Individualism, Abstraction and Authority

Friday, February 20, 2009

As I understand it, individualism is not merely political in any narrow sense of the term. It is philosophical in a broader sense, relating to fundamental questions of personal identity and responsibility. A thorough-going individualism, in epistemic terms, denies that one's identity and responsibility as an individual is absolutely predetermined for them by collective forces and abstract concepts. An individual is a separate entity from other people and things, with their own will and body. It could also be said, from a nominalist perspective, that an individual should not be directly conflated with a concept or abstraction.

To be sure, this isn't necessarily to be confused with atomism, I.E. the denial of the fact that one lives in a given environment or society. While it might be possible for individualism to overlap with atomism, pretty much no serious or thorough-going individualist denies interrelations or pretends that people exist in a vacuum; this isn't solipsism. But individualism could be viewed as a denial of both nature and nurture being used in a fatalistic or hard detereministic way as it relates to personal identity. In terms of epistemology, individualism recognizes some sort of uniqueness in each individual (more of an analytic approach) or leaves it to the individual to discover and create their own uniqueness (more of an existentialist approach). In either case, people clearly are not identical or uniform or absolutely unanimous in every way.

It is important to note that the implications of this overlaps with pluralism. Approached as an analytic description of people, individualism attempts to identify the unique characteristics of an individual in terms of their physical composition and behavior, and since each individual's characteristics vary, this analysis will have a pluralistic result when we start to deal with multiple people. Human behavior can be incredibly diverse and unpredictable. Praxeology, employing methodological individualism, describes human behavior in terms of the values that people hold and their purposeful action in the pursuit of their values, rather than being based on the criteria of a particular value (since it isn't working in the field of ethics).

Individualism can also be seen as pluralistic in a more overtly existentialist sense, which is to say that in some sense individuals create their own meaning and value (especially in the realm of aesthetics). To be sure, there is culture, and a culture is essentially a collectivity of memes that come from people. But at the same time, it could be said that each individual has their own unique culture, as they do not all have the exact same ideas and behaviors, and individualism would encourage the individual to develope a unique personal identity that is not to be conflated with highly abstract and collective cultural memes such as the nation, class, race, gender, family, political party, and so on. The individual has no inherent obligation to these memes, and they are free to create their own identity and their own ideas on the ruins of the old. Introspection is also an important element to this.

Consequentially, this may lead the thorough-going individualist to reject a good deal of tradition when it comes to ethics, since a lot of these memes are often normatively treated as something that one has a duty to and has no choice but to identify with. Why should the individualist value something like "the nation"? They clearly never chose to be a part of any "nation", and they clearly are not identical with the other people whom "the nation" is said to represent. There is no "nation", as an entity in and of itself with its own conciousness and values. The individualist strongly feels that this "nation" is alien to them, for good reason. They soon find that many other cultural memes are alien to them (especially those relating to "the state"), and from the perspective of tradition or the norm, their deviations must be considered "immoral" by default.

Hence why the individualist is so despised by authoritarian institutions and ideologies of all kinds. The individualist who dares to rebel against the norm must be treated as a sinner against the good, because the good is superficially understood only in terms of what's already the norm. The greatest threat to tradition and the norm is the individual who innovates, who thinks for themself and slips away from the psychological trappings of the society that they were born into. Independance of judgement is the ultimate enemy of arbitrary authority, and arbitrary authority tends to be rooted in floating abstractions that are turned into ethical and legal obligations. Once one rejects the abstractions upon which the authorities are founded (such "god", "state", "humanity", "family", "nation", "race", and so on), if one follows things consistantly through one ends up rejecting the authorities. And since ethics is so often defined in terms of those authorities, the individualist must superficially be classified as immoral by either the elites or the masses (or both).

The thorough-going individualist is an anti-authoritarian, through and through. The highly abstract concepts that are used to justify the norm of authority claims hold no instrinsic authority in the eyes of the thorough-going individualist. Not only is "the state" conceptually used as a spook, so are a laundry list of cultural memes, some of which may relate to the state directly and others of which do not directly relate or even precede the state. Some of these cultural memes are used to justify the state and some others are consequences of the state, and in turn the rejection of any intrinsic authority to such cultural memes strengthens the reasons for opposing the state. In some sense this is a question of "thickness", specifically in terms of individualism. It's also a question of the epistemological roots of individualism.

Posted by Brainpolice at 5:25 PM

Labels: Abstraction, Anarchism, Authority, Duty, Epistemology, Ethics, Existentialism, Individualism, Personal Identity, Personal Responsibility,Philosophy, Praxeology

Propertarianism, Voluntaryism and Freedom

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

I'd like to once again clarify my own views, put in contrast to some views that I have rejected. Hopefully this may help illuminate exactly what is at stake in the conflicts that take place within libertarianism and anarchism.

Propertarianism

One of the major issues at stake is how one treats the concept of property. I use the term propertarianism to refer to libertarian ideologies that tend to treat property as a primary value, as an absolute, or as some sort of starting point or the basis for defining everything. For example, Murray Rothbard's declaration that all rights are property rights is an example of a form of propertarianism. More generally, propertarians tends to view freedom as reducible to a question of property and have a deontological view of property rights.

I reject propertarianism. To be clear, rejecting propertarianism does not necessarily mean that one rejects property or property rights outright. In my case, what it means is that freedom is not reducible to property because life and liberty are prior concepts, and that property rights are not absolute in that they may have contextual side-constraints. I reject any framing of the question which assumes that we must either be pro-property or anti-property in some absolute sense, and I do not think that freedom and property can be absolutely equated.

There are reasons for this. There are contexts in which a default defense of property amounts to a rationalization for infringing on someone's freedom or unnecessarily taking their life. I don't think that ownership legitimately grants absolute authority, regardless of how it is acquired. I think that ownership alone may be necessary but insufficient for legitimacy. I think that freedom is more fundamentally a matter of the concrete interpersonal relations of individuals, while property is a secondary question in relation to it.

In my understanding, property in the most general and disambiguated sense is a multi-faceted concept that cannot reasonably be simplified or reduced to a particular aspect or manifestation of it. It depends on the context. In one context, property could be linked to freedom. In another context, property could be linked to aggression and tyranny. Propertarianism attempts to reduce property to its positive aspects while ignoring or denying its negative aspects, and in the process it may end up effectively legitimizing the negative aspects, even if some propertarians do not explicitly intend to rationalize or endorse infringing on anyone's freedom.

If freedom entails not unnecessarily being coerced or bossed around on the basis of other people's whims and not being physically aggressed against in a clearly non-defensive context, then propertarianism has tension with freedom to the extent that this can be justified in its framework. To take this to the institutional and territorial level, if a territorial monopoly on ultimate decision-making power and force is a state and a propertarian framework establishes a standard for legitimacy in which a qualitatively identical institution can be justified depending on nothing more than property acquisition norms, then propertarianism can logically entail and consequently lead to a state. Hence, anti-statists have a reason to be skeptical of propertarianism.

A purely deontological or absolutist conception of property rights also leads to blatant absurdities on practical grounds, particularly because it commits the propertarian to dismiss all life-boat scenarios out of hand or simply default to whatever a property owner decides as an answer. From the point of view of the person in a sticky situation, this implies that they have a moral obligation to let themselves die or at least suffer a significant amount of unecessary harm in the name of respecting property. Hence, property is effectively placed above life. This gives one consequentialist grounds for rejecting propertarianism.

At each step of the way so far, we have pointed out various ways in which property can conflict with both freedom and life. I think that it is important to emphasize that to the extent that one wants to uphold the value of freedom and life in these contexts, one has necessarily placed limits on the concept of property and its practical applications. On the flip side, to the extent that one upholds a propertarian theory one is committed to some sort of negation of freedom and life. I think that there are well-meaning propertarians who hold positions that are a bit fuzzy on these matters, so I wouldn't want to lump them in with a more extreme position. However, I think they have reason for cognitive dissonance.

These questions can invoke a lot of hostility among libertarians and anarchists. Some propertarians are absolutist to the point where the more nuanced positions that I have hinted at are considered to be diametrically opposed to everything they favor and as a total negation of property. I believe that this is false because it is based on a misleading framing of the question that smuggles in the assumption of certain absolute dichotomies. Those propertarians who think that the choice is essentially between their position and communism, or who act as if any alternative position necessarily equates to statism, are being dogmatic and making non-sequitors.

This should constitute a decent overview of the problems that I have with propertarianism. While I don't necessarily condemn property and property rights outright, I do not consider property to be the right framework to conceptualize everything in. I view these concepts as inherently being contingent and necessary but insufficient. There are great dangers to focusing so much or so narrowly on property that all common sense and decency goes out the window and the pretense of freedom begins to become suspect. It would be wise not to think in such simplistic and axiomatic terms about the question of property.

Voluntaryism

I use the term voluntaryism to refer to libertarian ideologies that tend to treat the notion of voluntary interaction as a primary value, as an absolute, or as some sort of starting point or basis for defining everything -- in a way that does not particularly disambiguate what constitutes "voluntary" and "involuntary" relations. Generally, voluntaryism is presented in a way that makes it seem more pluralistic than propertarianism, as a sort of all-inclusive umbrella "so long as it's voluntary". I am using the term voluntaryism to refer to views that tend to consider the question of interpersonal relations as being reducible to a question of voluntary-ness, beyond which point "anything goes" or is "just a preference".

To be sure, I think that some ideas going by the name of "voluntaryism" are actually hardly distinguishable from propertarianism because the concept of "voluntary" and "involuntary" are disambiguated in explicitly propertarian terms, which can make it rather misleading. But as I am using the term here, it involves at least the intent of being more pluralistic than that. Voluntaryism contrasts with propertarianism insofar as propertarians act as if their particular models are the only ones that can possibly be compatible with freedom, while voluntaryists function on the pretext that essentially all norms other than "is it voluntary or not?" are compatible with freedom.

As I have already hinted at, I think that voluntaryism suffers from ambiguity. There are a multitude of normative concepts of exactly what is and isn't voluntary, so a meta-debate is almost inevitably begged. What one voluntaryist considers voluntary may be considered involuntary by another depending on normative assumptions, so it seems hard to think that the concept of voluntaryism can be separate from such questions. I think that voluntaryism collapses into meaninglessness if it is taken at face value, divorced from any particular norm. This kind of pluralism is just nihilism by another name, a nihilism that clings to one norm: noone's views can apply to anyone else. To put it another way, it is a form of nihilism that at least puts on the front of valueing tolerance as some sort of end in and of itself.

Perhaps the closest that voluntaryist pluralism can come to providing a neutral definition of "voluntary" that isn't packaged with additional norms is a definition that effectively reduces to "agreement". But it is hard to see how this is particularly useful. The very nature of any society contains various degrees of disagreement. A stalinist, a monarchist, or a neo-nazi aren't going to agree with libertarians and anarchists, but surely libertarians and anarchists aren't inherently imposing an "involuntary" relationship by opposing those ideas and systems. A murderer may disagree with being defended against or shunned, or they may disagree with the idea that they've done something wrong, but surely their rights aren't violated by this. Something is very fishy about this.

Some voluntaryists essentially do take a meta-view that is inclusive towards all norms and systems. Monarchy, democracy, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, whatever it may be, is fine and dandy with them "so long as it's voluntary" (or contingent on these systems isolating into enclaves or tribes). The problem is that this completely collapses the notion of "voluntary" and "involuntary". At best, it means that each system is voluntary relative to other systems, but a given system inside of this framework could be internally involuntary. Indeed, one could have a totalitarian dictatorship, and it would be okay by these standards so long as it does not cross over into the nation next door.

To be fair, not all those who call themselves voluntaryists take it to this level. Rather, what they are more likely to promote is effectively what's been called "thin libertarianism", the view that freedom or libertarianism is purely reducible to something like the non-aggression principle, beyond which point everything is a matter of subjective personal preferences. That is, it's the idea that non-aggression (which is almost always defined through the lens of some kind of property norm) is sufficient to produce a free society. Thick libertarians, such as myself, disagree with this on the grounds that this is insufficient (although perhaps necessary), that additional considerations matter.

So in this sense "voluntaryism is more or less the same thing as thin libertarianism. A big part of the problem with thin libertarianism is that it seems obvious that political outcomes are in some way dependant on cultural atmospheres and that not all cultural atmospheres are equally good breeding grounds for the goals of political freedom. Hence, this sort of total cultural and moral relativism can be a dangerous attitude to attempt to start a free society with. It is arguable that certain cultural and moral norms are likely to lead to aggression and statism, while others are a healthy precondition for realizing libertarian goals. Without getting into the details of the normative debate, I don't think it should particularly be hard to see the general point being made about this.

Some voluntaryists may be tempted to engage in a non-sequitor in reaction to such objections by accusing the critic of necessarily supporting aggression or "involuntary" relations. This is based a false framing of the discussion and it also likely involves the voluntaryist having hidden or unspoken normative assumptions. The fact of the matter is that noone has a concept of non-aggression or "voluntary" that is completely detached from particular normative premises, and in this sense "thin libertarianism" is inherently misleading, I.E. it is a front of value neutrality or a hypocritically applied relativity.

This should function as a sufficient general overview of my problems with voluntaryism. While I do think that pluralism is an important value, I don't think that it is an acontextual value or some sort of absolute. There are good reasons for being concerned about people being too open-ended with their pluralism, taken to the point of rationalizing blatant contradictions and leaving the door wide open for any old authoritarian ideology and system. And it is wise not to focus so much or so narrowly on "political justice" that a good deal of the social questions that effect people in their everyday lives are dismissed as irrelevant, while being naive about the preconditions necessary for practical achievement of political goals.

Conclusion

For the most part, this was a reiteration and clarification of positions that I've already taken ad naseum elsewhere and talked about in older posts. The two ideological tendencies that I've critisized can be viewed as representive of two extremes in a more general conflict between ideas that are too closed and absolute on one hand and ideas that are too open and ambiguous on the other hand. I would suggest that the most coherant positions can be found somewhere in between such extremes. What I've said here only scratches the surface of a multitude of much more particular discussions that could be had, but I think that I've set up the general foundation for such a discussion.

Posted by Brainpolice at 3:14 PM

Labels: Libertarianism, Lifeboat Situations, Nihilism, Non-Aggression Axiom, Pluralism, Propertarianism, Property Rights, Thick Libertarianism, Thin Libertarianism, Voluntaryism

The Disposition of Property Under Market Anarch

The Disposition of Property Under Market Anarchy

I have heard a lot of opining about how property is to be handled under market anarchy. Most of this discussion centers on how one acquires property legitimately in a free society, how to protect such property, how intrusions on ones property should be addressed, etc. Scarcely have I heard, dare I say never, any mention of how property should be conveyed at death. That is, when a property owner dies, what should happen to his property?

The most straightforward answer is that, well, clearly, the decedent (dead property owner) should convey all of his assets through testamentary disposition, e.g. a will. This answer is crystal clear, but the issue gets somewhat foggy if one asks a very obvious question: what if the decedent is intestate, i.e. he has no will?

At common law, the emphasis has always been placed on the biological relations of people when conveying property at death. It was a legal philosophy obsessed with blood: it wanted a decedent's property to end up in the hands of his blood relatives. Love it or hate it, this clear line of distinction about where your property went resolved a lot of problems. The state simply declared that upon your death all of your assets would be conveyed to your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, etc. If the state could not find anyone to give your property to within your bloodline, the state would grant itself your property.

Today, most, if not all, states in the United States still have such a system in place. If you die intestate, your property passes through your state's law of intestacy, which generally means it goes to your spouse and your blood relatives. If the state has trouble finding the decedent's heirs, it will go up the ancestral line, and locate a consanguineous heir. If all else fails, the state does what it does best: it claims the property for itself.

The problem facing market anarchists concerns how property should pass in the absence of a will. Simply, if a man dies with property and has devised no document dealing with its disposition at his death, what is to be done with said property? Surely the answer is not to adopt the government's current practice and convey it to blood relatives. After all, what makes blood relatives so bloody (excuse the pun) special under property rights properly understood? Well, nothing. There is no reason to assert that property rights demand the conveyance of ones assets to blood relatives at death.

There are a few possibilities to remedy this situation in the absence of the state.

It could be that each business would form a contractual relationship with its customers, especially in the purchase of large products like a car or refrigerator, wherein each particular product would have its own method of conveyance if the decedent is intestate. The forces of economic law would engage to serve consumers as well. If consumers desired for their property to be conveyed a certain way, they could very well alter their purchasing decisions to reflect their preference for a certain method of property disposition. Thus, if Company A is competing against Company B and their products are similar in every way except the method in which property is conveyed at death, the company with the more preferred method would tend to draw consumers away from its competitor and to it. The result being that either the rival company adopts a different method (perhaps the same one as the other company) or the rival company eventually goes out of business.

The most obvious and economically sensible approach for a company to take is to make it clear when the customer purchases a product that the item will revert to the company should the customer die intestate. This option gives the various companies an incentive to collect their property (if it's profitable to do so): the property could be resold, scrapped for parts, etc.

Another method under a truly free market could be through the use of insurance. In the insurance contract, the insurance company could have a clause that says how property is conveyed at death if the insured dies intestate. The contract could be narrow and cover only the property which is directly insured, or it could be broad and cover much more than that. For example, if you have insurance on land, the insurance policy could have a broad clause that conveys all property on that land should the insured die intestate.

If all else fails, there is also the possibility that entrepreneurs will spring forth in the free market to resolve the unforeseen. At worst, the decedent's property could be treated as unused and unowned, opening an opportunity for it to be homesteaded once more. At first glance, this may seem chaotic, as it could encourage a run on the decedent's property: first come, first serve. However, businesses specializing in the disposition of a decedent's assets could arise to make the process much more smooth. If Tom dies intestate and has land, a house, a car, and other personal items, the Intestate Disposition Firm, for example, could handle the allocation of those assets to buyers by hosting an auction.

What if these firms fight over who gets to auction off the property? Well, consumers would tend not to reward such activity. If firms fight over the now unhomesteaded property, it could damage the property (destroying value) and scare away potential buyers. The firms that want to maximize their profit will have an incentive to auction off the property peacefully, as those who do so violently would be at a comparative disadvantage: the violent firm would get less for damaged property in a sale and would perhaps even need to discount further to entice frightened consumers into purchasing from them. So, in the aggregate, the peaceful firms will tend to push the violent firms out of business as consumers patronize them more relative to the violent firms, and the violent firms will tend to destroy value in the process of aggressing against one another. It could also be assumed that the peaceful firms would set up some customary business arrangement that helps determine which firm proceeds with the auction. The case may be that the geographic location of the decedent's property helps in this instance.

One final issue worth mentioning is conflicting conveyance schemes. For instance, if Tom has an insurance policy that conveys the same piece of property that another, independent contract also conveys, how is it resolved? Well, the method that is flexible enough to cover the strangest situations is to allow dispute resolution authorities to resolve it and formulate a solution for each individual case. If there are conflicting claims to the property, an arbitrator would have to be called in to resolve the dispute. The conflicting claims would have to be analyzed, and the arbitrator would operate in much the same fashion as he would resolving more ordinary disputes between people on the free market.

In sum, freedom works, like always, in resolving even the most mindbogglingly complicated situations.

Posted by Nathan at 2:42 AM Labels: Anarchism, disposition, free market, Libertarianism, Property Rights, testate, will

Limited Liability and Corporations

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I so happened to be reading through old posts on this blog that slipped under my radar when they were initially posted. I came across one by Brainpolice entitled "Limited Liability and the Social Contract." While I understand where Brainpolice is coming from in his approach, I disagree with the overall claim of his article.

Instead of focusing on the article itself, I'd rather elaborate on the reasons that I think notions such as limiting liability are not in conflict with market anarchist philosophy.

It is claimed that limiting liability via a contractual arrangement suffers from the same problem as the social contract. Intellectuals like Lysander Spooner long ago swept the idea of a social contract into the dustbin of history. Spooner and others posited, quite rightly, that no one can bind a man to a contract in which he is not a party. Brainpolice alleges that limiting liability in corporations does the exact same thing that causes the social contract to fail: it attempts to bind third parties.

I dispute this claim. I do not agree that limited liability and the social contract are similar concepts which suffer from the same flaw. To the contrary, limiting liability is a product of free association and alienability in the free market.

My claim is that individuals can contract individually or form an entity to transfer responsibility for their actions, even their crimes. I base this on the idea that one can delegate his rights to another, i.e. he can alienate his rights. That is, a person can contract or sell away his legal responsibility to another in the same way that one can transfer any other kind of legitimately owned property. For instance, John buys the legal responsibility of Sam, so that when Sam goes out and commits a crime, like theft, the victim's right to restitution would not be viable against Sam, since John owns the legal responsibility of Sam. The victim's right to restitution would be directed against John, the rightful owner of Sam's legal responsibility.

It may be objected that the victim clearly has a right to have his restitution come directly from Sam. But does said victim? No. Restitution from Sam is no different than restitution from John in and of itself. To elaborate, if Sam is truly the owner of his legal responsibility, he can contract (or sell or alienate) it away. To the extent that Sam cannot alienate his legal responsibility, it is to that same extent that he does not truly own his own legal responsibility in the first place. If one does not truly own his legal responsibility such that he cannot alienate it, how can it be seriously maintained that restitution should be rightly directed against him for any of his crimes in the first place?

It is on this basis that the contrast between the social contract and the limited liability of corporations becomes evident. The social contract, from the outset, does not contract legal responsibility away from those that fall under a particular government, for the vital ingredient of consent is lacking. On the other hand, limited liability is a concept in which those that agree to it fully consent at the outset. This agreement does not bind third parties like the social contract, since it merely transfers a commodity from one person to another; it no more binds third parties than the fact that Yamaha purchases the tires for its motorcycles from Dunlop. Yamaha, in this market exchange, hardly "binds" consumers of its products in any meaningful sense. The rights of third parties remain completely intact. With one, the social contract, it imposes without consent a certain type of legal order; with the other, limited liability, it simply transfers a commodity, with no impact on the rights of third parties.

It is another matter to consider whether such an arrangement in a free market is a smart or good idea. It is also another matter whether or not such an arrangement under a government is legitimate, since the state's law is not consented to, and it does, in fact, change the legal rights of those seeking redress against a corporation. My point is to claim that limited liability of persons under a business contract merely transfers owned commodities and that this is compatible with market anarchy.

Radical Alienability Scenarios

In response to Brainpolice's recent post on inalienability, I would like to offer the following scenario, which I think will illustrate why Brainpolice's contention that responsibility and rights are not commodifiable is mistaken.

Suppose that at some point in the future, medical technology advances to the point where it devises a medication or medical device that can alter how the brain processes information and functions. In the present world, the brain operates by responding to stimuli in its environment and it sends signals to other parts of the body, commanding them to perform certain actions in response to that stimuli. This new medical technology, however, supplants this normal operation brought about by millions of years of human evolution. Instead, the medical device reconfigures the brain such that it obeys on command the verbal recitations of those persons in control of the external device. No longer does the brain process information it receives from stimuli and make a series of choices to send signals to other parts of the body for action. Now, the choices the brain makes, as in what signals to send to the body in response to its environment, are in the control of an outside person or persons.

Entertaining that this scenario is plausible (and it certainly does not seem logically impossible), suppose someone wanted to purchase this medical technology and use it on a consenting adult. This technology, in effect, alienates the person's body from his "will." Conscious, volitional choices are no longer possible once the decision is made to use said device. The reason for the seller selling his control over his body is not important, but imagine it is to save the life of his daughter. The seller's daughter has a deadly disease and the operation to cure it is very expensive, in the range of $1 million. So, the seller decides to contract with Company X that wants to buy all the capitalized value of his rents (wages) at once. The company pays the seller $1 million, and the seller deposits the money in a trust that will use it for his daughter's expensive operation. The seller then submits himself to operation, having the medical device implanted, and becomes a life-long worker for Company X. In essence, the man has become a mindless automaton.

The next scenario is possible at present.

Sarah has suffered for years with a debilitating disease that brings her unimaginable pain. She has tried medication and surgery, but nothing seems to completely eliminate the around-the-clock pain she feels. Sarah decides that life is not worth living anymore under these circumstances and commits suicide.

My point with these two scenarios is that the exact same thing is happening in both of them: the "will" is being separated from the body. In the first scenario, the father is making a conscious, consensual decision to end his control over his body by having the medical device implanted to save his daughter. In the second scenario, Sarah is making a conscious decision to end her control over her body by committing suicide. After all, who would contend that the "will" remains with the body once an individual has died? Both of these decisions are voluntary, and both of them should be allowed in a truly free society. If one is going to argue that alienating rights, control over your body, the will, responsibility, etc., is not permissible in a free market society, then one will have to also argue that suicide is not permissible either.

I should also make a distinction between selling things that are practically impossible and those things that are logically impossible. I can conceivable sell control over my brain functions as a matter of logic. As a matter of practicality, current technology and medical knowledge may not be able to perform it. This is different than trying to sell a square circle. Ownership of such a thing as a square circle is not possible, because square circles cannot logically exist. Thus, no one can sell a square circle.

To the extent that you cannot sell those things which you own, it is to that same extent that you do not own them to begin with.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Inalienability

There recently has been a lot of discussion and debate among libertarians online about self-ownership, rights, responsibility, voluntary slavery and inalienability. I think that this has helped reveal some significant flaws in the way that certain libertarians approach such matters, especially as it relates to Walter Block's ideas. In essence, what the issue boils down to is wether or not rights and responsibilities are alienable or not, or if alienation is possible or consistant with libertarianism. By alienation I do not refer to the Marxist notion of alienation, but the separation of certain things from the self in a more literal sense. As I have said before, a dualistic concept of self-ownership is an incoherant concept because it tries to alienate the mind or will from the body, and this simply cannot be done, hence why Walter Block's notion of "voluntary slavery" is incoherant and contradictary. I have explained in quite a bit of detail why this is in past blog posts.

But the issue apparently is even more far reaching than this. Some people have been taking the viewpoint that rights and responsibilities are actually commodities to be bought and sold on a free market. I think this stems from taking metaphors (such as self-ownership) too literally and not fully understanding what inalienable rights means, which leads some people to take what amounts to ridiculous positions that blatantly violate basic notions of personal responsibility and individual sovereignty. Not only is it impossible to alienate the mind or will from the body, but as a consequence of this, you cannot alienate someone's responsibility as an individual as if it something that can be transfered to someone else through contract. Nor is someone's actual person a commodity to be bought and sold on a free market, as that is precisely what chattel slavery is. If libertarians really want to take such a position, they must realize that the ultimate consequence is the total elimination of any coherant meaning for rights and responsibilities in libertarianism.

One can concievably sign a contract that says that someone else is responsible for their actions, but this contract would not change the actual causal reality of responsibility, which remains in the metaphorical court of the actual people who are human actors in a given scenario. If someone murders someone else, for example, it doesn't matter if they have made a contract that delegates responsibility for their murder to someone else, they are still the murderer. Such a contract is fraudulent with regaurd to their actual behavior. The idea that criminals can be exempted for responsibility for their crimes through contract eliminates a good deal of the meaning of justice. While I myself do place a lot of emphasis on the restitution of victims, I do not accept the notion that the criminal actors in a given scenario can delegate their responsibility for restitution to someone else. This is because you cannot alienate responsibility from someone, as you cannot alienate their will and the causal reality of the scenario is that they are the ones who commited the given act in question.

I think that a lot of this also generally stems for improper concept formation or a lack of understanding of the proper order of concepts. The old saying goes "life, liberty and property", and it is in this order for a good reason. A problem I often run into is that some people appear to act as if property is primary or axoimatic at the expense of life and liberty. But a coherant theory of rights does not place property above life and liberty, property is contextual to respecting the right to life and liberty. Property rights does not grant one a legitimate right to violate someone else's right to life and liberty, and it is a grave error to conceptualize literally everything, such as personhood and responsibility, as a property right. The idea that personhood is a property right to be bought and sold is part of the very basis for slavery of all kinds, and you cannot argue for a notion of "voluntary slavery" without destroying the inalienability of rights. Trying to turn literally everything into a propertarian question is to nonsensically expand the concept of property to absurdity.

While freedom of contract is a vital component of libertarianism, it is does not supercede people's inalienable rights. There is such thing as a fraudulent or criminal contract, and a perpetual contract that is enforced onto someone against their explicit consent into the future or as a 3rd party not directly privy to the contract is fraudulent and the basis for gross rights violations, including the coercive social contract. All contracts must have a way to get out of them, even if there are conditions or consequences for opting out of a contract such as dealing with withstanding debts. A perpetual contract that you cannot possibly get out of regaurdless of your will is a significant part of the very basis for the coercive social contract, and there is a huge differance beween the delegation of the enforcement of rights to a 3rd party and the delegation of the rights themselves. If contracts are a method by which one can legitimately lose all of their rights, then rights essentially lose their meaning as something to consistantly apply to recognize in people.

Wether they realize it or not, those who advocate notions of justice that rely on an alienation of the mind, will, responsibility and rights from the self are undermining the entire basis for individual liberty. The very premises that they are using can be used against the entire libertarian notion of justice and as a way to legitimize political institutions or policies that libertarians normally would oppose. So it turns out that this is actually an extremely important issue to clarify. It is based on some fairly fundamental philosophical misnomers that threaten to undermine the entire libertarian project, despite the good intentions of some proponents of such misnomers. If this issue is not properly clarified, I fear that libertarianism can be used to push for abominable notions of justice that commodifies rights and responsibilities. But rights and responsibilities are not commodities in any rational theory of justice.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

LaughingmanOX Pwns Stodles/ConfederalSocialist

Anarchism Is Not Panstatism/Polystatism

Saturday, February 21, 2009

I've recently run into some major trouble with some people who seem to be interpreting anarchist pluralism or anarchism without adjectives to mean a total open-endedness that allows one to establish whatever sort of system or organization they prefer, regaurdless of the content of that preference or its compatability with any particular principle of justice. In other words, these people are trying to completely divorce anarchism from any unifying or fundamental principles, and are redefining it to mean the same thing as polyarchy. Even on an etymological level, one should be able to see the difference between anarchy (no rulers) and polyarchy (multiple rulers). While anarchism without adjectives might have the appearance of being structured as a polyarchy, it isn't polyarchy in and of itself due to a lack of institutional rulership.

As far as I understand it, anarchism without adjectives is not completely open-ended, it is based on the context of anarchism. It'sanarchism without adjectives, not anything without adjectives. It has preconditions or qualifiers, particularly at least a basic fundamental understanding or agreement as to what distinguishes voluntary interaction or organization from rulership, or a basic understanding of what distinguishes initiation from defense. Otherwise, anyone can claim that any particular authoritarian preference they have is defacto compatible with anarchism, and anarchism is more or less redefined out of existance. Anarchist pluralism is pluralism contextual to voluntary interaction, not a completely open-ended hodge-podge of whatever people happen to like. Anarchist emergence is emergence contextual to voluntary interaction, not a broader sense of emergence as in "whatever occurs over the course of history".

To be sure, polycentric order is an aspect of anarchism, or the two can overlap. However, anarchism as such should not be conflated with polycentric order per se. Technically, one could have a polycentric order, and internal to each organization things are highly authoritarian. So while decentralization is an important aspect of anarchism, it is a necessary but not sufficientelement of it. Decentralization for decentralization's sake, without regaurd for the actual qualatative content of a given association, is nonsensical and suicidal. This is part of the problem with things such as "state's rights", for while it may be a useful tool against federal governments, it may also be a tool for empowering more local authorities. On one hand, this problem is due to there not being enough decentralization (decentralization ends at individual choice), and on the other hand, this problem represents a lack of any coherant principles or basic concept of justice.

The preferential nature of anarchism without adjectives is not completely open-ended. It means that one can follow their preferences with regaurd to what affects them, but they cannot enforce their preferences on innocent bystanders or unconsenting 3rd parties of people. The basic principle is supposed to mutually apply, I.E. I cannot rule you and you cannot rule me. Anarchism without adjectives does not mean that just because things are more decentralized or on a more local level, it's suddenly okay to rule people. Neither does it mean that the meaning of rulership is completely open-ended and can be redefinined by anyone as they please in order to justify their preferences or the unilateral enforcement thereof. This error seems to be thin libertarianism on speed, which results in no libertarianism at all.

Using such an approach, one can redefine their preference for a particular kind of state or rulership to superficially appearcompatible with anarchism, by blurring the definition of anarchism and voluntarism and rulership and force, and by displaying a superficial pluralism. At such a point, one is likely engaging in obscurantism and using anarchism as a sugar-coating or tool for their more fundamental and esoteric ideology (in the case of "national anarchism", this is clearly generally being done with respect to white nationalism). Why be an anarchist in the first place if there is no real difference between your "anarchism" and a particular proposal for a state? This is counter-intuitive if not deceptive, to say the least.

Of course, different anarchists can have pragmatic differences and different preferances for how they'd prefer to voluntarily organize or what purely personal values they would like to voluntarily pursue. But these differences are reconciled under a general umbrella of anarchism without adjectives, which involves at least a basic consensus with regaurd to non-rulership and "live and let live". This also tends to imply a degree of federation between anarchists; complete isolation or atomism is clearly not desirable. The differences, when in the context of anarchism without adjectives, are not really primary ethical differances. The basic ethical norm of personal sovereignty and the non-rulership that follows from it is supposed to be what unifies anarchists, and provides the proper context for anarchism without adjectives.

Posted by Brainpolice at 3:03 PM 

Labels: Anarchism, Anrchism Without Adjectives, Justice, Pluralism, Political Theory, Polycentrism

How to Argue for Libertarianism

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

I have long pondered on how best to defend and advocate for liberty, to persuade my fellow human beings that they, too, should hold it and advocate on behalf of it. In Murray Rothbard's book "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto," he identifies three philosophical foundations upon which the libertarian creed has been based: emotive, utilitarian, and natural rights.

I used to call myself a natural-rightist. However, I slowly moved towards the position that such a foundation was weak, simply due to scientific facts. The natural-rightist, says Rothbard, is one who advocates libertarianism on the basis of the self-ownership axiom: a person owns his or her physical body, just as one might own other tangible, material things in reality. The problem I have with this is it ignores the now obvious fact that the notion of "self" is brought about by the inter-working processes of the physical brain. Modern neuroscience has shown that human emotion is controlled by a set of brain structures called collectively the lymbic system, which is itself controlled (or regulated) by the more logic, future-projecting area of the brain: the frontal lobes. The sense of "self" has even been shown to originate predominately from a certain structure or region in the brain.

If the sense of "self" comes about by the physiological processes in the brain, how can one be said to own it in any true sense? What is owning what? Does the "self" come to own the physiological processes that bring it about as soon as it arises? This does not make sense on a fundamental level, but I won't go into the specific reasons for that here. Let me also note that I remain open to persuasion on this issue.

The main issue I have with Rothbard in his "For a New Liberty" is when he says the following:

The emotivists assert that they take liberty or nonaggression as their premise purely on subjective, emotional grounds. While their own intense emotion might seem a valid basis for their own political philosophy, this can scarcely convince anyone else. By taking themselves outside the realm of rational discourse, the emotivists thereby insure the lack of general success of their own cherished doctrine.

I think Rothbard overstates his own case against the emotivist's ability to convince anyone else of his doctrine. What I am fairly sure of is that morality is subjective. It is an opinion, a value. However, evolutionary psychology shows that the brain is equipped with some basic hardware that predisposes it to act morally towards certain people in a social context. In a sense, even chimpanzees are moral: they are documented to punish stealing, murder, etc., within their own social groups. The problem comes in when someone is viewed as an outsider, i.e. outside the social group one acts morally towards. This is true for humans and chimpanzees.

As an empirical matter, certain tenants of moral conduct (don't steal, don't murder, etc.) have been found present, in some form or another, in virtually every human culture on Earth. This moral predisposition is tempered, again, by the fact that it only extends so far: inside a given social group. And it may be cluttered with other unrealistic, culturally-based beliefs, like sacrificing infants to the gods to bring rain.

Given this and assuming morality is subjective, I still have an objective basis to appeal to within other members of my species: a basic moral sense that certain actions are bad within a social group. You can then argue for the expansion of the social group; that is, including more people (or even animals) within the realm of one's moral actions. You will find very few people willing to concede that they endorse aggression against innocent people without their consent. Instead, it's almost always maintained that it can't be avoided, or the people really do give some type of consent. Then the matter becomes one of showing how it can be avoided (leaving aside the notion of fiat justitia ruat caelum), or how it is not truly consent.

In short, I think emotivists do have an objective basis to appeal to in advocating liberty, and they could be very successful by appealing to peoples' basic moral intuitions alone, since such intuitions have a neurobiological basis. If large swaths of people intuitively hold the value that you should not hurt innocent people without their consent (even if it's only within the narrow range of a social group and even though it may be muddled by other predispositions), it seems very plausible that argumentation would be successful. If people want to hold a certain value, the task becomes showing how to be logically consistent; that is, how to truly hold it as a value.

Monday, December 7, 2009

"Soft" and "Hard" Arguments Against The State

The point that I'm about to make has been brought up before in the context of critiqueing propertarianism (or absolutist propertarianism), but I'd like to highlight it more explicitly in the context of anti-state arguments. My tone and purpose here will hopefully be less confrontational and more constructive. There is what I call the "soft" and "hard" arguments against the state, both of which I consider to be legitimate arguments. The main difference between the "soft" and "hard" arguments is that the "hard" argument goes further and more explicitly identifies what the objection to the state is. Both arguments are valid responses to the "implicit consent" and "love it or leave it" defenses of the state, but I think that the "soft" argument is necessary but insufficient as a counter to authoritarian claims.

A good example of what I'm calling the "soft" argument would be this:

"I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well, now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove – namely that this jurisdiction over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they don’t own it – at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do – and so, the fact that I am living in "this country" means I am living in a certain geographical region that they have certain pretensions over – but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it." -- Roderick Long, Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to 10 Objections

This is a valid argument. The person that is claiming that the state is legitimate because one implicitly consents to the rules established within its claimed territory is presupposing the legitimacy of the state's territorial claim to begin with, and this is something that they must prove. There is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of any territorial ownership claim. In the absence of a standard for the legitimacy for territorial ownership claims and in the absence of proof that a given claim meets that standard, an "implicit consent" or "love it or leave it" argument inherently fails. This inherently begs the question of what the standard is for the legitimacy of territorial ownership claims.

But this argument is "soft" for a number of reasons. For one thing, it leads to a meta-debate about the criteria for legitimate ownership, and the state can be either justified or unjustified depending on what criteria one uses. But, more importantly, I don't think that it adequately expresses what the problem with the state is. It gives the impression that if the state did meet the criteria for legitimate ownership, all of its powers would indeed be justified. In other words, it appears to unduly reduce the question of the state to one of legitimacy in land aquisition. But the problem with the state isn't simply that it doesn't legitimately own the territory that it claims power over, but extends further to the fact that there is something wrong with the arbitrary or unqualified kind of authority that it claims and exersizes in general. The "soft" argument is still functioning within a certain paradigm of "legitimacy" that is relative to "who is the owner?".

The "hard" argument against the state goes further than this: even if we do presume, for the sake of argument, that a given individual or group is a "legitimate" owner, this still would not justify the kind and scope of power of a state. There isn't only a burden of proof for the legitimacy of an ownership claim, but there is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of authority claims derived from ownership. This approach to the question inherently increases the burden of proof and implies a conceptual limit on "property rights", particularly as it relates to land, because it declares that the ownership of land in and of itself does not justify absolute, unqualified authority over other people. In constrast, the "soft" argument is open to being turned on its head as a re-legitimization of the state, dependant only on a norm for the legitimacy of property aquisition.

An analogy to a more small-scale context may drive the point home. For the sake of argument, let's presume that I legitimately own a home. Would it make sense for me to claim that by virtue of the fact that I own my home, anyone that visits must do literally whatever I tell them, and that I am justified in doing whatever I want to anyone that happens to occupy it at any given moment? Such a claim would be laughed out of court as a ridiculous propertarian justification for slavery and murder. But the state is just a large-scale embodyment of this. The members of the political class constitute the defacto "owners" of the territory that the state has jurisdiction over, and at the end of the day they have ultimate authority over the lives of everyone else within the territory. Asking "who is the legitimate owner?" isn't enough. One has to ask "what kind of authority should an owner really have?".

In short, the problem with the state is really just an application of a more general criticism of authoritarianism, and the state just happens to be a case of authoritarianism that is applied to the largest geographical area. This constitutes a certain form of "thickness" in which anti-statism is really just a part of a broader social philosophy. The burden of proof for an authority claim is higher than the "soft" anti-state argument suggests, since it is not simply relative to who is an owner. The "strong" anti-state argument proposes that it isn't a question of who has the authority, but a more general question about the rational limits of authority, and that "consent" is impossible in a context in which options are limited by the circumstances and assorted inherited power structures.

This also inherently raises the bar for what the necessary and sufficient conditions of a free society are. A free society isn't simply dependant on the right norm of property aquisition and a narrow, vague sense of "voluntaryism". "Voluntaryism" is effectively neutralized by the dominance of pre-existing authority structures and a social atmosphere that leaves little choice other than one of asqueisance. I don't think that the formula for a free society reduces to a redistribution of ownership claims while the general rubric of authoritarian norms that can be derived from ownership claims remain relatively unchallenged. An overly simplistic sense of propertarianism and voluntaryism seems to contain the seeds of its own dissolution, because it doesn't contain sufficient checks to avoid the re-justification and ultimately the re-emergence of the state from within its formula.

With this in mind, I urge libertarians to think more critically about their own arguments and be open to the prospect that there may be holes that need to be filled in order to avoid the possibility of their own concepts being used as justifications for precisely what they hopefully intend to be countering. We need a lot more ammunition than "but they didn't homestead this land!", and we should be cognizant of the dangers of certain overly zealous tendencies that exist within. There is much that can be done to strengthen our case and make us more internally consistent. I think that it's time to harden the arguments and steer clear of laying the foundation for one's own failure.

[Note: To be clear, none of this is particularly intended as an attack on Roderick Long, even though I quoted him as my example of the "soft" argument. I have a lot of respect for Roderick Long. I'm quite certain that, as exemplified in various other writtings of his, Roderick Long tends to have certain tendencies towards "thickness" that strengthen his anti-statism. However, I do think that the kind of argument that he presented in the quote is insufficient and open to valid objections by soft propertarians and anti-propertarians for the reasons gone into above.]

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Social Evolution vs. "Social Darwinism"

"Social Darwinism" is a term that is generally used to refer to a viewpoint arising in the 19th century that characterizes social relations in terms of a hobbesian struggle, a negative sense of "competition" in which the "the strong" overpower "the weak", combined with a prescriptive stance in favor of letting "the weak" die off in the name of fostering a superior gene pool. Sprinkle this with Malthus's theories of population and a rather vulgar creed can be formed. No doubt, positions along these lines did arise and influence racialist and eugenics movements. However, mainstream discourse on such matters often tends to conflate this with social evolutionary theory in general and mischaracterize figures such as Herbert Spencer as having a more vulgar view than is actually the case.

There are a number of things that are worth clarifying about this. The term "social darwinism" itself may be somewhat misleading in the sense that the kind of view being described here is, up to a point, more of a misinterpretation of Darwin himself than a logical extension of his views. While Darwin did talk about "the survival of the fittest" and a sense of "struggle for existence", by no means did he mean to imply that cooperation and empathy is excluded from his analysis. Furthermore, Darwin himself is not necessarily the sole or even main source for social evolutionary theories. Both Lamarkian and post-darwinian ideas have influenced various social evolutionary theories. The general rubric of "social evolution" should be distinguished from "darwinism".

When I think of social evolutionary theories, the first two names that pop into my mind are Herbert Spencer and Peter Kropotkin. Despite the ill reputation that Spencer has been given as a "social darwinist", he was a Lamarkian who theorized about evolution prior to Darwin and who thought of social evolution as moving in the direction of more cooperation and "beneficience". He was a radical classical liberal that was explicitly opposed to militaristic, violent, or conflictual tendencies. Those who characterize him as a "social darwinist" either misunderstand him or simply never read his work. Kropotkin was the father of anarcho-communism, who explicitly had the purpose of highlighting tendencies towards cooperation and empathy in both human and non-human life. While he certainly can be interpreted as a Rousseauan that romantisized "primitive" and medieval societies, the entire thrust of his work "Mutual Aid" is as a counter-balance to those very views that are commonly characterized as "social darwinism".

Social evolutionary theory, in the general sense, is simply an attempt to apply evolutionary concepts in a context beyond biology to things like culture, economics, and politics. In its backward-looking sense, it is simply an indispensible aspect of historical analysis. In its foreward-looking sense, it tends to entail some general conceptions of progress with respect to social interaction and organization. In and of itself, it does not entail the negative things associated with "social darwinism". It does not do justice to the general discourse on social evolution for it to be halted or polluted by associations with eugenics, racialism, and Mr. Scrooge bugaboos, or for many of its early proponents to be conflated with the Nazis, given the fact that liberalism and anarchism are involved. It would be best for people to try to look past their linguistic and socially inherited prejudices and judge the ideas of these thinkers on their own merits, while being cognizant of the much more broad scope of ideas that fall under the general umbrella of "social evolutionary theory".

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Anti-Darwinian Societies?

Anyone who keeps up with Richard Dawkins will have heard him mention that he thinks a society based on Darwinian principles would be vicious and contemptable. He goes further to state that Darwinian princples at the level of society would be an unhampered free market. He thinks society should be organized around anti-Darwinian principles, giving those who are destitute and impoverished a safety net in which to fall. I think this view is problematic.

The central fallacy in Dawkin's reasoning is his conflation of the free market with Darwinian principles. On this, I offer one large objection.

The law of association (also known as comparative advantage) makes clear that free trade is beneficial. It is beneficial because both parties gain during the exchange. That is, each party to the exchange values what he receives over and above what he gives up. The law of association also shows how the specialization and division of labor, with free trade as a backdrop, increases total productivity. Not only does it increase total productivity, but it even benefits the weaker party in terms of productivity. A simple example will illustrate this:

Imagine a world with two commodities: butter and bread. Amanda is best at producing bread, while David is best at producing butter. However, Amanda is absolutely better than David in producing bread and butter. In a day, Amanda can produce 20 loafs of bread if she concentrates solely on bread production, and she can produce 15 pounds of butter if she concentrates solely on butter production. David, on the other hand, can produce 15 pounds of butter if he concentrates solely on butter production, and he can produce 10 loafs of bread if he concentrates solely on bread production. On the other hand, if Amanda splits her time between bread and butter production, she can produce 10 loafs of bread and 7.5 pounds of butter, while David can produce 7.5 pounds of butter and 5 loafs of bread.


If Amanda produces that in which she is comparatively the best (bread) and David produces what he is comparatively the least disadvantaged (butter), overall production is higher than if each split their time between bread and butter. [Total production of 35 units versus 30 units.] The surplus can then be traded between the parties and each is better off. Expand this economic law across entire societies, with all of the goods and services produced therein, and the benefits of it become even more obvious.
I said all of that to point out the problem in Dawkins analysis of free markets: free markets do not impoverish the poor and inferior. As was shown, even if a person is superior in every way (at least when it comes to production), he will still be better off economically to trade with someone who is inferior in every way. In this way, the free market helps the poor and even those who may be genetically less gifted.
Thus, Dawkins contention that free markets are ruthless and have no regard for the poor is mistaken. You can be for the free market and be a champion of the least of those among us.