started right away and take full advantage of the tremendous power of compound interest. Consider the story of Jack and Jill: Jack saved $600 in an IRA each year between ages 8-18, then never added to it again; a total of $6,600. Jill waited to start saving until she was out of college at age 26. She put $2,000 per year into an IRA for 40 years; a total of $80,000. Both earned the same 10% rate of return.
Who would you expect to have the larger retirement fund at age sixty-five? Surprise! Jack is the winner: his fund has grown to more than $1,078,000, an amount 162 times more than he put in as a child! Jack's earlier start, even with much smaller amounts and for far fewer years, was too much for Jill to overcome, thanks to the tremendous power of compounding.
That's why it's important to start investing as early as possible and to add to your program regularly. SMI recommends setting up your accounts with companies that offer automatic savings programs, some of which will accept amounts as low as $50 per month. Even such small amounts can grow to substantial sums over many years. Every dollar makes a difference!
Whether you choose to follow one of SMI's investing strategies or create your own, incorporating these six principles will point you toward success. They're a solid foundation to build your financial future upon.
Published since 1990, Sound Mind Investing is America's best-selling financial newsletter written from a biblical perspective. Click here to request an SMI free information pack.
[Note: The Expert Witness series is a regular Friday feature that allows guest bloggers to write about a topic in which they have a particular interest or expertise. This week's entry is by the pseudonymous blogger FMF.]
While personal finance is my main hobby, chess is a "fun" passion. And while it's said that chess takes "a moment to learn; a lifetime to master," I'm going to at least try and give you an overview of the Royal Game.
Why Play Chess
I started playing chess four years ago when I read how chess exercises your mind. The article noted that people who keep their minds active have less of a chance of developing Alzheimer's. So I decided that just as I exercise my body to stay healthy, I should also do the same with my mind. And since chess provides an on-going challenge and I could pay it alone if need be (with a computer), it seemed to be a perfect choice.
You Know the Basics
One assumption I'm going to make in writing this post is that you know the basics of the game -- how to set up the board, how to move the pieces, how they capture, and the like. Just in case you don't and would like a little primer, here are some links:
What I will cover is basic chess strategy. I'm using the U.S. Chess Federation's "10 Tips to Winning Chess" as my framework for this piece. My plan is to give you enough information to show how cultured and smart you are in case you get put into a social situation involving chess. ;-)
Basic Chess Strategy
Here are ten tips to help you learn some simple ways to win more chess games:
1. Look at your opponent's move. Once your opponent moves, determine why he made that specific move. Then you will know how better to move your pieces to thwart his plans!
2. Make the best possible move. Emanuel Lasker, a former world champion, said: "When you see a good move, wait---look for a better one!" In other words, look over the position and find a good move. Once you do, re-evaluate the situation to see if you can find a better one. Many times you will be able to do so.
3. Have a plan. Don't move your pieces at random. Or worse yet, don't move them to make a useless threat. Have a plan, and think about the repercussions of moving a particular piece. Very rarely will a piece do anything by itself -- always think of your pieces as being part of your team.
4. Know what the pieces are worth. When you are considering giving up some of your pieces for some of your opponent's, you should think about the relative values of the pieces. (Note: Here's how to usually tell who's winning at any given time: Add up the value of the pieces on each side and whoever has the most is usually ahead. I say "usually" because one side may have 10 pieces, but if the other side has its opponent's king in check with two pieces, it's all over.)
Here's what Staunton's Handbook says is the approximate mathematical value of each piece (after calculations by some scientists):
Pawn = 1 pawn
Knight = 3.05 pawns
Bishop = 3.50 pawns
Rook = 5.48 pawns
Queen = 9.94 pawns
King = invaluable
A few miscellaneous notes about the value of the pieces:
*The Bishop and Knight are known collectively as the minor pieces; the Queen and Rook are the major pieces. Winning a Rook for a minor piece is known as winning "the exchange".
*Knights and bishops are approximately equal, with most people (as shown above) giving the bishop a slight edge. This is because bishops are much faster and can cover the whole board in one move (though they are limited to one color of the squares each). However, the knight is the only piece that can jump over other men, and as such, the knight is often more valuable than a bishop when there are a lot of pieces on the board (which tend to block bishops' movements).
*A combination of two minor pieces (knights and bishops) can often subdue a rook.
*A queen is worth almost as much as two rooks. It can move to the greatest number of squares in most positions.
5. Move your pieces out quickly and to good squares. Time is a very important element of chess. The player whose men are ready for action sooner will be able to control the course of the game.
Because knights can jump over pieces, they make for good attackers. So don't be shy about bringing them out early. The general rule is "knights before bishops".
Be sure not to expose your major pieces too early. You don't want to risk losing a queen or rook early on, they're too valuable. So take your time in bringing them out.
6. Control the center. The middle four squares on the board (d4, d5, e4, and e5 in chess notation) are the most important squares on the board because they let you control everything that's going on. So grab control of these squares.
7. Keep your king safe. Everyone knows this, but sometimes in the heat of the battle, you can forget. Make it a general policy to castle early in the game to protect your king. Then be very careful about advancing the pawns near your king -- the farther away they move, the less protection they provide.
8. Know when to trade pieces. The best time to trade pieces is when you can capture pieces worth more than the ones you will be giving up, which is called "winning material".
Since you will probably have many chances to exchange pieces on an "even" basis (i.e. trade a bishop for a bishop), it's useful to know when you should or shouldn't do this. Here are some general guidelines:
*If you have the initiative (your pieces are better developed, and you're controlling the game), try not to exchange men unless it increases your advantage in some clear way. The fewer men each player has, the weaker the attacking player's threats become, and the easier it is for the defending side to meet these threats.
*Do not trade pieces when your opponent has a cramped position with little space for the pieces to maneuver. It's tough to move a lot of pieces around in a cramped position, but easier to move just a few.
*Trade pieces when it weakens your opponent's pawn structure. If, for example, you can capture with a piece that your opponent can only recapture in a way that will give him "doubled pawns", it will often be to your advantage to make that trade.
*The player who is ahead in material will usually benefit from trades. It's sort of like basketball or soccer; five players will sometimes have trouble scoring against four opposing players, but take away three from each side and the stronger team will find it easier to score with two players against one.
10. Always be alert. Never relax -- even if you are way ahead. Even world champions have lost from winning positions because they relaxed too early. Chess can be complicated and a person with a seemingly insurmountable lead can find his game lost in a few moves if he doesn't pay attention.
Just like the topic of personal finances, this is a hard one to cover in just one post. Hopefully I've given you some insights into becoming a better chess player that you can use to crush whatever enemies might dare to stand in your way. ;-)
When FMF isn't playing chess, he blogs about personal finances at Free Money Finance.
[Note: The Expert Witness series is a regular Friday feature that allows guest bloggers to write about a topic in which they have a particular interest or expertise.]
Having lived through the thrill of victory (the late 1990 bull market) and the agony of defeat (the 2000-2002 bear market), many people today are finding it increasingly difficult to know which is the "right" step to take. They wonder:
"Is this a good time to buy stocks?"
"Should I sell some of my employer's stock in order to diversify?"
"How much of my retirement plan should I put in stocks versus bonds?"
"If I sell this losing investment and buy something else, will I be better off?"
Since we cannot know the future with certainty, it's obvious that no investment portfolio that any of us comes up with will ever be perfectly positioned to profit from upcoming events. As the future unfolds, it will always be possible to point to ways we could have made more money than we did - and some of them will appear incredibly obvious in retrospect! This means that it's pointless to think of the "right" investment portfolio simply in terms of maximizing profits. If that is your approach, you will always be frustrated and second-guessing your decisions.
The "right" portfolio is one that realistically faces where you are right now, looks years ahead to where you want to go, and has a very high probability of getting you there on time. Let's look at some of the characteristics of the "right" steps to take.
The right investing decision is one that is consistent with a specific, biblically sound long-term strategy you've adopted. One common trait that I find among many of those I counsel is that their current investment portfolio tends to be a random collection of "good deals" and assorted savings accounts. Each investment appears to have been made on its own merits without much thought of how it fit into the whole.
I find savings accounts (because the bank was offering a "good deal" on money market accounts), company stock (because buying it at a discount is a "good deal"), a savings bond for the kids' education (because they read an article that said they were a "good deal" for college), a universal life policy (because their insurance agent said it was a "good deal" for someone their age), a real-estate partnership (which their broker said was a "good deal" for people in their tax bracket), and 100 shares of XYZ stock (because their best friend let them in on this really "good deal").
I want you to become an initiator (one who develops an individual investing strategy tailored to your personal temperament and goals) rather than a responder (one who reacts to sales calls, making decisions on a case-by-case basis). Then you can select the appropriate investments accordingly. The right investment step is the one that you seek out purposefully, knowing where it fits into the overall scheme of things.
The right investing decision is one where you've taken plenty of time to pray and to seek trusted, experienced Christian counsel. Because your decisions have long-term implications, you should take all the time you need to become informed. Don't be in a hurry; there's no deadline. A good friend once commented to me: "The Christian life isn't a destination; it's a way of travel." Likewise, you're not under pressure to predict the best possible portfolio for the next six months or make next year's big killing. Your goal is to settle into a comfortable investing lifestyle that will serve you well for decades.
You need time to pray, ask for the counsel of others, and reflect. You should consider the alternatives, examine your motives, and continue praying until you have peace in the matter. If you're married, you should pray with your partner and talk it out until you reach mutual agreement. You're in this together and, rain or shine, you both must be willing to accept responsibility for the decision. This will add to your steadfastness during the occasional rough sledding along the way.
The right investing decision is one that you understand. This typically involves at least two things. First, it's relatively simple. It's not likely that your situation requires exotic or complicated strategies. In fact, the single investment decision of greatest importance is actually pretty easy to understand. It's deciding what percentage of your investments to put in stocks (where your return is uncertain) as opposed to bonds and other fixed income investments (where your return is relatively certain). This one decision has more influence on your investment results than any other. See our suggestions in our 5 Easy Steps to Start Investing the Sound Mind Investing Way.
And second, you've educated yourself on the basics. When you're able to give a simple explanation of your strategy to a friend and answer a few questions, you've probably got at least a beginner's grasp. The right investment step is the one where you understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you expect it to improve matters. That's the least you should expect of yourself before making decisions that can dramatically affect your life and the lives of those you love.
The right investing decision is one that is prudent under the circumstances. Does it pass the "common sense" test? How much of your investing capital can you afford to lose and still have a realistic chance of meeting your financial goals? The investments that offer higher potential returns also carry greater risks of loss. The right portfolio for you is not always the one with the most profit potential.
For example, it's usually best not to have a majority of your investments in a single asset or security. For that reason, people who have large holdings of stock in the company they work for often sell some of it in order to diversify. If the stock doubles after they sell it, does that mean they did the "wrong" thing? No, they did the right thing. After all, the stock could have fallen dramatically as well as risen (ask the former employees of Enron). What would a large loss have done to their retirement planning? The right investment step is the one that protects you in the event of life's occasional worst-case scenarios. Generally, this moves you in the direction of increased diversification.
Many people seem to find investing to be a nerve-racking, if not downright scary, experience. Making investment decisions, and then watching the results unfold, can be stressful. Do you become anxious when circumstances compel you to make important investing decisions? Most of us do to one degree or another. If my mail is any indication, a great degree of financial fretting is common. Three recurring comments lead the list of ways my readers express their concerns.
- "There's so much at stake. I'm afraid I'll make the wrong decision."
- "I don't have much experience. I'm afraid I'll make the wrong decision."
- "My savings aren't making enough now, but if I make a change I'm afraid I'll make the wrong decision."
What is the "wrong" decision, anyway? If you feel a wrong decision is like saying 2+2=5, then you're off track; such thinking implies investing decisions can be made with mathematical certainty. They can't. This doesn't mean the economy and investment markets are completely random, only that you're dealing with probabilities, not certainties and predictable events. Scientists can predict with great accuracy when the next eclipse of the sun will occur decades into the future, yet they can't tell you if the sun will be eclipsed by a thunderstorm and ruin next week's football game.
All of this is actually good news. It means anybody can play. It's like learning to drive a car. After a couple of lessons, you know enough to travel around town if you follow a few basic safety guidelines. After all, you're not trying to qualify for the Indy 500 — you just want to reach your destination. In the same way, once you understand Sound Mind Investing's core concepts, you're fairly well equipped for making whatever decisions you face.
Austin Pryor is the publisher of Sound Mind Investing. Published since 1990, Sound Mind Investing is America's best-selling financial newsletter written from a biblical perspective. Click here to request an SMI free information pack.
[Note: The Expert Witness series is a regular Friday feature that allows guest bloggers to write about a topic in which they have a particular interest or expertise.]
If any of you have ever visited my site at Free Money Finance you'll know how I dislike the term "expert." But, since this is the name of the column and I'm a guest, I guess I'll have to live with the Expert Witness name. But I don't have to like it. :-)
Why I Dislike Financial Experts
Seriously, there is a reason for my dislike of the term. The current state of personal financial media/information/data (or whatever you want to call it) is dismal. The industry is full of sales people (who call themselves "experts") who:
1) Overcomplicate the facts so the average person thinks he/she can’t possibly manage their own money
2) Want to make "your" money "their" money (or at least take part of what you have to give you "valuable" advice)
3) Don’t know much about personal finances.
I’ve found that there is a lack of financial wisdom (advice if you prefer) that is simple, easy to implement, and to the point. You don't need to be up on the latest tax implications of off-shore oil investments or be able to articulate the difference between puts and calls to be a success financially. You simply need to focus on the basics -- the 20% of tasks that will make 80% of the difference in your finances. If you do this, you'll be fine. More than fine really. With this in mind, Free Money Finance is an attempt to talk about finances in a simple, easy-to-understand manner that allows the reader to manage his or her finances without a lot of effort but still achieve superior results.
Why Listen to Me
Here's why you should listen to me instead of listening to "experts": You shouldn’t.
I am not a financial expert. I do not have a professional degree in finance. I do not work in the financial products industry. In other words, you may find my advice to be worth what you pay for it. (the "free" in the name of the site.) In other words, use any information at my blog at your own risk.
However, there are a few reasons I am semi-qualified to address this subject:
First, I have undergraduate and master’s degrees in business. (Though these didn’t teach me anything about managing money.)
Second, I have authored over 100 articles on finances over the past seven years that have appeared in many nationally recognized magazines. At least a few editors think I know what I’m talking about.
Third, I have written a book on saving money - one of the best ways to increase your net worth.
Fourth, I have coached people on their finances over the past decade, helping many to get out of debt and get on the right path to increasing their net worth.
Fifth, in the course of the past several years, I’ve read a gazillion books on personal finances, watched endless news reports, poured over countless magazines, and consulted many websites daily in search of financial wisdom. In other words, I’m self-trained.
But the best reason I can give you for why you might want to read what I’m writing is this: Over the past 20 years, I have managed my own finances so that my net worth now places me well above that of the average American. I started with nothing and while I’m not "rich", I am doing well. And what I did (and continue to do) can be done by anyone.
There are many aspects of personal finance. Thousands of books have been written on just part of the subject (like investing, saving money and retirement). My plan in this column is to give you a broad overview of the subject and then you can visit Free Money Finance for more information.
Net Worth is the Key, America not Doing So Well
All financial topics are subsets of net worth, and that's why I focus on it so much. Net worth is simply all of your assets added up to get a (hopefully) big number from which is subtracted all your (hopefully smaller) liabilities - like debts. This leaves your net worth –- what you’d have left if you sold everything you had and paid off everything you owed.
Let’s do a simple example so we’re all on the same page. Let’s say Mary owns her home that’s worth $200,000. She owns nothing else. If she has a mortgage of $50,000 (and no other debts), her net worth is $150,000 ($200,000-$50,000). At least in theory. Yes, she’ll have selling costs and the like, but this is just a simple example to illustrate a principle. You get the idea.
Unfortunately for Americans, we’re not good at accumulating net worth. According to the Administration on Aging:
"The net worth of households increases with age until age 74 and declines somewhat from age 75. The median net worth of the elderly households (with a householder aged 65+) in 2000 was $108,885 as compared to $55,000 for the total population. The largest asset type is home ownership which accounts for $85,516 or 78.5% of this net worth."
Ok, let’s do the math. The elderly have an average net worth of $109k of which $86k is tied up in their houses. That means they have just over $20,000 in liquid net worth at most. Yikes! That’s not much. And look at the other number - $55,000 is the average net worth. Pitiful. But it gets worse.
Here’s another article (though a bit dated, it’s not that old) from America Saves. They say:
"One study, conducted for the Consumer Federation by an Ohio State University consumer professor, showed that the average household in 1998 (the most recent data available from the Federal Reserve) had a net worth of $71,700, mostly from home equity. But that same household had only $9,850 in net financial assets, including retirement money. And households with income under $25,000 had net financial assets of just $1,000."
Is it any wonder we’re in such sad shape? We spend like crazies (I’ve heard it said that if you’re an average world citizen you spend 98% of what you make - unless you’re an American and then you spend 110% of what you make), we live like out of control lives (I’ve heard it quoted that the average family is three paychecks away from financial trouble), and we don’t save (we do the opposite - we borrow). It’s a very sad situation.
Five Principles to Increasing Your Net Worth
Fortunately, improving the situation is not that difficult. There are a few simple ways to increase your net worth. They are:
These can be further simplified into general principles. If you do these five simple things, you will see a radical increase in your net worth in a short amount of time. The five principles to an increasing net worth are:
1. Maximize income from all sources
2. Minimize expenses
3. Control liabilities - eliminate liabilities and limit or eliminate borrowing of any kind
4. Invest in appreciating (or at least neutral) assets only
5. Protect the value of your assets
I know, I know. Pretty simple stuff. I told you that personal finances were actually pretty easy when you boiled it down. It’s the "experts" that want to make them hard.
Now let's talk about how to make the most of each principle.
Making the Five Principles Work
Principle 1 is to "maximize income from all sources". In order to maximize your income from all sources, you must:
Yes, there are exceptions to all of these. Bill Gates didn’t get 30 years of education. Warren Buffet doesn’t have a second job (and though he likes bridge, I don’t think he’s turned it into a money maker), and Ross Perot doesn’t have a co-ed living in his basement (at least to my knowledge he doesn’t). So while there are exceptions to the rule, generally, for the vast majority of people out there, these hold true.
Principle 2 is probably the most important principle of the group. It’s certainly the most ignored principle of the five, but it’s the one principle that people have the most control over and the one that can make the greatest impact on their financial futures. Principle 2, quite simply, is to "minimize expenses."
You’ve probably heard the saying that you should "live on less than you make." It’s a true saying, but unfortunately one that many people don’t follow. Not only do Americans have a hard time keeping expenses in line, but they go one step further, not only spending all they make, but spending more than they make. Consider these facts from debtguru.com
Unfortunately, I could go on and on. The situation is very bad. That's why the brother of Principle 2 is Principle 3: "control liabilities - eliminate liabilities and limit or eliminate borrowing of any kind."
In short, we need to get and stay out of debt. This includes all kinds of debt. Nasty credit card debt, hurtful debt, depreciating assets (can you spell c-a-r?), and on and on.
Principle 4 tells us to "invest in appreciating (or at least neutral) assets only." This includes things like a house, a small business, or rental property. On the flip side, this principle also advises us to avoid those assets that decline quickly in value - like new cars.
Finally comes Principle 5 which says "protect the value of your assets." The great book The Millionaire Next Door (which you should read if you like anything I have to say) talks about people who become millionaires. (Guess the title makes that clear, huh?) Anyway, the book says that the key to being wealthy is for a person to play both good offense (make a lot of money) and good defense (spend little and protect what they have). The heart of good defense is insurance and estate planning.
In order to be financially solid, you must protect your largest assets - your home (house insurance), your car (auto insurance), and your income (disability and medical insurance). In addition, you must protect them even beyond your life (life insurance).
The Big Wrap Up
While this may be one of the longest posts you've read in some time, it's just a small part of the total personal financial picture. Perhaps in future posts the host will be so kind as to invite me to discuss additional topics like investments, retirement planning, and the least painful ways to save money. Until then, visit Free Money Finance for guidance and money discussions. Just be sure you don't trust the "expert" there too much. :-)
Other posts in the series:
When Evangelical Outpost began this "Expert Witness" series he started with Bill Wallo of Wallo World on graphic novels. Bill did a great job, and I, in a vain attempt at humor, left a trackback to my usual Saturday post on "Comic Art," with a rather petulant link back to that post. As a result, Joe has quite kindly and needlessly offered to allow me to do this post on comic books -- but given how I love the medium, I cannot turn the opportunity down.
So first I should address the difference between graphic novels and comic books. The short answer is often not much. If you go to a book store these days you will generally find a section dedicated to graphic novels; however, most of what you will find there is soft cover compilations of the numerous comic books that comprise a story arc. It's kind of like someone took the old RKO serials and put them on a single real, editing out only the credits associated with each episode.
Comic books are stories, told graphically and episodically. A graphic novel is also a story told graphically, but when well done, it has a different narrative structure, lacking the numerous cliffhangers and gimmicks designed pull you back for the next episode. It's a subtle differentiation that obviously most people are oblivious to since so much of what is sold as graphic novels is really just a compilation.
Here I am addressing comic books, and most importantly, art in comic books. I am concentrating on the graphical part of the medium for one very good reason -- I buy comics far more because of how they look than the story they tell. So what do I look for?
Far and away the most important element of comic art is storytelling. The art should tell the story and the narration, dialogue and thought balloons should just embellish it. To my way of thinking that line is what differentiates a comic from an illustrated short story or novel. Where that line is is argued often and loudly, but it's in there somewhere.
The next thing I look for is what I call "richness." In this day and age most kids come to comics through animation, when I was a kid, it was the opposite. That has created some changes I am not real happy with. Animation involves thousands of images, so an artist endeavors to render that art with as few lines and as simple backgrounds as possible. Comics, by contrast, involve only hundred of images and should give the artist more opportunity to add detail and emphasis to the art. Unfortunately, as kids buy comics because they look like their TV cousins, youth oriented comics are now appearing with that same simplistic art. I understand the need to capture the kids as a market, but I hope they do not end up finding the richer stuff ugly as they grow.
Finally, I want to discuss how the art is produced. The evolution of printing technology has resulted in the color palette for comics growing to infinity -- to the point that some high end books are now completely painted, lacking the traditional pencil and ink lines that comics have had since their inception. Alex Ross is a paint artist in huge demand and very popular. Mostly he does covers, because to do a whole book that way is very expensive. I realize I am a bit of a curmudgeon here, but I don't love it. As I start to cite those that I consider the best artists below, they are defined by their ink lines. To my way of thinking, the ink line is the essence of comic art, a painting of a comic character may be beautiful (which many of Ross' are), but it is not, in my never to be humble opinion, comic art.
So now I want to turn to notable artists. First I want to present the "Honorable Mentions." these are some very good artists, presented in no particular order. I will link each name to some related material, mostly without comment. Some of these people are most prolific and many influential. I like all of them, but in the end one must decide some better and best. Gene Colan -- John Buscema -- Jim Steranko -- Joe Kubert -- Gil Kane -- Neal Adams -- Mike Mignola -- Carmine Infantino -- John Romita Sr. -- John Romita Jr. -- George Perez (his recent work on Justice League*Avengers was spectacular) -- Bill Sienkiewicz (best known for "Elektra: Assassin," my favorite was his creation of the character Warlock in "The New Mutants") -- John Byrne (his reinvention of Superman "Man of Steel" is one of the more important comic miniseries ever done) -- Steve Ditko (the man that designed Spider-man -- 'Nuff Said!)
Now I'll turn my attention to my top twelve with comments and illustration, leading up to my personal #1.
Peter Laird
Peter, and his partner in crime Kevin Eastman, got very greedy with their breakout creation - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those characters have been commoditized, infantilized, cartoonized, and merchandised to the point of non-recognition. But the original small, black-and-white, parody-of-other-comics was quite good. If you can get them, and it's not easy, a look at TMNT #1, first printing, is a wonderful look at how comics should be done.
Bob Burden
Burden's creation - The Flaming Carrot - is the silliest superhero ever invented. Burden's art somehow matches the character perfectly. The somewhat offbeat appearance, the scratchy lines, the muted colors just fit.
Dave Sim
Cerebus, Sim's creation, has had some color mutations lately, but was in it's origin a grayscale comic. That made it somewhat unique and quite enjoyable. Using grays to indicate depth and shadows and so forth, Sim combined the great storytelling of just pen lines and the richness of color.
Howard Chaykin
When allowed, Howard is nearly pornographic, and he is a neighbor. He is best known for his signature title "American Flagg," my personal favorite is his 1985 miniseries of the classic radio character "The Shadow." His art is some of the more easily recognizable out there, and he has been quite prolific over the years, even doing illustrations for TV show "Tales From The Crypt."
Will Eisner
Will Eisner is certainly one of the three or four most influential comic creators ever. I've never heard any other creator pass out kudos that did not include Eisner. He is best known for his long running book "The Spirit." He may be the most generous creator ever. You just cannot talk about great comic artists without talking about Will Eisner.
Dave Gibbons
Gibbons is the artist half of the creative team (writer: Alan Moore) that created what is likely the second most influential comic miniseries of all time -- "The Watchmen." The series was ground-breaking in its depiction of heroes as people with problems like all of us -- divorce, unfaithfulness, alcoholism.... Gibbons dark and shadow filled art perfectly matched the tone of the work. This series changed comic books, likely forever.
Frank Miller
Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" is the most influential comic miniseries ever done. It has spawned two movies, and reset the character firmly back into the night from which he sprang. I'll be honest, I don't love Miller's art -- it's ugly, but it's purposefully ugly. He writes about the darkest and ugliest our world has to offer, and the art reflects that. His "Sin City" series (and the incredibly faithful movie) reflect that even more than his Batman stuff.
Todd McFarlane
Todd is probably best known at this point for his maverick ways, how he has transformed compensation in the comics industry and "Spawn." But his best work was on Spiderman. He revolutionized the character, and he came to my notice by one simple visual innovation -- those little knots on Spidey's webbing. So good was he at the webbing, that I am convinced it is the origin of Spawn's chains -- they are similar visual elements and add just a great amount of drama to the image.
Walt Simonson
Considered by many to be the definitive Thor artist, I have to modify that to say he was the best to draw the character, but not necessarily the book -- more on that later. He did indeed make a huge splash with his run on Thor and they are among some of the best books ever done. His introduction of Thor's superpower doppleganger "Beta Ray Bill" almost stole the title from its decades long lead and title character, and Bill did look awfully good.
Jim Lee
Jim Lee has, to my mind, become the definitive renderer of the Batman. He has done marvelous work on many titles for a long time now, but his recent work with writer Jeff Loeb, on the "Hush" run in Batman was stupendous. He managed to capture the darkness of the character without the ugliness of Miller. The results were pleasant to look at and very enjoyable to read. I think it will be a long time before anyone does Batman better.
Goseki Kojima
I came very close to making Mr. Kojima number 1. He is the master story teller. The Japanese manga series "Lone Wolf and Cub" was serialized in American by First Comics and it absolutely blew me away. Bold black-and-white, and virtually without dialogue, narrations, or thought balloons, one never struggled to understand the story or the impact of the moments depicted. He could communicate more with his pen than most artists can with a full battery of tools from brushes to computers.
Jack "King" Kirby
Jack Kirby, creator (with Stan Lee, though Jack did a lot more than most people think) of virtually the entire Marvel Universe, he is the standard by which all other comic art is measured. The bold ink lines, and the amazing backgrounds are his trademark. Most people think his best work was the Fantastic Four, but I an not so sure. I love his Captain America, especially because he was able to draw Cap in both the Gold and Silver age of comics, an incredible feat. But it is his Thor that caught my eye when I was but a child. As I said above, Walt Simonson draws Thor himself better than almost anyone, but Kirby's books were just spectacular. No one has ever drawn the fabled kingdom of Asgard like Kirby, and no one ever will. He did similar things when the FF would travel to places like the Negative Zone, but it is Asgard and the Rainbow Bridge that is cemented in my memory.
As Wallo pointed out, graphic storytelling long ago left behind it's childishness. I have concentrated on art here, not only because of it's appeal, but because when one learns to appreciate the telling of the story as much as the story itself, comics can really open up to you. Anytime anyone decides who are and are not "the best" artists, debate will rage. I have no doubt I will be called a fool and an idiot. In the end this comes down to taste. This is about who I like and think is good. My goal is to give people who do not necessarily have an opinion about these things some pointers on where it might be good to start. So those of you that disagree, by all means, I encourage you to do so, but please try to be courteous about it. If we do not draw new fans of all ages into comics, this great medium could die. If we argue to hard, we just look geeky and exclusive.
Thanks Joe for this marvelous opportunity. I try to write something about Comic Art every Saturday on Blogotional. Maybe you'd like to drop by some time and see more.
In his essay, "The Question Concerning Technology," Martin Heidegger says that the primary question concerning technology is the question of "what it is." Many answers have been given to this question and there is not a definitive answer to the question. There is, however, agreement about many aspects of what technology is. The rest of this essay is going to explore various answers to the question.
A Definition (or Two) of Technology
One definition of modern technology given by the authors of Responsible Technology is
"a distinct human cultural activity in which human beings exercise freedom and responsibility in response to God by forming and transforming the natural creation, with the aid of tools and procedures, for practical ends and purposes."Carl Mitcham's theory of technology includes four parts or, rather, four ways to view technology.
While there may not be a clear distinction between technology and non-technology, the first definition is useful for giving us guidelines to help identify what technology is. The second definition is useful for helping us think about technology in different ways. Both definitions shows technology to be multifaceted. The first definition sees technology primarily as an activity (Mitcham’s #2) that results in practical ends and purposes (Mitcham’s #1 and #4). The first definition speaks of "exercising freedom and responsibility," which implies the making of choices (Mitcham’s #2 and #4) and also speaks of "tools and procedures" (Mitcham’s #1 and #3). So while on the surface the two definitions may not look that similar, they do end up corresponding rather well with each other.
The first definition does help us make some distinctions between technological activity and non-technological activity. Technology is for practical ends and purposes, as opposed to things like art or sports. Technology also forms and transforms the natural creation, as opposed to things like writing a blog entry or passing a law.
Neither of these definitions is meant to be a complete definition nor a final one. Indeed, there have been numerous, often conflicting, attempts to describe what technology is. Various other descriptions of technology include:
Technology - A Larger Picture
Albert Borgmann identifies at least two theories of technology - the instrumentalist and the substantive. The instrumental theory sees technology as a value-neutral tool that is a "mere means." Technology is neither good nor bad in itself, but depends on how it is used. Under this view, technology’s neutrality is a result of its instrumentality. According to Andrew Feenberg, instrumentalists see technology as "indifferent to the variety of ends it can be employed to achieve." Technology, if anything, allows us to reach our desired ends in an easier, more efficient or quicker way. In addition to its neutrality from specific ends, technology is socially and politically neutral as well. Instrumentalists view technology as having a rational character that is "based on verifiable causal propositions." This rational character means that technologies are socially universal in that if they work in one society, they will work in every society.
The instrumentalist view is a common one that reflects our intuitions about technology. A chair, for example, can be used for a variety of ends - sitting, reaching a light bulb, keeping somebody from opening a door, etc. The instrumentalist theory also gains some force because it relies on the connection between the "rational character" of technology and that of science.
Critics of the instrumentalist view say that the means of technology are not (or should not be) "mere." They say that even if much of modern technology separates the means from the ends, it has not always been that way and it does not have to be that way. Thus, they say, instrumentalism is not an adequate theory of technology. This is the view of the substantive approach to technology. In this view, technology is not a mere means, but is a driving force or power in its own right. Technology is not a neutral way of arriving at some desired end, but rather it shapes all of society. In this way, the means cannot be separated from the ends. Feenberg writes that people who hold this view believe that "[h]ow we do things determines who and what we are. Technological development transforms what it is to be human." People who hold this view often see technology as autonomous force.
Substantivists also see a rational character to modern technology. Whereas for instrumentalists this technical rationality serves as the basis for the neutrality of technology, for substantivists rationality is the essence of technology and modernity has unleashed this autonomous force from its pre-modern restraints.
A popular example (used by Borgmann, Feenberg, and Don Ihde) that highlights the differences between the substantive and instrumental approaches is that of comparing fast food to a traditional, prepared family meal. Fast food can be seen as a technological approach to the consumption of food. The purpose of fast food is to supply nourishment. In this way, the instrumentalist treats both eating fast food as well as preparing and eating a family meal as different, neutral means to the same end - nourishment. Substantivists claim that the traditional family meal and fast food may have the same ends, but the technological approach of fast food does not have the same meaning as a family meal. This meaning is found in the rituals and practices surrounding eating that have value in themselves. Because of this, they are not "mere" means, but make up the larger social context of the activity.
Feenberg argues that what both approaches have in common is that they both have a "take it or leave it" attitude towards technology,
"On the one hand, if technology is a mere instrumentality, indifferent to values, then its design and structure is not at issue in political debate, only the range and efficiency of its application. On the other hand, if technology is the vehicle for a culture of domination, then we are condemned either to pursue its advance toward dystopia or to regress to a more primitive way of life. In neither case can we change it: in both theories, technology is destiny. Reason, in its technological form, is beyond human intervention or repair."So, with these two theories, the choices seem to be between a full speed ahead pursuit of technological progress or reverting back to a simpler time where technology doesn't have the autonomous force that it does in our society. Whereas the instrumentalists see the control of nature through technology as our hope for the future, substantivists believe our hope lies in freeing ourselves from the control of technology itself. Clearly this take it or leave it attitude is problematic, so the question of how to navigate our way between technological pessimism and technological optimism arises.
What is needed, says Borgmann, is a view that emulates
"the boldness and incisiveness of the substantive version without leaving the character of technology obscure. It should reflect our common intuitions and exhibit the lucidity of the instrumentalist theory while overcoming the latter’s superficiality."Various attempts have been made to form a theory that successfully takes into account the best of the above views. I will not explore whether or not any of these attempts have been successful, but I will look at a few of the key issues involved. These issues include the value-neutrality of technology, the idea of technological progress, and the relationship between science and technology.
The Neutrality of Technology
While it is true that a technological artifact can be used for different ends and that different technological artifacts can be used for the same ends, this does not imply that technology is neutral. The authors of Responsible Technology argue that technology is "value-laden." Their argument relies on two basic characteristics of technological artifacts - their uniqueness and their intertwined-ness with their environment.
Every technological artifact is unique in that each is designed for a specific purpose. A technological artifact is a combination of "specific resources - know-how, materials, and energy - into unique entities with unique sets of properties and capabilities." This unique combination is a result of the designers' choices
"to develop one kind of knowledge and not another, to use certain resources and not others, to use energy in a certain form and quantity. There is no purely neutral or technical justification for all these decisions."Rather, all of these choices involve human valuing, whether it is the economic valuing of a certain method of production or the aesthetic valuing of a particular design or the environmental valuing of one material over another.
Likewise, as I suggested above, people have some freedom in how they use an artifact. A chair can be used for a variety of purposes. But this freedom is not unconstrained. A chair cannot be used for any end I may dream up. The decisions made by the designers of an artifact both enable it to function as it does, but also limit it. In this way, we can say that an artifact "embodies" the values of the decisions of its designers. An artifact's shape, structure, material makeup, etc. both enable it to function as its designers envisioned (and usually in ways that the designers didn't envision), but also limit it to functioning in certain ways.
In addition to being unique, technological artifacts are also intertwined with their environments.
"[E]ach technological object, given its properties and capabilities, opens up certain possibilities for interaction with both its cultural and its natural environment, and correspondingly closes down other possibilites."The desire of easy, personal transportation led to the mass production of automobiles. One of the ways automobiles interact with their natural environments is by emitting various pollutants into the environment. One way they interact with their cultural environment is their need for highways and gas stations and service shops and law enforcement. All of these are things that have been "opened up" by the decisions and values of both designers and society.
Technological Progress
A common view of technological progress holds that we are increasingly becoming more technologically sophisticated. The combination of scientific advances and technological ingenuity leads to improved conditions for human beings and future problems will similarly be met by technological solutions. Progress, then, is the meeting of desired goals through the most efficient, technical means possible.
There are problems with this view of technological progress, however. Historical studies show that technology does not follow this path of progress. Decisions in technology are often based not on technical reasons, but on social, aesthetic, safety, and other factors. This idea parallels the idea of the underdetermination of theories found in the philosophy of science. Underdetermination in science is the idea that empirical data alone cannot determine a choice between two or more competing theories. The empirical data cannot force us to choose one theory over another. Technological underdetermination, then, is the idea that technical reason alone is not enough to determine the success of two or more competing technologies. Feenberg describes another way of looking at this principle: "[U]nderdetermination means that technical principles alone are insufficient to determine the design of actual devices."
In many ways, this view is akin to a religious belief in that it offers a solution to what's "wrong" with the world. This solution is efficient, technical control over nature. Technology is seen as the way in which we will curie diseases, end world hunger, create world peace, and even gain immortality. Faith in technological progress, then, resembles the faith found in many religions in that it offers hope.
Technology and Science
Virtually everybody agrees that science and modern technology are closely related. Indeed, in many instances (e.g., biotechnology) it is difficult to determine where the technology begins and where the science ends. There are, however, disagreements about how science and technology are related.
The most popular view today is that technology is merely applied science. Scientists make discoveries about nature and develop general theories and knowledge about reality. Technology is the process of applying these theories and knowledge towards useful purposes.
Others have taken the opposite stance, saying that science is actually "theoretical technology." They have looked at the history of technology and have noted that very often technological advances actually precede the scientific explanations for how they work.
Besides the historical approach just mentioned, there have been two other types of arguments against the technology as applied science view. The first argues that technological knowledge is distinct from and not reducible to scientific knowledge. As an example of this approach, Edwin Layton points out,
"[E]ngineering theory often deals with idealizations of machines, beams, heat engines, or similar devices. And the results of engineering science are often statements about such devices rather than statements about nature. ... By its very nature, therefore, engineering science is less abstracted and idealized; it is much closer to the "real" world of engineering. Thus, engineering science often differs from basic science in both style and substance. Generalizations about "science" based on one will not necessarily apply to the other."The other argument tries to dissolve the sharp distinction between science and technology. In essence, this argument challenges the technology as applied science's implicit assumptions about what science and technology are. It relies on the difficulties in distinguishing scientific knowledge from other forms of knowledge. Because of these problems, it is difficult to even talk about one being an application of the other. We could just as easily speak of science as applied technology as we do of technology as applied science. The fact that scientific advances generally rely on technology just as much as technological advances rely on science also adds support to this view. In addition, throughout its history, science has used technological metaphors as guiding principles. The machine has served as a metaphor for things ranging from the entire universe to animals to parts of animals.
Conclusion
We have really only touched the surface of the subject of technology. There are many other topics including the difference between natural and artificial, technology and politics, technology and ethics, sustainable/appropriate/intermediate technologies, and others. The two views of technology that I discussed - instrumentalism and substantivism - each have nuggets of truth to them. Neither is an adequate theory, however. The betterment of humanity will not come through faith in technical control or through the rejection of modern technology. Technology is neither savior nor the scapegoat for what's wrong with this world.
Macht is a Systems Engineer and specializes in statistical signal processing and communication systems. His interests lie in the areas of philosophy of technology, philosophy of science, and neocalvinism. He blogs at prosthesis.
Other posts in the series:
[Note: Although originally written for the Master’s Programs for Autodidacts post, Dr. Forster has graciously agreed to let me use this piece for this week’s EW feature.]
Here’s my contribution for a do-it-yourself MA in political thought (I have a Ph.D. in political science from Yale). I should say as a disclaimer that graduate school in the liberal arts is not nearly so useless as MBA programs apparently are; you get a lot out of spending day after day discussing a liberal arts subject with other people who are studying it.
Most political thought programs start with Hackett’s The Trial and Death of Socrates, which collects four dialogues of Plato (the Apology, the Euthyphro, the Crito, and the Phaedo). This will give you an idea of 1) what philosophy is, and 2) why philosophy matters for the life of a political community.
Another good book to read at the outset, I think, would be G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. While it is not explicitly a work of political thought, it gives you a really valuable insight in to what paganism is (most Westerners just don’t have the first idea of how pagan people and societies actually think), what philosophy is (from the perspective of a critic rather than an insider, as with Plato), and what theism is, and how all three of these affect the way political communities think and act.
Then it’s time for the big plunge: Allan Bloom’s edition of Plato’s Republic. Make sure you get Bloom’s edition if you really want to read the book as Plato wrote it. Bloom’s interpretive essay is not required reading, but the textual notes in the back of the book are. You need to read this book with two bookmarks – one in the main text and one in the notes, which you should be following as you go along. The notes really should have been printed alongside the text, like a study Bible.
A common confusion about the Republic is that it is a plan for political reform. It is not that. Plato does not actually envision these proposals being enacted. Rather, the Republic is a meditation on the nature of human beings, specifically on what the root cause of the phenomenon we call “justice” is. What is it about human beings that cause them, and them alone among all natural creatures, to believe that their affairs must be governed by rules of right and wrong? Plato thinks the answer lies in the way human psychology is constructed, and the “ideal” political community he sketches in the Republic is intended to illustrate this.
For extra credit, you might want to read Plato’s Laws (a set of practical observations on the laws of Greek communities), the Protagoras (on the sources of virtue), and the Symposium (on the sources of sexual love).
Next up are Aristotle’s Ethics (sometimes called the Nicomachean Ethics in honor of Aristotle’s son Nicomachus, who collected and edited his father’s works for publication) and the Politics. I would recommend reading them in that order. Aristotle is such a precise and systematic writer that it doesn’t much matter which translation you use. If you find Aristotle to your taste, you might be interested in the Rhetoric as well, though it is a less profound book.
Optionally, if you are interested in pre-Christian Rome, you might want to read the Republic of Cicero and the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius. But no one will think you any less well-informed if you skip them. For a more lively portrait of political thought in Rome during its republican and imperial periods, read Shakespeare’s plays Coriolanus and Julius Caesar (for all Shakespeare plays I highly recommend The Complete Pelican Shakespeare).
Now you have a pretty solid overview of political thought in the pre-Christian world. The next big step is the cataclysmic encounter between Roman thought (both pagan and philosophic) and Christianity. If you really want to get the full story here, there’s no substitute for reading Augustine’s City of God. Yes, I know, it’s 1,100 pages long, but a lot of it is redundant and you have permission to skip whenever he starts belaboring a point. Make sure you get a modern translation (as opposed to the obsolete translations available on the Internet) in an annotated edition – Augustine spends a lot of time discussing things that were being said by other people, and you’re going to need footnotes to keep track.
As with the Republic, there is a common confusion of mind to avoid here. The Latin term traditionally translated “city” in the phrase “city of God” does not really mean “city” so much as “community”. Augustine does not envision the city of God and its opposite, the city of man, as distinct political entities. They are two communities that coexist within the larger political community of the city and interpenetrate one another.
Fast forward to the Middle Ages. The usual shortcut for covering this thousand-year period of history is to read Thomas Aquinas, who distilled the best thought of the scholastics – the school of thought that dominated until the rise of the nominalists at the end of the Middle Ages. The single most important thing to get here is the development of the idea of “natural law,” that is, the idea that God has revealed the moral law to all human beings through reason. While this idea was present in Christian thought from the early church, and also in much non-Christian philosophy, it was the medieval church that developed the full-fledged doctrine as we know it today. In Summa Theologica, in the “First Part of the Second Part,” read Questions 90-114. This section of the Summa is traditionally called the “Treatise on Law.” The influence of Aristotle – whose works had been recently reintroduced to the West after having been lost since ancient times – is clearly visible here. For extra credit, you can read Defensor Pacis by Marsilius of Padua, a 14th century thinker who took natural law in a more radically liberating direction.
If you want a more rounded idea of the political worldview of the scholastics, rather than just concentrating on the one aspect of their ideas that had a really lasting impact, there are quite a few editions of the collected political thought of Aquinas. These are generally arranged by subject, allowing you to check out whatever aspects you find interesting.
Now we come to the emergence of modernity in the 16th century. There are a lot of interrelated developments that happen at the same time. Here are the three most important for political thought, in no particular order:
1) Natural-law thought culminates in the idea of “natural rights,” that is, claims for certain kinds of political treatment (e.g. the protection of private property) to which a person is entitled under natural law. A history of how this idea emerged can be found in Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights. While this is a history book rather than a work of political thought, it’s valuable because it establishes how “natural rights” grew out of “natural law” and remained an essentially religious idea. Lots of people have the wrong idea about this.
2) The breakdown of political order in much of Europe in the early 16th century, coupled with widespread fear that Europe was on the verge of being conquered by the Ottoman Empire, leads many people to think that the decorous moralism of natural-law thought just doesn’t cut the mustard in a harsh, cruel, and wicked world. Machiavelli is the major thinker here; while most people were revolted by the open amoralism of his book The Prince, that book’s powerful critique of natural-law thought was nonetheless widely influential. You don’t have to go all the way down the road to amoralism to get Machiavelli’s major point, which is that all other questions will be moot if you fail to secure the safety of the political order, which (he argues) natural-law thought fails to do. For extra credit, read the Discourses on Livy.
3) The Reformation fragments Europe into deeply hostile cultural groups. For a long time it was believed, for various reasons that were a lot more serious than most people assume, that Protestants and Catholics could not possibly share a common political community. The only thing for a ruler to do was to establish the dominance of one group and suppress or even completely stamp out the other group. A good summary statement of this kind of thinking can be found in Book IV, Chapter 20 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion; much the same was being said in reverse on the other side. For an important dissenting view, see John Milton’s Areopagitica. Luther, interestingly, went back and forth on this question in a relatively short period; see the comparatively authoritarian Letter to the Christian Nobility of Germany and the (I think) comparatively libertarian Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. In the former document he’s calling for German princes to ban the Catholic church and enforce the Reformation by law. When the princes failed to oblige, he wrote the latter document, in which he seems to have given up on enforcing religious conformity – though not everyone would read Secular Authority as being a real reversal of his previous position.
While these currents in political thought were taking shape, the facts on the ground were changing in another way. The printing press (which drastically increased the use of languages other than Latin), the fights over religion, and the increasing power of secular political authorities gradually led people to identify themselves more and more as members of larger political communities that we now call “nations.” It was during this period that people stopped thinking of themselves as Parisians or Nuremburgers or Londoners and started thinking of themselves as French or German or English. Over time, particularly in the 17th century, the boundaries of political units came to coincide with the nationalities of their peoples, producing the entity known as the “nation-state.” From here on in, the important political question is: how should the nation-state be governed?
The first really great political thinker whom you can unreservedly call “modern” is Thomas Hobbes. His Leviathan was written in reaction to the English Civil War, one of the bloodiest of the very bloody wars of religion that followed the Reformation. Hobbes wants to demystify politics – strip it of all the powerful religious and cultural ideas that people associate with it – and make it into a science. If people would stop investing politics with so much religious, moral, and cultural importance, then they would stop killing each other so much. Hobbes is an opponent of religion – though he was careful to claim otherwise, his hostility to Christianity is really quite obvious – and most of the arguments on the secularist side of our culture war are ultimately rooted in a Hobbesian view of the world. Hobbes takes the language of Christian natural-law thought and twists it into a wholly new shape. Make sure you read both halves of Leviathan, and not just the explicitly political first half; as you will see, the second half, which is a radically unorthodox interpretation of the Bible, is really just as important to what Hobbes is doing politically.
The next stop on our tour is John Locke, who also wrote in the context of England’s wars of religion (though during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as opposed to the earlier Civil War). Locke takes two major currents of thought that had been developing particularly in English thought, and gave them their fullest and most forceful expression. The first is the idea that there is a “natural right” to armed resistance against tyranny, and the second is the idea of religious toleration. The key texts here are the Two Treatises of Government and the Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke’s formulation of these ideas was transformative – the whole idea of natural rights takes on a completely different character when one of those rights is the right to defend all your other rights by force, even against your own government. And no one needs to be told how transformative the idea of religious toleration was.
There are two major confusions to avoid in reading the Two Treatises. First, Locke takes over Hobbes’s idea of a “state of nature,” which was a sort of thought experiment that Hobbes used to work out what the ultimate justification of government was. Do not think that this means Locke is following Hobbes’s thought. A few scholars do defend this view, but the overwhelming majority of Locke scholars (myself among them) agree that Locke is a Christian natural-law thinker who uses some of Hobbes’s ideas precisely in order to prove Hobbes wrong on all the really important points.
The other confusion to avoid is to think that the idea of a “divine right of kings,” which Locke argues against in the First Treatise, was the longstanding traditional political theory of the West. This is simply a myth. Divine right was a radical innovation introduced by power-hungry monarchs in the early modern period. At a time when kings were getting a lot more powerful than they used to be, some of them got greedy and tried to promote the idea that the king speaks with God’s direct authority. But this view was never the mainstream or majority view of the West; the mainstream view (as in Aquinas) was always that the king got his authority as a grant from the community. The catch was that this grant was traditionally held to be irrevocable; once the community set up a king, it couldn’t change its mind. Locke’s real innovation was to argue that the grant of authority from the community was revocable.
Locke’s thought was the beginning of what came to be called political “liberalism.” Obviously we’re using “liberalism” in a very specific sense, not in the same way it’s used in modern American politics and not in the way it’s used in theology. Sometimes this ideology is called “classical liberalism.”
Two more major thinkers are necessary to get a complete introductory portrait of liberalism. First, for the economic thought that was a crucial element of liberalism, read Books I, III, and V of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Don’t miss the intriguing analysis in Book V of how the behavior of schools and churches is shaped by financial incentives. If you’re interested in the issue of trade you might also want to read Book IV.
The other major element is the development of what we might call “constitutional thought” in liberalism – working out what kinds of political institutions would best put liberalism into practice. One of the distinguishing characteristics of liberalism is its particular attention to the design of institutions. The Federalist Papers provide a concise statement of the basic elements of liberal constitutional thought; if you’re looking for more, you might want to tackle Baron Charles de Montesquieu’s much longer The Spirit of the Laws.
So much for sketching a portrait of liberalism. All that really remains is to go over the major reactions against liberalism that have sprung up since it became the dominant mode of political thought.
The first really large-scale reaction against liberalism was Romanticism, which had its origins almost entirely from the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It’s very hard to summarize Romanticism, but a good beginning of a summary is that seeks to replace theistic natural law with a deistic moral system built on the conscience. For me the real heart of Rousseau’s works has always been the book Emile, which is sort of Rousseau’s version of Plato’s Republic. But it is more common for people to read his “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” (also known as the “First Discourse”), “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality” (a.k.a. the “Second Discourse”), and especially his book The Social Contract, which is as close as he came to laying out a political program. For extra credit, American Romantics included Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson (start with the essay “Self-Reliance”).
Another major reaction against liberalism is what we might call political traditionalism. This bursts on the scene rather dramatically with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. For extra credit, read Michael Oakeshott’s Radicalism in Politics and Other Essays and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.
Still another is utilitarianism. The hard-core version of utilitarianism was a passing intellectual phase in the 19th century that gained little traction. However, John Stuart Mill produced a more moderate version of utilitarianism that continues to be influential to this day. Start with the short book On Liberty; for extra credit read Utilitarianism. Mill’s most enduring idea is that people with ideas or ways of life that are unusual or unpopular need special protection against the overbearing pressure for conformity; here we find another major precursor of the secularist side of the culture war.
Tempted as we may be, we can’t leave out Marxism. Only the “Communist Manifesto” is required reading as far as primary sources go; the basic ideas of Marxism are already too familiar, and are turning out not to be lasting very long historically anyway. But two major analyses of Marxism and its weaknesses are definitely required reading, especially since they are important for more than just their analyses of Marxism: George Orwell’s 1984 and Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel, particularly, diagnosed Marxism’s fundamental immorality as the fatal flaw that would ultimately bring it down. Extra credit assignments include Orwell’s Animal Farm and “Politics and the English Language,” and Havel’s play “The Memorandum.”
We’ve saved the most powerful critique of liberalism for last. Quite a few people who share very little else in common believe that liberalism can’t work because it leads people to want nothing more than lives of comfort and conformity, for which they are eventually willing to sell their freedom, their minds, and their souls. Get ready, because I’m about to drop a pretty lengthy reading list on you: Alexis de Tocqueville’s huge but indispensable Democracy in America, Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” See also Havel’s play “The Unveiling” and his essay “A Sense of the Transcendent.”
Greg Forster is the author of John Locke's Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005). When not studying political theory in his spare time, he conducts empirical research on school choice as a senior fellow at the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. His e-mail address is Greg_Forster[at]Hotmail.com.
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“Simple-mindedness consists in having too few thoughts and feelings to match the world as it really is. In private life and the field of personal morality it is often possible to survive in that state—indeed, the very statement for that case is over-simple, since the question of what moral demands life makes is not independent of what one’s morality demands of it. But the demands of political reality and the complexities of political thought are obstinately what they are, and in the face of them the simple-mindedness of utilitarianism disqualifies it totally.”
-Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism”
I have been given the good fortune to take a stab at replying to last week’s post by Kevin T Keith on consequentialist ethics with a post of my own on perhaps their main competitor in the field of ethics, deontological ethics. I’d like to proceed in three stages: to try and offer a brief explanation of what deontological ethics are (and why you should care), to explain some of the faults of utilitarianism (there are lots more where these will come from) and a bit of explanation for my own personal hobby-horse with respect to consequentialism (nobody actually believes in it), and then to look at some of the more notable (for better or worse) works which have attempted to incorporate deontological ethics.
Despite, so far as I can tell, having been a deontologist for most of my life, I didn’t actually get exposed to the term until my junior year of college. My professor of political philosophy described deontologists as people who believed in the motto “fiat justitia, pereat mundus” (let justice be done, though the world perish). I think that’s probably an accurate description of my personal ethics, but I think one need not go nearly that far. Any of the following things probably make you a deontologist:
1. Believing some things (torture, murder, etc) are always wrong.
2. Thinking that it is sometimes possible that doing the right thing will make you worse off (which is to say, believing that what’s right and what’s good are sometimes different).
3. Believing that your relation to somebody makes a difference as to what you have to do for them.
4. Believing in general in moral imperatives, duties, or obligations.
(If you have access, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice article summarizing deontological theory.)
To expand just a little bit, deontologists believe that the moral status of actions is ontological, which is to say, it’s part of the universe (whether from God, or rationality, or just because) whether killing someone is right or wrong, and no amount of argument or thinking or anything will make it not so. Deontologists further recognize the separability of the right and the good, and give priority to the right (e.g.: it’s probably better for me if I have no income withheld and don’t pay my taxes, but I think I have an obligation to do what the government reasonably asks of me (Romans 13:7). I think these are different, and that the right is more important than the good). Further, deontology is what’s known as an agent-centered theory, which is to say that your relation to another person matters in terms of calculating your obligations to them (mothers have different responsibilities to their children than casual acquaintances have to each other).
Problems with Utilitarianism/Consequentialism
A good compendium of various problems, on the individual and social level, can be found in Bernard Williams’ “A Critique of Utilitarianism” in Utilitarianism For and Against (Williams is the against). I’ll limit myself to pointing out three failings of consequentialist theory:
1. Utilitarianism is, as Williams says at the quote at the beginning, just too simple to be of much use in the political or social realm. What it does best is reduce everything in the world to a single metric (some form of utility, however that’s defined and quantified), which is perhaps good when you want to decide something utterly trivial, such as whether to eat healthily or go out for fast food. But in the real world, giving the pluralism of judgment in society, all utilitarianism can really claim to do is reduce the world to one single way of measuring with which no one would be particularly happy. As that raging religious conservative Michael Sandel has pointed out (in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice—no Amazon link because, well, he does a transcendental deduction of Rawls’ Theory of Justice, and it’s even less interesting than it sounds), it’s just the case that in the world, even on questions of something as basic as distributive justice, there is disagreement over not only how to apply certain principles of justice in particular policies, but what the relevant principles are (for example, the split between liberals and libertarians on the role of the state). Utilitarianism has nothing at all to say to people who do not think it the right way to judge. Though deontologists will disagree as to what the appropriate moral rules for inclusion or exclusion are, they are at least (by judging for themselves which rules are most important) in the position to begin a dialogue with people who disagree with them.
2. Utilitarianism is critically ungrounded, and this should worry anyone who might want to follow it. Deontological theory is fully grounded because the particular rules which it references it considers to be part of the fabric of the universe—so discussions of better and worse, at least when it comes to the rules, are irrelevant. But utilitarian claims to ‘best’-ness for any outcome are always relative (relative to the circumstances surrounding the act if you’re an act-consequentialist, relative to the rule if you’re a rule-consequentialist (a.k.a. ‘closet deontologist’). To ground utilitarianism in some non-relative way, a consequentialist would have to enshrine some utilitarianism as Utilitarianism (that is, the right way to go about making utilitarian calculations, not merely a good way). One could hypothetically imagine a Utilitarianism* which alters the payoff calculations in such a way as to produce all the same results at Utilitarianism except one, which it can do better. The utilitarian has two options then:
a. They can reject Utilitarianism* as being insufficiently well grounded, and therefore compromise the end to which utilitarianism strives (producing the best possible results), or
b. They can accept Utilitarianism* and accept that utilitarianism is a relative principle
3. Utilitarianism is unbelievably unpracticable for an ethical theory.
Utilitarianism requires, in good game-theoretic fashion, an ability to “see down the tree” to the potentially far-off consequences of one’s actions, to be able to convert them all into a common standard, figure out how much payoffs might diminish in worth over time, and then pick the one that scores the highest. All this requires complete information about all possible outcomes. No one could ever possibly have that, not to mention the time to do such calculations. Further, utilitarianism always requires that there be a ‘right’ answer to every moral question: it has definite opinions, to borrow again from Williams, as to whether 7,000,000 people being murdered or 7,000,001 is worse—it is, in short, critically unable to see the existence of moral dilemmas (a point Michael Walzer makes in his article “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” available via JSTOR for those who have access), in which no available option is a good one. Deontology, when done well, is very sensitive to this fact.
Some writings on deontology
It’s actually rather shameful for me to admit that I’ve never read an exceptionally good book which systematically incorporates deontological theory (this does give me some hopes for the publications prospects for my future dissertation, however), in part because I want a specifically Christian deontological ethics. But there are some things I’d be remiss not to tell you to check out:
For a more modern view of how a deontological ethics might work (though he might not call it explicitly deontological), there’s blogger (and political philosopher) Norman Geras’ The Contract of Mutual Indifference, an attempt to sketch the implications of the Holocaust for moral imperatives and duties. The book is sometimes bleak, but always illuminating and, I think, a wonderful discussion of adjudicating between moral claims with a solid recognition of what can reasonably be demanded of human beings.
Two others which attempt to show how competing principles of right can be adjudicated in a Christian context, “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” by C.S. Lewis (in The Weight of Glory) and Reinhold Niebhur’s “Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist” (reprinted here, among other places; all of Niebuhr’s writings on politics exhibit a similar sensibility). Both of these are attempts to look at what appears to be a pair of moral rules in opposition: the obligation not to hurt, and certainly not to kill, another person, and the obligations we have to see that evil does not triumph. Both Lewis and Niebuhr trace the implications of these beliefs, the need to decide between them when they conflict (and in a way that looks at other than just their outcomes), and the need to be humble about the actions our ethics sometimes demand of us.
Deontological theory probably bears the strongest resemblance to the way people naturally think about morality, and allows, in the very best possible fashion, a way to see nuance in the moral world while still standing on principle. There is also, quite happily for the future scholar, a lot of room left to be filled in.
Nick Troester is a graduate student in political theory and international relations at Duke University. His primary interests are in theories of humanitarian intervention, responses to genocide, and (surprise!) deontological ethics. He blogs at Anti-Climacus
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[Note: More information about the Expert Witness series can be found here .]
Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, often rail against “situation ethics” or non-deontological ethics (i.e., moral reasoning that does not adhere to specific, fixed moral rules). They seem to see such thinking as emblematic of an unprincipled, inconsistent, “if-it-feels-good-do-it” moral outlook, or as a form of moral relativism, contrary to the firmness and consistency of the “moral absolutism” that they value. This seems to be very much what was on the mind of then-Cardinal Ratzinger in his widely-quoted sermon before the recent papal election:
[R]elativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
This explains the seemingly-increased salience of the word “absolutism” in moral discussion by conservatives – something I think is today much more in evidence than a few years ago. Given a certain stereotype of “relativistic ethics” which treats that term as a catch-all for any non-rigidly prescriptivist ethics, it can seem absurd that anyone would adopt a moral stance that gives different answers to moral questions in different situations. It can seem as if situation-responsive ethics could not be ethics at all, or that it would be the ethics of people who simply don’t care to draw clear moral distinctions or to take strong moral stands. And, given also that that form of moral reasoning is most associated with the liberal side of the policital sphere, a superficial understanding of what consequentialist ethics is can reinforce a superficial understanding of what leftist or liberal politics stands for.
When Joe offered me the glory and extensive remuneration that comes with being an “Expert Witness” on this blog, it occurred to me I might try to at least slightly narrow the gap of understanding and discursive common ground between liberals and conservatives, offer some insight into characteristically liberal values and ways of thinking, and perhaps put discussions of fundamental political standpoints on a firmer footing, if I could explain what the link is between consequentialist ethics and political liberalism, and what consequentialist, or “situation” ethics, is about. What, actually, does this way of thinking entail? Why would anyone think that way? Why do so many do so today? What makes it attractive as a way of understanding moral problems, and what are its drawbacks? Those questions are too big to answer here, but I hope to sketch out some ideas and offer resources for those interested in broadening their grounding in an influential and still popular approach to moral reasoning.
Consequentialism: Its Attractions and Advantages
The word “consequentialism” identifies a general approach to moral reasoning, within which there are several somewhat similar moral theories (each with numerous variations). As the name implies, it revolves around a general belief that the morality of anything – any act, any decision, any situation, any way of living or behaving – lies in its consequences for the person directly involved and anyone else who is affected. The most moral act is the one with the best moral consequences. What could be simpler, or more obvious? By definition, any other moral theory endorses (at least sometimes) acts which have outcomes that are morally worse than the available alternative - which can’t possibly be right.
A classic comparison is made between the answers given by consequentialist reasoning and the theory of Immanual Kant (a highly influential “deontological,” or rule-driven, moral theory; among other things Kant argued, specifically, that you can never tell lies for any reason, and more generally that you can never “use a person as a means [to an end]” but must always value that person as “an end in themselves”). It is easy to imagine situations in which following Kantian rules rigidly requires, for instance, telling Nazi police that, yes, there is indeed a family of Jews hiding in your attic, or where, in a case of limited resources, it is impermissible to choose who will live and who will die, and thus you must condemn all to exhaust their resources and die together. Consequentialist thinking would in both cases accept the obvious solution of doing some bad in order to prevent much greater harm – telling a lie to save a life, or letting some die so that many can live. Similar comparisons can be made against other relatively inflexible moral systems (explaining, for instance, why many conservative religious thinkers insist on restricting access to birth control or clean drug needles, where consequence-minded liberals are more willing to adopt a “whatever-works” stance and endorse any program that effectively reduces severely bad consequences – unwanted pregnancy, infectious disease – even at the cost of lesser bad consequences – risky sex, drug use). Where the predictable outcome of an action is clearly better in one case than another, and especially when the objection to it is not that it actually entails bad consequences but merely that it breaks some rule (e.g., is a “sin”), the attraction of consequentialism is again clear: deliberately choosing bad consequences out of concern for a rule and not for the actual lives of the people affected seems absurd and, worse, morally indifferent to the good or harm people experience.
Consequentialism: Theoretical Considerations
Every moral theory incorporates some notion of the “moral good” – that is, of what counts as morally good or morally worthy in the first place. Moral theories can be distinguished on the basis of what they take to be the moral good: for religious moralists, it is some notion of what is good in the eyes of (a/the) god(s); for strict deontologists such as Kant, it is some specified thing taken to be inherently good in and of itself (for Kant, this was “the good will”); for “virtue” ethicists it is some notion of “the good life” or morally right character traits; and so on. In each case, we need some argument as to why this thing, whatever it is, is taken to define moral good or moral right; those arguments are notoriously difficult and often suspect – we will skip most of them here. But once a definition of moral right or moral good (we will also skip distinctions between “right” and “good,” though they are important) is in hand, the thing to do, of course, is to seek it and promote it as we live our lives. Thus, each candidate definition of good or right naturally lends itself to a certain theory of how to go about promoting that sense of morality in daily life.
For consequentialists, the theory, obviously, is “maximize the good.” But what is “the good”? That’s where the rubber meets the road – and where the various flavors of consequentialism diverge.
Utilitarian consequentialists (“utilitarians”) define the good in individualistic terms – what is good for a person is morally good for them, on the grounds that there can be nothing good or bad for a person in any sense other than that which furthers or harms their interests. As to those interests, the person themselves determines what they are. (Most utilitarians have been atheists, hence see no imposed good from un-earthly sources. As to an earthly good, what else could it be but what helps or harms the person in question, and who could judge what “help” or “harm” means in this context other than the person themselves? John Stuart Mill offered a somewhat weak “proof” of the theory of utilitarianism by observing that everyone has interests and values, but they are unique for each person – thus we cannot promote any particular value as best among all human values, but must allow each person to seek their own good.) Since good and bad are defined in terms of personal interest, and no other definition of good or bad seems possible, the task of morality is to promote the good – personal benefit or interest – as much as possible. Further, there is nothing about any one person that makes them better or more worthy than another – if “the good” is defined in terms of personal interest, and everybody has such an interest, and those individual interests are all different, there is no way to say that some people are more important than others, or that some people’s interests carry greater weight than others. So the utilitarian theory becomes: in every act or instance, promote the maximal good for all parties concerned, treating each affected person’s interests as equally valuable.
How can we narrow down this notion of “interest” or “the good” more explicitly? For Jeremy Bentham, leading promulgator of utilitarianism in the late 19th century, the good was simply pleasure or pain in the literal, physical sense. (Emotional states such as happiness or sadness were taken to be forms of pleasure or pain – thus anything that pleases or harms one in whatever way can be cashed out in terms of pleasure or pain.) He proposed a “hedonic calculus” – an actual, mathematical model for ranking pleasures and pains by various weighting factors and then calculating outcome totals for any act under consideration. (Bentham’s most important statement of these ideas is found in his Principles of Morals and Legislation.) His follower John Stuart Mill refined this into a broader notion of “preference satisfaction,” whereby “the good” was to have one’s desires fulfilled and “the bad” was to be frustrated in one’s desires. This gave credence to a moral sense that wasn’t so narrowly focused on one’s own bodily state (one may care strongly about, say, helping starving children, but not actually feel physical pleasure over doing so; Mill attempted to account for that). Mill also believed that some pleasures were of greater value than others (which we could know by the fact that most people who had tried, say, classical music and rap would value classical music more highly). In these ways he diverged from Bentham. (Mill’s version of utilitarianism is found in his classic essay Utilitarianism.)
In both cases, the intention was to identify the available alternative act in any situation that would produce the greatest overall outcome; one’s moral obligation was then to perform that act. Utilitarianism is thus a “maximizing” theory (one is maximizing the good derived from one’s actions), and one that responds to each new situation distinctly, in light of the specific circumstances that can affect various persons’ interests. Utilitarians tend not to talk in terms of blanket rules for broad categories of situations, but instead to treat each case separately – hence the moniker “situation ethics.” Utilitarians also tend not to talk in terms of inflexible moral values such as rights (Bentham famously called the notion of moral rights “nonsense on stilts”), duties, obligations, and the like.
Questions arose over practicalities such as the difficulty of calculating predicted goods for every possible act, and the inconvenience of not knowing what to expect in any given situation (sometimes lying is OK, sometimes it’s not; sometimes stealing is OK, sometimes it’s not; . . .). One solution was to adopt “rules of thumb” for common situations (yes, lying could be utility-maximizing, but it usually isn’t, so you need to have an obviously good justification for it in any given case). Another was, instead of attempting to maximize utility in each individual act, to attempt to formulate rules governing general categories of behavior whereby following the rules would maximize utility over the long run, even if not in every case, and would also provide the benefits of stability, predictability, and ease of use. Thus was born a distinction between “Act Utilitarianism” and “Rule Utilitarianism” (Bentham is clearly an Act Utilitarian; J.S. Mill is often called a Rule Utilitarian, but this is somewhat controversial.) Rule Utilitarianism is obviously much easier to implement in a statutory legal scheme, and so is more practical as a way of applying moral rules at the social level; Act Utilitarianism can still be used for small-scale situations at the individual level.
Non-Utilitarian consequentialism largely arose in response to perceived problems with utilitarianism. It can obviously be awkward to try to shoe-horn everything that is good or bad in life into a single measurable value, to rank, say, music, food eaten to avoid starvation, food eaten for pleasure, the love of family, and the feeling of a good backrub all on a single scale and compare them to some equally-mixed-up hodgepodge of goods for someone else, then say which is “more morally worthy.” If the problem of “commensurability” (ranking unalike things on the same scale) could be solved, it still remains that each person’s ranking of each of these things is entirely idiosyncratic. Some, then, proposed multi-value consequentialist systems in which a variety of moral goods could be recognized and weighed – including, for instance, social values such as justice or fairness. This would allow for taking broader moral principles into account while still conforming to the moral goal of maximizing overall good (by treating such things as justice and fairness as goods to be maximized, along with individual interests). This does not abandon the consequentialist notion of maximizing the good, but it avoids necessity of making suspicious claims about the nature of moral goods (i.e., that there is really only one type of them).
Moral evaluations such as “virtuous,” “praiseworthy,” “righteous” and so forth take on meanings other than their common ones, under any consequentialist theory, and the moral value of such traits as honesty, moral integrity (i.e., consistency), or family loyalty is likewise questionable or counter-intuitive. For the consequentialist, remember, the only moral prinicple is to maximize the moral good; whether one does so with a cheerful heart, with an expectation of reward, grudgingly, or in whatever other way is irrelevant – only the actual, practical outcome matters. Similarly, having certain traits of character is of no moral importance in itself - only the tendency of certain traits to lead people to maximize the good consistently is of moral worth, and even there, such a trait is not necessarily “virtuous” as much as simply useful. (That is, if being generous or self-effacing makes it more likely that one will contribute to others’ welfare, then that is a useful trait in the utilitarian scheme, but it is not morally good in itself – only the good outcomes it contributes to are good.) Similarly, the only purpose to moral praise or punishment is to influence the likelihood of appropriate behavior in the future; purely retributive justice is literally worse than useless, because it explicitly comprehends harming (punishing) someone without an expectation of compensatory good to be obtained by it – which is as anti-utilitarian as anything that can be imagined. It makes no sense to say the transgressor “deserves” punishment, because that is a moral evaluation that, to the consequentialist, merely means that punishing will maximize future utility – which cannot be the case if we are punishing merely to punish.
This is not to say that consequentialists have no moral principles or make no moral evaluations or distinctions. Of course they have, and do. But in every case those moral discriminations turn on producing good outcomes in particular (personal or social) circumstances – not on some independent moral categories that hold some things good or bad come what may. The idea that morality could be so rigid as to be indifferent to outcome is literally absurd, and morally bankrupt, in a consequentialist perspective – but, when the appropriate evaluations of acts or rules has been performed, and certain choices analyzed as producing relatively good or bad outcomes, it then becomes of the greatest moral significance that the “good” one be implemented. To knowingly take a course that fails to maximize the good – when an alternative exists – is as shocking to a consequentialist as to knowingly punish the wrong person is to a deontologist, or to knowingly sin would be to a religious ethicist.
Consequentialism and Liberalism
For reasons that should be obvious, consequentialism – specifically, Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism – was the foundation of the political movement now known as “classical liberalism.” Though what today we call “liberalism” is rather different from that, and does not directly emphasize utilitarianism for the most part, it retains many features of classical liberalism and its consequentialist reasoning.
Defining elements of classical liberalism include the political and moral equality of all persons; personal autonomy or liberty in pursuit of one’s own plans and interests; a so-called “public/private distinction” (meaning that only some things fall under the public sway and may be regulated or legislated, while all others, and especially choices about personal lifestyle, are strictly private – not in the sense of being hidden, but in the sense of being immune to public interference) – which encompasses most areas of personal choice or conscience including marriage and sexual behavior, religion, child-rearing, education, employment, lifestyle, tastes or preferences, and other matters; and in general a broad sense of liberty to pursue one’s own interests. (Classical liberals were not what we would call libertarians, because they typically saw a robust role for the government in social reform and creation of opportunity for the disadvantaged. Some fiscal conservatives call themselves “classical liberals” in distinction to the so-called “nanny state liberals” of today, but again Bentham, especially, and Mill were not in any way “small-government” proponents in the modern sense.)
The grounding of these precepts in utilitarianism rested on the latter’s emphasis on individual equality, and on the notion that all personal tastes or preferences were equally worthy (entirely so, for Bentham; mostly so, for Mill). Since “all are to count for one, and none for mo