Tuesday, December 8, 2009
I have long pondered on how best to defend and advocate for liberty, to persuade my fellow human beings that they, too, should hold it and advocate on behalf of it. In Murray Rothbard's book "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto," he identifies three philosophical foundations upon which the libertarian creed has been based: emotive, utilitarian, and natural rights.
I used to call myself a natural-rightist. However, I slowly moved towards the position that such a foundation was weak, simply due to scientific facts. The natural-rightist, says Rothbard, is one who advocates libertarianism on the basis of the self-ownership axiom: a person owns his or her physical body, just as one might own other tangible, material things in reality. The problem I have with this is it ignores the now obvious fact that the notion of "self" is brought about by the inter-working processes of the physical brain. Modern neuroscience has shown that human emotion is controlled by a set of brain structures called collectively the lymbic system, which is itself controlled (or regulated) by the more logic, future-projecting area of the brain: the frontal lobes. The sense of "self" has even been shown to originate predominately from a certain structure or region in the brain.
If the sense of "self" comes about by the physiological processes in the brain, how can one be said to own it in any true sense? What is owning what? Does the "self" come to own the physiological processes that bring it about as soon as it arises? This does not make sense on a fundamental level, but I won't go into the specific reasons for that here. Let me also note that I remain open to persuasion on this issue.
The main issue I have with Rothbard in his "For a New Liberty" is when he says the following:
The emotivists assert that they take liberty or nonaggression as their premise purely on subjective, emotional grounds. While their own intense emotion might seem a valid basis for their own political philosophy, this can scarcely convince anyone else. By taking themselves outside the realm of rational discourse, the emotivists thereby insure the lack of general success of their own cherished doctrine.I think Rothbard overstates his own case against the emotivist's ability to convince anyone else of his doctrine. What I am fairly sure of is that morality is subjective. It is an opinion, a value. However, evolutionary psychology shows that the brain is equipped with some basic hardware that predisposes it to act morally towards certain people in a social context. In a sense, even chimpanzees are moral: they are documented to punish stealing, murder, etc., within their own social groups. The problem comes in when someone is viewed as an outsider, i.e. outside the social group one acts morally towards. This is true for humans and chimpanzees.
As an empirical matter, certain tenants of moral conduct (don't steal, don't murder, etc.) have been found present, in some form or another, in virtually every human culture on Earth. This moral predisposition is tempered, again, by the fact that it only extends so far: inside a given social group. And it may be cluttered with other unrealistic, culturally-based beliefs, like sacrificing infants to the gods to bring rain.
Given this and assuming morality is subjective, I still have an objective basis to appeal to within other members of my species: a basic moral sense that certain actions are bad within a social group. You can then argue for the expansion of the social group; that is, including more people (or even animals) within the realm of one's moral actions. You will find very few people willing to concede that they endorse aggression against innocent people without their consent. Instead, it's almost always maintained that it can't be avoided, or the people really do give some type of consent. Then the matter becomes one of showing how it can be avoided (leaving aside the notion of fiat justitia ruat caelum), or how it is not truly consent.
In short, I think emotivists do have an objective basis to appeal to in advocating liberty, and they could be very successful by appealing to peoples' basic moral intuitions alone, since such intuitions have a neurobiological basis. If large swaths of people intuitively hold the value that you should not hurt innocent people without their consent (even if it's only within the narrow range of a social group and even though it may be muddled by other predispositions), it seems very plausible that argumentation would be successful. If people want to hold a certain value, the task becomes showing how to be logically consistent; that is, how to truly hold it as a value.
Monday, December 7, 2009
"Soft" and "Hard" Arguments Against The State
The point that I'm about to make has been brought up before in the context of critiqueing propertarianism (or absolutist propertarianism), but I'd like to highlight it more explicitly in the context of anti-state arguments. My tone and purpose here will hopefully be less confrontational and more constructive. There is what I call the "soft" and "hard" arguments against the state, both of which I consider to be legitimate arguments. The main difference between the "soft" and "hard" arguments is that the "hard" argument goes further and more explicitly identifies what the objection to the state is. Both arguments are valid responses to the "implicit consent" and "love it or leave it" defenses of the state, but I think that the "soft" argument is necessary but insufficient as a counter to authoritarian claims.
A good example of what I'm calling the "soft" argument would be this:
"I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well, now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove – namely that this jurisdiction over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they don’t own it – at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do – and so, the fact that I am living in "this country" means I am living in a certain geographical region that they have certain pretensions over – but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it." -- Roderick Long, Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to 10 Objections
This is a valid argument. The person that is claiming that the state is legitimate because one implicitly consents to the rules established within its claimed territory is presupposing the legitimacy of the state's territorial claim to begin with, and this is something that they must prove. There is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of any territorial ownership claim. In the absence of a standard for the legitimacy for territorial ownership claims and in the absence of proof that a given claim meets that standard, an "implicit consent" or "love it or leave it" argument inherently fails. This inherently begs the question of what the standard is for the legitimacy of territorial ownership claims.
But this argument is "soft" for a number of reasons. For one thing, it leads to a meta-debate about the criteria for legitimate ownership, and the state can be either justified or unjustified depending on what criteria one uses. But, more importantly, I don't think that it adequately expresses what the problem with the state is. It gives the impression that if the state did meet the criteria for legitimate ownership, all of its powers would indeed be justified. In other words, it appears to unduly reduce the question of the state to one of legitimacy in land aquisition. But the problem with the state isn't simply that it doesn't legitimately own the territory that it claims power over, but extends further to the fact that there is something wrong with the arbitrary or unqualified kind of authority that it claims and exersizes in general. The "soft" argument is still functioning within a certain paradigm of "legitimacy" that is relative to "who is the owner?".
The "hard" argument against the state goes further than this: even if we do presume, for the sake of argument, that a given individual or group is a "legitimate" owner, this still would not justify the kind and scope of power of a state. There isn't only a burden of proof for the legitimacy of an ownership claim, but there is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of authority claims derived from ownership. This approach to the question inherently increases the burden of proof and implies a conceptual limit on "property rights", particularly as it relates to land, because it declares that the ownership of land in and of itself does not justify absolute, unqualified authority over other people. In constrast, the "soft" argument is open to being turned on its head as a re-legitimization of the state, dependant only on a norm for the legitimacy of property aquisition.
An analogy to a more small-scale context may drive the point home. For the sake of argument, let's presume that I legitimately own a home. Would it make sense for me to claim that by virtue of the fact that I own my home, anyone that visits must do literally whatever I tell them, and that I am justified in doing whatever I want to anyone that happens to occupy it at any given moment? Such a claim would be laughed out of court as a ridiculous propertarian justification for slavery and murder. But the state is just a large-scale embodyment of this. The members of the political class constitute the defacto "owners" of the territory that the state has jurisdiction over, and at the end of the day they have ultimate authority over the lives of everyone else within the territory. Asking "who is the legitimate owner?" isn't enough. One has to ask "what kind of authority should an owner really have?".
In short, the problem with the state is really just an application of a more general criticism of authoritarianism, and the state just happens to be a case of authoritarianism that is applied to the largest geographical area. This constitutes a certain form of "thickness" in which anti-statism is really just a part of a broader social philosophy. The burden of proof for an authority claim is higher than the "soft" anti-state argument suggests, since it is not simply relative to who is an owner. The "strong" anti-state argument proposes that it isn't a question of who has the authority, but a more general question about the rational limits of authority, and that "consent" is impossible in a context in which options are limited by the circumstances and assorted inherited power structures.
This also inherently raises the bar for what the necessary and sufficient conditions of a free society are. A free society isn't simply dependant on the right norm of property aquisition and a narrow, vague sense of "voluntaryism". "Voluntaryism" is effectively neutralized by the dominance of pre-existing authority structures and a social atmosphere that leaves little choice other than one of asqueisance. I don't think that the formula for a free society reduces to a redistribution of ownership claims while the general rubric of authoritarian norms that can be derived from ownership claims remain relatively unchallenged. An overly simplistic sense of propertarianism and voluntaryism seems to contain the seeds of its own dissolution, because it doesn't contain sufficient checks to avoid the re-justification and ultimately the re-emergence of the state from within its formula.
With this in mind, I urge libertarians to think more critically about their own arguments and be open to the prospect that there may be holes that need to be filled in order to avoid the possibility of their own concepts being used as justifications for precisely what they hopefully intend to be countering. We need a lot more ammunition than "but they didn't homestead this land!", and we should be cognizant of the dangers of certain overly zealous tendencies that exist within. There is much that can be done to strengthen our case and make us more internally consistent. I think that it's time to harden the arguments and steer clear of laying the foundation for one's own failure.
[Note: To be clear, none of this is particularly intended as an attack on Roderick Long, even though I quoted him as my example of the "soft" argument. I have a lot of respect for Roderick Long. I'm quite certain that, as exemplified in various other writtings of his, Roderick Long tends to have certain tendencies towards "thickness" that strengthen his anti-statism. However, I do think that the kind of argument that he presented in the quote is insufficient and open to valid objections by soft propertarians and anti-propertarians for the reasons gone into above.]
A good example of what I'm calling the "soft" argument would be this:
"I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well, now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove – namely that this jurisdiction over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they don’t own it – at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do – and so, the fact that I am living in "this country" means I am living in a certain geographical region that they have certain pretensions over – but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it." -- Roderick Long, Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to 10 Objections
This is a valid argument. The person that is claiming that the state is legitimate because one implicitly consents to the rules established within its claimed territory is presupposing the legitimacy of the state's territorial claim to begin with, and this is something that they must prove. There is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of any territorial ownership claim. In the absence of a standard for the legitimacy for territorial ownership claims and in the absence of proof that a given claim meets that standard, an "implicit consent" or "love it or leave it" argument inherently fails. This inherently begs the question of what the standard is for the legitimacy of territorial ownership claims.
But this argument is "soft" for a number of reasons. For one thing, it leads to a meta-debate about the criteria for legitimate ownership, and the state can be either justified or unjustified depending on what criteria one uses. But, more importantly, I don't think that it adequately expresses what the problem with the state is. It gives the impression that if the state did meet the criteria for legitimate ownership, all of its powers would indeed be justified. In other words, it appears to unduly reduce the question of the state to one of legitimacy in land aquisition. But the problem with the state isn't simply that it doesn't legitimately own the territory that it claims power over, but extends further to the fact that there is something wrong with the arbitrary or unqualified kind of authority that it claims and exersizes in general. The "soft" argument is still functioning within a certain paradigm of "legitimacy" that is relative to "who is the owner?".
The "hard" argument against the state goes further than this: even if we do presume, for the sake of argument, that a given individual or group is a "legitimate" owner, this still would not justify the kind and scope of power of a state. There isn't only a burden of proof for the legitimacy of an ownership claim, but there is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of authority claims derived from ownership. This approach to the question inherently increases the burden of proof and implies a conceptual limit on "property rights", particularly as it relates to land, because it declares that the ownership of land in and of itself does not justify absolute, unqualified authority over other people. In constrast, the "soft" argument is open to being turned on its head as a re-legitimization of the state, dependant only on a norm for the legitimacy of property aquisition.
An analogy to a more small-scale context may drive the point home. For the sake of argument, let's presume that I legitimately own a home. Would it make sense for me to claim that by virtue of the fact that I own my home, anyone that visits must do literally whatever I tell them, and that I am justified in doing whatever I want to anyone that happens to occupy it at any given moment? Such a claim would be laughed out of court as a ridiculous propertarian justification for slavery and murder. But the state is just a large-scale embodyment of this. The members of the political class constitute the defacto "owners" of the territory that the state has jurisdiction over, and at the end of the day they have ultimate authority over the lives of everyone else within the territory. Asking "who is the legitimate owner?" isn't enough. One has to ask "what kind of authority should an owner really have?".
In short, the problem with the state is really just an application of a more general criticism of authoritarianism, and the state just happens to be a case of authoritarianism that is applied to the largest geographical area. This constitutes a certain form of "thickness" in which anti-statism is really just a part of a broader social philosophy. The burden of proof for an authority claim is higher than the "soft" anti-state argument suggests, since it is not simply relative to who is an owner. The "strong" anti-state argument proposes that it isn't a question of who has the authority, but a more general question about the rational limits of authority, and that "consent" is impossible in a context in which options are limited by the circumstances and assorted inherited power structures.
This also inherently raises the bar for what the necessary and sufficient conditions of a free society are. A free society isn't simply dependant on the right norm of property aquisition and a narrow, vague sense of "voluntaryism". "Voluntaryism" is effectively neutralized by the dominance of pre-existing authority structures and a social atmosphere that leaves little choice other than one of asqueisance. I don't think that the formula for a free society reduces to a redistribution of ownership claims while the general rubric of authoritarian norms that can be derived from ownership claims remain relatively unchallenged. An overly simplistic sense of propertarianism and voluntaryism seems to contain the seeds of its own dissolution, because it doesn't contain sufficient checks to avoid the re-justification and ultimately the re-emergence of the state from within its formula.
With this in mind, I urge libertarians to think more critically about their own arguments and be open to the prospect that there may be holes that need to be filled in order to avoid the possibility of their own concepts being used as justifications for precisely what they hopefully intend to be countering. We need a lot more ammunition than "but they didn't homestead this land!", and we should be cognizant of the dangers of certain overly zealous tendencies that exist within. There is much that can be done to strengthen our case and make us more internally consistent. I think that it's time to harden the arguments and steer clear of laying the foundation for one's own failure.
[Note: To be clear, none of this is particularly intended as an attack on Roderick Long, even though I quoted him as my example of the "soft" argument. I have a lot of respect for Roderick Long. I'm quite certain that, as exemplified in various other writtings of his, Roderick Long tends to have certain tendencies towards "thickness" that strengthen his anti-statism. However, I do think that the kind of argument that he presented in the quote is insufficient and open to valid objections by soft propertarians and anti-propertarians for the reasons gone into above.]
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Social Evolution vs. "Social Darwinism"
"Social Darwinism" is a term that is generally used to refer to a viewpoint arising in the 19th century that characterizes social relations in terms of a hobbesian struggle, a negative sense of "competition" in which the "the strong" overpower "the weak", combined with a prescriptive stance in favor of letting "the weak" die off in the name of fostering a superior gene pool. Sprinkle this with Malthus's theories of population and a rather vulgar creed can be formed. No doubt, positions along these lines did arise and influence racialist and eugenics movements. However, mainstream discourse on such matters often tends to conflate this with social evolutionary theory in general and mischaracterize figures such as Herbert Spencer as having a more vulgar view than is actually the case.
There are a number of things that are worth clarifying about this. The term "social darwinism" itself may be somewhat misleading in the sense that the kind of view being described here is, up to a point, more of a misinterpretation of Darwin himself than a logical extension of his views. While Darwin did talk about "the survival of the fittest" and a sense of "struggle for existence", by no means did he mean to imply that cooperation and empathy is excluded from his analysis. Furthermore, Darwin himself is not necessarily the sole or even main source for social evolutionary theories. Both Lamarkian and post-darwinian ideas have influenced various social evolutionary theories. The general rubric of "social evolution" should be distinguished from "darwinism".
When I think of social evolutionary theories, the first two names that pop into my mind are Herbert Spencer and Peter Kropotkin. Despite the ill reputation that Spencer has been given as a "social darwinist", he was a Lamarkian who theorized about evolution prior to Darwin and who thought of social evolution as moving in the direction of more cooperation and "beneficience". He was a radical classical liberal that was explicitly opposed to militaristic, violent, or conflictual tendencies. Those who characterize him as a "social darwinist" either misunderstand him or simply never read his work. Kropotkin was the father of anarcho-communism, who explicitly had the purpose of highlighting tendencies towards cooperation and empathy in both human and non-human life. While he certainly can be interpreted as a Rousseauan that romantisized "primitive" and medieval societies, the entire thrust of his work "Mutual Aid" is as a counter-balance to those very views that are commonly characterized as "social darwinism".
Social evolutionary theory, in the general sense, is simply an attempt to apply evolutionary concepts in a context beyond biology to things like culture, economics, and politics. In its backward-looking sense, it is simply an indispensible aspect of historical analysis. In its foreward-looking sense, it tends to entail some general conceptions of progress with respect to social interaction and organization. In and of itself, it does not entail the negative things associated with "social darwinism". It does not do justice to the general discourse on social evolution for it to be halted or polluted by associations with eugenics, racialism, and Mr. Scrooge bugaboos, or for many of its early proponents to be conflated with the Nazis, given the fact that liberalism and anarchism are involved. It would be best for people to try to look past their linguistic and socially inherited prejudices and judge the ideas of these thinkers on their own merits, while being cognizant of the much more broad scope of ideas that fall under the general umbrella of "social evolutionary theory".
There are a number of things that are worth clarifying about this. The term "social darwinism" itself may be somewhat misleading in the sense that the kind of view being described here is, up to a point, more of a misinterpretation of Darwin himself than a logical extension of his views. While Darwin did talk about "the survival of the fittest" and a sense of "struggle for existence", by no means did he mean to imply that cooperation and empathy is excluded from his analysis. Furthermore, Darwin himself is not necessarily the sole or even main source for social evolutionary theories. Both Lamarkian and post-darwinian ideas have influenced various social evolutionary theories. The general rubric of "social evolution" should be distinguished from "darwinism".
When I think of social evolutionary theories, the first two names that pop into my mind are Herbert Spencer and Peter Kropotkin. Despite the ill reputation that Spencer has been given as a "social darwinist", he was a Lamarkian who theorized about evolution prior to Darwin and who thought of social evolution as moving in the direction of more cooperation and "beneficience". He was a radical classical liberal that was explicitly opposed to militaristic, violent, or conflictual tendencies. Those who characterize him as a "social darwinist" either misunderstand him or simply never read his work. Kropotkin was the father of anarcho-communism, who explicitly had the purpose of highlighting tendencies towards cooperation and empathy in both human and non-human life. While he certainly can be interpreted as a Rousseauan that romantisized "primitive" and medieval societies, the entire thrust of his work "Mutual Aid" is as a counter-balance to those very views that are commonly characterized as "social darwinism".Social evolutionary theory, in the general sense, is simply an attempt to apply evolutionary concepts in a context beyond biology to things like culture, economics, and politics. In its backward-looking sense, it is simply an indispensible aspect of historical analysis. In its foreward-looking sense, it tends to entail some general conceptions of progress with respect to social interaction and organization. In and of itself, it does not entail the negative things associated with "social darwinism". It does not do justice to the general discourse on social evolution for it to be halted or polluted by associations with eugenics, racialism, and Mr. Scrooge bugaboos, or for many of its early proponents to be conflated with the Nazis, given the fact that liberalism and anarchism are involved. It would be best for people to try to look past their linguistic and socially inherited prejudices and judge the ideas of these thinkers on their own merits, while being cognizant of the much more broad scope of ideas that fall under the general umbrella of "social evolutionary theory".
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Anti-Darwinian Societies?
Anyone who keeps up with Richard Dawkins will have heard him mention that he thinks a society based on Darwinian principles would be vicious and contemptable. He goes further to state that Darwinian princples at the level of society would be an unhampered free market. He thinks society should be organized around anti-Darwinian principles, giving those who are destitute and impoverished a safety net in which to fall. I think this view is problematic.
The central fallacy in Dawkin's reasoning is his conflation of the free market with Darwinian principles. On this, I offer one large objection.
The law of association (also known as comparative advantage) makes clear that free trade is beneficial. It is beneficial because both parties gain during the exchange. That is, each party to the exchange values what he receives over and above what he gives up. The law of association also shows how the specialization and division of labor, with free trade as a backdrop, increases total productivity. Not only does it increase total productivity, but it even benefits the weaker party in terms of productivity. A simple example will illustrate this:
Imagine a world with two commodities: butter and bread. Amanda is best at producing bread, while David is best at producing butter. However, Amanda is absolutely better than David in producing bread and butter. In a day, Amanda can produce 20 loafs of bread if she concentrates solely on bread production, and she can produce 15 pounds of butter if she concentrates solely on butter production. David, on the other hand, can produce 15 pounds of butter if he concentrates solely on butter production, and he can produce 10 loafs of bread if he concentrates solely on bread production. On the other hand, if Amanda splits her time between bread and butter production, she can produce 10 loafs of bread and 7.5 pounds of butter, while David can produce 7.5 pounds of butter and 5 loafs of bread.
If Amanda produces that in which she is comparatively the best (bread) and David produces what he is comparatively the least disadvantaged (butter), overall production is higher than if each split their time between bread and butter. [Total production of 35 units versus 30 units.] The surplus can then be traded between the parties and each is better off. Expand this economic law across entire societies, with all of the goods and services produced therein, and the benefits of it become even more obvious.
I said all of that to point out the problem in Dawkins analysis of free markets: free markets do not impoverish the poor and inferior. As was shown, even if a person is superior in every way (at least when it comes to production), he will still be better off economically to trade with someone who is inferior in every way. In this way, the free market helps the poor and even those who may be genetically less gifted.
Thus, Dawkins contention that free markets are ruthless and have no regard for the poor is mistaken. You can be for the free market and be a champion of the least of those among us.
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