Michael Otsuka, author of Libertarianism Without Inequality, responded to a comment by my friend Paul Bogdanor in which Paul pointed out that Otsuka resorts to ad hominem attacks on libertarians in academic journals:
Otsuka was responsible for one of the most disgraceful ad hominem remarks ever published in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal: “Libertarians… are interested in more than the right to be altruistic. They are also interested in the right to line their own pockets” (“Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27:1, Winter 1998, p91). Doubtless Hayek, Nozick and other libertarian billionaires would have been much enlightened by this intriguing insight into their motivations. How would we react to a comparable comment to the effect that “welfare-statists… are interested in more than the right to be selfish. They are also interested in the right to steal other people’s savings”? And what are the odds that such a remark would make it into the pages of Philosophy and Public Affairs?
Otsuka responded as follows:
I’ve just noticed that Paul Bogdanor has written above that “Otsuka was responsible for one of the most disgraceful ad hominem remarks ever published in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal”.
Then he quotes the offending remark: “Libertarians… are interested in more than the right to be altruistic. They are also interested in the right to line their own pockets.”
By “right to line [i.e., fill] their own pockets” I meant they were interested in the right to acquire wealth by means of market transactions, where this right is unconstrained by egalitarian principles. That much is clear from the context of the remark. Nozick defends such a right by means of his famous Wilt Chamberlain argument.
I think a minimally charitable reader would have managed not to have read what I said as a “disgraceful ad hominem remark”, let alone “one of the most disgraceful ad hominem remarks ever published in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal”.
I must say that I find Mr. Otsuka’s defense of his remarks quite weak and unpersuasive. Even a maximally charitable reader would find the phrase “They are also interested in the right to line their own pockets” to be pejorative and ad hominem.
Mr. Otsuka responded to Paul’s characterization of his [Otsuka’s] remarks by claiming that the phrase denotes the following: “they were interested in the right to acquire wealth by means of market transactions, where this right is unconstrained by egalitarian principles.” But what he originally wrote was “They are interested in the right to line their own pockets,” which does not denote an interest in the right of all people to line their pockets, but only of libertarians in lining their own pockets. Not only is the denotation not what Mr. Otsuka claims, but the connotation of “line their own pockets” is completely inconsistent with his reformulation, as well. The phrase “line their own pockets” has the connotation of being motivated by rapacious personal greed at the expense of others. In Britain (where Mr. Otsuka resides) it is always a pejorative term, as witness this letter to The Daily Telegraph of October 21, 2004 from Helen Matthews of Buckinghamshire:
“The point of paying a salary and expenses to MPs in the first place was to ensure that the opportunity of standing for parliament was not restricted to those who had the private means to support themselves. It should not be an opportunity for the greedy to line their own pockets. What ever happened to the ethos of public service?”
In a simple “Google search” of the term I found that every single use of the term that appeared was pejorative. It was frequently conjoined with the term “greedy” and more frequently with the term “at the expense of [the consumer, the public, etc.].”
Mr. Otsuka is a native speaker of English, so the connotations of the phrase “They are also interested in the right to line their own pockets” should be clear to him. In fact, I’m confident that they were, although he may now regret having written those lines.
Is the remark ad hominem? Absolutely. Note that his reformulation is not ad hominem.: “they were interested in the right to acquire wealth by means of market transactions, where this right is unconstrained by egalitarian principles.” The phrase “they were interested in the right” could mean that they are interested in the principle and wish to explore it further, or that they support the right for everyone, or that they have some personal interest, e.g., a pecuniary interest, in advocating some right. When written as Mr. Otsuka originally wrote it, the sentence surely is not equivalent to either of the first two formulations. Remember, “They were interested in lining their own pockets” does not mean that they wished to explore, explicate, or even advocate the rights of everyone to do that, but merely that they had an interest in pursuing their own financial gain. When the phrase for financial gain is formulated as “line their own pockets” it carries the further negative connotation of “at the expense of others.”
Hence, Mr. Otsuka’s claim that “a minimally charitable reader would have managed not to have read what I said as a ‘disgraceful ad hominem remark’, let alone “one of the most disgraceful ad hominem remarks ever published in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal” is clearly false. Even a maximally charitable reader would have had difficulty reading it has he has recast it; a normally charitable reader would clearly see it as a particularly nasty ad hominem remark. What that says about Mr. Otsuka is not clear. Either he thinks that lobbing personal insults at people with other views and questioning their motives is an acceptable form of discourse in an academic journal, or his command of both the denotative and connotative functions of language is deficient.
Point taken about ‘their own’. I regret that I did not say ‘right to line one’s own’, as I meant to be making a point about the rights libertarians affirm and not about their personal motives.
I’ve discussed this piece with a number of libertarians, none of whom has raised Paul Bogdanor’s or Tom Palmer’s objection to these remarks. Perhaps these remarks struck them as a ‘particularly nasty ad hominem’ attack, but they refrained from objecting out of politeness. But I would like to believe that the explanation was that they simply did not read me as a questioning of the motives of libertarians.
Note that if one does read this passage as a claim about the personal motives of libertarians, then one should read me as claiming that libertarians have a personal interest in the right to be altruistic as well as the right to line their own pockets. That ought to have mitigated the harshness of these remarks.
Of course I totally agree with Tom’s argument. I would make several further points:-
(a) Otsuka’s original remark that libertarians are “interested in the right to line their own pockets” was not only ad hominem in its meaning – as he now concedes by his qualified retraction – but also incorrect: libertarian academics have never been “interested in the right to line their own pockets,” and have rarely succeeded in doing so, as a glance at their bank statements would certainly demonstrate. The analogous comment that welfare-statists are “interested in the right to steal other people’s savings” is also ad hominem in its meaning – as Otsuka would surely agree – but accurate in its purely descriptive aspect: welfare-statist intellectuals are indeed attempting to defend the forcible transfer of other people’s savings, whether or not we endorse the ethical judgement that such practices amount to stealing. Thus whatever condemnation would be appropriate for Otsuka’s hypothetical free-market counterpart, who delivers a remark which is pejorative but true, applies a fortiori to Otsuka, who published a statement which was both abusive and false.
(b) If – as Otsuka now seems to accept – libertarian intellectuals are not, in fact, interested in the right to line their own pockets – notwithstanding their belief that it should be permissible for them to do so – then we can draw certain important conclusions about their moral character, and about the moral character of those who publish abusive and false statements about them. In renouncing the opportunity to line their own pockets while defending the right of others to do so, libertarian intellectuals are sacrificing their own welfare for the benefit of others. They make this choice for a variety of reasons: some of them enjoy discussing philosophy for its own sake; others enjoy teaching the subject; still others believe that they are defending the core values of a civilised society. Whatever their motives, I think that we should not be impressed when their ideological adversaries twist their idealism into its opposite by publishing abusive and false statements about them in respected academic journals.
(c) It is interesting that in neither of his responses has Otsuka displayed any interest in answering the question I posed at the outset, i.e. whether Philosophy and Public Affairs – or any other peer-reviewed philosophy journal – would even consider publishing right-wing insults comparable to the left-wing insults which he successfully inserted into its pages. If Otsuka thinks that Philosophy and Public Affairs would be prepared to publish such right-wing insults, then he assumes the burden of adducing evidence to support this claim. If, on the other hand, he admits that Philosophy and Public Affairs would not agree to publish right-wing insults, then perhaps he would like to comment on the questions of professional ethics raised by his decision to submit abusive and false statements about other academics to a respected journal, safe in the knowledge that the victims of his attacks would not be granted the opportunity to reply in kind.
I think I will stop responding to this line of objection, since I don’t want to lend credence to Tom Palmer’s ad hominem attack on another thread: “There’s nothing particularly consensual about any of what he [Otsuka] describes, no obvious efficiency gains, no increase in liberty, and nothing attractive to anyone other than an intellectual who evidently has too much time on hands.”
I can’t say I’ve enjoyed this brief visit to your pages, which I should now cut short, but I appreciate the attention you’ve given my work, however negative your reaction to it.
Fair enough. Few people enjoy reading that their writings fail to add anything useful to the understanding of an important topic. But just for the record, none of the quotation from my review of Mr. Otsuka’s book in the January 2005 Reason could properly be considered ad hominem.
Certainly the points about there being neither anything particularly consensual nor any efficiency gains or increase in liberty are not ad hominem, so let’s look at my conclusion that his book contained “nothing attractive to anyone other than an intellectual who evidently has too much time on hands.”
It may be that my conclusion was too harsh (I don’t think so myself), but it is not ad hominem. Mr. Otsuka may be a Reader in Philosophy, but he doesn’t show much evidence of having read much logic. An ad hominem argument would assert that the arguments of the person in question should not be given credence because of some feature of the person, such as that he has a bad motivation, is a member of some ethnic or racial group, or is out to line his own pocket. I made no such claim in my review, but instead showed that Otsuka’s arguments were inadequate to demonstrate what he attempted to demonstrate. Otsuka has not responded to those criticisms, as is his privilege. But he cannot legitimately claim that I made an ad hominem attack on him. I inferred something about a person (Otsuka) who would write a book on property that neither cites nor draws in any way on the enormous resources from the disciplines of economics, jurisprudence, history, sociology, and anthropology. The only source or evidence we are offered for his strikingly radical conclusions are his own raw intuitions. I wrote:
“Otsuika proposes that the alternative proviso that he proposes is ‘convincing’ and ‘fair,’ although he offers no reason that anyone else should find it either convincing or fair. He seems unaware of Locke’s arguments for why appropriation of unowned resources meets Locke’s proviso.”
Had Mr. Otsuka taken the time to read some of the literature from one or more of the above mentioned disciplines, he would have had less time available to share his intuitions but the intuitions he would share might actually be more informed and interesting. They’re neither. Pointing that out does not constitute an ad hominem attack.
This exchange reminds me very much of a discussion I had with Otsuka’s mentor and “comrade” (as Otsuka refers to him in his book), G. A. Cohen (who has made much of his career out of criticizing one chapter in one book by Robert Nozick). Cohen had completely misunderstood both Locke’s and Nozick’s theories of appropriation of unowned resources, because he (Cohen) did not distinguish between the two senses of “community of resources” on which they both drew: negative community (no one owns it, and no one can be excluded from using or appropriating it) and positive community (it is owned jointly by the members of a particular defined group of persons). I mentioned to Cohen that Locke draws on the distinction in several places in the Second Treatise, that Locke’s contemporary Samuel Pufendorf had explicated the topic quite clearly in his works, and that they cleared up the confusion. Cohen said that he “had heard something about that” but that he had never bothered to read it. So much for scholarship. So much for intellectual seriousness.
Mr. Palmer: like Dimsdale Pirhana, you’re a cruel man – but fair.
So just don’t nail Mr. Otsuka’s head to the floor, OK?
The dead horse is pretty much beaten raw.
In spite of what I said in my last post, I cannot resist the bait of Mr Palmer’s post of 12:04 pm. Had I claimed that Mr Palmer had committed the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, what he says in the third paragraph of that post would have been pertinent. But I chose my words carefully in the vain hope of preempting this misguided reply. I said that he had launched an ad hominem attack, by which I meant an attack against my person. I did not say that he had committed the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. Prior to Mr Palmer’s latest post, nobody had accused anybody of committing that fallacy (as opposed to launching personal attacks). Neither Mr Bogdanor nor Mr Palmer has claimed, much less demonstrated, that I committed that fallacy in that piece. (They could not demonstrate this, as I did not commit that fallacy.) Nor have I accused Mr Palmer of committing that fallacy. So I’m afraid his defence of himself against this fallacy is a non sequitur. If Mr Palmer is an honest and decent man, he will admit his mistake.
Why should Tom Palmer admit to the “mistake” which Michael Otsuka attributes to him when Michael Otsuka refuses even to address the considerably more serious charges of group defamation and breach of professional ethics raised in my previous message?
It’s unfortunate that the discussion of Mr. Otsuka’s book has turned entirely to the issue of whether he made an ad hominem attack on libertarians or I made an ad hominem attack on him. But if that’s the only matter that Mr. Otsuka wishes to discuss, so be it.
Were there a mistake on my part to be admitted, I would admit it. But there just isn’t. Mr. Otsuka’s attempt at a precise formulation of his parting shot failed to be precise in the way he later claimed. Had he meant to write, “Mr. Palmer has insinuated that I am ill educated because I am ignorant of the disciplines of economics, history, jurisprudence, sociology, and anthropology, having shown no awareness of any of those disciplines in my book, but instead resting my argument on an appeal to my personal intuitions,” he could have done so. That does not qualify as an argumentum ad hominem, nor even does it qualify for the more vaguely labeled “ad hominem attack.” It was not “an attack on his person,” which usually refers to such matters as moral character; it was a claim of fact about his knowledge and how he has used his time, based on the evidence available from his book, viz., he shows no knowledge whatsoever of the disciplines necessary to have anything interesting to add to the discussion about property and has rested his claims entirely on his uninformed intuitions. It’s true that that claim of ignorance is a claim about the lack of knowledge of a person, but it is not “an attack on his person,” i.e., on his personality or on his character. It’s too bad that Mr. Otsuka has not bothered to acquaint himself with the useful literature from the disciplines listed, but that he shows no knowledge of them is a fact. Had I written a tract on the latest developments in quantum physics, drawing entirely on my own intuitions and showing no knowledge of the extant scientific literature on the topic, it would not be “an attack on my person” for a critic to point out that I was completely ignorant of a complex topic.
Let’s look at Mr. Otsuka’s claim that neither he, nor Paul Bogdanor, nor I had actually offered an argumentum ad hominem; they were merely personal attacks or claims that someone else had made a personal attack. Implicit in Mr. Otsuka’s claim is the insistence that to qualify as an argumentum ad hominem an argument must take the explicit form, “Mr. Smith says X; Mr. Smith is a [fill in the blank]; therefore X is not true.” Such statements are so obviously fallacious that they are rarely employed. Far more common is the preemptive form of the argumentum ad hominem known as “poisoning the well.” And the most common form of poisoning the well is the claim or suggestion that the opponent has offered an argument from bad motives, such as, say, the opportunity to “line his own pockets,” rather than because he is convinced that the claim is true [or, in the context of his remarks about libertarians being out to line their own pockets, just]. That is probably the most commonly used form of the argumentum ad hominem. If poisoning the well is a form of the argumentum ad hominem, then Mr. Otsuka is guilty, but that would not be true of either Paul Bogdanor or me, for we have not questioned his motives, which are undoubtedly noble, but, in any case, irrelevant.
Mr. Otsuka claimed that he had chosen his “words carefully in the vain hope of preempting this misguided reply.” Why, then, if Mr. Otsuka was not accusing me of committing a logical fallacy, would he use the well known Latin term associated with a logical fallacy, rather than merely asserting “Tom Palmer made a negative assessment of the state of my knowledge”? A claim about the state of one’s knowledge is not “an attack on one’s person,” no matter how much it might hurt one’s feelings.
It’s a shame that Mr. Otsuka has not offered any defense of his substantive claims about the chaotic system of constant seizure and reassignment of property necessary to fulfill what he believes to be the demands of justice, nor of the problem that the elimination of defined, defendable, and divestible property claims would pose for calculating the changes in wealth that trigger his non-consensual-but-justice-imposing egalitarian super state to readjust property allocations constantly, given that the only way to learn about the changes in wealth that require readjustment is to compare the capital values established by markets, which rest on the very defined, defendable, and divestible property claims that Mr. Otsuka would eliminate. Perhaps Mr. Otsuka could offer a response to the critique I offered in my review. Or perhaps Mr. Otsuka could take the advice of the most sensible sentence in his book, “There are already enough problems in the world. Philosophers should not add to the mess.” (p. 40)
Finally, a fun logic test:
Complete Mr. Otsuka’s syllogism:
“If Mr Palmer is an honest and decent man, he will admit his mistake.”
Mr. Palmer has not “admitted his mistake.”
_________________________________________________
(Fill in Blank)
Tom G. Palmer Wrote – “Cohen had completely misunderstood both Locke’s and Nozick’s theories of appropriation of unowned resources”
Why is this distinction relevant? And if it is relevant, how does it not make the principle of Nozickean / Lockean property acquisition even more implausible? If natural recourses (in the broadest of senses not including individual persons) are unowned, but qualify for labourmixing, you need an explanation as to how much of the natural world will actually follow from this mixing, and the lockean (or nozickean)proviso (for most libertarians) is the tool for the job. If the world is not unowned at the outset, then so what? It is clearly not the case that Otsuka is making, and if it were, it wouldn’t even qualify the right-libertarian view since labour-mixing wouldn’t be needed in the first place, since a relative part of the world already belongs to you.
The lockean proviso isn’t just a casual axiom, but rests on foundational argument. If Otsuka can prove that the lockean proviso fails to live up to these this foundation, he has a case (well, not if the right-libertarian actively ignores this).