YES, YES, YES…
Thank you.
In the world of philosophical thought and discussion, if I’m going to ask to be taken seriously, I can’t simply ignore historical arguments about these situations. So, if I’m going to claim these to be true, I establish a basis for saying they are true. My argument about conflict generically being an a priori concept is that it’s already present as a deduction from the existing concepts of Praxeology, which are deemed a priori. Therefore my category of conflict is also a priori, though in this case it’s, I believe, a priori synthetic. So when one asks me questions like this, I don’t think it’s fair for me to say, I don’t want to talk about it.
On the other hand I agree with your point which is, isn’t there a level of silliness to arguing about these points… And on one level I’d agree, in particular because they aren’t useful to me personally for my own edification. The usefulness to me is only in how responding to these questions helps me to convince others to take the ideas seriously, by not shying away from such criticisms.
Yes, I do hope to gain insights into situations in politics where this holds true. However, there are some additional points that I hope to make.
- Politics is generially a fuzzy field. It’s hard to reason about, and discuss because we’re unclear on what it’s about.
- Politics arises out of this condition of conflict. It does not exist where there is no conflict, but where conflict exists, Politics is the theory and technology that man uses to manage it. In other words, you said “situations in politics where that holds true…” I would state it’s only politics BECAUSE conflict exists. Otherwise, there’s no norm, law, regulation to create, there’s no punishment or jurisprudence to dispense, no “wrong” to “right”.
- Property is seen as a social phenomena, and criticized as exploitation. I believe a theory of conflict thus stated explains that it arises necessarily out of the actions of man in the face of scarcity. Man’s attempts to create causal chains of events that satisfy his ends, lead him into conflict with his fellow man. Just as man uses theory and technology to overcome the resistance of the natural world to the satisfaction of his ends, so also man uses theory and technology to overcome the resistance or opposition of his fellow man to the satisfaction of his own ends. In modern social science the theory and technology are blurred, this makes the field difficult to navigate. It’s like swimming in quicksand. I’d rather suck out the water and make a pool, leaving me with firm ground to stand on(theory), and a pleasant refreshing pool to swim in(technology).
There are others, but I believe that’s a start. My #1 concern with the state of libertarian, anarcho-capitalist thought today is that we are viewed as misunderstanding the role of government in society. I’m concerned that we fail to accept and embrace that mechanisms for defining legitimate claims on property will always exist, and we cannot ignore that aspect of the real world. In addition, any technological solution we produce must necessarily embrace and address the violation of and enforcement of these claims. We can’t gloss over it with a Non-aggression principle. We have to take it very seriously. I thoroughly embrace the idea of competing courts and competing defense agencies. But that’s technology. In addition, we don’t simply have to construct technological solutions, we have to also implement them from within the current technology. For example, I can design a bridge that is better than the bridge that currently exists, but if I can’t build that bridge, because I don’t know how to implement certain features using our current tools and processes, then it’s a great design, but it will have to wait to be implemented until we can design and implement new building techniques and processes that can implement those features.
Here’s an analogy: When I construct a technological device, it is not “value-free”. It has a purpose. A gun has a purpose. Now there are various theoretical fields of the physical sciences which make value free statements about the nature of the universe, such that they can be used to analyze and predict the success of a specific technological design. But those sciences have NOTHING to say about the purpose of the device. They can only tell me whether or not the device will function in the manner I wish it to.
How would one therefore, construct a technological solution to the issues of politics? If one were to design such a system, using a theoretical science that gave me good value-free analysis of the consequences of that solution would be a good tool. Praxeology is that tool. In one place, I’ve seen Mises call Politics the social science of conflict and Economics the social science of cooperation. (that’s a paraphrase). I agree on one level, though I don’t think that conflict and cooperation are so blithely divided, I think there’s a negotiative interactive feedback cycle that starts in the individual mind and is seen in action (by preferring the seeking of one end over another) but when multiple acting men pursue ends in an environment which CANNOT meet all persons ends at all times (i.e. the universe as we know it), conflict and all of it’s categories appear. And I’m arguing that a Praxeological science of conflict IS the equivalent to a mature science of Politics.
I agree they aren’t separate, one of my major frustrations in reading Austrian Economics is that the framework within which exchange happens is one of property, and this cannot be blithely glossed over. A social mechanism for establishing a legitimate use claim MUST exist in any social group IF there is scarcity. We find many modern libertarian theorists arguing about a non-aggression principle without placing it into a value-free framework.
Aggression is not cleanly defined, and is subjectively determined. But it’s the social technology that aggregates individual subjective values and desires to exclusive use of scarce resources that decides which claims are legitimate and which are not. The Non-aggression principle is interesting, but it tries to discard aggression as a valid means. I’m not saying I don’t agree with it, but it’s not rooted in normative space properly.
Mises clearly states that Ends are givens. We don’t get to decide whether or not a person’s ends are good or bad, that’s a subjectively determined value judgment of the individual. Praxeology has nothing to say about the ends that man aims at. Praxeology as a science can only set about to accurately describe the logical consequences of the technology that man uses as means to those ends.
I, like so many others here, value freedom and equality before the law, and the rapid and universal improvement in the living conditions of all men. But that is an end, if someone else has another end, I want to know that this is true. What Mises got right was understanding that he didn’t have to make men believe liberalism was “RIGHT”. He simply had to show what the necessary consequences were of other economic theories and systems. He made huge strides. But he didn’t have to cross the normative boundary and try to make the necessary ends into good or bad. He left that to the consumer of the science.
I’d like to divide the theory from the tech in the conflict space. We muddy the waters, because it is a necessarily muddy space. It’s hard for man to divorce the logical framework of knowledge he uses to analyze the consequences of action from the ends which he values.
Absolutely. I stated some of them above. Another example, Public ownership doesn’t exist in practice. It’s a complex set of norms about legitimate claims for individual use. In any dispute that arises in the realm of “public ownership”, that dispute will devolve to some means of establishing which of two individual claims for use is deemed to be the legitimate one. And over and over and over. Natural Property Rights is a specific technology, there is a theoretical science behind it. Clearly stating the theorems and axioms of that science is my goal.