Holding Human Rights Hostage To Favorable Statistical Outcomes
BY Herschel Smith
12 years, 7 months ago
I previously argued against John Lott’s procedure (especially when it is employed as an exclusive-use procedure) to demonstrate that gun ownership and crime are inversely proportional. Go back and read this article again if you need.
Kurt Hofmann sent me this wonderful note in response to the article. I have always claimed that my readers are better writers and I am (and especially so with Kurt), and so it behooves me to paste in his entire letter without further commentary from me.
For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that keeping and bearing arms suitable for self-defense is a bona fide individual right. If so, the fact that 100,000 people a year murder others with firearms, while one man alone uses a firearm to save a life, provides no basis for curbing the individual liberty to own and bear arms. Each individual must, because of his inherent, autonomous ethical freedom, be respected as an end in himself; no prior restraint may be imposed upon his right to own and bear firearms.Actually we can go further. Under an individual right view, the fact that 100,000 people a year murder innocents with firearms, and no one uses a firearm to protect himself or others provides no basis for a prior restraint. Individuals must still be possessed of a right to own firearms because their ethical freedom contains the potentiality of using firearms for good. That is, people can use this tool for good, if they turn to it with a good will.
Second, the individual’s private good is not merely subordinate to realization of the aggregate greatest good, but is freely sacrificed to securing that greatest good. The obverse of the fact that more lives are saved by gun prohibition is that some, having been deprived of an effective tool of self-defense, will of necessity lose their lives, so that others, admittedly more numerous, will live.
In short, some are sacrificed so that others, comprising a greater number, may live.
Utilitarianism sanctions human sacrifice, both great and small, as long as it is for “the greatest good of the greatest number.” Utilitarianism justifies using some people as cannon fodder merely as a means to the fulfillment of others’ ends– so long as those who are to be sacrificed are not too numerous.
Take care,
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