To correct their superior, inferiors must invoke another superior—a superior superior.

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, or the golden rule, is an ideal of equality, as is the precept of loving your neighbor as yourself. In the highest view, we hope for humans to treat one another as equals.

Many libertarians are among those who accentuate equality to a fault. It’s no accident that the English Levellers are sometimes regarded as the first libertarians. Many libertarians are among those who think hierarchy is a dirty word.

However, the golden rule—when properly understood—is a good ideal. That is, it is a superior ideal. And one way to understand the claim that it is a superior ideal is to think of the ideal as one approved of by a superior mind.

While equality has its places within the realm of ideals, so does superiority.

Just as equality implies two things equal in some respect, superiority implies two things unequal in some respect—one thing is superior in that respect, and the other thing is inferior. To acknowledge superiority is to acknowledge inferiority.

“In some respect” — that’s my main concern here. The horrible Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a superior in one respect but proved an inferior in more important respects. It’s good to clarify different respects—and hence different hierarchies. Below, I catalog some superior-inferior relationships and cast us—that is, you and me—as inferior, to train ourselves in accepting that there are others who are our superiors.

By acknowledging a respect in which another is superior to ourselves, we are in a better position to insist on our equality in a distinct respect. Getting the superiority issue squared away affords us the opportunity to turn to an equality and insist on the rights that pertain.

Indeed, any scheme of equal rights depends on a weighting of the different “respects”—or aspects, facets, qualities—of social relationships. To deem a scheme of equal rights to be true, proper, and ethical depends on the idea of a superior approving of that scheme—“And he called it good.”

I maintain that there is a sort of hierarchy of the hierarchies, and we organize our puzzlings about all of it around the notion of an infallible beholder of all, like God. That notion provides a fulcrum for lifting, by intellectual force or effort, the coherence of our world.

Inferiors, too, have rights; they have rights as inferiors. Those rights invoke the superior of another dimension, a dimension above that of the one who is immediately superior and against whom the rights are invoked.

To get our equalities and superiorities right, we must adjust them within a whole system of superiorities. Adjusting them to make a better system corresponds to making them more just. Justice in the fullest sense entails important equalities but also a complex system of superiorities.

Beside the need for a moral sense of upward and downward, there are practical necessities: We need superiors because we need focal points. We depend on focal points.

Without a focal person called “leader,” a mass of equals is apt to be a feckless mob. Without a guide or instructor, a class of pupils is apt to devolve into idle chatter. Without a boss, a workplace is apt to languish. Without a parent-figure, a household is apt to atomize.

And here’s another reason to sort out superiorities: Squaring away superiorities helps us fathom proprieties. Adam Smith explained that some sentiments depend on age, station, and occupation (see esp. ch. 2 of TMS Part V). Certain sentiments are appropriate to inferiors, others to equals, and still others to superiors. J. G. Heineccius (1681–1741), the German theologian and philosopher, distinguished loves for another person, saying that the beloved

must either be a more perfect being than our selves, equal, or inferior to us, and less excellent. Love of the first kind, we call love of devotion or obedience; love of the second kind, we call love of friendship; and love of the third sort, we call benevolence. (66; original italics)

Understanding superiorities helps us understand whether our love is devotion, friendship, or benevolence. By understanding superiorities, we learn, for example, that benevolence is not merely a desire for another’s well-being. Benevolence entails a sort of superiority—which is one reason people flatter themselves as benevolent.

Upwardness is Elemental to Personal Meaning

Before we turn to earthly relationships of superior and inferior, notice that superiority is essential to every decision you make. Your basic responsibility is to act in a way that makes you better than you would be if you acted differently—that is, that makes you superior than you’d otherwise be. The objects ranked here are two different yous: The you that you become by acting properly and the you that you would be by acting improperly. It is because you believe the first to be superior that you act as you do.

Smith asked: What is it that moves us to sacrifice one of our pinkies for the well-being of others, even those never known to us? His answer: “the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters” (TMS 137.4; italics added). Life would not be worth living without a notion of moral superiority.

The Parent-Child Relationship

The parent-child relationship is special in more ways than we can fathom. It must constitute its own category. It provides a pattern or analogy for other superior-inferior relationships. The love of life implies that we ought to feel gratitude to our superiors—our parents—as well as to other ancestors.

The Superior-inferior Jural Relationship

The superior-inferior jural relationship is the governor-governed relationship, or the ruler-ruled relationship—at least in the modern integrated polity in which we speak of “the government.”

The word jural refers to the rights and duties for which physical force (including the threat thereof) is regularly or conventionally employed. Such a convention to employ force against violations is naturally attended by another feature of jural relationships: The rules against violating those rights and duties are rather precise and accurate, or grammar-like, at least relative to the rules of other virtues (that is, non-jural virtues).

Legal systems aspire to be precise and accurate. Where they do not live up to the aspiration, their administrators are often embarrassed and pretend otherwise.

But “jural” is not simply a synonym of “legal,” for there is a set of jural rules other than the set of legal rules, namely, the rules of commutative justice—the rules against messing with another’s person, property, or promises-due. Many legal rules, such as taxation and intervention, violate commutative justice. Indeed, legal rules are promulgated by a player whose very nature is defined in part by its overt and wholesale violation of commutative justice. The government does, openly, what it would be criminal for your neighbor to do. Imagine your neighbor threatening to seize your property and lock you in a cage unless you turn over a percentage of your income. Or, unless you followed his diktats. When such initiations of coercion come from an equal, we call it extortion, robbery, assault, abduction, and so on.

Between you and your neighbor, there is a jural relationship, but it is an equal-equal jural relationship. Here, physical force may be regularly or conventionally employed in self-defense, retribution, restitution, and so on. Here, physical force is used in response to an initiation of coercion.

But the jural relationship between you and your neighbor is different from that between you and the civil authority; that is the superior-inferior jural relationship—and you are the inferior.

A polity is jurally integrated if all jural superiors are integrated into one system and thus constitute a single entity of jural superiority. In the modern jurally-integrated polity, we have jural dualism, in that there are two kinds of jural relationships: equal-equal (as between neighbors) and superior-inferior (governor-governed).

I remarked that some people deceive themselves about being benevolent because benevolence implies a superiority. Likewise, some people deceive themselves or others about the nature of government to deny subjection. Certain brands of politics pretend that government is consensual, as though government operated within a large system of equal-equal relationships—a ‘social contract.’ Adam Smith and David Hume rejected contractarianism. Most of the great classical liberals since Smith have rejected contractarianism.

The governing power is a distinct sort of superior, and we manage it best when we recognize it as such. Also, we understand our obligations to our polity and to our government best when we understand that we are jurally subjected. We are subjects.

Some Distinctions between Categories of Superiority

Temporal versus eternal

Thus far we have mentioned two kinds of superiors, the parental and the jural. Those two are earthly, temporal superiors, and they differ from the final superior to be mentioned, God or a God-like being.

Binary versus a comparative range

The superior may be quite binary, on/off. There are not multiple levels of superiority; there is just one unitary level, and then below it is a plane of inferiors.  This is the case for parent, government, and (the monotheistic) God. We’ll get to God later. Let’s consider the binariness of parent and of government.

The relationship of parent-child is unique—there are no deputy or lieutenant mothers or fathers. Parents might utilize a nanny, but ‘nanny’ is a station auxiliary to the parenting relationship. Grandparents, too, are auxiliary, and, indeed, mother retains a paramountcy above grandmother, even when mother is a child of grandmother.  And when a woman who is not the biological mother adopts a child, doing so presupposes that no other woman occupies the office or position of mother, or at least, such person is prepared to relinquish the office to the adopting mother. Parents-in-law and stepparents are, again, collateral—one’s mother-in-law is not deputy to one’s mother; the same is true with one’s stepmother and mother.

As for the jural superior—the governing power—although there are levels of government (e.g., municipal, county, state, national), the main thing to see is that the system is jurally integrated and that the subject is governed by “the government,” even if that governing power sometimes disagrees with itself, as it were. There is no semi-governmental power; there is no “somewhat government.” Of course there are institutions that do the bidding of government, but they do not do what modern government uniquely does. No other institution within the nation initiates coercion in the overt way that distinguishes government; no other institution institutionalizes initiations of coercion carried out supposedly according to posted rules. Thus, like parenthood, jural authority is basically on/off. This binary aspect differs from other categories presented below, categories in which earthly superiors run along a scale of sorts, a comparative range of grades, echelons, levels, ranks, stations, and so on.

Discrete versus continuous

Another distinction operates within the broad category of comparative superiorities: Notched, as with the notches on a belt, or unnotched, as we might tie a sash. Or we might say, discrete versus continuous. Some gradations are discrete and focally labeled or titled. The titles are explicit—clear notches. This focal titulary superiority is true of parent and government, but it is also true of designations up and down an organization, designations, that is, of position, office, or station within the organization, club, circle, or network. A continuous range of superiority might obtain in sports or any particular virtue, or overall virtue.

Accurate versus loose, vague, and indeterminate

Finally, there’s another distinction that is relevant: Accuracy in the standard of comparison versus looseness and vagueness. Who is the superior movie director? Who is the superior thinker? Who is the superior painter?

Having distinctions and titles does not make a person great, wise, or virtuous. Indeed, if systems of distinction are systematically corrupt—as many are, especially those that are highly governmentalized—such distinctions may lead us to doubt superiority in wisdom and virtue in those so distinguished. Thus, a distinction between categories of superiorities is that between superiorities marked “precise and accurate” standards (even if continuous) and those whose standards are “loose, vague, and indeterminate,” to echo Adam Smith’s distinction between grammar-like rules (precise and accurate) and aesthetic-like rules (loose, vague, and indeterminate).

With loose, vague, and indeterminate superiorities, others often disagree with you about who is superior; indeed, you may find yourself today in disagreement with yourself of yesterday.

Comparative superiors with and without a title

Designations of many sorts are used to signify positions, roles, offices, stations, and so on. Teams or troops may have a designated captain, coach, or leader. If a scheme of titles works as a scheme of focal points, it is because that scheme is well established and accepted. That scheme is a convention, in the sense of David Hume (Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature) and, more recently, philosopher David K. Lewis (link).

I have a title of professor at a university. Above me, however, is a sort of superior: the chair of the department to which I belong. And above him are the dean, the provost, and the president. Such titles or designations are vital for their focality. Focal points pertain to mutual coordination which pertains to conventions. The titles are conventions of semantics; the roles they signify are conventions of superiority; we mutually coordinate according to those conventions—members of the department defer to the chair; we follow his lead.

‘Mother,’ ‘father,’ and ‘parent,’ too, are titles. Roles of jural superiority are titled, such as President, Governor, or Mayor. The convention of superiority spells authority.

Note that many offices within the government sector are not offices of governing power (or jural superiority). The university I work for is in the government sector, but the university is not part of the jural superior. In jural matters, the university operates as an equal; what makes it part of the government sector is simply that its owner happens to be the Virginia government (which, in turn, we might say, is owned by the residents of Virginia).

Still, the university and other such government operations confer status. Such offices confer prestige. Perhaps the reason is that humans have a natural urge to sidle up to the powerful, to rub shoulders with the alphas, to caress their vanity. The officer of a government operation is a friend of the alpha, so, if you ingratiate yourself to the officer, you are a friend of a friend of the alpha. People seek validation from the governmental sector even if the validation does not involve becoming part of the governing power.

Next, there are comparative superiors beyond titles, yet with a definite standard or accuracy. There might be a quite focal way to rank people in some activity, like batting in baseball, which is continuous, and in that case there emerges a pretty clear continuous range of superiority.

Next, consider comparative superiors beyond titles and without a definite standard. This brings us back to “the loose, vague, and indeterminate.” Sometimes there are many competing schemes and none enjoys primacy; none presides as a “standard.”

Who was the superior baseball player, Bob Gibson or Pete Rose? We can look at their lifetime statistics, but one was a pitcher and the other was not. And even if we take two offensive players, say Pete Rose and Hank Aaron, there will be disagreement in how to rank them. Even if we believe that the criterion is a formula of a finite number of definite statistical measures, how shall we decide on the formula? And why should the criterion be such a formula? A television panel of baseball experts will agree to a large extent on who is among the greatest 100 players of all time but not entirely. And we might disagree with the so-called experts.

Does Pete Rose’s scandal about betting on his own team count against him as a baseball player? The scandal got him banned from the Hall of Fame, so that is one distinction he does not have.

When we go from performance in professional baseball to performance in life in general, things are thrown wide open. Besides not knowing what to include in the criterion or how to properly weight what you do include, the data are lousy. You cannot look up your neighbor’s batting average.

The Ontological Superior

Finally, we come to Adam Smith’s highest sense of “impartial spectator,” which is God or a being like God at least in being super-knowledgeable and universally benevolent. This being is super-human and ontologically superior to us.[1]  By “ontological superior” I mean a being different from human, and hence non-human, and the differences are superiorities—such as super-human knowledge and super-human benevolence.

This being has a knowledge of moral rightness superior to ours. We are his inferiors in knowing moral rightness.

Indeed, his knowledge of rightness is not only superior to ours; it is flawless. Such flawlessness is his nature.

Whereas all other sorts of superiors may be bad, he cannot be bad. He corresponds to goodness in the largest sense—as God and good correspond to one another.

However, he is remote. We want his approval but do not well know what it is that he approves of. For help, we turn to the man within the breast—that is, our conscience. Smith said that the highest impartial spectator has a “representative” in the man within the breast (TMS 215.11).

But our conscience is not necessarily good, wise, or effective. The only way upward is by way of the man within the breast, but he is no sure ticket to upwardness.

A skeptical reader may say that the idea of moral rightness need not involve a super-human mind that knows it and, on that basis, that moral rightness need not involve a superior to which we are inferior. The skeptic says that here there is no superior-inferior relationship. Elsewhere I have taken up this objection and exposited arguments in favor of Smith’s supreme impartial spectator. One argument is that by embracing it we maintain a humble awareness of why we scruple about rightness, namely, to avoid the pain of disapproval from a superior, as with the sacrifice of our pinky. We shall scruple not from our “feeble spark of benevolence” (TMS 137.4) nor from our pride in knowing rightness, but from the authority of conscience, which enforces our duty to be superior to what we would be if we acted other than in the way that the conscience best approves of.

Correction from Below

There is no room for correcting the supreme impartial spectator. He is the fulcrum, however, by which inferiors may correct earthly superiors, all of which do stand in need of correction. (Among your earthly superiors is your professor, pastor, master, or guru, whose characterization of the supreme impartial spectator, too, leaves room for correction, which you may make by the fulcrum of the supreme impartial spectator.)

Our catalog of superiorities resembles C.S. Lewis’s catalog of loves in The Four Loves (1960). The first three loves—affection, friendship, and eros—are loves between human and human. The fourth love, charity, is a love between human and God. Lewis explains that charity must govern the other loves. Not only does charity improve those other loves, but without charity other loves tend to become demonic. The parallel between Lewis’s catalog and our catalog is direct: Without correction using the fulcrum of the supreme impartial spectator, earthly superiors tend to become demonic.

In The Four Loves, all loves brook improvement except for charity, the love between man and God, for an imperfect love between man and God is not charity. The other loves can be imperfect and still be the loves they are. Likewise, in the gamut of superiors, all superiors below God can be imperfect and still be the superiors they are (though there are limits). In both schemes, the highest serves to correct and improve the lower.

It is our deepest, broadest sensibilities that judge our superiors and our duties to them. Our deeper sensibilities may hold that our superior is a bad superior—an inferior superior—that is, a bad father, a bad governor, a bad professor, and so on. And even if we judge our superior to be pretty good, there will always be room for improvement. Everything human has flaws calling for correction. We may help our fathers, governors, and professors to become better superiors.

In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith said that “every one naturally has a disposition to respect an established authority and superiority in others, whatever they be” (p, 318). Each earthly hierarchy has an upper-most office. Below that upper-most office are inferior offices whose correction can come from above.

But what the upper-most office does is not corrected by an office above, for there is no office above. It must be corrected from below. To do that, they must leverage another superior—a superior superior.

Society is suffused with spirits. Among them is the ontological superior corresponding to Smith’s supreme impartial spectator. That superior serves as a fulcrum by which his inferiors assert their status and rights as equals beneath him and thereby correct their earthly superiors.

Author’s Note: Elsewhere I have posited an allegorical being named Joy who is like God in some respects but not all, and I fancy that Smith quite invited his readers to understand his supreme impartial spectator either as God or something like Joy. A friend who is a theist read a draft of the present article and asked me whether it would be apt to consider Joy an ‘ontological superior’ since Joy does not actually exist. I agree that Joy does not actually exist, as Santa Claus does not actually exist. The allegory of Joy actually exists, however, as does the tradition of Santa Claus, and within that actually existing allegory Joy is ontologically superior, as within the Santa Claus tradition Santa is ontologically superior. In actually existing, assuming He does, God is ontologically superior to Joy and to Santa, but the latter are in important respects (universal benevolence, super-knowledgability) ontologically superior to us human beings.

Republished by gracious permission of the author from Libertarianism.org/Cato Institute.

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References:

Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb. 2008. A Methodical System of Universal Law: Or, the Laws of Nature and Nations, with Supplements and a Discourse by George Turnbull. Translated from the Latin by George Turnbull, edited with an Introduction by Thomas Albert and Peter Schröder. Liberty Fund.

Hume, David. 2007. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton. 2 vols. Oxford University Press.

Lewis, C. S. 1960. The Four Loves. New Harcourt Brace.

Lewis, David K. 1969. Convention; A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Smith, Adam. 1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Liberty Fund.

The featured image is “L’Eminence Griseand” (1873) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.