Violent Saviors, page 6
Kant was the first major thinker in the West to see the violation of consent as a violation of dignity. For Kant, to see some human beings as a means to progress for somebody else is to not respect them as human beings choosing their own objectives. In the liberal tradition so forcefully advanced by Kant, the quest for respect would be as important as the quest to escape poverty. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 declared that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” it articulated ideals already present in Kant’s writings more than a century and a half earlier.2
What is dignity? It is a word usually defined only in terms of other words that also need definition, such as “respect” or “honor.” As so often with liberal ideals, dignity is perhaps easiest to define in terms of its opposites: contempt, humiliation, degradation, disrespect, dishonor, insult, condescension, patronization. All these words have a visceral charge that would be clear to many peoples and cultures.
Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, had already identified an individual’s demand for dignity that was separate from his or her demand for material consumption. He saw it in opposition to oppression. Smith thought an oppressed individual had a passionate resentment for “the whole baseness of the injustice which has been done to him.” Acting on such a passion would “defend us against injuries, to assert our rank and dignity in the world.” We have a separate passion “to provide for the support and necessities of the body.” The demand for dignity and the demand for material consumption were two different dimensions of our well-being. Elsewhere in the same work, he evocatively describes how “what chiefly enrages us against the man who injures or insults us, is the little account which he seems to make of us.”3
But Smith stopped well short of the modern idea of equal dignity for everyone and did not spell out freedom as determinant of dignity. This would be up to Kant. Kant was born less than a year after Smith, in 1724, in Königsberg on the Baltic Sea. Königsberg was then part of Prussia; today, it is part of Russia and known as Kaliningrad.4
Like Smith, Kant was a critic of empire. In a work published in 1797, Kant asks whether colonial development of the lands of American Indians, “Hottentots” (as the Khoikhoi were then called by the Dutch) in South Africa, and Aboriginal people of Australia justified conquest of those lands. Kant noted the Europeans either took the land by force or by fraudulent purchases. Kant considered the rationale in words very close to those of John Winthrop, only substituting “nature” for “God.” Kant spelled out others’ argument that we should be allowed to conquer since nature “abhors a vacuum.” Therefore, nature allegedly demanded our settlement on lands that “would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people.” The argument was that it was to “the world’s advantage” that “these crude peoples will become civilized” thanks to our conquest.
Or maybe not. Although Kant noted sardonically that “sufficient specious reasons to justify the use of force are available,” he thought it was pretty “easy to see through this veil of injustice.” He noted that these bad arguments were like others that “sanction any means to good ends.” He mocked the “supposedly good intentions,” which cannot really “wash away the stain of injustice in the means used for them.” The unavoidable conclusion was that “such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.”5
Kant in his writings counterbalanced what it means to be human against violations of dignity:
As a person (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in itself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world.6
Kant’s usually tortured syntax was not going to give him much of a future in the refrigerator magnet industry. But the reader can still tease out the crucial points. Humans have an inherent dignity that they demand be respected by others. They want never to be used as a means to somebody else’s end; they want always to be an end in themselves. They want never to be sacrificed for the sake of an abstract goal like progress or civilization or development. Development was made for man and not man for development.
So Kant formulated a revolutionary new principle based on human dignity: “So act that you use humanity” to be “always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”7
You are always to treat everyone else as humans, whose well-being is an end in itself. You are never to dehumanize them by seeing them only as a means to some goal of your own, even if it is called progress or development.
Mutual respect for dignity was one application of Kant’s famous “categorical imperative,” that you should “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” This famous imperative is related to Smith’s impartial spectator in formulating the principle of reciprocity. Follow the maxims that you would want to be applied to you. You want your dignity respected, so you should respect everyone else’s.8
Kant is not sufficiently recognized as an economic thinker. Kant partly had in mind economic exchanges when he asserted the mutual right to dignity and the categorical imperative. His example of economic exchange was a loan—you give me money today in exchange for me giving you money as repayment tomorrow. But what if I get a loan from you when I plan to cheat you out of repayment? This treats you the lender as a means to my enrichment. Mutual respect of dignity is necessary for economic exchanges. The categorical imperative is violated by the cheating borrower. If everyone behaved like him, Kant said, then there would be no market for loans.9
Another economics example that Kant gave of violating others’ dignity was disrespecting their property rights. He included “attacks on the freedom and property of others.” Kant saw that when I violate others’ economic rights, I am violating the principle of respecting individuals as ends in themselves instead of just as a means to my own goals.10
Dignity is a nonnegotiable goal. Seeing material consumption and dignity just as competing ends that can be traded off against each other does not get it right either: “What is elevated above any price, and hence allows of no equivalent, has a dignity.” Kant condemned the many attempts to offer material progress as compensation to others for their loss of dignity. The very act of you offering to buy me out disrespects my dignity. My dignity is not for sale.11
Kant even included my political right to participate in making the rules as part of my dignity. I should get “respect” for my “autonomy” in helping with “legislating” the rules. I want the political right to consent to the laws applying to me, so I should respect the same rights for you.12
Crucially for the future of Western philanthropy, Kant identified the paternalism of rich benefactors as a violation of dignity. The philanthropists preferred to give to the poor rather than recognize the rights of the poor: “They do not want to subject themselves to the rights of people, but to view them simply as objects of their magnanimity.” I have a right to my own property; it is not something I beg you to give me: “What properly belongs to me must not be accorded me as something I beg for.”13
Kant was not only a pioneer on the concept of dignity. Kant should be seen as one of the founders of liberalism because of his absolute commitment to individual freedom for everyone. The universally right law is that which “enables the freedom of each individual’s will to coexist with the freedom of everyone else.”14
Kant in the end was close to articulating the modern idea of self-determination as freedom: Freedom is “independence from being constrained by another’s choice.” It is the individual “being his own master.”
Kant also offered a remarkable commitment to “innate equality” of the “original right” of all humans to “innate freedom.” He rejected the group hierarchy behind the Development Right of Conquest. Kant’s linking of the words “dignity,” “respect,” “autonomy,” “independence,” “equality,” and “freedom” was momentous for the debate on progress, even if it was still a little too vague to be a reference to the full set of political and economic freedoms that lay far in the future.15
Despite Kant’s clarity on principles, he did not see easy solutions on political institutions that would deliver equal dignity: “This is therefore the most difficult of all tasks, and a perfect solution is impossible.” In a phrase that the twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin loved to quote, Kant said that “nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of.” Again the liberals were a lot better on what was wrong than on how to fix it.16
Kant’s idea of equality was about equal dignity and rights and not about equal outcomes. Indeed, he had doubted the development potential of Black people early in his career. In 1764, he quoted David Hume on some rather dubious empirical work on Black people and white people, saying that there was not a single example of a Black person who had “accomplished something great in art or science or shown any other praiseworthy quality.” Whites, in contrast, “earn respect in the world” by their accomplishments. He thought the two races had unequal “capacities of mind.”17
Kant also doubted the capacity of women. A woman “does not possess certain lofty insights,” Kant wrote, “she is beautiful and engaging, and that is enough.”18
Kant did not repeat these views two decades later in his career as he was writing about equal dignity, but nor did he renounce them. Yet importantly for the huge debate on whether non-whites and non-males were fit to be free, he did not take away the right to self-determination even from groups he expected to have inferior outcomes.19
Even though Kant did not know how to achieve equal dignity, and even though he doubted the ability of women and Black people to participate in progress, he still could renounce gratuitous and unjust violence. In a 1795 work on his hopes for “perpetual peace,” Kant condemned the “behavior of civilized, especially commercial, states in our part of the world” for
the injustice they show in visiting foreign lands and peoples (which with them is tantamount to conquering them) goes to horrifying lengths. When America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth were discovered, they were, to them, countries belonging to no one, since they counted the inhabitants as nothing.
Like Smith, Kant denounced the European colonizers of India:
In the East Indies (Hindustan), they brought in foreign soldiers under the pretext of merely proposing to set up trading posts, but with them oppression of the inhabitants, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, rebellions, treachery, and the whole litany of troubles that oppress the human race.
Kant also denounced “the cruelest and most calculated slavery” in the sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. Counting individuals as nothing was precisely what violated Kant’s dignity principle.20
Like Smith, Kant saw global commerce as the peaceful alternative to colonial violence. Each nation could offer “to engage in commerce with any other,” as its traders traveled the world. The Europeans should have limited themselves to just “seek commerce with the old inhabitants. In this way distant parts of the world can enter peaceably into relations with one another.” Like Smith, Kant foresaw a world in which commerce would replace conquest, where mutual recognition of dignity would replace a zero-sum world of disrespect and contempt for others. It would take a couple more centuries to move in that direction.21
PART II
LIBERALS DOUBT EMPIRE, 1776–1865
It has been recorded as a principle in our legislation, that commerce itself shall have its moral boundaries.
—Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1808, celebrating the British abolition of the slave trade
4
Smith and Allies Challenge the Slave Trade
The Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of Slavery. Slavery was the biggest violation of Adam Smith’s free market principles in British policy during his lifetime. Defenders of slavery creatively argued that enslaved Africans were materially better off than those back in Africa that had escaped this blessing. Surprisingly, Smith agreed with this claim. But he explained why he thought this was not enough to justify slavery. For liberals, slavery was the most extreme demonstration of how material improvement was not necessarily development. Smith was the first in an age of economists addressing moral questions. He responded to slavery’s violence in the name of progress; his successors would campaign for abolition in the British Empire and in the United States. Smith’s alternative to slavery was a market for free labor that led to positive-sum gains for both workers and employers. The role of slavery in free market ideas, and the role of free market ideas in the campaign against slavery, have not been sufficiently appreciated.
The number of Africans that British slave traders carried across the Atlantic surged in the eighteenth century. Britain became the single-largest slave trading nation over this period, in most decades accounting for more than 40 percent of the traffic.
Eighty-eight percent of British slaves went to the Caribbean. The brutal conditions in the sugarcane plantations caused such high slave mortality that slaveholders needed continual flows of replacements. The single largest destination for British slave exports was Jamaica, accounting for 38 percent of total British slave exports during the history of the slave trade.1
The lack of consent of the slaves to slavery and the brutal coercion by slave owners were not abstract concepts. On April 7, 1760, a massive slave revolt broke out in Jamaica. Over the course of the revolt, the slave rebels killed sixty whites. The British suppression of the revolt killed over five hundred Black men and women. The British did not manage to end the insurrection until October 1761.2
A slave named Tacky led the initial phase of the rebellion, so it is known as Tacky’s Revolt. The etymology of his name suggests he had belonged to a royal lineage in a kingdom in what is now Ghana. Tacky died in battle early on, but the revolt did not depend on only one leader.3
The British forces tried to suppress the decentralized rebellion with severe punishments. One local white noted how they executed prisoners—“what they bring in alive we burn and some we hang in Gibbets.” The British wanted to “leave a Terrour on the Minds of all the other Negros for the future.” The British burned the rebel Quaco at the stake, like many others. They hanged some other rebels, Scipio, Harry, and Cuffee, then had their heads cut off and fixed on poles. The British Army pushed Black men, women, and children off cliffs. One observer noted, “We had Two that were hung up in Chains alive & Starv’d to Death. They hung a great while [and] one of them kept his Speech and Senses 9 days & a few Hours.”4
Not long after Tacky’s Revolt, on Wednesday, February 16, 1763, thirty-nine-year-old Professor Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, rose to address his students at 7:30 in the morning. He was very aware of the violence inherent in slavery. Possibly alluding to Tacky’s Revolt, he explained to his students that slaves were “put to death in prodigious numbers on the least appearance of insurrection.” The slaves were hung up with “an iron collar such as they use for the dogs, in which they will hang 6 or 7 days till they die of hunger.”5
In the previous day’s lecture, on Tuesday, February 15, 1763, Smith noted, “The authority of the masters over the slaves” is “unbounded.” In the West Indies, he noted, “it was a customary thing for the master to give the slaves a whipping” in the morning. The European citizens were the masters, and they knew their profits increased the greater was their “power over their slaves.”
Smith noted how slavery violated the reciprocity required for justice. Although white citizens in the British Caribbean made laws protecting their own rights, he noted sadly, they never made laws to protect the rights of slaves. On the contrary, they favored laws to strengthen even further “the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection.”6
The site of Smith’s university, Glasgow, itself participated in the slave system. Smith had arrived a quarter century earlier as a fourteen-year-old student in Glasgow. The city at that time was a major entrepôt for slave-grown tobacco and sugar from the Americas. Glasgow shipped tobacco and sugar to other British ports and to France, Germany, and Russia in exchange for goods for export to the Americas.7
Adam Smith would never become well known for his moral critique of slavery. This was partly his own fault, as his strongest denunciations of slavery were in his nonpublic lectures in Glasgow. The quotes of lectures here are from two manuscripts of student notes on Smith’s lectures discovered much later—one in 1895 and the other in 1958. Indications are that the first set of notes could have circulated for sale at the time, and his students could have told others about his ideas, but otherwise there was no way for Smith’s views to have influenced public debate. In any case, the notes help us understand Smith’s thinking that underlay some of his sparser public writings on slavery.8
In The Wealth of Nations, Smith noted that the labor of the slave “can be squeezed out of him by violence only” by the slave owner, “and not by any interest of his own” that he would choose for himself. The West Indian slave owners actually enjoyed the violence, Smith believed, out of a “love to domineer.”9
He had denounced violence in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. When violence prevails over justice, “what indignation does it not excite in the breast of every human spectator?” Smith imagined the impartial spectator having “compassion for the sufferings of the innocent,” but “furious resentment against the success of the oppressor.”10
The word “violence” was one of Smith’s favorite terms of abuse. It appears forty-eight times in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, and forty-two times in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
