The United States has a massive nuclear arsenal and the best-equipped, best-trained military the world has ever seen. It is an awesome, fearsome machine that can rain down inexorable death from the heavens.

But that’s not why I drive on the right side of the road.

I drive on the right side of the road for a whole host of reasons — practical, prudential, even moral I suppose. (Prudential and moral often overlap where safety is concerned. Plus Not Being an Asshole is a kind of moral reason.) All of those reasons precede the merely legal reasons for doing so. I’m certainly aware of those legal reasons as well. And in some vague sense I suppose I’m aware that there could be legal consequences for driving on the wrong side of the road and that those legal consequences, if it came to it and if I somehow survived to face them, would ultimately be enforced by armed agents of the government.

But it has never occurred to me that the possibility of violent coercion on the part of the state was among the most important, relevant or meaningful reasons for driving on the right side of the road. Nor has it ever occurred to me that such basic traffic laws are an undue restriction on my personal liberty — or even worse, a kind of “taking.” (If I can only drive on half the road, then my car is only worth half as much — it’s theft I tell you, theft of my car’s full potential value!)

This is something I just don’t understand about my libertarian friends here in cyberspace. For them, the menacing threat of armed government tyranny seems to be the only reason they can conceive of for complying with any law, rule, regulation or — heaven forfend! — tax.

And that’s just, well, odd.

The good news is that I’m fairly sure they don’t really mean it. The trajectory of their slogans forces them to argue some odd things, but most of them don’t really seem to live that way. “Taxation is theft,” they’ll shout, and thus they wind up arguing that the only reason they pay their taxes is because the jackbooted thugs from the IRS have pried it from their hands at gunpoint. But that’s not really the case any more than it’s true that the only reason they send their kids to school is because the jackbooted truant officers have forced them to do that at gunpoint. Or that the only reason they do not embezzle, default on loans, defraud their neighbors or prey on the weak is fear of legal reprisal. If the state and the police and every coercive mechanism for law enforcement were to evaporate overnight, they would not take to the streets in a lawless rampage of rioting and pillaging.

Not most of them, at least.

They’re not really the Nietzschean little sociopaths their arguments are always trapping them into claiming to be. If they met such a person, in fact, they’d probably do just what you or I would do — call the police.

Participating in civilization — particularly in a democratic civilization, a civil society — requires accepting certain rules, regulations, mores, laws, and, yes, taxes in your own best interest and the best interests of others, i.e., for the common good. It also requires that we constantly and vigilantly question every rule, regulation, more, law or tax to evaluate whether it is necessary, fair, wise, efficient, effective, useful, proportionate, etc. But once we accept that as our task — evaluating each on its merits and demerits in accord with the common good rather than dismissing them all, categorically, as by definition illegitimate — then we become liberals and not libertarians.

And one of the nice things about being a liberal is that you never need to pretend that you’re actually a barbaric hoodlum who only behaves civilly due to fear of punishment from the 101st Airborne.

Let's go back to our hypothetical old man sleeping in the doorway and to our non-hypthetical old man trapped in a submerged pickup truck. (Who is, police report, in stable condition.)

This is a free country. Each of us is free to see a stranger trapped or abandoned and to do nothing. We are free to put our own interests ahead of the interests of others. We are free to be selfish.

But that selfishness can, ultimately, erode our freedom. The more we choose to ignore and avoid the concerns of others, the more the state will be forced to attend to those concerns. A wholly selfish people can ultimately only be governed by a Leviathan state. A free people must also, therefore, be a good people.

But what do we mean by "good"?

Here I turn to W.V. Quine's delightful book Quiddities*. This is Quine on the subject of "Altruism":

Altruism is the main stem of morality and the primary concern of moral principles. The landlady says of her student lodgers that they are good boys, while knowing full well that they gamble, curse, drink, drive to endanger and consort with loose women. What does she mean? Just that they are reasonably altruistic.

Quine's landlady is, I think, a better judge of goodness than most of the virtuecrats and professional moralists who have made a career out of fretting about other people's immorality. She understands that vice, as we've come to define it, is no longer a true opposite of virtue.

The Bennetts, Borks and Bauers define virtue almost entirely as the avoidance of vice. And their conception of vice consists of a rather arbitrary list of no-nos. It is not possible, in their view, for the landlady's lodgers to be "good boys" if they also "gamble,** curse, drink, drive to endanger and consort with loose women." For these moralists, good people are, by definition, those who do not do these things.

Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan seems closer to the view of Quine's landlady than to that of the virtuecrats. The story begins with two members of the moral majority, a priest and a Levite, upright men who we can be sure abstained from gambling, cursing, drinking and consorting with loose women. They left a man bleeding by the side of the road.

My point here is not to defend the behavior of our rowdy student lodgers, but to point out that our national conversation about goodness and immorality is obsessed with trivia while ignoring matters of real importance. Janet Jackson is roundly condemned for having allowed one nipple a nanosecond of airtime during the Superbowl. Yet a man like Charles M. Cawley can build an empire based on usury and exploitation, amassing exorbitant personal wealth and power, and be hailed as a pillar of the community, "a larger-than-life visionary, a generous philanthropist."

Miss Jackson's immodest display of a pierced areola poses no real threat to the civic virtue than undergirds our freedom. MBNA's sociopathic disregard for the concerns of others does. We do not need more hyperventilating prudishness. We need more of Quine's altruism:

Altruism ranges from a passive respect for the interests of others to an active indulgence of their interests to the detriment of one's own. It ranges from the barely erogatory on the one hand to the supererogatory on the other. …

But [humanity's] altruism is not always as abundant as we could wish, nor are arguments from self-interest the way to increase it. The way rather is to play on whatever faint rudiments of fellow-feeling [we] may be capable of, fanning any little spark into a perceptible flame. Try the formative years for best results.

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* Quine's subtitle is "an intermittently philosophical dictionary." Don't let that fool you. It's nowhere near as dry as that sounds. Quiddities is a dictionary, Quine admits, only insofar as it's alphabetical arrangement liberates him from the need for a more formal structure. Reading it is a bit like sitting on a barstool next to a fascinating and opinionated polymath and prodding him to hold forth on a variety of semi-related topics.

** Insert your own William Bennett joke here.