Abstract: The following article is an analysis of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State, and asks the following: What makes an ethical network state? If network states replace nation-states, they must have some moral or ethical foundation. This article argues that a network state is ‘ethical’ only if it holds human autonomy as its principal end. The first section is concerned with formulating a rough historical context of this discussion, and the rest will be an answer to the question of what makes an ethical state.
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Section 1
As capitalism became the new economic system, replacing the old feudal guilds and their small and inefficient means of production, cultural conditions began to take hold that would give rise to nations and a sense of national consciousness. This thesis, argued in great detail by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities, is characteristically similar to Marxist theory, which generally holds that any difference made in a society’s economic and technological base results in changes throughout its whole structure. As humans alter their environment, gain control of its variables, and reduce the severity of their conditions, higher, more rational faculties may begin to develop. Karl Marx writes, “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, (human beings) at the same time change (their) own nature.” As technology progresses; as the tools used by human beings advance and become more efficient and productive, human consciousness grows with it. Starting with primitive forms of productive forces like stone tools, human beings organize themselves in ways made possible by this primal mode of technology, which possesses a meager capacity to tame and alter nature, and, consequently, casts human understanding and knowledge into the shadows, greatly obstructing their freedom, as well as their capacity to become self-aware. Thus as the means of production progress, more complicated forms of social organization become possible. Human beings slowly become conscious of their autonomy — the ability to live a life dictated by reason, by rational choice and principle, and not by the caprice of external causal factors. Throughout this historical process, the old institutions and societal structures deteriorate and grow obsolete; revolutions occur to update the social infrastructure and catch up to the progressing economic base.
When technology grew to the point of being able to sustain capitalism, and more well-organized systems of labor were needed to support the economy’s demands, people flocked to the cities, leaving behind the rural life that was characteristic of the feudal system, and began thinking of themselves as part of larger collectives, as nations. Marx writes, “Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one-customs tariff.” Industrialization, then, and its new tools, which drastically shifted the means of production, changed human consciousness and laid the conditions necessary for societies to become nation-states.
In Imagined Communities, Anderson claims this development toward industrialization and nation-states was largely set in motion by the advent of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440. He argues that this technology, which began to distribute newspapers, novels, and bibles to readers in a language that would become a people’s common vernacular, had laid the cultural conditions for a sense of national consciousness, the feeling that one belonged to a larger community that expanded past their immediate surroundings, to come about. People who previously did not think of themselves as ‘French’, or ‘English’, or ‘American’, who spoke in largely discontinuous dialects, slowly began to think of themselves as participating in a nation of people bound together by a shared experience. These new national identities replaced the old religious, preordained orders that once provided meaning to human beings, and nationality became one of the more dominant modes through which people identified who and what they were.
Now, another important technology that facilitated the historical development of nations was the ledger and its use for double-entry bookkeeping. As information regarding debits and credits was able to be recorded, more large-scale trades, transfers of assets, and general forms of record-keeping were made possible, bringing about the need for more uniform, clear, and discrete boundaries between the various territories. Nation-states became a means to meet the demands made by society’s progress. Feudalism and its notion of the Divine Right of Kings, its old religious dogmas, and its obsolete forms of social institutions, were unable to adapt to these economic shifts. The emergence of the Enlightenment period (1685–1789) ushered in new ways of understanding the state and its position of authority and legitimacy to hold power. Rather than being conceived as a beacon of Divine order, it increasingly became seen as a rational compromise between people who invested the state with authority in exchange for preserving their natural rights. It was now a third-party institution that resided over settling disputes, enforcing the law, and punishing those who violated it. The state was now only legitimate insofar as it protected the rights of the individuals who consented to be governed.
However, over time, a great deal of trust had been handed to these new institutions, and many believe they have now led to an excess of centralized power. Banks became the holders of financial ledgers; distribution of information, of news and events, became the job of a few selected companies, and the government, over time, stepped over its initial claim to legitimacy by taking on roles far surpassing the task of merely protecting individual rights and liberties. Because there was no technology for it, people still had to be trusted as disinterested and objective third-party mediators, which human nature often fails to achieve, allowing self-interest, greed, envy, and human vice more generally to have an influential role in state and governmental processes. This creates corrosive trust issues between citizens and their institutions. In their book The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna write, “Trust — especially in our institutions — is a vital social resource, the true lubricant of all human interaction. When it works, we take it for granted — we wait our place in line, follow road rules, and assume everyone will do the same … But when trust is lacking, things really, really break down.”
Today, with the invention of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, many believe these current institutions have become obsolete and that new forms of social organization are needed. In his book The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan labors to demonstrate this point, arguing that the network and its capacity to allow individuals to organize digital, landless communities, can replace the old nation-states that obstruct social development. In particular, he believes blockchain and its capacity to underpin trustless systems to be capable of supplanting the older institutions by automating what they were entrusted with doing; cryptocurrencies can automate the roles done by central banks and the Federal Reserve; information of news and events can be loaded onto blockchains and remain immutable, preventing self-serving parties from tampering and manipulating it for their interests; private information can be cryptographically secured and held by individuals rather than by centralized, private tech companies like Google; and nation-states more generally can be superseded by the network, which eliminates the perennial issue of land that has caused innumerable wars and conflicts between sovereign states. But, despite the optimism induced by these new technologies, there are problems. The rest of this article will address what it means for a network state to be ‘ethical’, to use a term of Srinivasan’s. Some nation-states are viewed as unethical, as providing conditions that are degrading to human beings; North Korea immediately comes to mind. The next section will propose a way to discern what makes this judgment, and others like it, to be true, and will be used to assess what a network state must achieve to be considered ‘ethical’. I will argue that this can only be done by holding people’s autonomy as the principal end of the state.
Section 2
To see this, we can think of creating a state as a complex activity, and, as with most activities, it is directed toward certain ends. Similarly to how playing a sport, gardening, or driving a car is an activity, so is creating a state — albeit a far more complicated one. But whereas the ends of certain activities may be for the sake of pleasure or leisure, the state’s ends are always within a moral and ethical scope. It is moral in that, whenever one is engaged in the activity of state-making, the ends by which the activity is oriented are always directed toward drafting principles that will establish cooperative social practices and institutions that guide and govern the actions of the members within the state, which lay the conditions by which human beings will pursue their individual and collective well-being. In other words, the ends that the act of founding a state is aimed toward is to create practices that consist of individuals who form collectives, and who cooperate and live according to a given set of moral ends that orient, inform, and shape the lives of those within the state. Therefore, all acts occurring within this activity are never neutral from the moral point of view but are inextricably linked to questions about morality and the ethical life. Such an activity, then, should not be viewed as anything less than a pursuit of moral and ethical ends, and to confuse this activity with the pursuit of other ones — like financial gain, technological innovation, the expansion of markets, or the satisfaction of personal interests — commits a modal confusion, which immediately involves one in a separate activity than that of founding a state.
By modal confusion, I mean the error of engaging in a particular mode of activity with the wrong set of ends in mind. For example, someone who makes paintings would be deeply confused to declare themself to be an artist when their chief end is financial gain. Such an end is better captured by calling the activity manufacturing rather than artistry. Perhaps a more characteristic end of an artist would be the production of beauty, for instance, or self-expression, but not profit. Profit would be employed only as a means to further, more artistic ends deemed necessary by the social conditions the artist finds themself in.
Or imagine a person who becomes friends with someone to derive certain benefits from them, like using them to get to know someone they are interested in, but who nevertheless believes that the two are sincere friends. The person who befriends the other confuses what kind of activity they are engaged in. The relation of being friends with someone involves adopting certain ends that are demanded by the relationship. In the case of friendship, an obvious end that characterizes the activity is holding the other person as an end-in-themselves, as someone who is not valuable for any other reason other than the fact that they’re a friend. One would be deeply confused by believing to be engaged in friendship when one does not hold the relevant end in relation to the activity.
Now, when founding a network state, reducing the degree of modal confusion is central to the project of creating an ‘ethical’ state. If a founder holds an irrelevant set of ends in mind, they risk the potential for causing significant harm to persons, and I will argue that it does so by reducing autonomy. By autonomy, I mean a human being’s capacity to exercise willful, deliberative choice, and not be wholly dictated by external influence. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defines it as follows: “Autonomy is essentially a matter of whether we are active rather than passive in our motives and choices — whether … they are the motives and choices that we really want and are therefore in no way alien to us.” Now, one’s autonomy exists within one’s subjectivity, which can be understood as a person’s conscious experience. It’s the center at which one’s thoughts, desires, perceptions, worries, fears, anxieties, all occur, as they manifest in experience. Subjectivity can then be divided into at least two parts, one of which is a quantitative dimension, the other being qualitative. The first consists of the stream of experience, of the constant succession of mental states and behaviors. At one moment I’m hungry and so act to satisfy the desire; at another, I’m struck with fear and run away from the object that is the target of my response, and so on. As the examples imply, this dimension of subjectivity involves a high degree of passivity; events and experiences are simply happening to me. The qualitative dimension, on the other hand, is far more active and is the space by which autonomy exists. This involves the capacity to evaluate one’s mental states and to reflect and decide whether they are worth acting on, whether they’re rational or not, whether they represent the world accurately; and to act autonomously is to act based on one’s qualitative nature, and not be carried away unreflectively by the more passive, quantitative dimension.
The central claim of this article is that the principal end of the state is to promote the development and growth of the qualitative nature of its members’ subjectivity. To hold this capacity of human beings as secondary, or accidental and not a primary need, is to be modally confused. That’s not to say the state is the primary institution responsible for promoting or even determining its citizens’ autonomy — the existence and crimes of the USSR are sufficient to refute that — but only that it shares the responsibility. Whatever its exact role is, or in what forms it is concretely realized, the state’s principal end is directed toward facilitating the development of its citizens’ subjectivity. A society can be imagined as a large, extended plane divided into proportions sized according to the degree of each part’s contribution toward reaching this goal. One part consists of the economy, another is occupied by the private and public affairs of communities and individuals, and another is delegated to the state. Whatever the exact configuration of this plain, each part cooperates and contributes toward fulfilling the full breadth of human needs. And I believe this can be done in numerous ways; there is not necessarily one form a state must have, which specifies and delineates each of its fixed parts to align with some ultimate reality, to reach this end. Nevertheless, I believe the state does have a hierarchy of ends.
It could be argued, however, that this is wrong and that founding a state is not a moral activity but merely a prudential one, whose end is to protect individual self-interests and preferences. That is, the state is not concerned with morality but with establishing conditions that enable individuals to pursue their self-interests and preferences uninterrupted by other human beings. Because individuals are concerned with their own well-being, their survival, and the satisfaction of their desires, living in a state of nature, where there is no authority to settle disputes or conflicts regarding life, liberty, or property, is contrary to individual interests. It would be rational, then, to form a state invested with the authority granted by the consent of the governed which has the power to punish those who violate the law, adjudicate and settle disputes, and protect everyone’s basic liberties that prevent others from interfering with one another’s lives.
Understanding the state this way means that the ends of the state are prudential and not primarily moral. Individuals are free to opt into whatever network state they wish, insofar as they do so by their own, uncoerced choice.
Now Srinivasan, as I see it, is somewhere in the middle between the moral and prudential conceptions of state founding. He speaks of state legitimacy as being grounded entirely in the consent of the governed. If a network state receives enough members; if it expands to the point of reaching diplomatic recognition, then that is a testament to the legitimacy of that state. People have consented to their smart contract(s), they have invested a certain amount of authority to the founder(s) by agreeing to its terms, and such a state, Srinivasan concludes, is therefore ‘ethical’. But the notion of being ethical here is ambiguous. Does he mean that it is so because what constitutes something as ethical is an agreement, or does he mean that freedom to choose is the principal end of the state? The former is prudential because it reasons that it is up to individuals to decide for themselves what is ethical or moral, given that there is no objective fact of the matter; individuals calculate according to their self-interests, preferences, and desires, and whether a contract is fair, just, or equal is up to each person. The latter, on the other hand, is moral because it holds freedom of choice as what constitutes the moral ends of the state. What matters is whether individuals freely choose to join the state, not whether the contract is fair or just independent of that. This is because individuals' most valuable capacity is to choose. As it is up to each person to decide for themselves whether a contract is fair or just, a state is morally legitimate if people voluntarily consent to its contract.
Whichever one Srinivasan is committed to, both are problematic and I will present arguments against the two interpretations, which will be motivated by the following claims. That one, holding the state to be merely concerned with prudential ends is to confuse means with ends, which underestimates the role it plays in the individual’s life, and two, holding freedom of choice as the principal end confuses mere choice with free choice. These confusions permit the degradation of human dignity by disregarding the human need to foster the faculties necessary for autonomy. It is within each individual’s interests to be within a society. To be outside of a community, to be isolated and without access to resources, to be without recourse to institutions who will enforce the protection of one’s rights, is to live within a hostile environment that is against fulfilling one’s needs. However, establishing more hospitable conditions does not thereby define the principal end of the state, and the mere ability to choose does not necessarily respect the capacity for autonomy. It only offers the appearance of choice and not the reality. To freely choose means more than the pursuit of satisfying an impulse. Before developing these arguments further, Srinivasan’s two potential conceptions of the ‘ethical’ state need to be better understood. Let’s begin with the prudential account.
Section 3
According to this argument, the state is directed toward establishing the conditions necessary for individuals to pursue their own self-interests, desires, and preferences, without the interference of others, and insofar as one’s projects do not infringe on someone else’s. An exemplar of this view is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. A state of nature, where individuals exist outside of an organized collective bound by laws and institutions, is a state of war, filled with perpetual conflict and strife and the competition of self-interests, consisting of an endless pursuit of individuals attempting to gain power over one another for the sake of control and security. Setting aside the plausibility of such a state, what’s important is that, by understanding individuals in this way, human nature is presented as calculative, as the rational pursuit of one’s own interests. And since interests conflict, and each individual has an inborn right to preserve itself, to fight for its own survival; and because each one must determine what their survival requires, life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short.
It would be far more rational, then, both for oneself and others, to form a state that would eliminate this perpetual state of war and conflict by implementing laws and institutions that enforce agreements and contracts made between persons, and that uphold conditions of peace, which allows individuals to pursue their ends without the fear of being interfered with. The philosopher Immanuel Kant phrases this as follows: “Each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a general workable law.”
Notice, then, that forming a state is not a matter of morals but of rational calculation, of looking out for one’s own interests. It’s not that a state should be formed because it allows persons to treat one another with dignity, or because each is worthy of some inviolable respect, but because it is in everyone’s best interests. Founding a state, then, says Kant, “means finding out how the mechanism of nature can be applied to men in such a manner that the antagonism of their hostile attitudes will make them compel one another to submit to coercive law, thereby producing a condition of peace within which the laws can be enforced.” This is a prudential account of state-founding.
There’s a fundamental problem with this kind of account, however. The first thing to note is the conception of human subjectivity contained within it. A Hobbesian notion of human nature, simply put, suggests subjectivity consists of computational processes whose ends are the satisfaction of the subject’s desires and preferences. The state’s aim, then, is to discipline the subject in a way that will lead to them having the capacity to coexist in peaceful conditions with others. It is not to prescribe certain definite moral ends, to orient them around a conception of the good, or to circumscribe what their desires should or should not be; it is to sustain the conditions necessary for individuals to pursue their interests without interfering with the right of others to pursue their own.
Now, the issue here is that human subjectivity is conceived one-dimensionally. Human beings are born with certain natural desires and preferences like survival and the fulfillment of basic needs, and the state is not to interfere with this but to protect each individual’s impulse to preserve them, and to shape their lives as they see fit. Each can do as they please insofar as it does not harm another. But this is too simplistic. This amounts to believing that human desires and preferences occupy a single, quantitative plain, and each individual goes about maximizing these while simultaneously avoiding infringing on others’ ability to do so. But if we step back and ask whether a desire itself is desirable we are no longer asking a question along this quantitative plane but have begun to ask about the qualitative nature of the desire. Is that desire of more worth than that one? This is a question regarding second-order desires.
First-order desires often happen to us, they occur, and pull us in the direction of the desired object. My desire to eat does not arise by my own volition. After a time of not eating, the desire simply renews itself. Second-order desires concern the will, of what one wants to want, of whether a desire is something one desires to motivate his or her will. Harry Frankfurt writes, “Creatures like ourselves are not limited to desires that move them to act. In addition, they have the reflexive capacity to form desires regarding their own desires — that is, regarding both what they want to want, and what they want not to want.” Focusing solely on the quantitative dimension of subjectivity does not account for this distinction. If someone goes about attempting to maximize their well-being by satisfying their immediate desires, some of the desires they do not act on, the ones that don’t motivate them to act but are present, are competing first-order desires, which do not consist of an evaluation regarding whether the one desire is of more worth than the other; one simply out-competes the other.
Now, with this distinction in mind, the point can be stated as follows: this qualitative, evaluative dimension, is first informed and shaped by the social context one finds oneself in, or, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger would phrase it, is thrown into. By being in the world with other people, through communication, language, and interaction, human beings begin to form and make sense of what occurs in their inner and outer life. William A. Luijpen and Henry J. Koren write in their book Existential Phenomenology that, “In my dealing with others, there occurs a quasi-process of sedimentation, and the quasi-effect of it is called ‘social facticity’ or my ‘social body’. The way I greet others, speak, or think is, at least in the first instance, largely the quasi-effect of the fact that I grew up in the West and not in China.” Social facticity, then, is the set of social conditions by which a human being becomes acquainted with the world, making things intelligible and meaningful, ordered and sensible. The philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “I can only learn what anger, love, anxiety, the aspiration to wholeness, etc., are through my and others’ experience of these being objects for us, in some common space.”
When developing within a social environment, the qualitative dimension of subjectivity is largely first shaped by the situation one is in, which provides the framework by which to discern who and what one is, what is valuable, what the good is, how one should conduct oneself in specific contexts, and so forth. Underpinning all of this is an assumed picture of qualitative evaluations. For this not to be present means the individual will not be able to live. Therefore, when a state is formed that will govern a society, it is not merely concerned with prudential ends but with moral ones as well. Self-interests, preferences, desires, fears, impediments to action, in short, the whole internal and external life of an individual, are first made sense of in the social environment.
The psychologist Erich Fromm argues in his book To Have or To Be that living in social conditions that only emphasize the quantitative nature of human beings is dehumanizing. A society and state that promotes the satisfaction of desires and preferences, of one’s self-interests, which will supposedly somehow lead to realizing human beings’ higher capacities, is highly implausible. How can character traits like egoism, greed, and selfishness produce social cooperation, connection, and harmony, which are integral to well-being? Most of the great thinkers throughout history spent their time on this issue. Socrates, Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, all formulated distinctions between our qualitative and quantitative capacities. Fromm writes, “The essential element in their thinking is the distinction between those needs (desires) … whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure, and those needs that are rooted in human nature and whose realization is conducive to human growth and produces eudaimonia, i.e., ‘well-being’.” If the qualitative dimension of subjectivity possesses needs essential to well-being, such as the ability to actively and critically engage with oneself and the world, then measures must be taken that target these features of human beings, otherwise, they will be left empty and unfulfilled.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean the state must therefore be delegated the primary bearer of this responsibility. But it does mean that it plays a role toward this end. Whatever that precisely is, the principal end of the state is to discern and actualize its part in this process.
Section 4
So much for Srinivasan’s notion of the ‘ethical’ state as one that establishes the prudential ends of rational, self-interest-seeking agents. What about the second way to understand this idea, that the state is ethical because freedom of choice is all that matters and is the fundamental end to be preserved and exercised in and by the state? The argument I will present against this way of understanding the state has to do with how we should understand the term ‘freedom’ in this context.
If freedom of choice is the primary end of the state; if non-interference in one’s decisions to pursue one’s ends is what the term ‘ethical’ amounts to, then it must be clear what constitutes a free choice. According to the prudential account of state-founding, a state was ethical because it established conditions for individuals to pursue their desires and private conceptions of happiness. It is not a question of morals but of calculative reason, of locating rational means, and the state is a way for individuals to coexist and pursue their interests.
As has been shown, however, the state does much more than this. By having an integral role in organizing society; by crafting and implementing laws and policies that citizens adhere to, the state substantially contributes toward the frameworks by which individuals understand themselves. It is not the only factor, of course, and certainly is not the predominant one — the family is more integral than the state in affecting development. But the state legally organizes these other influences and therefore has a hand in how they impact a society. The collection of which shapes the concepts necessary for moral deliberation, for positing ends worthy of pursuit, and the resources used to differentiate good from bad, right from wrong.
The proposal now is that the term ethical suggests that the state is a moral activity and not merely a prudential one, but also that the sole end of the state is to allow individuals to freely choose for themselves what they consider to be the good, or what holds value, and by making an uncoerced choice, whatever the agreement is, by consenting to it, it is ethical. The freedom to choose is the principal end of all human conduct and affairs.
This creates a twofold problem that depends on the degree of value placed on choice. The first is that, if choice is held as being forfeitable, as something someone may decide to surrender when consenting to join a state, then a state can be ethical merely because people chose to opt in, even if it allows for the existence of conditions that are degrading to human beings. The second is that, if choice is held to be the principal end of the state and is not forfeitable, it may still not realize the freedom necessary for free choice, namely, autonomy. The first problem is more easily discerned, while the second is more subtle. Let’s begin with the first.
There are many reasons why someone may choose to join a state and forfeit their freedom, but for the sake of argument it’s best to focus on one and this will be when an individual feels alienated from, and alone within, a society. A historical way to frame this problem, as Erich Fromm does in his book Escape From Freedom, is to look at the fading presence of the Church after the Reformation. To put it very crudely, in the Middle Ages the world was viewed as perfectly ordered and possessed an eternal structure created by God, including how human beings, individually and collectively, were to live. The individual was not confronted with deeply personal questions of how to live, what to do with one’s life, or what ends to pursue; the Church answered these questions and provided a sense of belonging in the world. Fromm writes, “In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt … The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave a feeling of security and belonging.” When God was “demoted,” as the historian Marci Shore puts it, and when there was no longer available recourse to some greater being to understand how human beings should live and the responsibility became their own, a great space was left empty and needed to be filled again; human beings could not assume they were at the center of things. They themselves became accountable for how society was to be organized, how life should be lived, what meaning life possesses; and the answers to these concerns must be formed by human reason itself and not by an imposed, nonhuman standard. But this emerging form of freedom came with a price. Dostoevsky formulates this cost in his famous phrase, “If there is no God, then everything is permissible.” That is, without some ultimate, nonhuman reality that makes the world appear ordered, harmonious, justified, good, everything becomes unchained. And for things to return to their previous, stable state, which is of course necessary for human beings to live, it was human beings that bore the burden. Simone de Beauvoir, a 20th-century philosopher, writes in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity that Man now “bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable.”
The experience of alienation in modern society can be partially explained by modernity not being able to cope with this burden. To use Fromm’s phrase, great efforts have been made to escape from it. Historians like Hannah Arendt have attributed the rise of totalitarian governments in the 20th century as arising from this condition, where individuals forfeit this new form of freedom by submerging themselves within the group and relinquishing their responsibility to choose how to live and decide what their lives ultimately mean. But doing so eliminates choice altogether and therefore reduces subjectivity to a mere thing that is not aware of itself, and thus not accountable for its actions and projects, as being the one responsible for what takes place in the world. And as the 20th century demonstrates, this is catastrophic. Therefore, no network state that attempts to allow individuals to forfeit their freedom and autonomy is worthy of being called ethical. Such a state is an attempt to avoid moral and ethical choices and does not attempt to cope with them.
The second part of the problem, where freedom is the principal value and is not forfeitable, is that it conceives of choice in purely negative terms. The mistake made is to confuse mere choice with free choice. Similarly to how the prudential account mistook individuals’ ends as being formed ultimately by the individual, this account of the ethical presupposes that choice can be a matter of pursuing first-order desires and does not require whether one has considered if such desires are worth pursuing; one could be moved entirely by instinct and therefore not by the faculties necessary for a real choice. If choice is simply a matter of determining how to maximize one’s satisfaction and is not concerned with the qualitative nature of the desires themselves, then reflection, deliberation, and thinking more generally are simply instruments used to obtain happiness. They are means employed to satisfy desires. But if desires go unchecked; if they’re taken for granted and assumed to be worth the attention we instinctively give them, then a choice was not made. That is, second-order desires are not taken into consideration. Acting purely from first-order desires is to be caused to act by impulse, instinct, or inclination, which determines the action, and not by reflection. It is through reflection and deliberation, through considerations formulated by one’s own will, that one truly chooses. The philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguishes between autonomy and heteronomy. Understanding this will clarify the argument.
To act autonomously is to be an originating and self-determining cause of an action. To act heteronomously is to be caused to act, to be moved by influences and forces outside of one’s will. Thus to enact a choice freely one must will the action and not be motivated by what is outside of the will. The philosopher Paul Franco writes in his book Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, “Kant rejects the naturalistic understanding of freedom as exemplified by Hobbes that sees it as the unimpeded pursuit of one’s empirically given desires. In giving into natural desire or inclination, the will is determined by something other than itself …” From this, it can be seen how acting from desire does not constitute a free choice. If desires are conditioned by the external environment, the expression of those desires was not at first of one’s choosing but was informed by the conditioning that took place in the development and upbringing of the individual. Mere choice, then, does not constitute free choice.
But why, it may be asked, is this problematic? Even if the individual’s choice is said not to be fully free, why should the state concern itself with this? It’s up to the individual to discover their own freedom. I don’t necessarily disagree with this. It is not that the state should interfere with and enforce that individuals make free rather than mere choices, but only that it should concern itself with realizing conditions that are conducive to the development necessary for individuals to actualize their faculties for autonomy, which is located in the more qualitative dimension of subjectivity. The aim here is not to precisely articulate how the state should do this, but only that individual autonomy is the end it must strive toward. To hold this as secondary is to treat human activity as being in service to something other than itself; as if human faculties are meant for some other end. This is false. The state’s aim is to play its role in treating human beings as ends-in-themselves and as the reason for its legitimacy to have any authority. To do otherwise is to confuse self-interests with morality.
Conclusion
The ‘ethical’ network state holds autonomy as its principal end. Its goal is to discover how to best contribute toward formulating conditions conducive to realizing this. What the government must precisely be, what laws are best, what institutions are necessary, must be understood in these terms. To do otherwise is to be confused about what activity one is involved in, which may lead to dehumanizing environments for those who opt-in to states that fail to live up to this standard.