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

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