A Clearheaded Philosopher Departs

by Fred E. Foldvary

On 8 April 2010, at the age of 87, a wise philosophical spirit flew into the void that is death.
Antony Flew was a British conservative libertarian philosopher. I met him at the meeting of the International Society for Individual Liberty in Lithuania in 2003.

As a cultural conservative, Flew was especially emphatic in wanting to preserve the heritage of the British. He fretted that what was distinctive in English culture was being lost to Europeanism, to excessive accommodation to the demands of immigrants, and to reformist modernizers. For example, the British cultural conservative seeks to preserve the British pound as the nation’s currency not just for economic reasons, but as part of the British tradition and national identity. Likewise, the cultural conservative wishes to preserve the British monarchy as the living embodiment of the nation’s history and continuity.

One area in which Flew was not conservative was religion. Antony Flew was, until late in his life, a staunch atheist. The concept of God was to Flew illogical. He had believed that there is no evidence of God, and that it is illogical for there to exist a being that is all powerful, all knowing, yet also completely benevolent. But then in 2004 Flew shocked his fellow atheists by converting to deism. He still did not believe in an afterlife, but he now saw design in the universe as possible evidence of God as creator.

In his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking: Do I Sincerely Want to Be Right? Antony Flew developed the cognitive dissonant concept, “No True Scotsman,” the fallacy of seeking to retain a generalization that has a counter-example. When one is confronted with a Scotsman who thinks that kilts are silly, the illogical reaction would be that all true Scotsmen favor kilts.

Flew also wrote about retro-causality or backward causation. The issue is whether the present-day can affect the past. For example, if time travel to the past is possible, then those who go back in time will change the past, and thus also change the future. In a 1954 article, "Can an Effect Precede its Cause," Flew rebutted the argument that it is possible for effects to precede the cause.

Antony Flew’s keen sense of logic and his mastery of linguistic philosophy is evident in his 1979 Dictionary of Philosophy. For those interested in philosophy, the work is not only informative but also fun to browse through as one hops from topic to topic.

Flew contested the statist political philosophy of works such as A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. Flew showed that the arguments for the redistribution of wealth by a welfare state lack clarity and logic. In Flew’s Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (1981), Flew rejected Rawls' opposition to self-ownership that is based on the claim that people do not create their natural talents. Rawls had it backwards: self ownership is not created by production; rather, self-ownership entitles one to one’s own production.

“Procrustean” derives from the giant Procrustes in ancient Greek mythology, who stretched people to make them fit the size of a bed. Theseus killed him by forcing Procrustes to sleep in his own bed. “Procrustean” policy, such as regulations, fits everybody into one mold. It is the policy of forced conformity to the arbitrary standards of the rulers. Laws prohibiting victimless acts are procrustean, as is the forced redistribution of legitimately earned wealth. Theseus, mythological founder of Athens, was a legendary reformer who battled and conquered monsters such as Procrustes. Antony Flew was a modern-day Theseus who sought to defeat procrustean policy by skewering its philosophical bedding.

If Flew ever confronted the moral issue of the ownership of land and its rent, it was not prominent in his thinking. I don’t remember whether I discussed it with him at the ISIL conference. Flew did recognize that the taxation of production reduces investment and output.

I believe that if Flew was ever opposed to the moral case for the equal sharing of the natural rent of land, and its use for public revenue, he would have had a conversion in favor of geoism, equality in the benefits of land, just as he towards the end of his life embraced deism.

This article first appeared in the Progress Report, www.progress.org. Reprinted with permission.

Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books: The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.