A Reply to Frank Knight

Abstract

IN 1965, at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Stresa, Italy, Professor Frank H. Knight was asked to deliver a paper on Liberal Movements in Socialist Countries. It was a strange performance. After a few perfunctory remarks on his assigned subject, he scoffed at the Hebrew Prophets, accused Jesus Christ of preaching doctrines evil as well as absurd, denounced major absurdities of propagandists for freedom, especially those of Adam Smith, rebuked some of his fellow members of the Mont Pelerin Society, including F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, as essentially anarchistic or individualistic, and ended by calling me, on the evidence of my Foundations of Morality (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), the latest and worst anarchist and oversimplified of them all. In the April, 1966, issue of Ethics, Knight resumed the attack in a fifteen-page article devoted exclusively to my book and the issues raised by it. I am flattered and honored by all this attention from so eminent a writer in so distinguished a journal, but I am also baffled by it. What could I have said that was so extraordinary as to touch off such an extraordinary response? I confess I have difficulty in learning from Knight's article exactly what I have been guilty of. To say that he misrepresents my views is putting it mildly. I simply cannot recognize as my own most of the opinions he attributes to me. In many cases I hold exactly the opposite opinion. Knight constantly accuses me of believing what I do not believe and of saying what I did not say. He constantly accuses me of not saying what I explicitly did say. There are so many instances of both sets of charges that if I tried to consider them all this discussion would run at least as long as his own. I must content myself with a few samples. Let me begin by answering some of Knight's charges concerning what I allegedly do not say: Hazlitt's ethic is individualistic to an extreme; he never mentions even the I repeatedly mention the family. Marriage and the family are, among other things, a form not only of biological but of economic cooperation, etc. (p. 42). The appropriate moral attitude . . . is neither pure egoism nor pure altruism but mutualism, consideration for others and for oneself, and often the failure to make any distinction between one's own interests and the interests of his family or loved ones, or of some particular group of which he feels himself to be an integral part (p. 356). Hazlitt's treatise . . nowhere recognizes the responsibility of anyone for anyone else. (This charge is repeated twice.) As the heart of my book is the chapter Social Cooperation, and as (p. 359) I even suggest that the most appropriate name for the system of ethics I propose would be either Co-operatism or Mutualism, I find this charge simply incredible. More specifically, I write: Of the three people who came upon the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jerico, and fell among thieves, the two who passed by on the other side were ignoring the plainest duty of compassion, and only the good Samaritan was acting morally (p. 190). This is followed by a three-page section specifically on responsibility, in which I write: