So yeah, Rothbard missed the boat here. Absolutely.
I would have argued differently.
Every govt action makes the owner of his own property unhappy, by taking it away from him withthe threat of force.
Every exchange makes the owners happier. As for the rest of the world being jealous or whatever, that’s their problem. Deal with it, rest of the woirld. Grow up, whatever. No reason for anyone to consider your emotional state when you should be minding your own business.
I have no units to measure it. So what? I think every person who ever existed on the face of the Earth would agree that yes, the world is more miserable from that transaction.
Theories are meant to organize and sharpen our understanding of the real world. If a theory says “Nope, no way of knowing, ridiculous to even ask, if the world is unhappier from that,” I see it as a flaw in the theory.
I see a flaw also in your rebuttal of Utilitarianism. Because if we can’t really tell what’s best, why not do whatever we please? All plans are equally good.. Why not just go wherever cunning and force leads us? Maybe the world as it is right now is perfect, because Obama is happy. Why expend energy fighting it?
My thoughts on Utilitarianism. Say the world contracts a rare disease and everyone will die, except one person. That fellow has something in his blood that makes him immune. Now for some odd reason, it turns out that if he was to be crucified, his blood bleeding on the cross would save the world. He doesn’t like the idea at all.
I think that indeed the sum total of human happiness would be greater if he was killed. But I think that he has the right to say “I don’t care about the sum total of human happiness. I care about me more than the whole world put together, and that’s my privilege. It’s my body and my blood, and I will do with it as I please.”
He is reserved the choice. What we cannot see is this man’s potential guilt, should he not sacrifice himself. Perhaps there is an optimality in GHP comparing the potential loss of life and one man’s guilt?
My caveman brain agrees too. We have evolved to have ideas about what our fellow man is experiencing. This says nothing about the philosophical validity of this empathy.
Rather than paint the world as less happy, I am proposing that we can say such a world is unjust, or disutilitarian (my conception).
What you mean is that “all plans are equal in aggregate good”. No plan can ever be evaluated for this parameter becuase it does not exist. Aggregate ‘good’ is a linguistic invention, nothing more. It only holds our attention because of our evolutionary instincts that I explained about.
Thus my Utilitarianism abandons trying to maximize ‘overall good’ or whatever. The only good that can be advanced is subjective and individual. You cannot make interpersonal comparisons of this property. The only way to promote this kind of good is to preserve people’s freedom to pursue their goals.
This approach frustrates any attempt to sacrifice one for the many, because it must rely on some conception of aggregate good, which is meaningless.
Because aggregate good is a preference, that does not mean that it is meaningless. If we could, we would have killed Hitler. Or Stalin. Or any of the other brutal dictators to rake this earth of a huge sum of entirely non-aggressive peoples. But in other situations it would possess little to no significance. it is contrary to the NAP though.