159 replies to this topic

[1kgcoffee]

That depends on your definition of 'best'.

I really like Rand, Russell, Aristotle and Nietzche, but I don't know that favourite and best are the same.

Since Socrates is the father of modern philosophy, and pretty damn awesome, I'll have to go with him.

[RighteousReason]

ayn rand, by far

um, no.

well who would you say then?

I don't know.

uh huh

[Alex Libman]

Wow, what a silly poll requiring its participant to choose just one from a list of ten arbitrarily-chosen philosophers, by implication equating the other nine. I think a better way to conduct such a poll would be to allow each person to input in a list of philosophers' names (with Wikipedia articles and categories used for input validation) and rank each entry numerically (ex. 1-5 stars). That's not rocket science, it's one database table and 30 lines of PHP!

The philosopher who'd get the highest rating from me would probably be Murray Rothbard, with Ayn Rand receiving high marks as well. Karl Marx would get the lowest score, below even any "philosophers" associated with fascism and religious tyranny of the middle ages. His religious delusions are just as detached from reality, but are far more violent and economically destructive.

[RighteousReason]

Wow, what a silly poll requiring its participant to choose just one from a list of ten arbitrarily-chosen philosophers, by implication equating the other nine. I think a better way to conduct such a poll would be to allow each person to input in a list of philosophers' names (with Wikipedia articles and categories used for input validation) and rank each entry numerically (ex. 1-5 stars). That's not rocket science, it's one database table and 30 lines of PHP!

The philosopher who'd get the highest rating from me would probably be Murray Rothbard, with Ayn Rand receiving high marks as well. Karl Marx would get the lowest score, below even any "philosophers" associated with fascism and religious tyranny of the middle ages. His religious delusions are just as detached from reality, but are far more violent and economically destructive.

"He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term wellbeing of the populace, labeling the State as nothing but a "gang of thieves writ large"—the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society."

me likey

[EmbraceUnity]

Wow, what a silly poll requiring its participant to choose just one from a list of ten arbitrarily-chosen philosophers, by implication equating the other nine. I think a better way to conduct such a poll would be to allow each person to input in a list of philosophers' names (with Wikipedia articles and categories used for input validation) and rank each entry numerically (ex. 1-5 stars). That's not rocket science, it's one database table and 30 lines of PHP!

The philosopher who'd get the highest rating from me would probably be Murray Rothbard, with Ayn Rand receiving high marks as well. Karl Marx would get the lowest score, below even any "philosophers" associated with fascism and religious tyranny of the middle ages. His religious delusions are just as detached from reality, but are far more violent and economically destructive.

Let's play a little game. It's called "Marx or Rothbard?"

You have to guess who said what, without consulting Google.

1) "History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends."

2) "A rights-ethic for mankind is precisely that: for all men, regardless of race, creed, color or sex, but for the species man alone."

3) "Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being."

4) "But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the "private property" of General Dynamics? ....One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution."

5) "... we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

6) "Imperialistic foreign policy and the permanent garrison state originated in the Big Business drive for foreign investments and for war contracts at home."

Edited by progressive, 30 March 2010 - 02:55 PM.

[Alex Libman]

Marx wrote a lot of self-contradictory gibberish (as only the German grammar can facilitate), which, like the bible, can be interpreted to mean absolutely anything. Having been born in the Soviet Union, I was forced to read some of it. Finding a few select quotes of Marx saying palatable things do not redeem him. Every sentence Marx ever wrote was wrong, because every sentence was based on irrational collectivist abstractions that have no greater basis in objective reality than any demigods or spirits of any other religion ever imagined! To be an atheist in the modern times no longer means rejecting the pre-Enlightenment religious abstractions any more than rejecting Zeus made you an atheist during the Catholic inquisitions! The new ruling elite no longer hides behind the old gods, but instead it has created new ones: the "class", the "inevitable stages of history", the "collective political consciousness", or the "revolution"! (EDIT: and that was several generations of gods ago, the new ones seem to be heavily based on liberal democracy and environmentalism, but they're just as irrational.)

The former of the two Rothbard quotes (#2 of 5) needs a slight clarification. Natural Rights are an empirical economic concept based on the capacity for self-ownership, that is the capacity to pull one's economic weight, to reason, and to respect the rights of other self-owning individuals. This should theoretically apply to all "rational economic actors", not necessarily humans, though human beings are the only animals known to human science that fit this criteria. I'm sure it wasn't Rothbard's intention to unduly discriminate against parahuman, "artificial", extraterrestrial, or whatever other intelligence may exist.

The latter Rothbard quote (#4 of 5) is actually about privatization, not just of the property that is explicitly "state-owned" but also the property that has been acquired through government force. What difference does it make whether the government establishes a directly-controlled bureaucracy to do its bidding, or whether it outsources the job to a company like Lockheed Martin or Blackwater? They are both paid for through involuntary taxation, and, like any other act of theft, the victims are entitled to receive restitution for their losses. That is an approach that Rothbard has theorized about in the 60s, but it's not something that most modern Anarcho-Capitalists will advocate. Perhaps a closer study of the various more recent reparation proposals by descendants of victimized ethnic minorities, as well as the lessons learned from the failed privatization attempts after the collapse of the Soviet Union, have been a major influence...

So, anyway, Rothbard is a strange case of a genius who created a lot of great ideas, many of which were quickly changed and improved upon by his ideological descendants, but that should in no way subtract from how much he has accomplished.


(EDIT: I see you added a 6th quote to even out the balance 3:3.)

Edited by Alex Libman, 30 March 2010 - 03:33 PM.

[EmbraceUnity]

It is interesting to see such a resurgence of Rothbard. I'd much prefer that over Rand, in any case. Though I think I'd prefer Marx to Rothbard, for philosophical significance, though his prescriptive judgments were just as lacking (though more thorough...ly wrong).

I admire true believers in Rothbardian anarchism, as long as they are serious. Libertarianism is often just a mask Big Business use to push through convenient legislation which may or may not have all that much to do with free enterprise, including many free trade agreements, ACTA, etc.

Though, despite my admiration for the intellectual honesty of some Rothbardians, anarcho-capitalism cannot overcome the folly of deontological ethics. JS Mill is king. It is not a battle that can be debated with rationalism though. My hope is that by fighting artificial scarcities we can make the old disputes irrelevant, and that is something I gladly collaborate with Rothbardians on.

[DairyProducts]

I'm saying Marx not because I think he's the best, but because I think he had more of an influence on peoples' lives than any other philosopher, be it good or bad influence.

[Alex Libman]

It is interesting to see such a resurgence of Rothbard. I'd much prefer that over Rand, in any case.

I didn't start out deciding to follow Rothbard, Rand, or anyone else, but I have created my own philosophical system that reaches most of the same conclusions, though often for different reasons. For example I reject that the Non-Aggression Principle is an axiom in of itself, but a consequence of my epistemological system of "evolutionary pragmatism". Etc. There were some great eggheads in the Austrian school of economics that have done a lot of the game theory / math before him, but Murray Rothbard was really the first to present a complete vision of a rational society.

Ayn Rand was in many ways more brilliant than Rothbard, but she had some very important flaws as well, and I'm not just talking about her aesthetics. Her philosophy was biased for anti-communism rather than pure reason, and that resulted in her supporting an irrational standard of intellectual property enforcement, for example, or turning a blind eye to the evils of the American government only because it was a lesser evil than all others that existed at the time. She also had a very difficult personal life, and that has affected her work to some degree. Some of her later followers took her nationalist compromises to the next level, and now you have idiots like Pamela Geller who are just inches away from total fascism...

I admire true believers in Rothbardian anarchism, as long as they are serious.

"Anarcho-Capitalism" is not "anarchism", it is free market capitalism in its purest form. A "chickpea" is not a "chicken".

An AnCap society will still have its criminals, but their crimes will not be institutionalized through the "divine rights" of the state, which will greatly diminish their impact. It will still have idiots who voluntarily sell their souls to tyrannical institutions, but it will be their choice to do so. A rational society isn't a society where everyone is 100% happy, but a society where the vast majority of people have no one to blame for their problems except the immutable reality of this universe and their own free will.

Though, despite my admiration for the intellectual honesty of some Rothbardians, anarcho-capitalism cannot overcome the folly of deontological ethics. JS Mill is king. It is not a battle that can be debated with rationalism though.

I believe that it can be. (See other thread.)

I'm saying Marx not because I think he's the best, but because I think he had more of an influence on peoples' lives than any other philosopher, be it good or bad influence.

By that standard Marx still has nothing on the initiators of religious delusions that preceded him, like Mohammad. If not Marx then there'd be plenty more collectivist gibberish and wishful thinking for the socialists to idolize. Without Mohammad the spread of monotheism would have worked out differently, with substantial consequences to the evolution of the empires of that era, as well as to science and world trade.

[EmbraceUnity]

The concept of objective ethics or natural rights is so obviously bullshit that it is insane that it would even need refuting. On this topic, I will refer you to another great philosopher, George Carlin.

The last line is golden. Any anarcho-capitalist enterprise would, just like any other form of governance, be a tenuous balance of political forces, assuming it could even exist. Rent-seeking, irrationality, ignorance, wickedness, and all sorts of things would cause your precious "natural rights" to go bye-bye. Everything said by Carlin could just as easily apply to a private consortium of insurance and security companies, or whatever the heck is supposed to keep order in an anarcho-capitalist system.

The distinction between private and public is arbitrary anyways. The first governments are private enterprises (warlords or cartels) that figure out the lucrative nature of rent-seeking, and gain a monopoly on force in order to extract disproportionate wealth from those around them.

I did happen to have a debate on this topic here not long ago in this thread. Furthermore, one cannot escape the absurdities of following almost any simplistic moral code to its logical conclusion. Rothbard, to his credit, was a truth-seeker. In his truth-seeking, he documented the logical conclusions that flow from the Non-Aggression Principle. Here is a juicy one.

“ Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.” - The Ethics of Liberty, chapter 14

This relegates children to the status of property. What if I were to create an artificial womb that continually produces babies, only to plop them down into a barren chamber where they starve to death? There are plenty more absurdities. As far as I can tell, the NAP legalizes the right to wield nuclear weapons. It legalizes the right to drive around in tanks while high on PCP. The thing I am most concerned about is that it legalizes cruelty to animals.

I also very much doubt, despite your experience with the Soviet Union, that you have read very much of Marx. He was a passionate man, and very much concerned with the fates of others. I have come to respect Rothbard more by reading his essays outside of his horrible M.E.S and E.O.L tomes (like Confessions of a Right Wing Liberal). Turns out he isn't a robot. Same is true of Marx. The fact that you can't admit that speaks to the highly ideological and emotional nature of your worldview.

In fact, I can hardly tell the difference between the two of them sometimes, since they are intellectually mirror images of one another.

I have a lot of respect for most of the great libertarian thinkers, excepting Rand. This comes from actually having read Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard, and others. Of course Marx is by no means my preferred philosopher. Though his insight into both the dynamics of capitalism and its effects upon the human condition were piercing and still relevant.

Edited by progressive, 31 March 2010 - 09:12 AM.

[Alex Libman]

The concept of objective ethics or natural rights is so obviously bullshit that it is insane that it would even need refuting.

Yes, after all, we live in a universe where we just cannot be certain that we even exist, or that 1 + 1 adds up to 2. It's not like objective reality appears consistent to anyone: any logical application (a piece of computer software for example) works differently every time: sometimes electrons follow one set of physical laws, and then suddenly the laws of physics simply change with no warning. Sometimes water floats uphill and pink unicorns shoot out of my ears! Sometimes E=MC², and sometimes E equals Tiger Woods divided by cat flushing a toilet! What a horribly random and irrational non-reality we allegedly live in! Oh wait, that's just you.

On this topic, I will refer you to another great philosopher, George Carlin.

I'm trying really hard to retain a positive memory of George Carlin, and that's becoming more difficult as people try to quote him in serious political discussions. He's funny of course in lampooning ye olde religions (or at least the primitive understanding of religion that most modern atheists have), and he's right in his criticism of government, but his routine cuts short of a serious discussion because, well, it's a friggin' comedy show and not a class in applied mathematics (ex. the game theory)!

Most people's ideas of rights is a fiction based on nothing but wishful thinking, but Objective Reality does exist, as do the empirically-verifiable laws of logic and mathematics, and there are certain things we can know about the science of economics with sufficient certainty. This inevitably creates the concept of Natural Law (or, speaking from an individual's perspective, Natural Rights), which are the foundational economic prerequisites that are needed to facilitate modern and on-going civilization. (See other thread.)

Any anarcho-capitalist enterprise would, just like any other form of governance, be a tenuous balance of political forces, assuming it could even exist. Rent-seeking, irrationality, ignorance, wickedness, and all sorts of things would cause your precious "natural rights" to go bye-bye. Everything said by Carlin could just as easily apply to a private consortium of insurance and security companies, or whatever the heck is supposed to keep order in an anarcho-capitalist system.

Once again, study the game theory and the way it applies to decentralized economic systems.

Would you pay taxes to Shell Oil without getting anything you value in return? Would you send your kids to a school where they were expected to pledge allegiance to WalMart or learned WalMart's biased version of history? Would you go fight a foreign war for FailBlog.org? Would you shop at a pharmacy that abducted your neighbor for using herbal remedies they don't approve of? Would you let the currency in your wallet be inflated by Chuck E Cheese's? Most people obviously would not!

In a sufficiently advanced society of rational economic actors, Natural Laws of order emerge generatively, as they do in all other evolutionary systems. That doesn't mean people become perfect, but crime simply does not pay, because any one entity that violates the Non-Aggression Principle will quickly find the rest of the world uniting against it! Only the governments can still get away with a sufficient level of neo-religious brainwashing in order to convince the world that they have a "divine right" to initiate force!

The distinction between private and public is arbitrary anyways.

The difference between "private" and "public" is as important as the difference between lovemaking and rape: consent.

[...] This relegates children to the status of property. [...]

It seems that every other month I re-write a long rant about parents' rights and the right to emancipation on some forum, but can never [url="http://www.google.com/search?q="right+to+emancipation"+libman&filter=0"]find[/url] the previous ones or when I find them they're never good enough... So I'm sorry, I don't have the time to address this issue in full right now, maybe I'll find some good quotes of myself later. I really should stop trying to "pay my dues" across the four corners of the Internet and just write a book...

The bottom line is that there are certain Natural Rights that are inherent in all human beings based merely on their hypothetical potential (i.e. the right to life) and certain Natural Rights that only apply to fully-formed Rational Economic Actors (i.e. the right to liberty and property). Potential future (but not current) Rational Economic Actors include human beings who have not yet reached sufficient mental maturity (which can be established by a jury, but most people can be assumed to be emancipated by default, by say age 18, unless there's evidence to the contrary), as well as people who lose their capacity for self-ownership due to mental illness, contractual obligation, or a crime against the rights of an other self-owning entity. (The ideas about an Anarcho-Capitalist justice system are well-defined elsewhere [MP3].)

Legal guardianship is a right similar to property, with the creators (ex. parents, AI programmers, etc) having the initial guardianship over each potentially-self-owning life-form they create until it can be expected to fully own itself, as well as victim(s) of a crime having some degree of guardianship of the convicted criminal who initiated aggression against them (usually resulting in jail time and/or restitution payments). You can tell your children what to do, make them work for your benefit, give them a darn good spanking, or even raise them in an incestuous environment, but you cannot kill them, hide them from the outside world, deprive them of the ability to develop basic language and reasoning skills, brainwash them into thinking that they must stay with you forever, restrict their access to information about their rights, or otherwise interfere with their right to emancipation. Given that right, all bad things you do to your children will come to light - either through the child protection charities that will want to visit homes with children to document what's going on, or if/when the children themselves choose to expose you. Refusing to cooperate with any such child welfare transparency institutions would result in some degree of bad karma (being forced to move out of a reputable neighborhood due to breach of contract, inability to find good work, etc), and that would obviously escalate to severe ostracism in cases of severe and well-documented abuse.

What if I were to create an artificial womb that continually produces babies, only to plop them down into a barren chamber where they starve to death?

You would be accused of murderer, and plenty of people (myself included) would be interested in contributing to a "justice fund" that would facilitate your arrest and trial. Even if you are able to defend yourself from the charge that you've violated the child's negative right to life, you most clearly will not be able to defend yourself from the charge that you've violated that child's "right to emancipation", which limits the power of legal guardians over their dependents (children, prisoners, the insane, indentured servants, etc) by requiring transparency and due process. In other words you have no obligation to feed your child, but you must announce your plans to stop feeding your child publicly. Given the superabundance of charitable people who'd be willing to save that child's life, what you'd in effect be doing is keeping away the aid that child would have otherwise received, just as murdering someone by suffocation is nonetheless murder even though you're merely depriving them of oxygen.

As far as I can tell, the NAP legalizes the right to wield nuclear weapons.

You do have the right to wield nuclear weapons, like in outer space somewhere, but bringing a nuclear weapon anywhere close to this planet creates massive risk liabilities, possibly involving millions of people! The "right to transparency" or the "right to risk assessment" is one of those few allegedly positive rights that can trump the negative right to property in a free society, other examples being the right to a fair trial, right to free exit, as well as the aforementioned right to emancipation. People who are entitled to those rights aren't entitled to your property, only to the free flow of information about it. And once you do have information that your neighbor is doing something that endangers your property then you definitely have a good cause to sue.

Of course it is theoretically possible for enough people to buy up enough adjacent land to build a nuclear weapon, but at the cost of many billions of dollars, and the rest of the world would see them as public enemy #1 and unite against them, which means they'll be throwing away all their reputation and capital, and possibly their lives, while 99% of the world economy would be ostracizing them and investing their defense dollars in missile shields instead. (See other endless threads about the alleged risk of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet taking over the world.) Only governments can centralize enough capital (through brainwashing and theft) and limit their own risk liabilities enough to make nuclear war possible!

It legalizes the right to drive around in tanks while high on PCP.

Of course - on your own property or with the property owner's permission. There might be some private roads in the desert somewhere that specialize in that sort of thing, but of course the vast majority of mainstream road-owners (homeowner associations, charter cities, local businesses and business alliances, toll road companies, etc) would have rules against it.

The thing I am most concerned about is that it legalizes cruelty to animals. [...]

As it should [2]. Having to tolerate the idea that bad people somewhere (but definitely not in your charter neighborhood) are doing things to their property that you don't approve of - thus is the price of liberty!

Edited by Alex Libman, 31 March 2010 - 02:44 PM.

[RighteousReason]

The difference between "private" and "public" is as important as the difference between lovemaking and rape: consent.

nice.

[EmbraceUnity]

Yes, after all, we live in a universe where we just cannot be certain that we even exist, or that 1 + 1 adds up to 2. It's not like objective reality appears consistent to anyone: any logical application (a piece of computer software for example) works differently every time: sometimes electrons follow one set of physical laws, and then suddenly the laws of physics simply change with no warning. Sometimes water floats uphill and pink unicorns shoot out of my ears! Sometimes E=MC², and sometimes E equals Tiger Woods divided by cat flushing a toilet! What a horribly random and irrational non-reality we allegedly live in! Oh wait, that's just you.

That's some lovely use of sarcasm there, but the apparent objectivity of physics, mathematics, and other laws have absolutely no bearing whatsoever upon values. Values are subjective by definition, and ethics rests upon maximizing those values. If one's core value is the Non-Aggression Principle then that is what you are seeking to maximize. I am a utilitarian, and seek to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. Someone else might wish to maximize belief in Jesus. You might argue that their supposed values are an incorrect deduction from their moral intuitions, but at base our moral intuitions are subjective and can vary greatly from person to person.

I'm trying really hard to retain a positive memory of George Carlin, and that's becoming more difficult as people try to quote him in serious political discussions. He's funny of course in lampooning ye olde religions (or at least the primitive understanding of religion that most modern atheists have), and he's right in his criticism of government, but his routine cuts short of a serious discussion because, well, it's a friggin' comedy show and not a class in applied mathematics (ex. the game theory)!

In trying to argue your position, evolution and game theory would be the last thing I would cite. Competition between rational actors is what creates governments in the first place. Feudalism was competition among warlords, and evolved into monarchies once certain warlords crowded out the others. Thus, anarcho-capitalists would be forced to continually secede from their societies, like the seasteaders and free staters want to, because corruption would immediately set in and power would quickly re-centralize. The more scarcity that exists, the quicker this would occur... hence why I think I have a mutual interest with rothbardians in the cause of eliminating scarcities.

Yet, even if continual secession were possible, despite the much more apathetic stance of the majority of people, the societies that would emerge would almost certainly constitute a tiny portion of all humanity... and likely be intolerable societies at that. Yet, even if they were both possible and pleasant, it still wouldn't be something I would ever spend time supporting. My goals as a utilitarian are to effect the greatest good for the greatest number, not just a tiny non-apathetic right-libertarian fringe.

The difference between "private" and "public" is as important as the difference between lovemaking and rape: consent.

That is a cute one-liner. Unfortunately it is meaningless. What is meaningful is the fact that there are two types of tyrannies, private and public. Nowadays the public tyrannies are at least somewhat accountable to those they are tyrannizing... the private ones have zero accountability.

Perhaps you may argue that an anarcho-capitalist society would have stronger consumer rights groups and unions, but that is very doubtful, and even so would be on the wrong end of the collective action problem.

You would be accused of murderer, and plenty of people (myself included) would be interested in contributing to a "justice fund" that would facilitate your arrest and trial.

Ha, but you have no right to enter my property, trespasser. I will murder all the babies I want. This positive liberty you speak of for me to identify my children to my neighbors is completely arbitrary, and Rothbard agreed. What if my neighbors don't want me to identify my children to them. Surely I have no right to introduce my children to them if they don't want. Furthermore, if my artificial womb machine plopped the babies out into a field somewhere then surely I couldn't be said to be obstructing their ability to acquire food, unlike in the barren chamber scenario.

If it is on my property, especially if it were a large property, nobody would ever find out about this murdering... err... I mean... "allowing them to starve." Surely a rumor would not be sufficient grounds to search my property. Thus, even if others suspected, there would be no way to search me. Furthermore, what if this "justice fund" just goes ahead and acts on a false rumor. Who penalizes them? Oh right, nobody.

Reputation systems are weak at best. You might not trade with someone who was involved in a racist or otherwise unsavory "justice fund" that brings frivolous cases against others, all else being equal, but with enough economic incentive, why not? Once enough people eschew trading with them, their prices will drop, and they may very well undercut competitors by quite a bit out of necessity.

As it should [2]. Having to tolerate the idea that bad people somewhere (but definitely not in your charter neighborhood) are doing things to their property that you don't approve of - thus is the price of liberty!

Animals are NOT PROPERTY. If there is a certain level of cognition which can relegate a feeling creature to property, then surely newborn infants fit that bill. Even toddlers. Why shouldn't I be able to starve them to death then? Of course that nullifies your argument about the fictitious "right of emancipation" somehow overriding the right we have to starve our children, which Rothbard asserted.

Having to tolerate that I am doing things on my own property that you don't approve of... namely starving babies... thus is the price of liberty!

Edited by progressive, 31 March 2010 - 06:15 PM.

[JLL]

In trying to argue your position, evolution and game theory would be the last thing I would cite. Competition between rational actors is what creates governments in the first place. Feudalism was competition among warlords, and evolved into monarchies once certain warlords crowded out the others. Thus, anarcho-capitalists would be forced to continually secede from their societies, like the seasteaders and free staters want to, because corruption would immediately set in and power would quickly re-centralize. The more scarcity that exists, the quicker this would occur... hence why I think I have a mutual interest with rothbardians in the cause of eliminating scarcities.

Men are not always rational... and they certainly weren't as rational back in the day when the concept of a state first formed. The state has its roots in religion and some individuals claiming divine rights. If you tried to repeat the statist experiment (by somehow cleaning the slate first) in a setting where men are atheists, I doubt you would succeed. In a rational society, a government would not emerge. To think that governments are somehow "natural" is also a fallacy; there are examples of hunter-gatherer societies without any state-like structures.

The state is a failed experiment that should be abandoned. In the future, it will be seen as such.

Edited by JLL, 31 March 2010 - 06:32 PM.

[medicineman]

A report i read by a professor of philosophy regarding Aristotle, was that the professor at a young age, thought that aristotle was way ahead of his time. By the time he became entrenched in the world of philosophy, he realized that Aristotle wasn't ahead of his time, but we, in the present age, use logic, language, and debate by the rules that aristotle set for us. I think Aristotle is the greatest philosopher.

[Alex Libman]

[...] Values are subjective by definition, and ethics rests upon maximizing those values. If one's core value is the Non-Aggression Principle then that is what you are seeking to maximize.

No one will agree that personal values are individual more than capitalist libertarians (including Objectivists), but the foundations of social laws must be objective and grounded in empirical science. The Non-Aggression Principle is not itself a universal value any more than the law of Supply and Demand is a universal value - it is a rational tactical compromise between the conflicting needs of all individuals within a society. One person may like blue houses, another may like red houses, so they compromise by recognizing each-other's right to paint their own house whatever color they choose. Individual rights are the concepts that protect an individual from other people who have the votes or ultimately the guns to force any individual to paint his house a different color against his will. A person may voluntarily agree to be obligated to abide by collective decisions (ex. a neighborhood association style guide), which is an alternative to the use of government force.

I am a utilitarian, and seek to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. [...]

Then you're doing it wrong. Anarcho-Capitalism is the logical conclusion of utilitarianism. You cannot maximize long-term happiness through absolute power, economic destruction, violence, and deceit!

In trying to argue your position, evolution and game theory would be the last thing I would cite. Competition between rational actors is what creates governments in the first place. Feudalism was competition among warlords, and evolved into monarchies once certain warlords crowded out the others.

What creates governments is human ignorance to see past their lies, and the cowardice to stand up to them.

Thus, anarcho-capitalists would be forced to continually secede from their societies, like the seasteaders and free staters want to, because corruption would immediately set in and power would quickly re-centralize. [...]

The transition of a society toward Anarcho-Capitalism is the gradual diminishing of government power and the "power gap" being filled with individual rights. Overthrowing a government is very easy - you simply refuse to obey, and even an evil empire like the Soviet Union will crumble without warning! (I lived in Moscow until 1992 so I saw a lot of youth dissidence first-hand.) Overthrowing a determined nongovernmental society, on the other hand, can be much more difficult: it took less time to capture Tokyo and Berlin than it will take to subdue a tiny band of rootless savages in a hell-hole like Afghanistan, with many an empire having failed already. I'm not comparing Anarcho-Capitalism to the Taliban on any level except their capacity to mount a resistance against an occupying force, which I believe John Galt wannabes like myself could do just as effectively. If we can stand up to a multi-trillion dollar government with aircraft carriers and nukes, then punishing a mad billionaire for overstepping his rights will be gravy in comparison.

What is meaningful is the fact that there are two types of tyrannies, private and public. Nowadays the public tyrannies are at least somewhat accountable to those they are tyrannizing... the private ones have zero accountability.

You have it perfectly backwards. It is governments that have zero meaningful accountability! Sure, they will let you collectively pick what actors you prefer to see on C-SPAN (and from only a couple of indistinguishably bad choices), but their script remains the same. All interactions in the private sector are voluntary - if another entity in the free market doesn't meet your standards, then you are free not to do business with them and they won't get a penny from you or influence your life in any direct way. There is no such thing as a private tyranny - if it initiates aggression, then it's a government and it needs to be resisted.

Perhaps you may argue that an anarcho-capitalist society would have stronger consumer rights groups and unions, but that is very doubtful, and even so would be on the wrong end of the collective action problem.

An Anarcho-Capitalist society would definitely have a healthier free press, greater decentralization and competition in the field of product certification / quality assurance services, and more rational consumer skepticism leading to a more information and reputation-driven shopping environment. That said - there's no such thing as "consumer rights" or "producer rights" or "sitting people's rights" or "standing people's rights" or "tall people's rights" or "short people's rights"; just universal rights based on the self-ownership of each individual. If you want to buy an uncertified product from an uncertified seller in a back alley somewhere then it's not my job to stop you.

As for unions - I seriously doubt they could exist on any level without government force, nor should they exist at all. Unions date back to a time when uneducated feudal serfs needed to have someone to articulate their requests to their feudal overlord, who often didn't even speak the same dialect or language (ex. the Russian aristocracy mostly spoke French). The utility of unions largely disappears if the worker is the least bit educated and can communicate with his employers directly, and most importantly is free to quit and go seek employment elsewhere, but the unions' utility reappeared again only when they gained political favor with socialist thugs in government. As a free agent (I sell my own time / programming skills and buy other people's time / skills all the time) I would certainly want to avoid dealing with any person who uses state violence to get his way, and if there isn't some sort of a blacklist for unionized employees then I would gladly volunteer my time to start one.

Ha, but you have no right to enter my property, trespasser. I will murder all the babies I want. [...]

Neither does a government agent without probable cause, at least in theory. The government can violate your privacy rights to save children, but then again so can a righteous individual who really cares about saving children and is willing to suffer the legal consequences if s\he is wrong. (Flying nano-robot cameras disguised as incests will be a dime a dozen soon enough.) A child welfare charity worker who violates the privacy rights of others on a whim is a small problem for a society, but a centralized government that spies on its citizens is a much bigger problem - absolute power corrupts absolutely! You people love comparing Anarcho-Capitalism to a Utopian vision of flawless government, but government in reality is just as likely to miss your "baby factory" scenario as an Anarcho-Capitalist society is - probably even more so because the evil mind operating that device can be a high-level government bureaucrat and thus be seen as above reproach. See how this works? All smart pedophiles don't fear the police - they get a job with Child Protection Services instead!

Furthermore, a house that gets regular shipments of "artificial womb" repair parts and doesn't allow child welfare charity auditing would definitely raise suspicions. If this becomes a widespread problem then public opinion will react accordingly, with companies that produce "artificial wombs" being subject to massive ostracism unless they agree to take certain measures to track how their products are manufactured, sold, shipped, maintenanced, resold, and disposed of - as would be the case with nuclear materials, dangerous chemicals, and so forth. Properly identifying and ostracizing the economic footprint of an entire industry with all the corporate subsidiary interrelationships is a very interesting science in of itself, but with transparency being the key. In a government-free society the documentation of all major property titles depends on transparency - if only you know you own something then you can't prove that you really own it? If Google can sift through billions of Web-sites to find the most accurate search results in fractions of a second for millions of simultaneous users today, then crunching some "karma" estimates in a stock-market owners database would be a piece of cake! Then your smart-phone can be set to automatically warn you if the product or service you're thinking of buying gets a low grade from "HelpPreventArtificialWombAbuse.org".

This positive liberty you speak of for me to identify my children to my neighbors is completely arbitrary, and Rothbard agreed. What if my neighbors don't want me to identify my children to them.

Then Rothbard was wrong in this issue. As I previously stated, I believe that the right to emancipation and other requirements of transparency (right to risk assessment, right to fair trial, etc) do trump property access rights to some small degree. There's no such thing as a positive right to secrecy!

And in the modern society you have 6+ billion "neighbors" and growing - the funds for child welfare charities can come from anywhere, and they can send their agents anywhere in the world. And any mainstream church, charity, neighborhood association, etc would almost definitely create contractual obligations for some minimal household transparency as a requirement for membership - in fact it would be in their interest to do so, not just to make sure you're not hiding away a child torture lab but also to make sure you're not building a bomb as well. Is it possible for some clever villain living somewhere far "off the grid" to structure his life in such a way so that he could torture children with impunity? Yes, but that same flaw would apply to any political system, and it's not the only standard by which a political system should be judged.

Reputation systems are weak at best. You might not trade with someone who was involved in a racist or otherwise unsavory "justice fund" that brings frivolous cases against others, all else being equal, but with enough economic incentive, why not? Once enough people eschew trading with them, their prices will drop, and they may very well undercut competitors by quite a bit out of necessity.

People currently waste billions upon billions of dollars a year (in US alone) and tremendous amounts of mental energy on the false sense of security that government tries to give them - the electoral circus, environmental hysteria, ban this, outlaw that, split Microsoft, crucify WalMart, save the whales, etc, etc, etc. Spending all this money and energy on consumer activism would do a whole lot more good, especially if you believe that people's "social consciousness" is supposed to "mature", and all that crap. Your wife will refuse to sleep with you for a week because you bought sneakers without checking the product karma dashboard on your smart-phone (or they were only rated 2 stars on "supply chain transparency" but you bought them anyway), and it turned out that the lace covers were manufactured in North Korea. Your son will get an F in capitalist civics class for not knowing how web-of-trust algorithms apply to identifying astroturfers paid to post biased comments on his blog. Your neighbors will shun you if you have less tree-hugger stickers from the local nature reserve than they do. Your daughter will tell you she's embarrassed to be seen with you because you're not on the recently published town survey of people who donate 10% of their salary to reputable charities. Ain't freedom great!

Animals are NOT PROPERTY. If there is a certain level of cognition which can relegate a feeling creature to property, then surely newborn infants fit that bill. Even toddlers. Why shouldn't I be able to starve them to death then? Of course that nullifies your argument about the fictitious "right of emancipation" somehow overriding the right we have to starve our children, which Rothbard asserted.

Discussed elsewhere. (And also see the links to other forums where I've debated all this before.)

Having to tolerate that I am doing things on my own property that you don't approve of... namely starving babies... thus is the price of liberty!

Um, no, that's precisely one of the few things that falls into the no-no category in an Anarcho-Capitalist society (right to emancipation). And of course socialist governments have already starved millions of babies since the turn of the 21st century by stifling trade and economic growth, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to help them - except of course to join me in speaking out against government force.

[JLL]

I have to admire your patience in explaining things, Alex. Let's hope it bears fruit.

[RighteousReason]

I have to admire your patience in explaining things, Alex. Let's hope it bears fruit.

Agreed, I appreciate it too

[medicineman]

"Um, no, that's precisely one of the few things that falls into the no-no category in an Anarcho-Capitalist society (right to emancipation). And of course socialist governments have already starved millions of babies since the turn of the 21st century by stifling trade and economic growth, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to help them - except of course to join me in speaking out against government force."

If I remember correctly, completely decentralized distribution of goods has its own skeletons in the closet. Bengal famine??

And regarding the evil empire you mention:

Did the USSR fail ? Well lets look at the facts. The liberal assertion that the USSR was a failure is predicated upon its being compared economically with the USA or Europe within a given time frame - a ridiculous comparison in that that these areas had been developed prior - you would have to go back about 800 years before both economies where alike. The rational comparison would be to look at nations that were similar to the soviet states in 1910 and compare their level of development in 1990. So we could compare Russia and Brazil or Bulgaria and Guatemala ect. Brazil for example should be a wealthy nation given its vast natural resources - peace ect (Russia being destroyed by world wars). Brazil is actually better equipped to develop than Russia ever was. Theirs a reason no-one undertakes the above comparison - because the result exposes liberal sophistry.

For Brazil about 5-10% of the population enjoy a high living standard, however the remaining 80% live in conditions comparable with central Africa. For the vast majority of Brazilians Soviet Russia would have looked like heaven. In fact when you look at the rate of industrial development within the USSR - it surpasses that of the developed western world. Living standards shot up from around 1917 - 1950 in terms of average income. The economy stagnated around the mid 60s until its collapse. Now if we compare living standards from the last period of the soviet regime - to the period of economic liberalization we see something very interesting, massive reduction in living standards and an increase in poverty levels. UNICEF documented half a million additional deaths a year in Russia alone due to the implementation of capitalist reform, or more accurately the removal of social supports and price controls. In the Czech Rep poverty went from 5.7% in 1989 to 18.2% in 1992. In Poland during the same period from 20% -40%. The massive votes retained by the eastern European communist parties aren't hard to explain at all in light of the facts - with the Russian CP alone averaging with roughly a third of the vote. Some months ago Moldova voted the communist party back into power. Now its often thrown around by misinformed liberals that this is due to the ''youth vote'' - who had no experience of soviet misery. The truth is actually the opposite - the majority of communist party voters are the elderly. So did the USSR fail ? - well the USSR had internal problems - social repression, difficulty with adequate production esp in the form of consumer goods ect. However its clear that it resulted in a higher standard of living than economic liberalism would have provided within the given time span.

Edited by medicineman, 01 April 2010 - 01:20 PM.

[medicineman]

But collectivists make horrible villains in video games. I much preferred Andrew Ryan to Sofia Lamb in bioshock.....

I mean c'mon. I randomly start playing some game, and in the intro i get this:

"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."

Sorry about this useless reply. Im postcall at work and about to head to bed and I had to share this point to kill the tension.

Edited by medicineman, 01 April 2010 - 01:37 PM.

[DairyProducts]

I'm saying Marx not because I think he's the best, but because I think he had more of an influence on peoples' lives than any other philosopher, be it good or bad influence.

By that standard Marx still has nothing on the initiators of religious delusions that preceded him, like Mohammad. If not Marx then there'd be plenty more collectivist gibberish and wishful thinking for the socialists to idolize. Without Mohammad the spread of monotheism would have worked out differently, with substantial consequences to the evolution of the empires of that era, as well as to science and world trade.

I don't consider religious leaders philosophers, at least in how this poll seems to define it.

[medicineman]

I'm saying Marx not because I think he's the best, but because I think he had more of an influence on peoples' lives than any other philosopher, be it good or bad influence.

By that standard Marx still has nothing on the initiators of religious delusions that preceded him, like Mohammad. If not Marx then there'd be plenty more collectivist gibberish and wishful thinking for the socialists to idolize. Without Mohammad the spread of monotheism would have worked out differently, with substantial consequences to the evolution of the empires of that era, as well as to science and world trade.

I don't consider religious leaders philosophers, at least in how this poll seems to define it.

Actually Marx has influenced a 1/5 of the worlds population in a timespan of 70 years. that is more than what Jesus or Mohammed could hope for.
That is not taking into account Marxian policies, im speaking strictly of countries which labelled themselves marxists.

[Alex Libman]

If I remember correctly, completely decentralized distribution of goods has its own skeletons in the closet. Bengal famine??

Which particular famine you wanted to pin on free market capitalism is beyond me... There have been many famines in that region, as elsewhere in the world, many of which aren't well documented by history because famines were very common until the economic growth led to a sufficient level of world trade and scientific growth to make them a rarity. The greatest driving forces in bringing this growth about are directly attributable to mercantilism and eventually capitalism. Sometimes the benefits of economic development were lopsided: infant mortality decreasing faster than agricultural productivity increasing is one example of this effect, and it has caused many famines until people learned to stop popping out kids by the dozen and development evened out. And many of the worst famines in history were caused by the incompetence or malice of centralized government, including governmental borders and "exclusive trade rights" reducing the ability to import grain.

And regarding the evil empire you mention [...]

The Russian Empire was a theocratic dictatorship only slightly better than Communism, but it was a superpower that controlled 8.6% of the world's economy prior to the Revolution, and you need to take that into account when comparing it to countries with similar per-capita GDP. Take away its army, and even today's Russian Federation will split into dozens of little pieces! Natural resources have always been and remain the engine of the economy. USSR's major economic accomplishments came from military pressure and forced labor that has killed tens of millions of people, but virtually all of its innovations had to be imported from the West (often luring in Western professionals and then forcing them to stay). It had its butt saved by the West not only militarily in WW2, but also through imports of much-needed grain, theft of trade secrets, foreign consultants, etc. Immitating ideas while trying to catch up is much easier than creating new ideas, especially if you can apply other people's ideas with the help of slave labor.

The piece of communist propaganda you've quoted also references some statistics that, as was revealed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were simply made-up lies. My mother was an economist in the Soviet Union, so I have a good first-hand understanding of how half the economy that existed on paper didn't exist in reality. My father was an aviation engineer in the Soviet Union, so I have a good first-hand understanding of how Soviet factories stole designs from the West. And Brazil is not a good example, because has been only a little bit more capitalist than USSR for most of the 20th century, and it currently ranks #111 in the world in terms of economic freedom, while Russia ranks #83. The evidence you get when you graph economic freedom and economic growth is undeniable, and every country that institutes a more-or-less capitalist economy always ends up a first world nation within 1-2 generations - there are no exceptions. Just compare South and North Korea, West and East Germany, Chile and Cuba, Estonia and Belarus, Mauritius and any African country, etc, etc, etc.

Actually Marx has influenced a 1/5 of the worlds population in a timespan of 70 years. [...]

No religion in human history has ever been spread more violently. Also very few people actually read Marx (compared to the billions of copies of other religious books that were printed over the ages.)

Edited by Alex Libman, 03 April 2010 - 11:26 PM.

[EmbraceUnity]

No one will agree that personal values are individual more than capitalist libertarians (including Objectivists), but the foundations of social laws must be objective and grounded in empirical science. The Non-Aggression Principle is not itself a universal value any more than the law of Supply and Demand is a universal value - it is a rational tactical compromise between the conflicting needs of all individuals within a society. One person may like blue houses, another may like red houses, so they compromise by recognizing each-other's right to paint their own house whatever color they choose. Individual rights are the concepts that protect an individual from other people who have the votes or ultimately the guns to force any individual to paint his house a different color against his will. A person may voluntarily agree to be obligated to abide by collective decisions (ex. a neighborhood association style guide), which is an alternative to the use of government force.

Objective ethics is an oxymoron. It is like saying we need objective subjectivity.

What if someone’s ideal society is one in which aggression occurs all the time, and that is what they seek to maximize? This isn’t even a hypothetical though. This is just how it is. People like what you term to be aggression. There are whole religions based upon it. There are companies, terrorist groups, and whole nation-states that spend practically all of their time thinking of more ways to commit aggression. Wouldn’t it be great (subjectively) if that weren’t the case? OF COURSE! But that isn’t the world we live in.

Then you're doing it wrong. Anarcho-Capitalism is the logical conclusion of utilitarianism. You cannot maximize long-term happiness through absolute power, economic destruction, violence, and deceit!

This is pretty slanderous. Perhaps you could be so kind as to highlight for me what exactly about my beliefs would entail any of that, because as far as I can see, I have revealed very little about my political philosophy to you. Of course I wouldn’t discount any action outright, the costs and benefits would need to be weighed as prudently as possible.

Even if my goals were absolute power or some such nonsense, that could not be discounted by a utilitarian. Virtually nothing can be discounted by a utilitarian outright, same with any consequentialist philosophy. Under certain hypothetical scenarios, even world destruction could have a higher utility than the alternatives. Strict negative utilitarians who disbelieve in the possibility of a positive Singularity arguably should already see this condition as having been met, and the expected utility of the world ending painlessly would be higher than its continuation. Not that this is a realistically achievable goal.

]What creates governments is human ignorance to see past their lies, and the cowardice to stand up to them.

Precisely! I absolutely agree! Now if only we could get these pesky humans to not be so human, then anarcho-capitalism could finally reign supreme!

The transition of a society toward Anarcho-Capitalism is the gradual diminishing of government power and the "power gap" being filled with individual rights. Overthrowing a government is very easy - you simply refuse to obey, and even an evil empire like the Soviet Union will crumble without warning! (I lived in Moscow until 1992 so I saw a lot of youth dissidence first-hand.)Overthrowing a determined nongovernmental society, on the other hand, can be much more difficult: it took less time to capture Tokyo and Berlin than it will take to subdue a tiny band of rootless savages in a hell-hole like Afghanistan, with many an empire having failed already.

I don’t discount the possibility for power structures to be overturned by grassroots action. I just don’t think it should be depended upon, especially in a country like the US. Not to mention the complete infeasibility of the system you would prop up in its place… which would work great if only humans weren’t human.

You have it perfectly backwards. It is governments that have zero meaningful accountability! Sure, they will let you collectively pick what actors you prefer to see on C-SPAN (and from only a couple of indistinguishably bad choices), but their script remains the same. All interactions in the private sector are voluntary - if another entity in the free market doesn't meet your standards, then you are free not to do business with them and they won't get a penny from you or influence your life in any direct way. There is no such thing as a private tyranny - if it initiates aggression, then it's a government and it needs to be resisted.

If that is your definition of government, then fine. Though if that is what you mean, you should be more clear and just say it is aggression that you oppose, because that description could apply just as easily to a corporation or religious institution.

As a utilitarian, I am free to reject your assertion that all aggression is wrong. It is my right! (I read it in the Natural Laws that I discovered under my microscope.)

An Anarcho-Capitalist society would definitely have a healthier free press, greater decentralization and competition in the field of product certification / quality assurance services, and more rational consumer skepticism leading to a more information and reputation-driven shopping environment. That said - there's no such thing as "consumer rights" or "producer rights" or "sitting people's rights" or "standing people's rights" or "tall people's rights" or "short people's rights"; just universal rights based on the self-ownership of each individual. If you want to buy an uncertified product from an uncertified seller in a back alley somewhere then it's not my job to stop you.

We went for centuries having snake oil salesmen and astrologers and all manner of quacks and charlatans fleecing people of their money. We have experienced corporations that have knowingly sold defective products. We have whole institutions that are revealed to be corrupt time and again, yes including governments, and yet people return to them time and again to lend support. Corruption is everywhere, as you pointed out with your rant about the sadists seeking positions of power. Gee, if only people made decisions based on reason instead of superstition. If only we had people that sought out independent certification groups before purchasing things. If only… If only…

As a utilitarian I am not going to be satisfied with wishing humanity were something it is not. We are not rational. We are aggressive. We are stupid and ignorant. But we are still valuable, and the idea that we must all accept the responsibility for our actions might sound good in theory, but it is a crock of shit. We need protection. We need forgiveness.

Then Rothbard was wrong in this issue. As I previously stated, I believe that the right to emancipation and other requirements of transparency (right to risk assessment, right to fair trial, etc) do trump property access rights to some small degree. There's no such thing as a positive right to secrecy! .

Agreed. Though all of these rights exist only in our minds.

any mainstream church, charity, neighborhood association, etc would almost definitely create contractual obligations for some minimal household transparency as a requirement for membership - in fact it would be in their interest to do so

This is indistinguishable from the social contract. Since nobody is forcing you to stay in the United States, why are you upset that they require you to follow their laws for you to remain here? Under this sort of contract you can justify taxation, drug laws, and basically anything else the US has on the books domestically.

I will close by saying that I do agree that we need to make the successful virus of government increasingly obsolete. But we must do so by building systems which are even more successfully viral but less shitty. I believe strongly in open source (especially the viral GPL), as well as sousveillance, reputation systems, decentralized technologies, and so forth. Yet systems fail, and reality doesn’t fit nicely with our preconceptions. We need to plan in advance for when these new governance mechanisms fail, just as the actors in the market can fail us.

It isn’t the theory of supply and demand that fails when people use of the shorthand term “market failure.” It is the people who have failed. In the context of capitalism, aggression is probably a main reason (right up there with stupidity), but aggression is inevitable. Even if you have reputation systems exposing it. You can expose something a thousand times…. like that televangelist Peter Popoff who is now out of prison and up to his same old tricks…. People will still fall for it. I think people need protection from this sort of thing, even if it is their own fault, since my goal is maximum happiness, not maximum enforcement of the NAP… that is simply Social Darwinism.

One of my preferred solutions to this is the Basic Income idea, since it would always provide a certain basic standard of living, and thus people could have a greater degree of freedom and still be protected. In my opinion, the ideal governmental system for the world we actually live in is something akin to an updated form of Georgism. Yet, we don’t even have that, and all strides in that direction are not unequivocally good. Stripping down one regulation in a context of a regulated economy can have horrible cascading effects. I work with what we do have and make decisions contextually based on this. I also contribute to open source projects, and even to more radical ones that you might like such as Factor e Farm. But there are no panaceas.

Join the dark side, Alex. We have hotter women.

P.S. Oh and as for that other thread where you called me a demagogue and compared me to nazis. You can kindly **** yourself.

Edited by progressive, 03 April 2010 - 11:38 PM.

[JLL]

Objective ethics is an oxymoron. It is like saying we need objective subjectivity.

Now that's a silly thing to say.

First, define the term 'ethics' (in a way that differs from the definition of 'conscience').

[RighteousReason]

Virtually nothing can be discounted by a utilitarian outright, same with any consequentialist philosophy.

I disagree! This is the magic of objective law. The same thing you said to be an oxymoron.

By the way, this relies on the example you used as an absurdity: "objective subjectivity" -- aka. "the psychic unity of humankind"

Edited by RighteousReason, 04 April 2010 - 07:39 AM.

[Alex Libman]

Objective ethics is an oxymoron. It is like saying we need objective subjectivity.

I didn't say we needed objective "ethics", which is a somewhat vague term, I said we need objective universal laws, a concept known as Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Human Rights. That concept only includes the most fundamental and irreducible kernel of societal rules (i.e. "thou shalt not": murder, steal, rape, kidnap, commit fraud, withhold essential information, etc), while all other higher-level ethical constructs (i.e. charity, animal welfare, speed limits, etc) are not objective and can be built on top of things like individual property rights, contract law, market pressure, and ostracism.

What if someone’s ideal society is one in which aggression occurs all the time, and that is what they seek to maximize? [...]

Every person's ideal society is the one where they are the king of the world and get to rape super-models by the hundreds, remote-control planes into skyscrapers just for laughs, torture people who don't bow down low enough to them, and order random people to battle each-other with chainsaws for their amusement. The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) emerges not because everyone is so peaceful and benevolent, but because everyone's thirst for power must balance with everyone else's in order to make civilized society possible. Sure, I may what to kill my neighbor, turn his skull into a teacup, take his stuff, conduct bizarre medical experiments on his wife, and make his children my slaves, but so does everyone, and everyone knows that if they make the first move then everyone else -- the other 6+ billion people in the world -- will find it in their best interest to stop them. NAP is like the law of supply and demand, the rational economic compromise between multiple people's self-interest that makes civilization possible.

This is pretty slanderous. Perhaps you could be so kind as to highlight for me what exactly about my beliefs would entail any of that, because as far as I can see, I have revealed very little about my political philosophy to you.

There is no such thing as "slander" in a legal sense - you don't own other people's minds and the opinion of you that they for whatever reason hold, nor their "means of speech" and how they choose to use it to communicate their opinion to others. You would be right to say that I've made inductive assumptions about you for being a "progressive" "utilitarian" and the things I've read from you so far. My criticism applies to "progressive" "utilitarians" in general, who in reality are anything but utilitarian or progressive, and I'm yet to read anything from you to indicate that you are any different.

Of course I wouldn’t discount any action outright, the costs and benefits would need to be weighed as prudently as possible. [...]

And yet you've jumped to a long list of conclusions the vast majority of which is demonstrably wrong and harmful to the human civilization, as I will continue to point out on the various threads where our paths happen to cross.

What creates governments is human ignorance to see past their lies, and the cowardice to stand up to them.

Precisely! I absolutely agree! Now if only we could get these pesky humans to not be so human, then anarcho-capitalism could finally reign supreme!

The level and expression of human ignorance and emotional irrationality changes over time, with Anarcho-Capitalism only becoming attainable in the 21st century as people gain rapid access to information. Pre-humans and early humans spent millions of years in a state of existence where not even the Right to Life could be recognized on any consistent level, because every time they met someone from another tribe they had no way of reasoning with them (prior to the development of language) and had to assume they were a threat. An observer could have said "it is human nature to live in caves and not be able to count to ten", but human nature has clearly changes since then, as it will continue to change at the ever-accelerating pace in the future. What will not change are the immutable laws of economics and the way they apply to a society of individual minds. Of course it is hypothetically possible that the human race will one day somehow merge into one conscious entity with a single irreducible mind, but that is not a relevant point of discussion just yet. And if the new unified human entity discovered that it was not the only "rational economic actor" in this universe, then the same laws of economics would once again apply.

I don’t discount the possibility for power structures to be overturned by grassroots action. I just don’t think it should be depended upon, especially in a country like the US. [...]

Of course - the U.S. government will very likely want to send in the Navy as soon as the first successful seastead is established anywhere in the world, or roll in the tanks to put down any municipal or regional attempt at secession, but that is a tactical problem for us to worry about, not a philosophical one. A barbarian who uses his club to smash the head of a nuclear scientist does not prove that he is stronger than a nuclear warhead!

If that is your definition of government, then fine. Though if that is what you mean, you should be more clear and just say it is aggression that you oppose, because that description could apply just as easily to a corporation or religious institution.

A corporation, a religious institution, or any other voluntary establishment stops being a "voluntary establishment" and instead becomes a "government" as soon as it initiates aggression, just like a "government" that stops initiating aggression is no longer called "government".

As a utilitarian, I am free to reject your assertion that all aggression is wrong. It is my right! (I read it in the Natural Laws that I discovered under my microscope.)

I didn't say that all aggression was wrong, I meant that INITIATING aggression should be punished through a polycentric legal system that is focused on restitution. Defensive violence (the Right to self-defense, which can be outsourced to others, as well as post-facto justice), enforcement of contracts and property rules (ex. no shouting "fire" allowed in my theater, no fetuses allowed in my vagina), and consensual "violence" (ex. euthanasia, "blood sports", BDSM) are perfectly acceptable.

My philosophical theories are based on empirically-verifiable economic facts, as summarized elsewhere on this forum, while what you discovered under your microscope hasn't even been published yet so it clearly cannot compete for the status of the most objectively-verifiable foundational theory of Natural Law! Please publicize your discoveries, and we will openly debate whose system is superior, though it would be mere foreshadowing until those social systems can be implemented and compete with each-other in real life.


(Bah, silly quote box count limit... Easier to split this into two posts then try to refactor them...)

Edited by Alex Libman, 04 April 2010 - 08:54 AM.

[Alex Libman]

(Continued from above.)

We went for centuries having snake oil salesmen and astrologers and all manner of quacks and charlatans fleecing people of their money. [...]

Wow, you mean those 19th century snake-oil buyers didn't whip-out their smart-phones and check out what reputable consumer protection databases have to say about those products and businesses? Well then, that may be a good argument to use against anyone who wants to build a time machine and promote Anarcho-Capitalism in the past, but it's not a very good argument moving forward. And most people going to astrologers today actually wanted to be fooled, but that is their business and they individually are responsible for the consequences of their actions.

In a competitive free-market information-driven economy, getting away with fraud becomes ever-more difficult, because everyone else the the world (your would-be customers, competitors, health insurance companies, the press, philanthropist / consumer interest non-profits, your employees / business partners trying to save their own reputation, etc) are motivated to expose and ostracize you, and there is no Mommy Government to limit your liability and keep you from having to pay a lot of restitution to the people you've deliberately defrauded. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time - and once information gets out it will be very difficult for you to ever do business anywhere again without addressing those allegations effectively.

This is indistinguishable from the social contract.

Most socialists' idea of a "social contract" is whatever the heck they want it to be, and good luck getting everyone to agree without resorting to some sort of a "might makes right" system (i.e. dictatorship or democracy). The objective idea of a social contract is one based on inescapable economic laws that are essential for the establishment of a competitive society, with all other social rules being voluntary.

Since nobody is forcing you to stay in the United States, why are you upset that they require you to follow their laws for you to remain here? Under this sort of contract you can justify taxation, drug laws, and basically anything else the US has on the books domestically.

United States is an entity that exists on the basis of force. I don't see myself as staying in any particular nation, state, municipality, or any other arbitrary lines on any map - I stay on private property (as all property should be private), and I diligently follow the rules that I have voluntarily agreed to follow, as well as the universal Natural Law.

There is an objective negative Right to private property, explicitly owned by an individual or specific group of individuals, which is derived from the fact that after the wide-spread establishment of those Rights (sorry, Native Americans) the legitimate ownership of property existed as the consequence of each owner bringing this property into the human economy (i.e. homesteading), or acquiring this property through voluntary exchange from someone who legitimately acquired it before him. The Right to private property is a definite competitive advantage that has been shown over and over again to directly correlate with a society's economic growth. Ownership of each piece of property is a consequence of (and a reward / incentive for) the actions of specific minds and bodies, not a gang of thugs projecting violent force in the name of some irrational nationalist abstraction from Washington DC! Thus individuals can legitimately own property and set the rules by which visitors / renters on that property are to conduct themselves, governments cannot.

[...] I believe strongly in open source (especially the viral GPL) [...]

Copyleft / GPL does not constitute an explicit contractual agreement nor a case of Right to Transparency, and can thus only exist as the result of government force. I am a big fan of open source software, which I see as the natural consequence of price / transparency competition within the software market, and a great example of free market capitalism in action (at least for the permissively-licensed projects). However, I don't encourage programmers to go against their own individual self-interest if they can make more money by keeping a piece of software proprietary, and when they do decide to publish the code they can no longer control it. (You can read a summary of my opinion on this matter here.)

It isn’t the theory of supply and demand that fails when people use of the shorthand term “market failure.” It is the people who have failed. In the context of capitalism, aggression is probably a main reason (right up there with stupidity), but aggression is inevitable. Even if you have reputation systems exposing it. You can expose something a thousand times…. like that televangelist Peter Popoff who is now out of prison and up to his same old tricks…. People will still fall for it. I think people need protection from this sort of thing, even if it is their own fault, since my goal is maximum happiness, not maximum enforcement of the NAP… that is simply Social Darwinism.

The "people are too stupid to be free" argument has some merit, but some people are more stupid than others - why should everyone be subject to your power equally? The involuntary institutions you put in place are not magically infallible - power tends to corrupt, and they historically do far more harm than good. A free society encourages people to become ever-more self-reliant and rational about their choices, while a government control is inherently biased toward keeping the citizens helpless and dependent, which can be the sum of all fears - the human civilization stagnating and declining because of the centralized rule of the entrenched power elite!

Wide-spread literacy and instant access to information makes rational decision-making ever-easier for the vast majority of people. The small minority of people who are smart enough to become self-owning adults (as opposed to the guardianship of their parents being extended or transferred to a special institution due to a mental illness) but are not smart enough to function well in a free society can be much better helped through voluntary institutions like churches, secular mentoring, and charity. Of course some stubborn fools will inevitably fall through the cracks and end up in work-houses or jails, but why should the rest of society suffer for their stupidity? After a few years many of them will be able to regain their freedom and be a lot more open to following the advice of the charities that want to help them.

One of my preferred solutions to this is the Basic Income idea, since it would always provide a certain basic standard of living, and thus people could have a greater degree of freedom and still be protected. In my opinion, the ideal governmental system for the world we actually live in is something akin to an updated form of Georgism. [...]

I agree that the negative income tax and Georgism (like in Hong Kong) would be an improvement over what we have today, especially in most European countries, and those systems can be implemented through voluntary legal constructs like charter cities, but implementing those things on a universal scale would be a big mistake. It is intergovernmental competition that keeps the greatest threat to human civilization -- government power -- in check!

There will always be social pressure to encourage voluntary charity, and because charities exist in a result-oriented competitive environment they tend to be far more effective than government-forced redistribution of wealth. Government power profits from human misery (the more it fails the more money it can rationalize taking from you), while private interests in the aggregate suffer from it. Having poor people in your town raises your property insurance costs and reduces your customer base, while helping them get on their feet produces good PR for you and your business. In most cases the best way you can help a person is by providing easy employment and on-the-job training, which can actually be profitable as that person's productivity increases, because you end up with a very grateful employee with a high level of company loyalty. I think that in a free society philanthropy will become everyone's favorite pass-time, and wealthy people who don't donate to charity would not be very popular with their would-be customers and friends.

Join the dark side, Alex. We have hotter women.

Not hotter women, just more of them. Women in the aggregate aren't as good at understanding hard logical sciences and are hormonally predisposed toward compassion, which is precisely the emotion socialist politicians are very effective at hijacking. Getting laid was very easy when I was a greenie, while the Anarcho-Capitalist gender ratio makes it a very bad ideology for a heterosexual male to hold, but truth is my highest value. Plus who needs real women when my "young Ayn Rand" sex robot is almost finished! It comes with prerecorded pillow talk phrases like: "is that a Rearden metal rail spike in your pocket", "screw me like you screw a labor union", and "there's no such thing as a collective orgasm".

[DairyProducts]

Sure, I may what to kill my neighbor, turn his skull into a teacup, take his stuff, conduct bizarre medical experiments on his wife, and make his children my slaves, but so does everyone,

For the record, I would like to state that I have no desire to do any of these things.
BTW - Great debate guys. I have my popcorn and Snuggie out.

Edited by DairyProducts, 05 April 2010 - 04:00 AM.

[Alex Libman]

For the record, I would like to state that I have no desire to do any of these things.

Suuure... We all believe you...

BTW - Great debate guys. I have my popcorn and Snuggie out.

It looks like the moment has passed. Also, I have to leave this forum for a few weeks cold turkey. Been wasting waaaaay too much time here and on similar forums... I should be coding. ABC's of success == Always Be Coding. Programming is a more logical medium for expressing my ideas, and people are actually willing to pay me to do it. (And so can you - PM me if you need a freelance developer.) The rest of the universe will attend to itself - and if it doesn't I can still laugh at its stupidity in private... So long. Don't let the commies bite.