Sunday, August 30, 2009
Ultimate Decision-making Power
Francios Tremblay links to this article against anarcho-capitalism. I think that the article, while not perfect, makes a crucial point that solidifies something that I've been talking about recently (namely that if we do not object to the principle of absolute decision-making power derived from territorialism in general, then liberty is relativized to whatever a property owner allows and consequentially the "love it or leave it" problem persists). This is *not* a mere "anarcho-semantics" issue, it is a substantive one that strikes at the heart of how liberty and property are concieved of in relation to eachother.
The problem reduces to this: that anarcho-capitalism does not object to the principle of absolute/arbitrary authority over people that live in a given geographical area, it only objects to the means with which ownership over the geographical area is obtained. That is, it opposes the state only in the sense that it did not obtain ownership justly; if the geographical claim were obtained through homesteading or exchange, then the authority claim over those who live in the area would suddenly be treated as "legitimate". In effect, this means that everything about the state that anarcho-capitalists would otherwise object to can theoretically become legitimized using an anarcho-capitalist framework on the condition that the ownership claim is based on what is considered to be the right property norm.
Anarcho-capitalists will normally, and quite correctly, object to the "love it or leave it" argument for the state. But their grounds for objecting to "love it or leave it" is only based on the idea that it isn't the state's just property (and the implication of this is that it if *were* the state's just property, then the "love it or leave it" argument would suddenly be valid). What's more, they tend to neglect the failure of "love it or leave it" in any other context (such as that of an individual proprietor). From my perspective, the problem with "love it or leave it" does not merely reduce to the state not having a rightful claim to ownership, but it is problematic for the even more fundamental reason that arbitrary claims of absolute authority over others derived from territory are not justified in general. The problem with authority cannot simply be reduced to a question of who owns what.
Even if someone "homesteaded" or voluntarily traded for a given plot of land, this doesn't give them legitimate absolute authority to control the lives of whoever happens to occupy the area. This, to me, is the glaring contradiction in anarcho-capitalist political theory: that it objects to the state's absolute authority claim over those that occupy the territory while not objecting to any other claim of absolute authority over those that occupy a given territory. Or, to put the matter more bluntly, it objects to the state while simultaneously rationalizing the exact same thing as the state ("ultimate decision-making power" over others based on territory) on absolutist propertarian grounds. Indeed, one could make a justification for a state using absolutist propertarian arguments (which, applied to larger scales, can go something like this: "city X was voluntarily sold to person Y, therefore person Y has ultimate decision-making power over everyone in the city").
The issue, then, reduces to the pressing question of "ultimate decision-making power" in general, not the question of *who* should have "ultimate decision-making power". In relativizing and subordinating liberty to property, hardline anarcho-capitalism ends up looking like a rather hollow creed in the sense that it does not fundamentally object to authoritarianism. Rather, by implication of its own norms, whether intended or not, it ends up justifying authoritarianism on the grounds that it occurs on so-and-so's property and that it's the proprietor's "ultimate decision-making power". This blurs the line between liberty and authority by making it dependant on ownership - if you don't have ownership, you more or less are stuck submitting to the authority of those with ownership, and if you do have ownership, everyone else's liberty ends where your property lines begin.
If this is what the heart of the social anarchist critique of anarcho-capitalism is, then I must confess: I agree with the social anarchists on this general point (although when things get more specific, some notable disagreements emerge). Granted, some anarcho-capitalists tweak their theories to avoid such an authoritarian implication (and I would therefore want to avoid strawmanning at least to that extent), but this should be the logical implication of absolutist propertarianism and an indication of what happens when one fetishizes property and contracts to the point of absurdity and self-contradiction. And in the context of such an implication, combining absolutist propertarianism with anarchism is indeed a gross contradiction in terms and anarcho-capitalism deserves the derision that it normally gets from traditional anarchists.
The problem reduces to this: that anarcho-capitalism does not object to the principle of absolute/arbitrary authority over people that live in a given geographical area, it only objects to the means with which ownership over the geographical area is obtained. That is, it opposes the state only in the sense that it did not obtain ownership justly; if the geographical claim were obtained through homesteading or exchange, then the authority claim over those who live in the area would suddenly be treated as "legitimate". In effect, this means that everything about the state that anarcho-capitalists would otherwise object to can theoretically become legitimized using an anarcho-capitalist framework on the condition that the ownership claim is based on what is considered to be the right property norm.
Anarcho-capitalists will normally, and quite correctly, object to the "love it or leave it" argument for the state. But their grounds for objecting to "love it or leave it" is only based on the idea that it isn't the state's just property (and the implication of this is that it if *were* the state's just property, then the "love it or leave it" argument would suddenly be valid). What's more, they tend to neglect the failure of "love it or leave it" in any other context (such as that of an individual proprietor). From my perspective, the problem with "love it or leave it" does not merely reduce to the state not having a rightful claim to ownership, but it is problematic for the even more fundamental reason that arbitrary claims of absolute authority over others derived from territory are not justified in general. The problem with authority cannot simply be reduced to a question of who owns what.
Even if someone "homesteaded" or voluntarily traded for a given plot of land, this doesn't give them legitimate absolute authority to control the lives of whoever happens to occupy the area. This, to me, is the glaring contradiction in anarcho-capitalist political theory: that it objects to the state's absolute authority claim over those that occupy the territory while not objecting to any other claim of absolute authority over those that occupy a given territory. Or, to put the matter more bluntly, it objects to the state while simultaneously rationalizing the exact same thing as the state ("ultimate decision-making power" over others based on territory) on absolutist propertarian grounds. Indeed, one could make a justification for a state using absolutist propertarian arguments (which, applied to larger scales, can go something like this: "city X was voluntarily sold to person Y, therefore person Y has ultimate decision-making power over everyone in the city").
The issue, then, reduces to the pressing question of "ultimate decision-making power" in general, not the question of *who* should have "ultimate decision-making power". In relativizing and subordinating liberty to property, hardline anarcho-capitalism ends up looking like a rather hollow creed in the sense that it does not fundamentally object to authoritarianism. Rather, by implication of its own norms, whether intended or not, it ends up justifying authoritarianism on the grounds that it occurs on so-and-so's property and that it's the proprietor's "ultimate decision-making power". This blurs the line between liberty and authority by making it dependant on ownership - if you don't have ownership, you more or less are stuck submitting to the authority of those with ownership, and if you do have ownership, everyone else's liberty ends where your property lines begin.
If this is what the heart of the social anarchist critique of anarcho-capitalism is, then I must confess: I agree with the social anarchists on this general point (although when things get more specific, some notable disagreements emerge). Granted, some anarcho-capitalists tweak their theories to avoid such an authoritarian implication (and I would therefore want to avoid strawmanning at least to that extent), but this should be the logical implication of absolutist propertarianism and an indication of what happens when one fetishizes property and contracts to the point of absurdity and self-contradiction. And in the context of such an implication, combining absolutist propertarianism with anarchism is indeed a gross contradiction in terms and anarcho-capitalism deserves the derision that it normally gets from traditional anarchists.
Monday, August 24, 2009
On Libertarianism and Anarchism
I'd like expand on some of my thoughts about libertarianism from my last post commenting on Stephan Kinsella's article defining libertarianism, and reiterate my general viewpoint about libertarianism and anarchism.
In terms of the relationship between libertarianism and anarchism, my view is actually rather subtle. I think that there are libertarians that are not anarchists (such as the various varieties of minarchy), anarchists that are not libertarians (such as certain amoral egoists and perhaps certain elements within social anarchism), and libertarian anarchists. This analysis makes sense if we use basic and minimalistic definitions for both libertarianism and anarchism: if by "anarchism" we simply mean any ideology that rejects the legitimacy of the state and by "libertarianism" we refer to a specific conception of justice (or a specific set of conceptions of justice that have a similar root).
Of course, things get even more complicated once we dig deeper into the multiple percieved meanings of both libertarianism and anarchism. Some define anarchism not as merely being a rejection of the state, but in terms of opposition to heirarchy or as a more holistic anti-authoritarianism. And some define libertarianism in a way that is ethically value-neutral, even in terms of conceptions of justice. There are also numerous specific strands of libertarianism that differ over the details of the conception of justice (such as geolibertarianism, paleo-libertarianism, left-libertarianism, libertarian socialism, etc.). While libertarianism may be somewhat less pluralistic than anarchism, it is also fragmented into numerous sub-categories.
Flavors and definitions of anarchism encompass a wide range of social, economic and political positions (anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-primitivism, mutualism, anarcha-feminism, green anarchism, christian anarchism, anarcho-pacifism, etc.). If we define anarchism in the narrow sense of opposition to the state, then all of these ideologies potentially pass for forms of anarchism with a different emphasis and different social and economic positions. Using a narrow definition of anarchism, these are all secondary or "unessential" characteristics; a mere matter of "personal preferance".
However, if we use a broader definition of anarchism or if we define the state in a specific way, some of them are ruled out as constituting defacto forms of statism or as insufficiently anarchist in spite of their anti-statism. Even if we do define anarchism in terms of anti-statism, there are multiple viewpoints on precisely what the state is and what the preconditions for state formation are. For example, some would rule out anarcho-capitalism on the grounds that it either devolves into a defacto form of statism due to its property norms or it doesn't oppose authoritarianism or heirarchy and is consequentially insufficient to qualify as anarchism. On the other hand, some would rule out the models of social anarchists in the grounds that it reduces to defacto democracies.
On one hand, I think that the conflict among the different schools of self-styled anarchism sometimes involves a semantical wall in which people have more compatible positions than they think they do but are unable to see it due to their word-association tendencies. But, on the other hand, I don't think that the issue can be completely reduced to semantics and "personal preferance" in that certain normative positions are undeniably irreconcilable and some normative positions either devolve into some form of statism (based on a certain understanding of what states are) or are insufficient to qualify as fully supporting freedom given a more holistic anti-authoritarian definition of anarchism, in spite of them being nominally anti-statist.
From a more holistic perspective, it is possible for a society to not have a state in the modern or common sense of a state, while not being free (or maybe even being less free than certain societies that do have "states"). It could be said that political freedom is only one type or definition of freedom, or that "the state" in a modern or common sense is only one blockade to freedom out of many. From this perspective, anti-statism is necessary but not sufficient to produce a free society. This could even possibly be argued from a certain libertarian perspective in which certain ethical norms that apply beyond anti-statism are a necessary condition for a society to be free. Indeed, libertarianism fits into this in the sense that it provides, by the very least, a particular view or set of views on ethics.
I sympathize most with libertarian anarchism for this reason: that it provides at least some sort of context for a stateless society. But I also object to a narrow sense of libertarianism that tends to be neutral towards authoritarianism in a way that I think undermines itself and ultimately could be said to provide a basis for conditions that reduce to a defacto form of statism (which it is supposed to be against in the first place). This is where how libertarianism is defined or concieved of in terms of one's broader social philosophy starts to become particularly important, because it may end up being incoherant if it does not give itself a strong foundation and oppose authoritarianism in a more general sense. If everything that libertarians claim to oppose can be snuck back in under the banner of a certain conception of libertarianism, then some reconceptualization is needed.
In terms of the relationship between libertarianism and anarchism, my view is actually rather subtle. I think that there are libertarians that are not anarchists (such as the various varieties of minarchy), anarchists that are not libertarians (such as certain amoral egoists and perhaps certain elements within social anarchism), and libertarian anarchists. This analysis makes sense if we use basic and minimalistic definitions for both libertarianism and anarchism: if by "anarchism" we simply mean any ideology that rejects the legitimacy of the state and by "libertarianism" we refer to a specific conception of justice (or a specific set of conceptions of justice that have a similar root).
Of course, things get even more complicated once we dig deeper into the multiple percieved meanings of both libertarianism and anarchism. Some define anarchism not as merely being a rejection of the state, but in terms of opposition to heirarchy or as a more holistic anti-authoritarianism. And some define libertarianism in a way that is ethically value-neutral, even in terms of conceptions of justice. There are also numerous specific strands of libertarianism that differ over the details of the conception of justice (such as geolibertarianism, paleo-libertarianism, left-libertarianism, libertarian socialism, etc.). While libertarianism may be somewhat less pluralistic than anarchism, it is also fragmented into numerous sub-categories.
Flavors and definitions of anarchism encompass a wide range of social, economic and political positions (anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-primitivism, mutualism, anarcha-feminism, green anarchism, christian anarchism, anarcho-pacifism, etc.). If we define anarchism in the narrow sense of opposition to the state, then all of these ideologies potentially pass for forms of anarchism with a different emphasis and different social and economic positions. Using a narrow definition of anarchism, these are all secondary or "unessential" characteristics; a mere matter of "personal preferance".
However, if we use a broader definition of anarchism or if we define the state in a specific way, some of them are ruled out as constituting defacto forms of statism or as insufficiently anarchist in spite of their anti-statism. Even if we do define anarchism in terms of anti-statism, there are multiple viewpoints on precisely what the state is and what the preconditions for state formation are. For example, some would rule out anarcho-capitalism on the grounds that it either devolves into a defacto form of statism due to its property norms or it doesn't oppose authoritarianism or heirarchy and is consequentially insufficient to qualify as anarchism. On the other hand, some would rule out the models of social anarchists in the grounds that it reduces to defacto democracies.
On one hand, I think that the conflict among the different schools of self-styled anarchism sometimes involves a semantical wall in which people have more compatible positions than they think they do but are unable to see it due to their word-association tendencies. But, on the other hand, I don't think that the issue can be completely reduced to semantics and "personal preferance" in that certain normative positions are undeniably irreconcilable and some normative positions either devolve into some form of statism (based on a certain understanding of what states are) or are insufficient to qualify as fully supporting freedom given a more holistic anti-authoritarian definition of anarchism, in spite of them being nominally anti-statist.
From a more holistic perspective, it is possible for a society to not have a state in the modern or common sense of a state, while not being free (or maybe even being less free than certain societies that do have "states"). It could be said that political freedom is only one type or definition of freedom, or that "the state" in a modern or common sense is only one blockade to freedom out of many. From this perspective, anti-statism is necessary but not sufficient to produce a free society. This could even possibly be argued from a certain libertarian perspective in which certain ethical norms that apply beyond anti-statism are a necessary condition for a society to be free. Indeed, libertarianism fits into this in the sense that it provides, by the very least, a particular view or set of views on ethics.
I sympathize most with libertarian anarchism for this reason: that it provides at least some sort of context for a stateless society. But I also object to a narrow sense of libertarianism that tends to be neutral towards authoritarianism in a way that I think undermines itself and ultimately could be said to provide a basis for conditions that reduce to a defacto form of statism (which it is supposed to be against in the first place). This is where how libertarianism is defined or concieved of in terms of one's broader social philosophy starts to become particularly important, because it may end up being incoherant if it does not give itself a strong foundation and oppose authoritarianism in a more general sense. If everything that libertarians claim to oppose can be snuck back in under the banner of a certain conception of libertarianism, then some reconceptualization is needed.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Definition and Scope of Libertarianism
Stephan Kinsella recently wrote a piece at mises.org that functions as a basic exposition of what he thinks libertarianism is by definition. I'd like to add some commentary and criticism in response to this article, because I think that it overlooks some fundamental issues and attempts to establish a definition for libertarianism that is too narrow in some ways. It seems like Kinsella is ultimately conflating a particular formulation of libertarianism with libertarianism as a whole.
The first issue is that it is not at all clear that "capitalism" (or at least, the particular norms that tend to be associated with "capitalism") inherently arises as the only economic system or forms of economic organization that can coherently be derived from libertarianism. Of course, this also depends on how "capitalism" is defined. If "capitalism" is merely being used to mean "whatever results from voluntary interaction", then there is no reason why the norms of libertaran socialism couldn't concievably arise as a particular manifestation of "capitalism" - which is confusing language. Presumably, these things (such as worker's cooperatives and mutual aid organizations) are technically "permitted" in a libertarian society.
However, the use of the term "capitalism" among many libertarians tends to conceal the implicit assumption that a certainspecific set of modes of economic organization are inherent to it (such as the corporation, traditional wage labor, and so on). This is a conflation of voluntary interaction in general with a particular type of organization or interaction. What's more, various libertarians have put foreward a criticism of them on the grounds that their relative dominance is within the context of an already-existing non-libertarian social order or political system, and that there are certain reasons for postulating that people would have an incentive to choose alternatives to them in a libertarian social order.
The second issue is that it is not at all clear that all libertarians agree with Murray Rothbard that "all rights are property rights", or that this view is a necessary component of being a libertarian. Many libertarians with a neo-aristotilean temperment (and not just those with a left-libertarian temperment as well), for example, tend to have a view more along the lines that property rights are an entailment of a more general right of liberty. In this sense, liberty can be thought of as providing a context for property rights, and not the other way around. In fact, if we want to take the premise that liberty is defined by property rights quite literally, a reductio ad absurdum of immense proportions should immediately pop out at us: that one's liberty is entirely dependant on whatever the will of a land owner is and completely goes away as soon as one is on someone else's land.
In effect, this would mean that liberty is constrained by property and contracts, potentially to the point of being completely nullified (I.E. "you're on my land, therefore I can do whatever I want to you" or "you signed this contract, therefore you have to do whatever I tell you to do for the rest of your life"). This is precisely why liberty as a general principle is actually over and above property and contracts in a certain sense, and property and contracts are in fact not involiable. And, despite his insistance that all rights are property rights, Rothbard himself aknowledged this in the sense that he considered liberty inalienable (and, quite rightly, opposed all slavery contracts). This is basically an admission to a way in which all rights can be said to not be property rights in an alienable sense.
Kinsella goes on to remark about property in relation to aggression:
If we don't accept Kinsella's particular formulation of libertarianism, we could concievably accuse it of condoning aggression. On the other hand and more generally speaking, if we assume a particular criteria for property ownership and if we assume a particular allocation of property titles, we could concievably accuse anyone that doesn't share our concept of property or anyone that doesn't agree with the particular allocation of property titles that we favor of inherently condoning aggression. And this is, in fact, what some libertarians end up doing: accusing anyone that doesn't share their property conventions (particularly, a non-proviso lockean conception of property) of condoning aggression by definition. It seems like this can be rather unfair; a conflation of one's property conventions with non-aggression and a conflation of all alternative property conventions with aggression.
As an additional note that may be worth considering, on the flip side of the matter, there is a sense in which would could say that property rights are dependant on the non-aggression principle, in that not aggressing against others is a norm with respect to the process of aquiring property. The very nature of trading and gift-giving is that of a non-aggressive process of action. One could therefore coherantly say that this works in both directions: there is a sense in which what constitutes aggression with respect to property is dependant on how property rights are defined to begin with, and there is a sense in which how property rights are defined to begin with is dependant on a question about aggression. This isn't as simple as it may initially appear to be.
Kinsella specifies what is meant by "property rights" a little more here:
But where I begin to disagree with Kinsella is that, in my understanding, it is not all the case that there is a single set of libertarian "property assignment rules", other than a commitment to non-aggression that can sometimes be rather vague. Non-proviso lockeans, proviso lockeans, geoists and mutualists are all different types of libertarians, whether Kinsella wants to admit this or not. It is not the case that one has to be a non-proviso lockean to be a libertarian, there is no absolute consensus among libertarians about property and even non-proviso lockeans don't completely agree with eachother with respect to what their property theory entails or is compatible with (for example, Roderick Long seems to think that non-proviso lockeanism can potentially be compatibalized with geoism and mutualism, while others take a much more rigid line about the matter).
Kinsella proceeds to talk about "self-ownership":
Kinsella goes on to talk about the relation between "self-ownership" and non-aggression.
The highlighted qualifier about defense and retaliation is not as cut and dry as it may initially seem. Libertarians have all sorts of internal disputes about precisely what constitutes defense, and most libertarians have a different view on "retaliation" than ARI Objectivists do. ARI Objectivists tend to justify many wars on the grounds of "retaliation" that most libertarians would object to as initiations of force. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that pacifists don't qualify as libertarians. If a commitment to the non-initiation of force is a prequisite to being a libertarian, then pacifists not only qualify as libertarians, they exceed the qualification. I therefore think it makes sense to maintain that pacifists are actually defacto libertarians.
Libertarians, even those who are not absolute pacifists, also have internal disputes about violent punishment. Some libertarians take a "maximalist position" in which physical violence is supposed to be justified in response to minor property transgressions, some libertarians take a "proportionality" position in which "maximalism" is ruled out as an unproportionate response to the initial crime, and some libertarians categorically reject all violent punishment as an inherent violation of the non-aggression principle. Libertarians are also split on the death penalty. Rothbard restricted the death penalty to cases of murder, but some libertarians support either a broader death penalty or no death penalty at all.
Considerations like this demonstrate that libertarianism cannot be so easily simplified and that the non-aggression principle cannot merely be stated as some sort of single-line maxim without begging a whole host of important questions with respect to how aggression is defined and the context that the non-aggression principle can be said to have. Libertarians don't even all agree with eachother on whether or not the non-aggression principle genuinely can be said to have axoimatic status (indeed, while Kinsella quotes Rand, she did not consider it to be a contextless axoim) and there are endless disagreements about what its foundations and implications are.
The article continues with an explaination trying to distinguish libertarians from others:
The second issue is that, even among self-proclaimed libertarian anarchists, there is no uniform opposition to slavery to be found. In fact, Walter Block and numerous individuals following in his footsteps or who take a similar view, think that slavery contracts can potentially be legitimate if they are initially voluntarily entered into. Consequentially, there have been "voluntary slavery" debates within libertarian discourse. One side maintains that such cases of slavery cannot be objected to because it's an initially "voluntary contract", while another side generally upholds the notion of inalienability of rights and considers such a contract to inherently be null and void - or at least, opt-outable at any time. There are also disputes over debt peonage or involuntary-servitude-as-punishment as a form of "voluntary slavery".
Moving on to property in external things, Kinsella states:
Kinsella goes on to get into the neo-lockean conception of ownership:
Furthermore, even if we agree with the general notion of original appropriation, we do not necessarily have to agree that the original appropriator legitimately maintains ownership forever and ever from that point onwards (or until they die). Hence the notion of abandonment (and abandonment is not based on the mere "intent" to abandon), which is really what the "occupancy and use" qualification that some people have for property reduces to: a more stringent notion of abandonment than that which is commonly held by anarcho-capitalists and non-proviso lockeans. And both the notion of "occupancy and use" and property "returning to the commons" is not a quantative timeline that functions as some sort of arbitrary regulation, it is a qualatative matter.
Kinsella goes into more depth about the property issue:
Various formulations abound. It is said that libertarianism is about individual rights, property rights, the free market, capitalism, justice, or the nonaggression principle. Not just any of these will do, however. Capitalism and the free market describe the catallactic conditions that arise or are permitted in a libertarian society, but do not encompass other aspects of libertarianism. And individual rights, justice, and aggression collapse into property rights. As Murray Rothbard explained, individual rights are property rights. And justice is just giving someone his due, which depends on what his rights are.There are two basic issues with this paragraph, which I've highlighted in italics.
The first issue is that it is not at all clear that "capitalism" (or at least, the particular norms that tend to be associated with "capitalism") inherently arises as the only economic system or forms of economic organization that can coherently be derived from libertarianism. Of course, this also depends on how "capitalism" is defined. If "capitalism" is merely being used to mean "whatever results from voluntary interaction", then there is no reason why the norms of libertaran socialism couldn't concievably arise as a particular manifestation of "capitalism" - which is confusing language. Presumably, these things (such as worker's cooperatives and mutual aid organizations) are technically "permitted" in a libertarian society.
However, the use of the term "capitalism" among many libertarians tends to conceal the implicit assumption that a certainspecific set of modes of economic organization are inherent to it (such as the corporation, traditional wage labor, and so on). This is a conflation of voluntary interaction in general with a particular type of organization or interaction. What's more, various libertarians have put foreward a criticism of them on the grounds that their relative dominance is within the context of an already-existing non-libertarian social order or political system, and that there are certain reasons for postulating that people would have an incentive to choose alternatives to them in a libertarian social order.
The second issue is that it is not at all clear that all libertarians agree with Murray Rothbard that "all rights are property rights", or that this view is a necessary component of being a libertarian. Many libertarians with a neo-aristotilean temperment (and not just those with a left-libertarian temperment as well), for example, tend to have a view more along the lines that property rights are an entailment of a more general right of liberty. In this sense, liberty can be thought of as providing a context for property rights, and not the other way around. In fact, if we want to take the premise that liberty is defined by property rights quite literally, a reductio ad absurdum of immense proportions should immediately pop out at us: that one's liberty is entirely dependant on whatever the will of a land owner is and completely goes away as soon as one is on someone else's land.
In effect, this would mean that liberty is constrained by property and contracts, potentially to the point of being completely nullified (I.E. "you're on my land, therefore I can do whatever I want to you" or "you signed this contract, therefore you have to do whatever I tell you to do for the rest of your life"). This is precisely why liberty as a general principle is actually over and above property and contracts in a certain sense, and property and contracts are in fact not involiable. And, despite his insistance that all rights are property rights, Rothbard himself aknowledged this in the sense that he considered liberty inalienable (and, quite rightly, opposed all slavery contracts). This is basically an admission to a way in which all rights can be said to not be property rights in an alienable sense.
Kinsella goes on to remark about property in relation to aggression:
The nonaggression principle is also dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our (property) rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass — aggression — only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim.The basic premise highlighted in italics is important. This is where I think that things start to get especially murky. If the non-aggression principle is dependant on how one defines property rights to begin with, which seems true enough, then this opens a huge philosophical can of worms. This, at least descriptively, relativizes non-aggression. We bump into the problem that when an act of physical violence can be considered either aggression or defense will vary widely depending on (1) what basis we have for property and (2) consequentially, how property titles are allocated. And it is therefore not at all clear that (1) libertarians in general are the only group that can claim to consistently favor non-aggression and (2) that Kinsella's particular formulation of libertarianism is by definition the only one that can claim to consistently favor non-aggression.
If we don't accept Kinsella's particular formulation of libertarianism, we could concievably accuse it of condoning aggression. On the other hand and more generally speaking, if we assume a particular criteria for property ownership and if we assume a particular allocation of property titles, we could concievably accuse anyone that doesn't share our concept of property or anyone that doesn't agree with the particular allocation of property titles that we favor of inherently condoning aggression. And this is, in fact, what some libertarians end up doing: accusing anyone that doesn't share their property conventions (particularly, a non-proviso lockean conception of property) of condoning aggression by definition. It seems like this can be rather unfair; a conflation of one's property conventions with non-aggression and a conflation of all alternative property conventions with aggression.
As an additional note that may be worth considering, on the flip side of the matter, there is a sense in which would could say that property rights are dependant on the non-aggression principle, in that not aggressing against others is a norm with respect to the process of aquiring property. The very nature of trading and gift-giving is that of a non-aggressive process of action. One could therefore coherantly say that this works in both directions: there is a sense in which what constitutes aggression with respect to property is dependant on how property rights are defined to begin with, and there is a sense in which how property rights are defined to begin with is dependant on a question about aggression. This isn't as simple as it may initially appear to be.
Kinsella specifies what is meant by "property rights" a little more here:
Property rights specify which persons own — that is, have the right to control — various scarce resources in a given region or jurisdiction. Yet everyone and every political theory advance some theory of property. None of the various forms of socialism deny property rights; each version will specify an owner for every scarce resource. If the state nationalizes an industry, it is asserting ownership of these means of production. If the state taxes you, it is implicitly asserting ownership of the funds taken. If my land is transferred to a private developer by eminent domain statutes, the developer is now the owner. If the law allows a recipient of racial discrimination to sue his employer for a sum of money, he is the owner of the money.The parts that I highlighted in italics are of particular interest to me. Kinsella makes a valid point in that, if by "property rights" we generally mean the question of who controls what (at a minimum), then all political theories have some conception of property rights, even if they do not explicitly use the term "property" or "property rights". In this sense, it doesn't make sense to say that anyone is "against property" or "pro-property" in any absolute manner because this is rather vague. We should always keep in mind that we are dealing with specific conceptions of property and property rights.
Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its particular property assignment rules: its view concerning who is the owner of each contestable resource, and how to determine this.
But where I begin to disagree with Kinsella is that, in my understanding, it is not all the case that there is a single set of libertarian "property assignment rules", other than a commitment to non-aggression that can sometimes be rather vague. Non-proviso lockeans, proviso lockeans, geoists and mutualists are all different types of libertarians, whether Kinsella wants to admit this or not. It is not the case that one has to be a non-proviso lockean to be a libertarian, there is no absolute consensus among libertarians about property and even non-proviso lockeans don't completely agree with eachother with respect to what their property theory entails or is compatible with (for example, Roderick Long seems to think that non-proviso lockeanism can potentially be compatibalized with geoism and mutualism, while others take a much more rigid line about the matter).
Kinsella proceeds to talk about "self-ownership":
A system of property rights assigns a particular owner to every scarce resource. These resources obviously include natural resources such as land, fruits of trees, and so on. Objects found in nature are not the only scarce resources, however. Each human actor has, controls, and is identified and associated with a unique human body, which is also a scarce resource. Both human bodies and nonhuman, scarce resources are desired for use as means by actors in the pursuit of various goals.I highlighted the statement about any political theory having to assign ownership rights in bodies as well as in external things because I think part of the problem is that libertarians often do not make it clear that their notion of "self-ownership" does not function exactly the same as property rights in external objects. That is, when we think of ownership over external objects, we normally think of them as exchangable (or givable) commodities. However, this is not the same sense of "ownership" that most libertarians mean by "self-ownership" in that it is not concieving of one's body as an exchangable commodity, it is inalienable. It is a claim of autonomy or individual sovereignty. The problem with murdering and assaulting people need not be concieved of in a propertarian manner or using propertarian language.
Accordingly, any political theory or system must assign ownership rights in human bodies as well as in external things. Let us consider first the libertarian property assignment rules with respect to human bodies, and the corresponding notion of aggression as it pertains to bodies. Libertarians often vigorously assert the "nonaggression principle." As Ayn Rand said, "So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate — do you hear me? No man may start — the use of physical force against others."
Kinsella goes on to talk about the relation between "self-ownership" and non-aggression.
In other words, libertarians maintain that the only way to violate rights is by initiating force — that is, by committing aggression. (Libertarianism also holds that, while the initiation of force against another person's body is impermissible, force used in response to aggression — such as defensive, restitutive, or retaliatory/punitive force — is justified.)
Now in the case of the body, it is clear what aggression is: invading the borders of someone's body, commonly called battery, or, more generally, using the body of another without his or her consent. The very notion of interpersonal aggression presupposes property rights in bodies — more particularly, that each person is, at least prima facie, the owner of his own body.
The highlighted qualifier about defense and retaliation is not as cut and dry as it may initially seem. Libertarians have all sorts of internal disputes about precisely what constitutes defense, and most libertarians have a different view on "retaliation" than ARI Objectivists do. ARI Objectivists tend to justify many wars on the grounds of "retaliation" that most libertarians would object to as initiations of force. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that pacifists don't qualify as libertarians. If a commitment to the non-initiation of force is a prequisite to being a libertarian, then pacifists not only qualify as libertarians, they exceed the qualification. I therefore think it makes sense to maintain that pacifists are actually defacto libertarians.
Libertarians, even those who are not absolute pacifists, also have internal disputes about violent punishment. Some libertarians take a "maximalist position" in which physical violence is supposed to be justified in response to minor property transgressions, some libertarians take a "proportionality" position in which "maximalism" is ruled out as an unproportionate response to the initial crime, and some libertarians categorically reject all violent punishment as an inherent violation of the non-aggression principle. Libertarians are also split on the death penalty. Rothbard restricted the death penalty to cases of murder, but some libertarians support either a broader death penalty or no death penalty at all.
Considerations like this demonstrate that libertarianism cannot be so easily simplified and that the non-aggression principle cannot merely be stated as some sort of single-line maxim without begging a whole host of important questions with respect to how aggression is defined and the context that the non-aggression principle can be said to have. Libertarians don't even all agree with eachother on whether or not the non-aggression principle genuinely can be said to have axoimatic status (indeed, while Kinsella quotes Rand, she did not consider it to be a contextless axoim) and there are endless disagreements about what its foundations and implications are.
The article continues with an explaination trying to distinguish libertarians from others:
The libertarian says that each person is the full owner of his body: he has the right to control his body, to decide whether or not he ingests narcotics, joins an army, and so on. Those various nonlibertarians who endorse any such state prohibitions, however, necessarily maintain that the state, or society, is at least a partial owner of the body of those subject to such laws — or even a complete owner in the case of conscriptees or nonaggressor "criminals" incarcerated for life. Libertarians believe in self-ownership. Nonlibertarians — statists — of all stripes advocate some form of slavery.There are two main issues with the implication of the part in italics. The first issue is that it seems unfair and oversimplistic to claim that minarchists are not libertarians. The very person who the site that this article was written for is named after was a minarchist: is Kinsella going to claim that Mises was not a libertarian? While I'm a libertarian anarchist myself, as a matter of categorization I fully grant minarchists the status of "libertarian". Generally, what distinguishes minarchists from libertarian anarchists is a matter of what one thinks the logical implications of libertarianism are. Minarchists tend to believe that the state is necessary to enforce the non-aggression principle. They may be wrong about this and there may be an internal contradiction within minarchism in which the state itself is dependant on aggression, but this doesn't make them non-libertarians by definition. The libertarian vs. statist dichotomy seems oversimplified.
The second issue is that, even among self-proclaimed libertarian anarchists, there is no uniform opposition to slavery to be found. In fact, Walter Block and numerous individuals following in his footsteps or who take a similar view, think that slavery contracts can potentially be legitimate if they are initially voluntarily entered into. Consequentially, there have been "voluntary slavery" debates within libertarian discourse. One side maintains that such cases of slavery cannot be objected to because it's an initially "voluntary contract", while another side generally upholds the notion of inalienability of rights and considers such a contract to inherently be null and void - or at least, opt-outable at any time. There are also disputes over debt peonage or involuntary-servitude-as-punishment as a form of "voluntary slavery".
Moving on to property in external things, Kinsella states:
Libertarians apply similar reasoning in the case of other scarce resources — namely, external objects in the world that, unlike bodies, were at one point unowned. In the case of bodies, the idea of aggression being impermissible immediately implies self-ownership. In the case of external objects, however, we must identify who the owner is before we can determine what constitutes aggression.I'm going to try to make a clarification with respect to the part in italics in the sense that I find it to be necessary but not sufficient. I've expressed this viewpoint before. The problem is that what constitutes aggression is not merely dependant on the question of "who is the owner?", it is also dependant on the question of "even assuming the legitimacy of a given person's ownership, what type of scope of decision-making power does ownership legitimately allow for?". And to this question, my answer is that the decision-making power is actually non-absolute precisely because it comes into conflict with people's right to life and liberty if it is treated as absolute. For example, if I'm the legitimate owner of my home, this doesn't mean that I can do whatever I want to whoever is in my home at a given time; I can't just assault and murder people and then appeal to the fact that it's my home and say "love it or leave it". In this sense, what constitutes aggression is a much broader issue than property in external things.
Kinsella goes on to get into the neo-lockean conception of ownership:
Unlike human bodies, however, external objects are not parts of one's identity, are not directly controlled by one's will, and — significantly — they are initially unowned. Here, the libertarian realizes that the relevant objective link is appropriation — the transformation or embordering of a previously unowned resource, Lockean homesteading, the first use or possession of the thing.[19] Under this approach, the first (prior) user of a previously unowned thing has a prima facie better claim than a second (later) claimant, solely by virtue of his being earlier.I must repeat that it is not at all fair for Kinsella to be defining non-proviso lockeanism as a rigid requirement for one to be a libertarian. Geolibertarians and proviso lockeans are not non-libertarians for not accepting the anarcho-capitalist hardline on land property - unless Kinsella wishes to denounce sacred cows such as Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov for the sin of geoism. I'd also like to point out that the question of "original appropriation", at least in the context of modern industrial areas, has little to no relevance in the sense that we're mostly dealing with property that has long since already been originally appropriated, and it largely reduces to a question of title-transfer of already-owned property and the issue of abandonment. The question of "homesteading" in the sense of original appropriation has no relevance with respect to the question of who owns the roads, the houses, the factories, the parks, the schools, city hall, and so on.
Furthermore, even if we agree with the general notion of original appropriation, we do not necessarily have to agree that the original appropriator legitimately maintains ownership forever and ever from that point onwards (or until they die). Hence the notion of abandonment (and abandonment is not based on the mere "intent" to abandon), which is really what the "occupancy and use" qualification that some people have for property reduces to: a more stringent notion of abandonment than that which is commonly held by anarcho-capitalists and non-proviso lockeans. And both the notion of "occupancy and use" and property "returning to the commons" is not a quantative timeline that functions as some sort of arbitrary regulation, it is a qualatative matter.
Kinsella goes into more depth about the property issue:
Why is appropriation the relevant link for determination of ownership? First, keep in mind that the question with respect to such scarce resources is: who is the resource's owner? Recall that ownership is the right to control, use, or possess, while possession is actual control — "the factual authority that a person exercises over a corporeal thing." The question is not who has physical possession; it is who has ownership.It appears obvious to me that Kinsella is conflating the "occupancy and use" qualification for property with a Max Stirner amoralist style position. The "occupancy and use" qualification for property is not the claim that "whatever I can take and can maintain is mine". If anything, it is the exact same thing as what Kinsella himself is trying to defend in a certain sense: that claims to ownership have to be traceable back to an objective criteria that demonstrates some sort of meaningful connectionbetween the claimant and the property. The main difference is that the "occupancy and use" qualification is more open to the possibility that an "original appropriator" can become so disconnected from the property that they are claiming that their "ownership" become dubious. And a mere legal title to the property is not sufficient as an objective criteria connecting someone with the property; in fact, it can be completely arbitrary, and Rothbard himself actually went out of his way to make this point in "The Ethics of Liberty".
Thus, asking who is the owner of a resource presupposes a distinction between ownership and possession — between the right to control, and actual control. And the answer has to take into account the nature of previously unowned things — namely, that they must at some point become owned by a first owner.
The answer must also take into account the presupposed goals of those seeking this answer: rules that permit conflict-free use of resources. For this reason, the answer cannot be whoever has the resource or whoever is able to take it is its owner. To hold such a view is to adopt a might-makes-right system, where ownership collapses into possession for want of a distinction. Such a system, far from avoiding conflict, makes conflict inevitable.
Instead of a might-makes-right approach, from the insights noted above it is obvious that ownership presupposes the prior-later distinction: whoever any given system specifies as the owner of a resource, he has a better claim than latecomers. If he does not, then he is not an owner, but merely the current user or possessor. If he is supposed an owner on the might-makes-right principle, in which there is no such thing as ownership, it contradicts the presuppositions of the inquiry itself. If the first owner does not have a better claim than latecomers, then he is not an owner, but merely a possessor, and there is no such thing as ownership.What I would like for Kinsella to entertain is the possibility that the claim of the "latecomer" is not always wrong by definition, that there can be circumstances in which the "prior comer" has become so disconnected from the property and that the "latecomer" has established a significant connection to the property that the "prior comer's" claim is actually the one that is nullified. There may be at least some cases in which the "first owner" actually doesn't have a "better claim", and is indeed nothing but a "possessor" without a legitimate claim to the property anymore. I would also like to point out that if we adopt as an absolute rule that the "late comer" is always in the wrong and the prior possessor is always the legitimate owner, then this justifies the state, because the state is the defacto prior owner of the land in the societies that we are simply born into. In fact, this is a huge hole in anarcho-capitalism, in which the very arguent that anarcho-capitalists give in favor of land owners can just as easily be applied as a defense of any state and as an explaination for state formation.
More generally, latecomers' claims are inferior to those of prior possessors or claimants, who either homesteaded the resource or who can trace their title back to the homesteader or earlier owner. The crucial importance of the prior-later distinction to libertarian theory is why Professor Hoppe repeatedly emphasizes it in his writing.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Conclusions of Materialism
I've noticed a tendency of some materialists to completely dismiss the moral perspective and the aesthetic perspective (and even the epistemological perspective) out of hand, leading to a certain kind of scientistic (and not scientific) nihilism. I think that this is a non-sequitor from materialism in which context is dropped. By materialism I refer to the basic naturalistic notion that matter is the only thing that exists, which is generally understood to be in opposition to idealism and supernaturalism. By all accounts, I am a materialist myself, but I object to the conclusions that some people reach from materialism.
Materialism can sometimes lead people to adopt what might be called a "concrete-bound" or "anti-conceptual" mentality in which the role or power of concepts is neglected, taken to the point of dismissing various abstractions as if they necessarily are "floating" or completely unrelated to reality. This can be manifested as a reductionism taken too far or a sort of vulgar atomism in which aggregates or higher-level properties are said to not exist. It also can be manifested as a crude view in which conciousness practically dissapears. But, given a sensible philosophy of mind (hint: John Searle?), such views are indefensible.
Materialism has also lead some people to adopt a pessimistic nihilism in terms of the viewpoint that life is just a pointless cycle of consumption and reproduction, the continual fruitless striving to avoid pain and the purely malevolent play of volatile physical forces. This is basically what happens when we project a pessimistic value judgement onto determinism that downplays what we can potentially make out of life while we're here. But I don't think that any of this necessarily follows from materialism. It seems like one could just as easily find meaning in life as an individual in a more existentialist sense. The fact that I'm a biological being doesn't have to negate my individuality and the various goals and things that make me happy in life. Such a nihilism is a non-sequitor; materialism does not negate the realm of experience.
Another issue is the use of scientific descriptions as if they override morality and aesthetics. For example, suppose someone is playing a piece of music on a guitar. A materialist can lecture us about how the sound waves coming from the guitar technically work. But from a musical perspective, that is irrelevant - what matters is how it sounds, how that makes us feel and values that it could represent. It seems like both the scientific and the aesthetic perspective are valid, it's just that they're different contexts. The scientific description of sound waves doesn't negate the aesthetic value of the music and the aesthetic value of the music doesn't make the scientific description of how it's produced false either. In this sense, perspectivism (or a vibrant contextualism) makes sense to me.
Or let's use a flower as an example. A scientist can lecture us about the "brute facts" of the flower, the description of its physical composition. On the other hand, someone can consider the flower in terms of its beauty or in terms of the particular function that it may have in a given context (for example, perhaps the flower was given to them as a gift and they view it as a token of appriciation). It seems clear to me that both perspectives can be valid without contradicting eachother. The "brute facts" about the flower don't negate its aesthetic value or its "use value", and its aesthetic value and "use value" don't negate its physical nature as an object. One could concievably entertain both aspects of the flower at the same time. To use materialism to negate aesthetic value and "use value" seems rather vulgar and misses the point.
Materialism can sometimes lead people to adopt what might be called a "concrete-bound" or "anti-conceptual" mentality in which the role or power of concepts is neglected, taken to the point of dismissing various abstractions as if they necessarily are "floating" or completely unrelated to reality. This can be manifested as a reductionism taken too far or a sort of vulgar atomism in which aggregates or higher-level properties are said to not exist. It also can be manifested as a crude view in which conciousness practically dissapears. But, given a sensible philosophy of mind (hint: John Searle?), such views are indefensible.
Materialism has also lead some people to adopt a pessimistic nihilism in terms of the viewpoint that life is just a pointless cycle of consumption and reproduction, the continual fruitless striving to avoid pain and the purely malevolent play of volatile physical forces. This is basically what happens when we project a pessimistic value judgement onto determinism that downplays what we can potentially make out of life while we're here. But I don't think that any of this necessarily follows from materialism. It seems like one could just as easily find meaning in life as an individual in a more existentialist sense. The fact that I'm a biological being doesn't have to negate my individuality and the various goals and things that make me happy in life. Such a nihilism is a non-sequitor; materialism does not negate the realm of experience.
Another issue is the use of scientific descriptions as if they override morality and aesthetics. For example, suppose someone is playing a piece of music on a guitar. A materialist can lecture us about how the sound waves coming from the guitar technically work. But from a musical perspective, that is irrelevant - what matters is how it sounds, how that makes us feel and values that it could represent. It seems like both the scientific and the aesthetic perspective are valid, it's just that they're different contexts. The scientific description of sound waves doesn't negate the aesthetic value of the music and the aesthetic value of the music doesn't make the scientific description of how it's produced false either. In this sense, perspectivism (or a vibrant contextualism) makes sense to me.
Or let's use a flower as an example. A scientist can lecture us about the "brute facts" of the flower, the description of its physical composition. On the other hand, someone can consider the flower in terms of its beauty or in terms of the particular function that it may have in a given context (for example, perhaps the flower was given to them as a gift and they view it as a token of appriciation). It seems clear to me that both perspectives can be valid without contradicting eachother. The "brute facts" about the flower don't negate its aesthetic value or its "use value", and its aesthetic value and "use value" don't negate its physical nature as an object. One could concievably entertain both aspects of the flower at the same time. To use materialism to negate aesthetic value and "use value" seems rather vulgar and misses the point.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Independence of Thought
As a virtue, independence of thought is roughly an extension of the virtue of rationality. Rationality (as a virtue) is a general personal policy of applying reason to the evidence available to you and to your decision making. The codified, explicit discipline underlying rationality is logic; and the target of logic is the evidence of the senses.
By its very nature, rationality is not contingent on consensus or the opinions of others but on reality and actual objective means towards the end of acquiring knowledge. The old expression "Four million Frenchman can't be wrong" is not correct; there's nothing about the nature of consensus that transforms reality to conform with opinion.
Once a group of people begin to realize that they share certain premises, it becomes clear that they can benefit through a mutually arranged allegiance for the sake of elaborating upon and spreading those premises. This is particularly true of political premises, since politics are essentially contingent on the thinking and behavior of the majority of other people.
This group of people will develop additional premises through interaction and discussion, leading to the development of an othodoxy of generally accepted ideas within this group. This marks the creation of an ideology, which is a bundle of premises identified with a specific label. Examples include Christianity, socialism, science, and even libertarianism.
Ideologies can be both very useful and very dangerous. They are useful in that exposure usually leads to a solid increase in knowledge from exposure to a large bundle of interrelated premises. Even if someone does not accept an ideology as a whole, in all likelihood they will still retain some useful premises from it.
Ideologies are also useful because they enable people to interact with the types of other people that they want to interact with more easily. The label becomes a tag that functions as an identifier for social interaction. Someone with a strong distaste of religion might, for example, seek out others that bear the label "freethinker" or "Bright."
The social nature of ideologies is also what makes them dangerous. In its most extreme forms, dissenters among the group can be killed or tortured, which was a common occurence among many religious ideologies throughout history. In more common and less extreme forms, dissenters might be excommunicated or otherwise banned from interaction with members of the ideology.
Individuals that are seeking to escape from independent thinking often flock to ideologies as a means of delegating the task to others. An ideology provides a group of people that will warmly accept an individual in the event that they submit their will to the members. This is very appealing to individuals with no sense of self.
Members of an ideology who are not without a sense of self may still feel pressured to openly accept ideas or premises that they think are wrong. Once one has established their social network deep within an ideology, breaking free becomes painful and possibly even devastating, and can put someone in a position of basically having to "start over" socially.
This creates an incentive structure centered around collectivism and herd mentality. Once people with the courage to leave sense what is happening, they do leave. The remainder consists of submissive types that seek acceptance, being largely controlled by the power hungry that also have no sense of self and define themselves by conquering others.
A cult, in essense, is an ideology that has evolved along these lines to the point that the original ideas that spawned the ideology are little more than a smokescreen for hiding a systemic master/slave relationship between individuals. Ideology can lead to hierarchy in the most unpleasant sense of the term.
Adopting independence of thought as a major virtue and social custom is, as far as I'm aware, the only thing preventing the above mentioned travesties. For the sake of preserving rationality, It has to be understood that disagreement alone is not a criminal or immoral act or a reason to cast someone out from your social circle.
This is not to say that I advocate a philosophy of total inclusion. If someone is so far off the mark from how you think that neither of you stands to gain from interacting, then there is no reason to interact. This is far different, however, than the many small disagreements that often lead to ideological schisms.
In the end, you can't escape the consequences of submission to an ideology. Always think for yourself. There's no other way to retain yourself.
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Saturday, August 15, 2009
On The Performative Contradiction
In the past, I have expressed a rejection of Hans Hoppe's "argumentation ethics" argument for libertarianism, in which libertarianism is supposed to be proven through demonstration in the very act of discourse through the alleged inherent negation of people's propositions arising from a contradiction between their proposition and the very act of making the proposition. I still stand by my rejection of this argument, as well as all arguments that take a similar form (such as Stephan Kinsella's "estoppel argument" and Stefan Molyneux's "self-detonating argument" concept that is part of his "universally preferable behavior").
As an initial clarification, allow me to say that there is a sense in which I think that there is such thing as a "performative contradiction" that can be pointed out in a valid way to justify certain propositions. For example, if I shout in your ear that sound does not exist, this seems to inherently be empirically disproven by the very act of me shouting (assuming that you are not deaf). In this context, I think that a "performative contradiction" argument is valid because the act of making the argument literally does disprove the argument. And the argument isn't disproven because you "presuppose" the opposite of what you're saying, but because what you are saying is empirically falsified by your very attempt to say it.
However, my problem with the "performative contradiction" argument as it is normally used by libertarians is that this is clearly not the context in which they use it. They try to use it with respect to perscriptive statements which are actually not inherently falsified by the act of argueing for or against them. The problem is that in this context the contradiction is not a formal or logical contradiction, it is only a contradiction between one's theory and one's behavior at best, and even that isn't necessarily the case because it is simply not true that everyone already presupposes the same normative ethic as you. It only works if we conflate normative ethics ("people should not initiate force") with metaphysical categories ("it is the essence of man that he does not initiate force"; which would be a falsehood in either case). To argue against a normative ethic is *not* to implicitly assume or prove that normative ethic, and it is misleading to respond to people's ethical statements as if they are making a metaphysical claim.
Furthermore, even if there is a contradiction between someone's theory and their behavior, that does not constitute a logical proof of the theory, it can only demonstrate personal hypocrisy at best. This is why argumentation ethics completely fails, because the statement "people should not have property rights" (as a normative ethic) is *not* inherently falsified by someone, in fact, controlling things - because "property rights" does not refer to the mere fact that people control things. "People should not have property rights" cannot reasonably be conflated with "people do not control things", and argumentation ethics can only work if we engage in such a conflation. Hoppe's "argumentation ethics", Kinsella's "estoppel argument" and Molyneux's "universally preferable behavior" all suffer from these same basic philosophical problems: the conflation of prescriptive statements with descriptive statements, the conflation of normative ethics with metaphysics, the conflation of acts of personal hypocrisy with logical contradictions and the conflation of falsifications with positive proofs.
If someone says, "I don't own myself", this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they purposefully act, because "ownership" does not mean "physiological autonomy". If a slave says, "I am free", this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they purposefully act, because "freedom" in the normative ethical sense does not mean "the capacity to purposefully act or make a statement"; the slave is in fact not free. If an average middle-class person says, "the normative ethic of private property rights is false", this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they actually own a lot of things, because "property rights" does not merely mean "the fact that people own things"; at best, all you can point out using this method is that they are being hypocrits. In short, there are no formal logical contradictions in the mere act of making these statements and the assertion that there is reduces to plain old sophistry of an obvious sort.
Even going by a hypocrisy criteria, the revelation of someone's hypocrisy by itself does absolutely nothing to prove or disprove either side of the formula. For example, if a pacifist supports the state, yes, this makes them a hypocrit, but pointing this out in no way constitutes a logical disproof of either pacifism or statism. One would need independant grounds for rejecting either pacifism or statism; the fact that they contradict eachother is not a case for or against either of them. So my point still stands that other people's hypocrisy doesn't make a logical proof for libertarianism, let alone anything else. At best, pointing it out may create the cognitive dissonance necessary to get them to more consistently apply certain principles that they already had or to hash out inconsistencies between different principles that they already have. But it is not a knock-down case for libertarianism.
As an initial clarification, allow me to say that there is a sense in which I think that there is such thing as a "performative contradiction" that can be pointed out in a valid way to justify certain propositions. For example, if I shout in your ear that sound does not exist, this seems to inherently be empirically disproven by the very act of me shouting (assuming that you are not deaf). In this context, I think that a "performative contradiction" argument is valid because the act of making the argument literally does disprove the argument. And the argument isn't disproven because you "presuppose" the opposite of what you're saying, but because what you are saying is empirically falsified by your very attempt to say it.
However, my problem with the "performative contradiction" argument as it is normally used by libertarians is that this is clearly not the context in which they use it. They try to use it with respect to perscriptive statements which are actually not inherently falsified by the act of argueing for or against them. The problem is that in this context the contradiction is not a formal or logical contradiction, it is only a contradiction between one's theory and one's behavior at best, and even that isn't necessarily the case because it is simply not true that everyone already presupposes the same normative ethic as you. It only works if we conflate normative ethics ("people should not initiate force") with metaphysical categories ("it is the essence of man that he does not initiate force"; which would be a falsehood in either case). To argue against a normative ethic is *not* to implicitly assume or prove that normative ethic, and it is misleading to respond to people's ethical statements as if they are making a metaphysical claim.
Furthermore, even if there is a contradiction between someone's theory and their behavior, that does not constitute a logical proof of the theory, it can only demonstrate personal hypocrisy at best. This is why argumentation ethics completely fails, because the statement "people should not have property rights" (as a normative ethic) is *not* inherently falsified by someone, in fact, controlling things - because "property rights" does not refer to the mere fact that people control things. "People should not have property rights" cannot reasonably be conflated with "people do not control things", and argumentation ethics can only work if we engage in such a conflation. Hoppe's "argumentation ethics", Kinsella's "estoppel argument" and Molyneux's "universally preferable behavior" all suffer from these same basic philosophical problems: the conflation of prescriptive statements with descriptive statements, the conflation of normative ethics with metaphysics, the conflation of acts of personal hypocrisy with logical contradictions and the conflation of falsifications with positive proofs.
If someone says, "I don't own myself", this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they purposefully act, because "ownership" does not mean "physiological autonomy". If a slave says, "I am free", this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they purposefully act, because "freedom" in the normative ethical sense does not mean "the capacity to purposefully act or make a statement"; the slave is in fact not free. If an average middle-class person says, "the normative ethic of private property rights is false", this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they actually own a lot of things, because "property rights" does not merely mean "the fact that people own things"; at best, all you can point out using this method is that they are being hypocrits. In short, there are no formal logical contradictions in the mere act of making these statements and the assertion that there is reduces to plain old sophistry of an obvious sort.
Even going by a hypocrisy criteria, the revelation of someone's hypocrisy by itself does absolutely nothing to prove or disprove either side of the formula. For example, if a pacifist supports the state, yes, this makes them a hypocrit, but pointing this out in no way constitutes a logical disproof of either pacifism or statism. One would need independant grounds for rejecting either pacifism or statism; the fact that they contradict eachother is not a case for or against either of them. So my point still stands that other people's hypocrisy doesn't make a logical proof for libertarianism, let alone anything else. At best, pointing it out may create the cognitive dissonance necessary to get them to more consistently apply certain principles that they already had or to hash out inconsistencies between different principles that they already have. But it is not a knock-down case for libertarianism.
Friday, August 14, 2009
On Slavery
preface,
the following may not be the most eloquent or stylish expression of ideas, but the ideas are inspired from the last 2 centuries greatest minds and I believe God himself. saying this puts all the more pressure on me for the following to be smooth and flawless on the technical side. But I have finally caved and conceded to the fact that I am not a good enough writer to do the ideas justice, but the weight of the idea is such that it must be brought fourth no matter how badly the quality of its expression is lacking.
PART I
Writing in 2008, it is easy to find people who are absolutely opposed to slavery, but I have not had such luck finding people who are opposed to 50% slavery, or 35% slavery, or even 10% slavery. The concept of slavery is that man “A” works, and the fruits of his labor are taken against his will by man “B.” Does it matter if only half of his fruits are taken, or maybe only a fifth? Would there be an abolition movement today if slavery only existed on one day of the week, while the remainder of the week slaves were free to leave the farms and plantations and work for themselves?
I know it is coming, so let me put to rest the socialist complaint of our current system right now. The socialist would complain about the capitalist system where a man works for a company producing $2,000 dollars of profit but only getting $700 in his paycheck. The socialist might complain that this is partial (or fractional, if you will) slavery, but I must point out that it is not, because chains are necessary for slavery. Under the capitalist system there is no force compelling man “A” to work for man “B,“ nor is there a law fixing the price for which man “A” must work -- except for the current minimum wage laws. “A” is free to work for “B” and can quit at anytime under most circumstances to work for “C,” unless there is a contract stating otherwise.
A more accurate way of looking at the employer-employee relationship is to see it as a partnership. The employer provides the business plan and the means of production and whatever other details are necessary, and the employee provides the labor. If I were better at math I’m sure I would be able to find some kind of 10/90 or 15/85 split in the business between the employee and employer, where each is able to terminate the partnership at will.
Under a slave system the servant is not at liberty to quit or to negotiate the split of the profit. There is coercion and a threat of violence in slavery. With 100% slavery, the slave must work and produce, and the master will take all the profits. In a 50% slave system there is coercion to force the slave to give 50% of his production to the master. In either case the slave has no choice, but must yield to the demands of the master or else face punishment.
Now we must come to the question as to whether or not a man who is coerced into working for free for the master only on Monday is really a slave or not. If not, where is the line drawn? If he is forced to work for the master Monday and Tuesday, would that count as slavery? And if not, can it be considered freedom in either case? Where shall the line between freedom and slavery be drawn? I am of the school of thought that if a man is not 100% free (allowed to act without coercion), then he is a slave.
But can slavery actually be justified? Would it be acceptable to own a slave and to say to him, “You will give me all you earn from Monday’s work each week and keep the rest when the profits from Tuesday through Friday’s labors are enough to provide you with a mansion, luxuries, and comforts equal to or surpassing mine.”? For a person to nod in agreement is to not oppose slavery at all as an institution, but to only oppose the condition of a slave. Thus it would also be fine to hold a slave in bondage all week long so long as his material condition were at some acceptable level. I would have to disagree. I do not put such high and weighty value on material possessions, but in the spirit and in the freedom to choose. Even if the slave has a mansion and all the latest technologies and greatest comforts of the age, it is not acceptable that his will be negated or that his labor or wages be confiscated. Under a “Monday Only” slave system the slave is unable to keep that profit made on Monday. If he is sick Monday and unable to work, his labor will be confiscated from the following day’s work whether the slave wants to give those profits up or not.
I have been flirting with, and will now discuss, the old defense of the brutish institute of slavery. The defenders of the institution would defend slavery on the grounds that the slave was better off as a slave than as a free man. They would say that the master provides the slave with the necessities of everyday life (food, clothing, shelter, basic medical care, etc.), and if the slave were free he would not be able to provide those things independent of his master. If a reader is only interested in the end condition of the slave he might come to the same conclusion and agree that slavery is justified. He would certainly have to agree that “Monday Only” slavery, where the labor and production of a man is bound and confiscated for the first day of the week, but the production of the slave the other four days is enough to provide him with all those aforementioned luxuries, is justifiable and even preferable to no slavery where the man’s labor is never confiscated, but is only enough to give him a humble means of existence.
As I have said above, I cannot support these ideas and all I can say to those who do is that they have an inflated value of material well being and a deficiency in regards to the value of free choice. As far as I am concerned, it is not the hard work involved in picking cotton, or the deplorable conditions that slaves endured in the 19th century, but the confiscation of their labor and deprivation of the choice to do with that labor what they would like that is the evil of slavery. It would make no difference to me if a slave were put up in the best hotel in Las Vegas and required to count the stitches in the carpet and then given access to the best spa at the end of the day, it would be slavery nonetheless and equally as wrong.
It is for this reason that I oppose the Income Tax System and look forward to the day when a man’s wages are his own to do with as he sees fit. The income tax is the reincarnation of slavery, though it may only be “Monday Slavery” or “All of January and Half of February Slavery,” it is slavery nevertheless. The income tax is the most direct form of slavery in America today, as it directly takes away a person’s labor against his will. This should be abolished.
It is not only morally wrong, but also a form of slavery to take a man’s paycheck by force, never mind taking it before he even has it in his hand. Money is labor. No matter how it is reduced, some sort of physical activity had to be done to produce an income. It is a very direct conversion for most of us; we work and, in exchange for that work, we are paid money. But even for the landlord or the heir, money is still backed by labor -- no one gets rent property for nothing, it must be bought. It is bought with money that was earned through labor, either that or was given as a gift or in the will of a relative. In either case, labor is being confiscated. I can not say for sure because I am not in the position to know, but it would seem that it is less painful when the labor confiscated is removed through the years in the case of the landlord or through the labor of a parent, but it is still confiscation and, though it is not direct, it is enslavement. However, there is another reason to do away with the income tax in the case of wealthy business owners and landlords; people are both smart and inclined to make more rather than less money. In the case of a landlord, for example, the landlord does not pay taxes, but becomes a tax collector; raising the price of rent and adding “taxes” into his expense list to be covered by the renter just as he would “new carpet” or a “new door.” The same principal can be applied to corporate income tax, where the expense of the tax, like all business expenses, is passed on to the consumer.
Indeed, all taxation is the coercive deprivation of labor, whether it is the income tax or more subtle forms of partial slavery like the sales tax, property tax, tariffs, or others. But my superior moral fiber only extends so far, and being human, there is a hint of despotism in me. Government, though it is evil, is necessary, and must be funded. This funding is going to come from taxation. Therefore, while fractional slavery is condemnable on moral grounds, it can be justified at a very limited level, to provide those functions that, it could be said, could not be adequately provided for by the private sector. (Such as roads, emergency services, and defense.)
Due to both the necessity of taxation to fund our government and the nature of taxation itself, we should be very stringent with our government’s fiscal policy. Though we might like the idea of government undertaking an action which we may believe will have a positive impact on society, we should keep in mind that it takes funding and that the funding will not come from only those who support that particular action of government, but also coercively from those who do not support that action.
When we vote for government functions that are not absolutely essential and that private enterprises could, if given half the chance, handle sufficiently, we are subjecting our fellow citizens to unnecessary confiscation of their labor and fractional slavery. It is also imperative to realize that our fellow citizens may, in turn, use this as license to commit the very same atrocity to us somewhere down the line, for the sake of "providing" for society.
the following may not be the most eloquent or stylish expression of ideas, but the ideas are inspired from the last 2 centuries greatest minds and I believe God himself. saying this puts all the more pressure on me for the following to be smooth and flawless on the technical side. But I have finally caved and conceded to the fact that I am not a good enough writer to do the ideas justice, but the weight of the idea is such that it must be brought fourth no matter how badly the quality of its expression is lacking.
PART I
Writing in 2008, it is easy to find people who are absolutely opposed to slavery, but I have not had such luck finding people who are opposed to 50% slavery, or 35% slavery, or even 10% slavery. The concept of slavery is that man “A” works, and the fruits of his labor are taken against his will by man “B.” Does it matter if only half of his fruits are taken, or maybe only a fifth? Would there be an abolition movement today if slavery only existed on one day of the week, while the remainder of the week slaves were free to leave the farms and plantations and work for themselves?
I know it is coming, so let me put to rest the socialist complaint of our current system right now. The socialist would complain about the capitalist system where a man works for a company producing $2,000 dollars of profit but only getting $700 in his paycheck. The socialist might complain that this is partial (or fractional, if you will) slavery, but I must point out that it is not, because chains are necessary for slavery. Under the capitalist system there is no force compelling man “A” to work for man “B,“ nor is there a law fixing the price for which man “A” must work -- except for the current minimum wage laws. “A” is free to work for “B” and can quit at anytime under most circumstances to work for “C,” unless there is a contract stating otherwise.
A more accurate way of looking at the employer-employee relationship is to see it as a partnership. The employer provides the business plan and the means of production and whatever other details are necessary, and the employee provides the labor. If I were better at math I’m sure I would be able to find some kind of 10/90 or 15/85 split in the business between the employee and employer, where each is able to terminate the partnership at will.
Under a slave system the servant is not at liberty to quit or to negotiate the split of the profit. There is coercion and a threat of violence in slavery. With 100% slavery, the slave must work and produce, and the master will take all the profits. In a 50% slave system there is coercion to force the slave to give 50% of his production to the master. In either case the slave has no choice, but must yield to the demands of the master or else face punishment.
Now we must come to the question as to whether or not a man who is coerced into working for free for the master only on Monday is really a slave or not. If not, where is the line drawn? If he is forced to work for the master Monday and Tuesday, would that count as slavery? And if not, can it be considered freedom in either case? Where shall the line between freedom and slavery be drawn? I am of the school of thought that if a man is not 100% free (allowed to act without coercion), then he is a slave.
But can slavery actually be justified? Would it be acceptable to own a slave and to say to him, “You will give me all you earn from Monday’s work each week and keep the rest when the profits from Tuesday through Friday’s labors are enough to provide you with a mansion, luxuries, and comforts equal to or surpassing mine.”? For a person to nod in agreement is to not oppose slavery at all as an institution, but to only oppose the condition of a slave. Thus it would also be fine to hold a slave in bondage all week long so long as his material condition were at some acceptable level. I would have to disagree. I do not put such high and weighty value on material possessions, but in the spirit and in the freedom to choose. Even if the slave has a mansion and all the latest technologies and greatest comforts of the age, it is not acceptable that his will be negated or that his labor or wages be confiscated. Under a “Monday Only” slave system the slave is unable to keep that profit made on Monday. If he is sick Monday and unable to work, his labor will be confiscated from the following day’s work whether the slave wants to give those profits up or not.
I have been flirting with, and will now discuss, the old defense of the brutish institute of slavery. The defenders of the institution would defend slavery on the grounds that the slave was better off as a slave than as a free man. They would say that the master provides the slave with the necessities of everyday life (food, clothing, shelter, basic medical care, etc.), and if the slave were free he would not be able to provide those things independent of his master. If a reader is only interested in the end condition of the slave he might come to the same conclusion and agree that slavery is justified. He would certainly have to agree that “Monday Only” slavery, where the labor and production of a man is bound and confiscated for the first day of the week, but the production of the slave the other four days is enough to provide him with all those aforementioned luxuries, is justifiable and even preferable to no slavery where the man’s labor is never confiscated, but is only enough to give him a humble means of existence.
As I have said above, I cannot support these ideas and all I can say to those who do is that they have an inflated value of material well being and a deficiency in regards to the value of free choice. As far as I am concerned, it is not the hard work involved in picking cotton, or the deplorable conditions that slaves endured in the 19th century, but the confiscation of their labor and deprivation of the choice to do with that labor what they would like that is the evil of slavery. It would make no difference to me if a slave were put up in the best hotel in Las Vegas and required to count the stitches in the carpet and then given access to the best spa at the end of the day, it would be slavery nonetheless and equally as wrong.
It is for this reason that I oppose the Income Tax System and look forward to the day when a man’s wages are his own to do with as he sees fit. The income tax is the reincarnation of slavery, though it may only be “Monday Slavery” or “All of January and Half of February Slavery,” it is slavery nevertheless. The income tax is the most direct form of slavery in America today, as it directly takes away a person’s labor against his will. This should be abolished.
It is not only morally wrong, but also a form of slavery to take a man’s paycheck by force, never mind taking it before he even has it in his hand. Money is labor. No matter how it is reduced, some sort of physical activity had to be done to produce an income. It is a very direct conversion for most of us; we work and, in exchange for that work, we are paid money. But even for the landlord or the heir, money is still backed by labor -- no one gets rent property for nothing, it must be bought. It is bought with money that was earned through labor, either that or was given as a gift or in the will of a relative. In either case, labor is being confiscated. I can not say for sure because I am not in the position to know, but it would seem that it is less painful when the labor confiscated is removed through the years in the case of the landlord or through the labor of a parent, but it is still confiscation and, though it is not direct, it is enslavement. However, there is another reason to do away with the income tax in the case of wealthy business owners and landlords; people are both smart and inclined to make more rather than less money. In the case of a landlord, for example, the landlord does not pay taxes, but becomes a tax collector; raising the price of rent and adding “taxes” into his expense list to be covered by the renter just as he would “new carpet” or a “new door.” The same principal can be applied to corporate income tax, where the expense of the tax, like all business expenses, is passed on to the consumer.
Indeed, all taxation is the coercive deprivation of labor, whether it is the income tax or more subtle forms of partial slavery like the sales tax, property tax, tariffs, or others. But my superior moral fiber only extends so far, and being human, there is a hint of despotism in me. Government, though it is evil, is necessary, and must be funded. This funding is going to come from taxation. Therefore, while fractional slavery is condemnable on moral grounds, it can be justified at a very limited level, to provide those functions that, it could be said, could not be adequately provided for by the private sector. (Such as roads, emergency services, and defense.)
Due to both the necessity of taxation to fund our government and the nature of taxation itself, we should be very stringent with our government’s fiscal policy. Though we might like the idea of government undertaking an action which we may believe will have a positive impact on society, we should keep in mind that it takes funding and that the funding will not come from only those who support that particular action of government, but also coercively from those who do not support that action.
When we vote for government functions that are not absolutely essential and that private enterprises could, if given half the chance, handle sufficiently, we are subjecting our fellow citizens to unnecessary confiscation of their labor and fractional slavery. It is also imperative to realize that our fellow citizens may, in turn, use this as license to commit the very same atrocity to us somewhere down the line, for the sake of "providing" for society.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Rights and Morality, Political and Social
“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” - Voltaire
A lot of confusion seems to pop up in political discourse due to either a conflation or out of context separation between the political and the social. One of the most common of these confusions is over the relationship between what one thinks people have a "right to do" and what one thinks people "ought to do". For example, someone could think that one has a "right to discriminate based on presupposed racial categorizations" while simultaneously thinking that one "ought not to discriminate based on presupposed racial categorizations", grounded by an epistemological (or even ontological) objection to presupposed racial categorizations.
In this particular example, one's notion of "rights" is more inclusive then what one's social goals actually are, and it would be fallacious to act either as if supporting one's "right" to do something means that one actually supports the thing in question or as if supporting one's "right" to do something inherently implies some sort of neutrality towards the thing in question. This seems to be a problem that "thin" libertarianism has, in that only the question of rights tends to be focused on, taken to the point of expressing a neutralist attitude towards the more fundamental issue of social goals and outcomes. But just because I think that someone has a right to do something does not necessarily mean that I will not object to the thing in question or advocate against it.
On the flip side of things, it does not necessarily follow from the fact that one thinks that one "ought not" to do something that one thinks that people don't have a "right" to do it or that one is advocating the use of aggression to oppose the thing in question. For example, someone could think that one "ought not to do heroine" without believing that "heroine should be illegal" or that "force should be initiated against those who do heroine". Neither does it necessarily follow from the fact that one thinks that a particular social goal is desirable in the broadest or most all-encompassing sense possible that one advocates the use of aggression, and hence it would simply be a non-sequitor to object to the social goals of "thick" libertarians by implying that they want to "force their preferences on others".
The problem with "thin" libertarianism should be clear here: it only concentrates on the narrow question of legality and the use of force. In debates among libertarians, this can manifest itself in some fairly shoddy arguments in which it is unfairly implied that libertarians with certain social goals are for "forcing their preferences on others", or when a standoffish attitude is given in which social concerns are dismissed as irrelevant because all that matters is legality and rights. Of course, this is rarely done in a consistent way. Usually, it's social goals which are generally concieved of as being "left-wing" (such as anti-racism, anti-patriarchy, feminism, any sense of economic egalitarianism, etc.) that are accused of being authoritarian, while things like racism, nationalism, patriarchy and corporatism are given the "so long as it's voluntary" treatment.
In either case, what I wish to illustrate with these examples and points is a certain distinction between the social and political spheres, since it appears that a confusing conflation often occurs between the two. Just because something is (at least nominally) voluntary does not necessarily mean that it is good, that it is just as good as anything else or that it should be treated as irrelevant, and just because a given social goal happens pursued by aggression in a given context does not mean that that social goal is inherently aggressive or bad. The legal is not necessarily the moral, and the moral is not necessarily the legal. The political is not necessarily the social, and the social is not necessarily the political. To always conflate these things is to create a lot of confusion.
On the other hand, it seems reasonable to grant a certain sense in which there may be an overlap between the two at least in one area: the use of force. Afterall, questions of the use of force are moral questions in and of themselves, and non-aggression is a "social preference" too. It seems like "politics" is where the two meet. But I don't think that this point bolsters "thin" libertarianism at all, because those who express the attitude that "social preferences are subjective" or a relativistic attitude towards them seem to overlook the fact that their commitment to non-aggression is not outside of the realm of moral discourse, since it is a moral premise. And it is definitely in this sense that morality and politics are one and the same thing in libertarianism, in that politics is concieved of as being bound by the moral constraint of non-aggression.
But noone is literally only a libertarian (in the strict sense of a commitment to non-aggression). Everyone has social goals other than those directly pertaining to the use of aggression. While aggression and non-aggression are ends, they are ends that are simultaneously means. And it is rather nonsensical to adhere to a social philosophy in which only certain ends which are means (I.E. aggression and non-aggression) matter, while all other ends are conceptualized in a completely relativistic manner (despite the fact that various ends that don't directly pertain to the question of aggression are held by everyone, including those who argue from a "thin" libertarian standpoint). This is why I think that it is counter-productive to continue to treat libertarianism as a stand-alone philosophy, isolated from the broader bundle of values that it is only a part of.
A lot of confusion seems to pop up in political discourse due to either a conflation or out of context separation between the political and the social. One of the most common of these confusions is over the relationship between what one thinks people have a "right to do" and what one thinks people "ought to do". For example, someone could think that one has a "right to discriminate based on presupposed racial categorizations" while simultaneously thinking that one "ought not to discriminate based on presupposed racial categorizations", grounded by an epistemological (or even ontological) objection to presupposed racial categorizations.
In this particular example, one's notion of "rights" is more inclusive then what one's social goals actually are, and it would be fallacious to act either as if supporting one's "right" to do something means that one actually supports the thing in question or as if supporting one's "right" to do something inherently implies some sort of neutrality towards the thing in question. This seems to be a problem that "thin" libertarianism has, in that only the question of rights tends to be focused on, taken to the point of expressing a neutralist attitude towards the more fundamental issue of social goals and outcomes. But just because I think that someone has a right to do something does not necessarily mean that I will not object to the thing in question or advocate against it.
On the flip side of things, it does not necessarily follow from the fact that one thinks that one "ought not" to do something that one thinks that people don't have a "right" to do it or that one is advocating the use of aggression to oppose the thing in question. For example, someone could think that one "ought not to do heroine" without believing that "heroine should be illegal" or that "force should be initiated against those who do heroine". Neither does it necessarily follow from the fact that one thinks that a particular social goal is desirable in the broadest or most all-encompassing sense possible that one advocates the use of aggression, and hence it would simply be a non-sequitor to object to the social goals of "thick" libertarians by implying that they want to "force their preferences on others".
The problem with "thin" libertarianism should be clear here: it only concentrates on the narrow question of legality and the use of force. In debates among libertarians, this can manifest itself in some fairly shoddy arguments in which it is unfairly implied that libertarians with certain social goals are for "forcing their preferences on others", or when a standoffish attitude is given in which social concerns are dismissed as irrelevant because all that matters is legality and rights. Of course, this is rarely done in a consistent way. Usually, it's social goals which are generally concieved of as being "left-wing" (such as anti-racism, anti-patriarchy, feminism, any sense of economic egalitarianism, etc.) that are accused of being authoritarian, while things like racism, nationalism, patriarchy and corporatism are given the "so long as it's voluntary" treatment.
In either case, what I wish to illustrate with these examples and points is a certain distinction between the social and political spheres, since it appears that a confusing conflation often occurs between the two. Just because something is (at least nominally) voluntary does not necessarily mean that it is good, that it is just as good as anything else or that it should be treated as irrelevant, and just because a given social goal happens pursued by aggression in a given context does not mean that that social goal is inherently aggressive or bad. The legal is not necessarily the moral, and the moral is not necessarily the legal. The political is not necessarily the social, and the social is not necessarily the political. To always conflate these things is to create a lot of confusion.
On the other hand, it seems reasonable to grant a certain sense in which there may be an overlap between the two at least in one area: the use of force. Afterall, questions of the use of force are moral questions in and of themselves, and non-aggression is a "social preference" too. It seems like "politics" is where the two meet. But I don't think that this point bolsters "thin" libertarianism at all, because those who express the attitude that "social preferences are subjective" or a relativistic attitude towards them seem to overlook the fact that their commitment to non-aggression is not outside of the realm of moral discourse, since it is a moral premise. And it is definitely in this sense that morality and politics are one and the same thing in libertarianism, in that politics is concieved of as being bound by the moral constraint of non-aggression.
But noone is literally only a libertarian (in the strict sense of a commitment to non-aggression). Everyone has social goals other than those directly pertaining to the use of aggression. While aggression and non-aggression are ends, they are ends that are simultaneously means. And it is rather nonsensical to adhere to a social philosophy in which only certain ends which are means (I.E. aggression and non-aggression) matter, while all other ends are conceptualized in a completely relativistic manner (despite the fact that various ends that don't directly pertain to the question of aggression are held by everyone, including those who argue from a "thin" libertarian standpoint). This is why I think that it is counter-productive to continue to treat libertarianism as a stand-alone philosophy, isolated from the broader bundle of values that it is only a part of.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Falsifiability
One thing I hear a lot from people in the atheist community, mainly those guilty of scientism, is the idea that any claim must be falsifiable in order to be worth considering. Unfalsifiable claims are rejected outright, regardless of the nature of the claim itself.
First, I will briefly explain what falsifiability is. A falsifiable claim is a claim that can be empirically tested. An example of a falsifiable claim would be "The Earth orbits the Sun." One can make observations, do calculations, etc. to demonstrate this claim to be true or false.
An unfalsifiable claim is a claim that cannot be empirically tested. An example of an unfalsifiable claim would be "There is an invisible unicorn following you, but he runs away anytime you try to prove he is there." Since the so-called invisible unicorn runs away when you attempt any tests, this claim is not testable and is not falsifiable. There is no way to prove it true or false.
Now in the realm of scientific claims, falsifiability is very important. Science hinges on the ability to test claims, so an untestable claim is an unscientific one. If the claim itself is an empirical one, such as the existence of the aforementioned invisible unicorn, then a lack of falsifiability means that the claim can be rejected as unimportant, since the claim has no testable impact on the empirical world.
Not all claims are fundamentally scientific or empirical in nature. One of the key errors of those who unwittingly engage in scientism is the assumption that all valid claims are scientific or empirical in nature. This naturally leads to the assumption that all valid claims must be falsifiable. This kind of "hard" materialism quickly unravels itself under philosophical scrutiny, which I will show below.
Basic logical principles underpin science. For example, the laws of identity, causality (identity over time), and noncontradiction are fundamental assumptions of all scientific activity. For any scientific claim to be testable, it has to be assumed that the universe itself operates in a rational and predictable manner.
Fundamental laws of logic, however, are not falsifiable. It is not possible to falsify, for example, the law of noncontradiction. I will demonstrate this with an example.
In classical physics, it was assumed that all matter was either waves or particles. Observation had led scientists to believe that these were basically two fundamentally different kinds of matter; all matter was one or the other, and whether the matter in question was a wave or a particle had ramifications on how that matter behaved.
Then some brilliant scientists came along and shattered this assumption. They were able to demonstrate, through mathematics and scientific testing and observation, that all matter was effectively both a wave and a particle. All matter had the traits of both and this was measurable and demonstrable.
Now, after this discovery, did scientists declare that the law of noncontradiction had been disproven? Since waves and particles were supposed to be exclusive traits, didn't the fact that matter could be (and always is) both mean that the universe could contain contradictions?
Of course not. The claim that "all matter is either waves or particles" was falsified. But the important point here is that it is simply assumed, by scientific standards of falsifiability, that the law of noncontradiction is true and could not be falsified by the test. This assumption is present in every scientific test.
Attempts to openly disprove the law of noncontradiction fail because any attempt to disprove anything requires the implicit assumption that basic laws of logic are valid and applicable in all contexts. What would "disprove" even mean if no standard existed by which to prove and disprove claims?
The law of noncontradiction is, for all intents and purposes, unfalsifiable. Yet it is an implicit assumption behind all rational claims, scientific and otherwise. This is far from the only philosophical claim that is both true and scientifically unfalsifiable, but it demonstrates the crucial point that there are claims that are true but cannot be falsified.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Political Quizes and the Political Spectrum
Austro-libertarian recently linked to this political quiz in a blogpost making some commentary on the tenability of such quizes. After taking the quiz and being somewhat displeased with the result, I'd like to go over the objections I have to such a quiz and some of the thoughts that I have about such a political spectrum.
I do think that a two-dimensional political spectrum of this sort is better than the more typical one-dimensional spectrum, and this quiz even went beyond the normal two-dimensional spectrum or "nolan chart" by trying to track "culture" and "foreign policy" as their own sub-spectrums. Nonetheless, I think that the "nolan chart" is insufficient in the way that it completely splits up the "economic" and "social" or "political" spheres. In particlar, it is not at all clear to me that supporting "economic freedom" inherently is a "right-wing" tendency. It doesn't seem to be the case that certain views that might be tagged as "left-wing" on economic issues necessarily imply a lack of economic freedom. This gets a bit more into the way in which one's answers to certain questions are categorized on the "economic" axis. There is also an issue with how "the social" and "the political" are dealt with.
Let me give some examples from this quiz.
"2. Unions were indispensible in establishing the middle class."
I found giving a straight answer to this question to be somewhat difficult. For one thing, I'm not entirely sure precisely what is meant by "unions", and I don't think that a union qua union necessarily has to be a governmental entity or a governmentally legislated entity. There is an extent to which, at least earlier in the history of unions, they did play a role in establishing the middle class in terms of being a mechanism of bargaining power for workers.
On the other hand, an "agree" answer to this may be construed to imply the merits of the current system of unions, which I consider to be largely corrupt and hardly distinguishable from corporations. And I would not want to endorse contemporary "liberal" dogmas about labor legislation, in which we're presented with an either/or choice between supporting the current system of governmentally privileged union status and being corporatists.
"3. In nearly every instance, the free market allocates resources most efficiently."
I essentially agree with this statement. However, it may have somewhat different meanings depending on what one assumes "the free market" to be. One could think that "the free market allocates resources most efficiently" as a defense of the current system, with the implicit assumption that it is more or less a free market. On the other hand, one could think that "capitalism" as we know it in fact does not allocate resources efficiently, and that it is worlds apart from a free market.
"8. Sċhool science classes should teach intelligent design."
Statements like this are also somewhat ambiguous. On a personal level, I completely disagree with this, because I don't consider intelligent design to be a tenable notion and would prefer that it not be part of school curiculums. Yet at the same time, I support the right of people to voluntarily teach false views all they want. So there is a distinction between supporting the right to do something and necessarily being in support of the thing in question. Of course, I reject the statist model of education to begin with, so the meta-question is left out of this.
"22. It is wrong to enforce moral behavior through the law because this infringes upon an individual's freedom."
I also found this statement to be somewhat ambiguous, depending on what one means by "moral behavior". If this is meant to imply that "vices are not crimes", then I strongly agree. On the other hand, even something as simple as murder laws are within the sphere of "moral behavior". Would I therefore oppose "the enforcement of moral behavior through the law" (although I would question what's meant by "enforcement", because I don't think that "the law" predetermines behavior for the most part) when it comes to such things? No!
"25. Whatever maximizes economic growth is good for the people."
I do not exactly agree with this. I do not think that the emphasis on "growth" for the sake of "growth" is necessarily a good thing, and this still begs the question of precisely what "maximizes economic growth". Monetarists and Keynsians may think that monetary inflation "maximizes economic growth", but it certainly isn't "good for the people" and it isn't consistent with a free market. I also resent that anyone who doesn't agree with this is going to be placed further away from "economic freedom", when one's answer to this question in no way necessarily implies whether or not one thinks the state should be involved in the economy.
"35. It makes sense and is fair that some people make much more money than others."
This statement is ambiguous in that it does not specify the means with which "people make much more money than others". Furthermore, it is unclear whether or not this statement is meant to be a defense of plutocracy. I do not consider a society in which the vast majority of people are just above substinence levels while most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small elite to be a good thing. And I resent that I will have to be placed further away from "economic freedom" for not enthusiastically marking this statement with "strongly agree".
"44. It is not our place to condemn other cultures as backwards or barbaric."
One's answer to this may misleadingly create a dichotomy between cultural conservatism and cultural liberalism. I reject cultural relativism, but I don't think that should place me closer to cultural conservatism. In fact, cultural conservatism would be precisely one of those cultural tendencies that I'd question. Furthermore, sometimes relativism has been used to justify cultural conservatism, while a culturally liberal standpoint has sometimes been approached in a non-relativistic manner. So I'm not sure how such a statement should be approached.
"50. A person's morality is between that person and God only. Government should not get involved."
This one seems like a package deal. I strongly disagree with the premise that morality, properly construed, has anything to do with "god". But I don't think that "government should get involved" in terms of people's expression of religious views and non-violent practises. And, like the previous statement about the relationship between morality and the law, it is unclear exactly what kind of relationship is implied by one's response to this statement. I'm for the complete separation of religion and state, but I also object to religion for non-political reasons.
Summary Of Objection To Quiz
There are two main issues I have with this test. The first issue is that "economic freedom" is sometimes conflated with either support for or opposition to certain social outcomes that are not themselves necessarily intrinsic to a free market. In this way, certain egalitarian social views are conflated with opposition to economic freedom, while certain views that could be interpreted as plutocratic are conflated with support for economic freedom. The second issue is what appears to be problems sorting out "the social" and "the political". Certain social views may not necessarily imply support for an official political policy, and certain political views may not necessarily imply support for a certain social custom. There is a danger of "what is legal" and "what is moral" being both conflated and separated in a way that is misleading, and this begs questions at the meta level.
As for ultimate results on such a quiz, the issue I have with it is two-fold. On one hand, depending on how I answer, I feel like I am pushed further "rightward" than I actually am because of the implicit assumption that "economic freedom" is a "right-wing" thing. On the other hand, I resent being placed further away from "economic freedom" if I concentrate on my views on social outcomes. It seems like a series of package deals and false dichotomies in this sense. Ideally, I'd like to end up somewhere around "the libertarian center" or perhaps even "left of the libertarian center" on such a spectrum, but I'm usually pushed too far "rightward". This is part of why I find the nolan chart to be insufficient as a political spectrum, but it's also a matter of the assumptions that one builds into the statements or questions.
I do think that a two-dimensional political spectrum of this sort is better than the more typical one-dimensional spectrum, and this quiz even went beyond the normal two-dimensional spectrum or "nolan chart" by trying to track "culture" and "foreign policy" as their own sub-spectrums. Nonetheless, I think that the "nolan chart" is insufficient in the way that it completely splits up the "economic" and "social" or "political" spheres. In particlar, it is not at all clear to me that supporting "economic freedom" inherently is a "right-wing" tendency. It doesn't seem to be the case that certain views that might be tagged as "left-wing" on economic issues necessarily imply a lack of economic freedom. This gets a bit more into the way in which one's answers to certain questions are categorized on the "economic" axis. There is also an issue with how "the social" and "the political" are dealt with.
Let me give some examples from this quiz.
"2. Unions were indispensible in establishing the middle class."
I found giving a straight answer to this question to be somewhat difficult. For one thing, I'm not entirely sure precisely what is meant by "unions", and I don't think that a union qua union necessarily has to be a governmental entity or a governmentally legislated entity. There is an extent to which, at least earlier in the history of unions, they did play a role in establishing the middle class in terms of being a mechanism of bargaining power for workers.
On the other hand, an "agree" answer to this may be construed to imply the merits of the current system of unions, which I consider to be largely corrupt and hardly distinguishable from corporations. And I would not want to endorse contemporary "liberal" dogmas about labor legislation, in which we're presented with an either/or choice between supporting the current system of governmentally privileged union status and being corporatists.
"3. In nearly every instance, the free market allocates resources most efficiently."
I essentially agree with this statement. However, it may have somewhat different meanings depending on what one assumes "the free market" to be. One could think that "the free market allocates resources most efficiently" as a defense of the current system, with the implicit assumption that it is more or less a free market. On the other hand, one could think that "capitalism" as we know it in fact does not allocate resources efficiently, and that it is worlds apart from a free market.
"8. Sċhool science classes should teach intelligent design."
Statements like this are also somewhat ambiguous. On a personal level, I completely disagree with this, because I don't consider intelligent design to be a tenable notion and would prefer that it not be part of school curiculums. Yet at the same time, I support the right of people to voluntarily teach false views all they want. So there is a distinction between supporting the right to do something and necessarily being in support of the thing in question. Of course, I reject the statist model of education to begin with, so the meta-question is left out of this.
"22. It is wrong to enforce moral behavior through the law because this infringes upon an individual's freedom."
I also found this statement to be somewhat ambiguous, depending on what one means by "moral behavior". If this is meant to imply that "vices are not crimes", then I strongly agree. On the other hand, even something as simple as murder laws are within the sphere of "moral behavior". Would I therefore oppose "the enforcement of moral behavior through the law" (although I would question what's meant by "enforcement", because I don't think that "the law" predetermines behavior for the most part) when it comes to such things? No!
"25. Whatever maximizes economic growth is good for the people."
I do not exactly agree with this. I do not think that the emphasis on "growth" for the sake of "growth" is necessarily a good thing, and this still begs the question of precisely what "maximizes economic growth". Monetarists and Keynsians may think that monetary inflation "maximizes economic growth", but it certainly isn't "good for the people" and it isn't consistent with a free market. I also resent that anyone who doesn't agree with this is going to be placed further away from "economic freedom", when one's answer to this question in no way necessarily implies whether or not one thinks the state should be involved in the economy.
"35. It makes sense and is fair that some people make much more money than others."
This statement is ambiguous in that it does not specify the means with which "people make much more money than others". Furthermore, it is unclear whether or not this statement is meant to be a defense of plutocracy. I do not consider a society in which the vast majority of people are just above substinence levels while most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small elite to be a good thing. And I resent that I will have to be placed further away from "economic freedom" for not enthusiastically marking this statement with "strongly agree".
"44. It is not our place to condemn other cultures as backwards or barbaric."
One's answer to this may misleadingly create a dichotomy between cultural conservatism and cultural liberalism. I reject cultural relativism, but I don't think that should place me closer to cultural conservatism. In fact, cultural conservatism would be precisely one of those cultural tendencies that I'd question. Furthermore, sometimes relativism has been used to justify cultural conservatism, while a culturally liberal standpoint has sometimes been approached in a non-relativistic manner. So I'm not sure how such a statement should be approached.
"50. A person's morality is between that person and God only. Government should not get involved."
This one seems like a package deal. I strongly disagree with the premise that morality, properly construed, has anything to do with "god". But I don't think that "government should get involved" in terms of people's expression of religious views and non-violent practises. And, like the previous statement about the relationship between morality and the law, it is unclear exactly what kind of relationship is implied by one's response to this statement. I'm for the complete separation of religion and state, but I also object to religion for non-political reasons.
Summary Of Objection To Quiz
There are two main issues I have with this test. The first issue is that "economic freedom" is sometimes conflated with either support for or opposition to certain social outcomes that are not themselves necessarily intrinsic to a free market. In this way, certain egalitarian social views are conflated with opposition to economic freedom, while certain views that could be interpreted as plutocratic are conflated with support for economic freedom. The second issue is what appears to be problems sorting out "the social" and "the political". Certain social views may not necessarily imply support for an official political policy, and certain political views may not necessarily imply support for a certain social custom. There is a danger of "what is legal" and "what is moral" being both conflated and separated in a way that is misleading, and this begs questions at the meta level.
As for ultimate results on such a quiz, the issue I have with it is two-fold. On one hand, depending on how I answer, I feel like I am pushed further "rightward" than I actually am because of the implicit assumption that "economic freedom" is a "right-wing" thing. On the other hand, I resent being placed further away from "economic freedom" if I concentrate on my views on social outcomes. It seems like a series of package deals and false dichotomies in this sense. Ideally, I'd like to end up somewhere around "the libertarian center" or perhaps even "left of the libertarian center" on such a spectrum, but I'm usually pushed too far "rightward". This is part of why I find the nolan chart to be insufficient as a political spectrum, but it's also a matter of the assumptions that one builds into the statements or questions.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Name-Based Political Marketing
One of the most irritating things about politics is how different political agendas and policies are marketed. In particular, the names of many policies are deliberately biased in order to convince people to accept them. Below I will discuss a few of these and the name I think libertarians should use for these policies. Note that I am not claiming to have invented the alternate names provided.
Affirmative Action
This is a particularly good example. What on Earth does the name “Affirmative Action” have to do with requiring that employers maintain race-based quotas when they hire people? This name has nothing to do with the content of the political agenda or policy at all; the goal is clearly to just sound good.
Libertarians should probably refer to this as racial preference legislation, or race-based hiring quotas. The key here is to not let people hide the fact that the state is requiring employers to engage in racism.
Gun Control
Fortunately for everyone, guns are not self-willed beings that just go crazy at the drop of a hat. Guns are always being controlled by someone. The name “Gun Control” gives the impression that guns are just firing willy nilly and, golly, we need to dosomething!
Libertarians should properly refer to this as civilian disarmament. This reflects the fact that such legislation does not disarm soldiers, police, etc. and that it's not about “controlling guns” but limiting arms possession.
Pro-Life
The obvious goal of someone labeling themselves as “Pro-Life” is to subtly smear one's opponents as being anti-life or pro-death. It's very obvious that most people who want abortion to be legal/allowed are in no way anti-life, or even pro-abortion in and of itself.
Libertarians should refer to “Pro-Life” individuals as being in favor of abortion criminalization. This description is less emotionally driven and more accurately describes their position; these are individuals that wish to make abortion illegal e.g. to make it a criminal activity.
Universal Health Care
Consider the implications of the word universal. The premise hidden in the name is that it's possible to make health care a non-scarce commodity that everyone can have as much of as they want. I'm going to assume that the audience that I am writing this for needs no explanation on why this makes no economic sense whatsoever.
Libertarians should refer to this as government-imposed collectivized health care, or just collectivized health care once context is established. This more accurately reflects the fact that, essentially, the idea is to apply communist ideas to health care, and removes the implication that any sort of universal, non-scarce health care system is a possibility.
Affirmative Action
This is a particularly good example. What on Earth does the name “Affirmative Action” have to do with requiring that employers maintain race-based quotas when they hire people? This name has nothing to do with the content of the political agenda or policy at all; the goal is clearly to just sound good.
Libertarians should probably refer to this as racial preference legislation, or race-based hiring quotas. The key here is to not let people hide the fact that the state is requiring employers to engage in racism.
Gun Control
Fortunately for everyone, guns are not self-willed beings that just go crazy at the drop of a hat. Guns are always being controlled by someone. The name “Gun Control” gives the impression that guns are just firing willy nilly and, golly, we need to dosomething!
Libertarians should properly refer to this as civilian disarmament. This reflects the fact that such legislation does not disarm soldiers, police, etc. and that it's not about “controlling guns” but limiting arms possession.
Pro-Life
The obvious goal of someone labeling themselves as “Pro-Life” is to subtly smear one's opponents as being anti-life or pro-death. It's very obvious that most people who want abortion to be legal/allowed are in no way anti-life, or even pro-abortion in and of itself.
Libertarians should refer to “Pro-Life” individuals as being in favor of abortion criminalization. This description is less emotionally driven and more accurately describes their position; these are individuals that wish to make abortion illegal e.g. to make it a criminal activity.
Universal Health Care
Consider the implications of the word universal. The premise hidden in the name is that it's possible to make health care a non-scarce commodity that everyone can have as much of as they want. I'm going to assume that the audience that I am writing this for needs no explanation on why this makes no economic sense whatsoever.
Libertarians should refer to this as government-imposed collectivized health care, or just collectivized health care once context is established. This more accurately reflects the fact that, essentially, the idea is to apply communist ideas to health care, and removes the implication that any sort of universal, non-scarce health care system is a possibility.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Market and Anti-statism Does Not Intrinsically Solve Social Problems
One idea that floats around is the notion that whatever is best will inherently be chosen on the free market. But this isn't exactly true. To be more accurate, whatever is in the highest demand will be the most likely to be chosen on the free market. And this should make it rather clear that the establishment of competition and the free flow of the forces of supply and demand, while this may be necessary, is not sufficient alone to produce the best social outcome. It is concievable that what people demand is in fact harmful or of low quality. It is thus simply not the case that whatever happens to "emerge" from the market will be the best thing.
To be clear, this is not a problem with free markets, but a problem with the values of people. Free markets, in this sense, is merely a mechanism of decision-making rather than a system of values in and of itself; just like democracy. Indeed, this is one of the major problems with majoritarian democracy, in that it sanctions whatever the majority happens to vote for, which does not necessarily mean that the results will be the best. But the exact same thing is true of "the market" (which could be construed as an economic type of democracy in terms of demand), in that if the values of the people with demands are questionable (and I'm not refering to economic value here in terms of prices, but value in the more general sense of what people prefer), the supply that "emerges" will not necessarily be the best.
Of course, there is a sense in which "the market" is being used by people as a catch-all metaphor for social organization in general. And what I'm basically saying is that it is not at all clear that after the elimination of the current state, whatever form of social organization that happens to "emerge" will inherently be better, let alone not be a state. Basically, I'm saying that whether or not what "emerges" is better, and whether or not a new state will arise, will be dependant on the values that people have. To expect things to be fundamentally different or necessarily better without any real change in people's values is naive, and it is for precisely this reason that I find anti-statism conceptualized as something to be pursued for its own sake, completely divorced from any sort of social context, to be problematic. The "value-neutral" approach to anarchism fails.
Let's be frank about this: anarchism, without any sort of reasonable social context of values to ground itself, actually does reduce to a void that can be filled by any concievable form of authoritarianism. It is a completely vacuous concept, a purely floating abstraction, without at least some basic principles of social organization (such as libertarianism, at a minimum) to back it up. This is precisely why people are libertarian anarchists in the first place, and by libertarian I mean a social philosophy with certain principles of social organization that provides a context for anarchism; certain values of liberty. In the abscence of such a context, "anarchism" could function as a completely open-ended vacuum that could be the starting point and legitimization for literally anything, including fascism; a transition from one authoritarian state to another.
This is why, for good reason, most anarchists throughout history have not defined anarchism as simply being the abolition of a given state. In this sense, the "social anarchists" deserve some credit in that they tend to realize that a more holistic sense of anti-authoritarianism is necessary to produce the end of a flourishing and sustainable free society (although some of their conceptions of exactly what the basis for that is may be debatable). The goal of anarchists should be a flourishing free society, not just the abolition of the current state and then a "who cares? whatever the market decides will arise" attitude about whatever "emerges" from that point onwards. It simply is not the case that whatever "emerges" after the fall of a given state will be a free society irrespective of the values of the people in it and how social organization is approached "after the revolution".
To be clear, this is not a problem with free markets, but a problem with the values of people. Free markets, in this sense, is merely a mechanism of decision-making rather than a system of values in and of itself; just like democracy. Indeed, this is one of the major problems with majoritarian democracy, in that it sanctions whatever the majority happens to vote for, which does not necessarily mean that the results will be the best. But the exact same thing is true of "the market" (which could be construed as an economic type of democracy in terms of demand), in that if the values of the people with demands are questionable (and I'm not refering to economic value here in terms of prices, but value in the more general sense of what people prefer), the supply that "emerges" will not necessarily be the best.
Of course, there is a sense in which "the market" is being used by people as a catch-all metaphor for social organization in general. And what I'm basically saying is that it is not at all clear that after the elimination of the current state, whatever form of social organization that happens to "emerge" will inherently be better, let alone not be a state. Basically, I'm saying that whether or not what "emerges" is better, and whether or not a new state will arise, will be dependant on the values that people have. To expect things to be fundamentally different or necessarily better without any real change in people's values is naive, and it is for precisely this reason that I find anti-statism conceptualized as something to be pursued for its own sake, completely divorced from any sort of social context, to be problematic. The "value-neutral" approach to anarchism fails.
Let's be frank about this: anarchism, without any sort of reasonable social context of values to ground itself, actually does reduce to a void that can be filled by any concievable form of authoritarianism. It is a completely vacuous concept, a purely floating abstraction, without at least some basic principles of social organization (such as libertarianism, at a minimum) to back it up. This is precisely why people are libertarian anarchists in the first place, and by libertarian I mean a social philosophy with certain principles of social organization that provides a context for anarchism; certain values of liberty. In the abscence of such a context, "anarchism" could function as a completely open-ended vacuum that could be the starting point and legitimization for literally anything, including fascism; a transition from one authoritarian state to another.
This is why, for good reason, most anarchists throughout history have not defined anarchism as simply being the abolition of a given state. In this sense, the "social anarchists" deserve some credit in that they tend to realize that a more holistic sense of anti-authoritarianism is necessary to produce the end of a flourishing and sustainable free society (although some of their conceptions of exactly what the basis for that is may be debatable). The goal of anarchists should be a flourishing free society, not just the abolition of the current state and then a "who cares? whatever the market decides will arise" attitude about whatever "emerges" from that point onwards. It simply is not the case that whatever "emerges" after the fall of a given state will be a free society irrespective of the values of the people in it and how social organization is approached "after the revolution".
Politics Is Inherently Linked With Interpersonal Morality
There has been a recent trend, particularly among certain youtube market anarchists, of a certain distain for moral discourse. Associated with a particular trend towards a certain kind of amoralism (one that largely seems to be the remnants of logical positivism), some have been construeing themselves as anti-perscriptive, as if they do not engage in perscription. However, I find this to either be dishonest or confused, because these very same people continue to rely on normative ethical premises to argue for anti-statism, and hence it doesn't make sense to be dismissive when other people talk about morality while continueing to (at least implicitly) make use of interpersonal moral concepts oneself.
It should be quite clear that noone is above perscription. The moment that one talks about politics, one is inherently caught up in questions of interpersonal morality, because politics *is* interpersonal morality at an institutional level. Everyone, including those who claim to be above morality, is dealing with the question of how society should be organized. Even anti-statism, in the most narrow sense possible, is a perscription about how society should be organized. Libertarianism, at the most basic level, is a political theory (or a set of political theories) about how society should be organized. The value of non-aggression is a normative ethical premise about how society should be organized. It therefore seems disingenous to continue making use of these concepts (such as non-aggression, private property and freedom of association) while claiming to be above perscription.
Taking things further, it is not at all clear that the question of how society should be organized ends upon the establishment of the value of non-aggression or the conclusion of anti-statism. The negation of politics in the narrow sense of questions of state policy does not by itself solve the problem or end the debate over how society should be organized, nor does a completely relativistic attitude in which all forms of social organization are treated as just as good as any other logically follow from such a negation. Furthermore, anti-statism actually self-detonates as soon as one's basis for how society should be organized ends up leading to more or less the exact same thing that one initially set out to negate. In this sense, the negation of the current state rings rather hollow if what one wishes to replace it with is either not fundamentally different or arguably worse.
Just because the current state is done away with does not inherently mean that whatever happens to "emerge" henceforth is better, or is not a state for that matter. In the absence of a decent enough interpersonal morality, liberty is a completely vacuous concept. In the libertarian senses of the term, liberty is inherently an interpersonal normative ethic that places certain constraints on what is morally permissible. "Freedom" in the broadest sense of "whatever people happen to do" is not liberty, it is compatible with any political ideology and any form of social organization. When libertarians speak of liberty, they generally are not refering to the notion that "I can do whatever I want to other people" or that "all interpersonal norms are equally valid". The moment that one debates politics, one implies the favorability of certain interpersonal norms over others.
So some people should really drop the talk of morality being somehow irrelevant or transcended. There is a very relevant and serious discussion and debate to be had about how liberty is concieved of and what values are most conductive to liberty, as well as what values liberty is most conductive towards, and amoralist memes do not get around this. Market anarchists who lay claim to amoralism have not actually transcended the discussion of values, even if they distain the word "morality" and are under the illusion that "practicality" is somehow completely divorced from it. "Practicality" is always a matter of "practical" towards an end, and hence it inherently begs the question of value. The question is not nullified simply because one nominally rejects the state, and it would be more intellectually honest if the amoralists stopped acting like it is.
It should be quite clear that noone is above perscription. The moment that one talks about politics, one is inherently caught up in questions of interpersonal morality, because politics *is* interpersonal morality at an institutional level. Everyone, including those who claim to be above morality, is dealing with the question of how society should be organized. Even anti-statism, in the most narrow sense possible, is a perscription about how society should be organized. Libertarianism, at the most basic level, is a political theory (or a set of political theories) about how society should be organized. The value of non-aggression is a normative ethical premise about how society should be organized. It therefore seems disingenous to continue making use of these concepts (such as non-aggression, private property and freedom of association) while claiming to be above perscription.
Taking things further, it is not at all clear that the question of how society should be organized ends upon the establishment of the value of non-aggression or the conclusion of anti-statism. The negation of politics in the narrow sense of questions of state policy does not by itself solve the problem or end the debate over how society should be organized, nor does a completely relativistic attitude in which all forms of social organization are treated as just as good as any other logically follow from such a negation. Furthermore, anti-statism actually self-detonates as soon as one's basis for how society should be organized ends up leading to more or less the exact same thing that one initially set out to negate. In this sense, the negation of the current state rings rather hollow if what one wishes to replace it with is either not fundamentally different or arguably worse.
Just because the current state is done away with does not inherently mean that whatever happens to "emerge" henceforth is better, or is not a state for that matter. In the absence of a decent enough interpersonal morality, liberty is a completely vacuous concept. In the libertarian senses of the term, liberty is inherently an interpersonal normative ethic that places certain constraints on what is morally permissible. "Freedom" in the broadest sense of "whatever people happen to do" is not liberty, it is compatible with any political ideology and any form of social organization. When libertarians speak of liberty, they generally are not refering to the notion that "I can do whatever I want to other people" or that "all interpersonal norms are equally valid". The moment that one debates politics, one implies the favorability of certain interpersonal norms over others.
So some people should really drop the talk of morality being somehow irrelevant or transcended. There is a very relevant and serious discussion and debate to be had about how liberty is concieved of and what values are most conductive to liberty, as well as what values liberty is most conductive towards, and amoralist memes do not get around this. Market anarchists who lay claim to amoralism have not actually transcended the discussion of values, even if they distain the word "morality" and are under the illusion that "practicality" is somehow completely divorced from it. "Practicality" is always a matter of "practical" towards an end, and hence it inherently begs the question of value. The question is not nullified simply because one nominally rejects the state, and it would be more intellectually honest if the amoralists stopped acting like it is.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Clarification On Property
I'm not sure if everyone is likely to completly understand the implied view on property from my last post. The sense in which I reject "absolutism" in property is when it is context-dropping, to the point of either overriding life and liberty (for example, the "maximalist" position of shooting people for very minor property transgressions, or the "voluntary slavery" notion that upholds perpetual contracts that take away someone's liberty for the rest of their life) or simply defying common sense self-interest (which is illustrated well in these sort of circumstantial situations in which it seems quite obvious that the preservation of one's life is the right thing to do).
In the thread that Danny Shahar's scenario comes from (http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/7159.aspx), most of the commentators fundamentally did not seem to understand Danny's point and they more or less insisted that by taking the position that it is morally permissible to break into a cabin when you are freezing to death, he is somehow engaging in a grand heresy against private property. In fact, many of the commentators seemed to take a hardline view that it is not moral to do so and seemed to treat the question as revolving entirely around what the owner of the cabin thinks (despite the fact that the owner is not present in the scenario; the cabin is unoccupied).
As far as I can tell, the problem is that the hardline view that it is not morally permissible to temporarily engage in a minor property transgression in order to save one's life, even in such dire circumstances, defies common sense self-interest. Furthermore, some commentators did precisely what I refered to in my prior post, which is to say that they tried to reduce the entire question to an ex-post-facto issue of whether or not the person can potentially be held legally liable for damages, while in vain I repeatedly tried to explain to them that that is a separate question from the more fundamental one at hand, which is the moral permissibility of breaking into the cabin in the scenario (I.E. whether or not it makes practical sense for one's moral theory to consider saving one's life in such circumstances the right thing to do in the first place).
To an extent, the thread devolved into a meta-debate about how liberty and property are concieved of in general. And let's make no bones about it: I do not think that liberty can be reduced to a question of property and I deny the center-rothbardian position that "all rights are property rights", because I think that property rights are an entailment of a broader general right of liberty or personal sovereignty. In other words, a general conception of individual liberty, while it forms a basis out of which to justify property, it also inherently involves certain constraints on property in the sense of the power that owning property could be said to grant. Indeed, the moment that one opposes murdering and enslaving people via an appeal to the authority of property owners (whether this be manifested as "proportionality" or a more general notion of property-as-constrained-by-liberty), there is a sense in which this makes property "non-absolute".
Let me put it this way: the implication of the idea that owning property grants absolute decision-making power actually does result in a justification for whatever an owner does to whoever happens to be on their land. And it's in this sense that I very strongly want to say that one does not lose one's rights as soon as one enters someone else's property, and that "love it or leave it" as a rationalization for however owners happen to treat people on their property seems like an arbitrary appeal to absolute authority that is identical in kind to precisely what libertarians tend to object to about the state. Usually, libertarians will reject the "love it or leave it" argument for the state by questioning the legitimacy of the state's ownership. However, I think that the problem runs even deeper than this, in that even if someone is a "just owner", it still would not grant them legitimacy to any sort of claim over other people's lives just because they are on the land.
Hence, while it definitely seems like somewhat of a bad comparison to equate a small land owner with a state, if we maintain the principle of absolute authority based on territorialism then there is no qualatative difference between a small land owner's claim over the lives of others and a large nation-state's claim over the lives of others. To be clear, this is not necessarily an objection to ownership itself, but to claims of absolute authority derived from ownership. If various anarcho-capitalists object to the current state's claim of absolute authority derived from ownership (albiet an ownership claim that is dubious), it would be wise for them not to establish their model for the alternative to the state on the basis of the exact same type of claim. In this sense, I think that there are some serious issues pertaining to land ownership in anarcho-capitalism that create what seems like a fairly obvious risk of an anarcho-capitalist model of social organization constituting a defacto new state (especially if pursued through faux-privatization).
This is the sense in which I want to challenge "propertarian absolutism": that it risks devolving into precisely what it initially set out to oppose if property is not reconceptualized. To be fair, some are better than others on this question. On one hand, some people will oppose the authoritarian implications of absolutist propertarianism while simultaneously continueing to use the language upon which it is based. On the other hand, some people will either deny that there are such implications or outright endorse them in the case of the more "vulgar" types (for example, some have endorsed what reduces to a monarchal city-state achieved through a faux-privatization scheme in which the entire land and infrastructure of a city is sold by the state to a single individual, who maintains absolute dominion over the occupants of the city from that point onwards). The anarcho-capitalist "hardline" seems fairly dismissive of such considerations, which I obviously think is a problem.
The other main sense in which I want to challenge "propertarian absolutism" is with respect to the issue of contracts. Some libertarians justify slavery contracts on the grounds that it is concievable for one to initially be voluntarily entered into. Hence, there is a certain notion of "voluntary slavery" that gets kicked around in some libertarian circles. But I think that this potentially reduces to the total annialation of liberty by essentially conceptualizing it as something that can be contracted away permanently, which defies the "inalienability" of rights. What I wish to maintain is that, even if someone voluntarily enters into a contract, they should always be able to opt out of contracts later on, even if this means that they may be liable for withstanding debts. In this sense, I view contracts, properly construed, as inherently being temporary. I don't think that it is sensible to support contracts that take away someone's liberty for the rest of their life, in which force is ultimately used to stop them from exiting the relationship. This nullifies freedom of association through perpetual contracts.
Just like with Shahar's scenario, some may be prone to concentrate entirely on the ex-post-facto issue of restitution or debt payment. But I categorically distinguish this from the more fundamental question of whether or not contracts can be opted out of. I maintain that contracts can always be opted out of, with the understanding that prior obligations or debts are taken care of. But you cannot reasonably bind someone to perpetually be obligated to you for the rest of their lives, effectively taking away their liberty entirely, simply because they signed a contract in the past. And it is this sense in which what's called "voluntary slavery" immediately crosses over into plain old slavery: to call it "voluntary" when a party of the contract is forced to stay in the association in perpetuity is misleading. This is effectively to completely nullify liberty through an appeal to the perpetual authority of contracts.
I have similar problems with the notion of "restrictive covenants", in that it seems to ultimately boil down to the same thing as the involuntary "social contract". If a "restrictive covenant" is a contract that is enforced onto an entire community in the absence of explicit consent, which inherently means the binding of 3rd parties of bystanders, then it is the same thing as the very "social contract" that libertarians like to rail against. I find the likelyhood of literally everyone within a given geographical area unanimously agreeing to a "restrictive covenant" to be quite null. Furthermore, even assuming that such a contract is explicitly agreed to in the first place, there is an intergenerational issue that comes up that is similar in kind to the problem with "the social contract". In short, to uphold the contract in perpetuity for future generations runs into the same problem that the "voluntary slavery" notion runs into: it becomes intergenerational slavery.
The "restrictive covenant" notion also seems to be dependant on territorialism to begin with. In order for the restriction to apply to everyone in a given geographical area, some individual or group's absolute claim to ownership over that geographical area must be assumed in the first place. Hence, a "restrictive covenant" over an entire city, for example, would be dependant on some individual or organization's claim to own that entire city. But, as I've talked about with respect to the monarchal city-state model that some anarcho-capitalists propose, this is untenable. Someone's ownership claim over an entire city is dubious to begin with, at least in the sense that it is rather questionable how someone is going to obtain ownership over the entire thing, and how ownership is transfered given the existance of people who already occupy the city (other than as a faux-privatization scheme as described above). Such a transfer is incredibly volatile, in that it quite likely would require forcing people off their own property and it is rather inconcievable that everyone in a given city would unanimously agree to give up their small portions of ownership to a single individual or organization. Again, this basically reduces to everything that one set out to challenge in the first place.
So I hope this clears up precisely what I am refering to when I use the term "absolutist propertarianism", which more or less reduces to the use of the concept of property to justify authoritarianism (I.E. justifying things like murdering people, enslaving people and establishing little monarchies in the name of "property rights").
In the thread that Danny Shahar's scenario comes from (http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/7159.aspx), most of the commentators fundamentally did not seem to understand Danny's point and they more or less insisted that by taking the position that it is morally permissible to break into a cabin when you are freezing to death, he is somehow engaging in a grand heresy against private property. In fact, many of the commentators seemed to take a hardline view that it is not moral to do so and seemed to treat the question as revolving entirely around what the owner of the cabin thinks (despite the fact that the owner is not present in the scenario; the cabin is unoccupied).
As far as I can tell, the problem is that the hardline view that it is not morally permissible to temporarily engage in a minor property transgression in order to save one's life, even in such dire circumstances, defies common sense self-interest. Furthermore, some commentators did precisely what I refered to in my prior post, which is to say that they tried to reduce the entire question to an ex-post-facto issue of whether or not the person can potentially be held legally liable for damages, while in vain I repeatedly tried to explain to them that that is a separate question from the more fundamental one at hand, which is the moral permissibility of breaking into the cabin in the scenario (I.E. whether or not it makes practical sense for one's moral theory to consider saving one's life in such circumstances the right thing to do in the first place).
To an extent, the thread devolved into a meta-debate about how liberty and property are concieved of in general. And let's make no bones about it: I do not think that liberty can be reduced to a question of property and I deny the center-rothbardian position that "all rights are property rights", because I think that property rights are an entailment of a broader general right of liberty or personal sovereignty. In other words, a general conception of individual liberty, while it forms a basis out of which to justify property, it also inherently involves certain constraints on property in the sense of the power that owning property could be said to grant. Indeed, the moment that one opposes murdering and enslaving people via an appeal to the authority of property owners (whether this be manifested as "proportionality" or a more general notion of property-as-constrained-by-liberty), there is a sense in which this makes property "non-absolute".
Let me put it this way: the implication of the idea that owning property grants absolute decision-making power actually does result in a justification for whatever an owner does to whoever happens to be on their land. And it's in this sense that I very strongly want to say that one does not lose one's rights as soon as one enters someone else's property, and that "love it or leave it" as a rationalization for however owners happen to treat people on their property seems like an arbitrary appeal to absolute authority that is identical in kind to precisely what libertarians tend to object to about the state. Usually, libertarians will reject the "love it or leave it" argument for the state by questioning the legitimacy of the state's ownership. However, I think that the problem runs even deeper than this, in that even if someone is a "just owner", it still would not grant them legitimacy to any sort of claim over other people's lives just because they are on the land.
Hence, while it definitely seems like somewhat of a bad comparison to equate a small land owner with a state, if we maintain the principle of absolute authority based on territorialism then there is no qualatative difference between a small land owner's claim over the lives of others and a large nation-state's claim over the lives of others. To be clear, this is not necessarily an objection to ownership itself, but to claims of absolute authority derived from ownership. If various anarcho-capitalists object to the current state's claim of absolute authority derived from ownership (albiet an ownership claim that is dubious), it would be wise for them not to establish their model for the alternative to the state on the basis of the exact same type of claim. In this sense, I think that there are some serious issues pertaining to land ownership in anarcho-capitalism that create what seems like a fairly obvious risk of an anarcho-capitalist model of social organization constituting a defacto new state (especially if pursued through faux-privatization).
This is the sense in which I want to challenge "propertarian absolutism": that it risks devolving into precisely what it initially set out to oppose if property is not reconceptualized. To be fair, some are better than others on this question. On one hand, some people will oppose the authoritarian implications of absolutist propertarianism while simultaneously continueing to use the language upon which it is based. On the other hand, some people will either deny that there are such implications or outright endorse them in the case of the more "vulgar" types (for example, some have endorsed what reduces to a monarchal city-state achieved through a faux-privatization scheme in which the entire land and infrastructure of a city is sold by the state to a single individual, who maintains absolute dominion over the occupants of the city from that point onwards). The anarcho-capitalist "hardline" seems fairly dismissive of such considerations, which I obviously think is a problem.
The other main sense in which I want to challenge "propertarian absolutism" is with respect to the issue of contracts. Some libertarians justify slavery contracts on the grounds that it is concievable for one to initially be voluntarily entered into. Hence, there is a certain notion of "voluntary slavery" that gets kicked around in some libertarian circles. But I think that this potentially reduces to the total annialation of liberty by essentially conceptualizing it as something that can be contracted away permanently, which defies the "inalienability" of rights. What I wish to maintain is that, even if someone voluntarily enters into a contract, they should always be able to opt out of contracts later on, even if this means that they may be liable for withstanding debts. In this sense, I view contracts, properly construed, as inherently being temporary. I don't think that it is sensible to support contracts that take away someone's liberty for the rest of their life, in which force is ultimately used to stop them from exiting the relationship. This nullifies freedom of association through perpetual contracts.
Just like with Shahar's scenario, some may be prone to concentrate entirely on the ex-post-facto issue of restitution or debt payment. But I categorically distinguish this from the more fundamental question of whether or not contracts can be opted out of. I maintain that contracts can always be opted out of, with the understanding that prior obligations or debts are taken care of. But you cannot reasonably bind someone to perpetually be obligated to you for the rest of their lives, effectively taking away their liberty entirely, simply because they signed a contract in the past. And it is this sense in which what's called "voluntary slavery" immediately crosses over into plain old slavery: to call it "voluntary" when a party of the contract is forced to stay in the association in perpetuity is misleading. This is effectively to completely nullify liberty through an appeal to the perpetual authority of contracts.
I have similar problems with the notion of "restrictive covenants", in that it seems to ultimately boil down to the same thing as the involuntary "social contract". If a "restrictive covenant" is a contract that is enforced onto an entire community in the absence of explicit consent, which inherently means the binding of 3rd parties of bystanders, then it is the same thing as the very "social contract" that libertarians like to rail against. I find the likelyhood of literally everyone within a given geographical area unanimously agreeing to a "restrictive covenant" to be quite null. Furthermore, even assuming that such a contract is explicitly agreed to in the first place, there is an intergenerational issue that comes up that is similar in kind to the problem with "the social contract". In short, to uphold the contract in perpetuity for future generations runs into the same problem that the "voluntary slavery" notion runs into: it becomes intergenerational slavery.
The "restrictive covenant" notion also seems to be dependant on territorialism to begin with. In order for the restriction to apply to everyone in a given geographical area, some individual or group's absolute claim to ownership over that geographical area must be assumed in the first place. Hence, a "restrictive covenant" over an entire city, for example, would be dependant on some individual or organization's claim to own that entire city. But, as I've talked about with respect to the monarchal city-state model that some anarcho-capitalists propose, this is untenable. Someone's ownership claim over an entire city is dubious to begin with, at least in the sense that it is rather questionable how someone is going to obtain ownership over the entire thing, and how ownership is transfered given the existance of people who already occupy the city (other than as a faux-privatization scheme as described above). Such a transfer is incredibly volatile, in that it quite likely would require forcing people off their own property and it is rather inconcievable that everyone in a given city would unanimously agree to give up their small portions of ownership to a single individual or organization. Again, this basically reduces to everything that one set out to challenge in the first place.
So I hope this clears up precisely what I am refering to when I use the term "absolutist propertarianism", which more or less reduces to the use of the concept of property to justify authoritarianism (I.E. justifying things like murdering people, enslaving people and establishing little monarchies in the name of "property rights").
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