See the work of Ayn Rand, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Roderick Long, Tibor Machan, myself and others.
Sorry to interrupt and be a pain in the ass, but for somebody not understanding any of this, where as good places to begin?
@ LS and Magnus, why the hostility?
Actually, I think you should read Norms of Liberty first before re-reading it. I found it to be the more rigorous of their two works.
-Jon
Liberty student, I’m glad to know that my behavior fits your model.
Magnus, why do you think that Marx and Hegel were evil? Hegel was a religious idealist, and his theories reflect that starting point. If you seperate out the bad stuff from his thinking, there’s some really good stuff in there. Marx, on the other hand, rejected religion, but nevertheless accepted the dialectical view of history. Further, like many other economists of his time, he accepted the labor theory of value. If you look at his theories in light of his acceptance of those two fundamental premises, it’s not difficult to see why he reached the conclusions he did. They make perfect sense if you take as given the theories of dialectical materialism and the labor theory of value. Granted, a lot of Marx’s thinking crumbles once those two supports are removed. But again, some of what remains is really valuable.
I list Marx and Hegel as inspirational here, but that doesn’t mean that I’m a Hegelian or a Marxist. Gerald Cohen is certainly another significant inspiration for me, as are Richard Arneson, John Rawls, Peter Singer, John Harsanyi, and Paul Taylor. I don’t agree with them on a lot of things, but I’ve certainly learned a whole lot from what they had to say, and in a lot of ways they’ve influenced my thinking just as much as any libertarian author (perhaps not true with regard to Mises, Hayek, and Nozick). Obviously there are a lot of libertarian or classical liberal thinkers who’ve had a significant impact on me as well, including the aforementioned three, along with Locke, Hazlitt, Bauer, Long, Feinberg, Schmidtz, Gaus, Lomasky, Simmons, Steiner, Otsuka, Narveson, Benson, Holcombe, Dolan, Block, (David) Friedman, etc., etc. But just because I’m a libertarian doesn’t mean I have to ignore the contributions of the great figures in philosophical history. It’s that kind of doctrinaire attitude that can only impoverish a school of philosophical thought.
If it is the perfectionist ethics and rights you’re interested in, I recommend looking into the works of Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl (frequent co-authors), each has an article in the JLS, and Roderick Long. Roderick has a seminar on this site on the praxeological foundations of libertarian ethics. Roderick also has a great essay in which he argues that indirect consequentialism (e.g., rule-utilitarianism) is praxeologically unstable.
Same reason you get hostile with Juan and BP. I’m surprised you can’t see it.
Aestheticbend, I think I understand what you’re getting at.
Geoffrey, don’t you mean “See the work of Aristotle?” [:P] Would you really consider Aristotelian views to be perfectionist in nature? For some reason, I thought that perfectionism was an aggregative teleological view, rather than an individualistic one like I took Aristotle’s to be…but you’re the Aristotelian here; what do you think?
Giles, apparently I don’t know what perfectionism is, so unfortunately I’m not likely to be able to provide any decisive help. My invocation of Socrates in clarifying a variant of utilitarianism draws on Socrates’ idea (I know it from the Gorgias, but I imagine it appears elsewhere as well) that it’s not necessarily good for people to get what they want, because what they want might not be what they should want. His classic example (if I remember correctly) invokes a cook and a doctor trying to compete for the favor of a panel of sick children. Socrates’ point is that the cook will always win, even though the doctor is the one who can actually heal them, because the cook can offer the children things that are more intuitively appealing, whereas the doctor’s remedies may involve some short-term discomfort in a more roundabout way of producing benefit. This idea is often used to dispute preference-based varieties of utilitarianism which say that people are better off insofar as they get what they want, since what they want may in fact be harmful to them. I therefore attempted to equate Aestheticbend’s views with a sort of utilitarianism which is structured around this objection, advocating the maximization of what people should want (that is, what would be best for them), rather than what they do want.
It’s not my model. Let’s just say you are internally consistent.
It’s more rigorous, but it also brings out more explicitly the flaw in their theory of rights that I critique in my dissertation. Liberty and Nature also has a broader scope, dealing with the is-ought gap, friendship, commerce and other topics; it’s a good starting point.
Indeed, but I had in mind the grounding of their overarching system, which they do best in NoL, both in terms of ethical as well as metaethical arguments.
-Jon
Are you familiar with the philosophers Danny is? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to familiarize yourself first, then judge the possibility of gleaning insights from the authors, rather than criticizing him beforehand?
-Jon
I’m only really hostile to them after they are too me, moreso in the case of the former than the latter. In any case, I only return as a result of their ad homs, straw men and just generally tendancy to avoid the issue. Although, I usually come across as more hostile than I intend to be purely because of the way I write.
I began listening to Long’s seminar the other day, I’ve found it very interest. As for Douglas Rasmussen and Den Uyl, I’ve got their Norms of Liberty sitting on my bookshelf which I intend to read after I finish with Miller’s An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics (recommended by Jon). Any other authors you can recommend?
Well, Geoffrey Allan Plauche gave a better answer than I could, especially if you are looking for writing from a perfectionist libertarian perspective, but I would say from a more broad perspective read Aristotle, Aquinas and Joseph Raz (even though he is an egalitarian liberal, his arguments for the justification of individual liberty are still quite influential on me).
Well, you mentioned perfectionist ethics and rights, and Aristotle was not a liberal/libertarian. Fred Miller does find rights language in Aristotle, however, and traces the roots of liberalism back to him in his excellent book Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics; see also Roderick Long’s “Aristotle’s Conception of Freedom” (citation on his website) for a necessary amendment to it though.
I have a feeling the people who use the terms ‘perfectionist’ and ‘teleology’ like that haven’t studied the history of philosophy much further back than modernity. 
Aristotle’s ethics is individualist, egoist, eudaimonist, teleological and perfectionist. The subtitle of R&DU’s Norms of Liberty, btw, is A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics.
I’m familiar with a lot of things, it doesn’t make my observations on a particular topic correct, or my time spent being familiar insulating me from criticism.
I’m sure you would agree that in debate, neither claim to immunity holds up. But that’s internally consistent, because when questioned closely (as Magnus did), the tactic is to generate a strawman and then feign victimhood. Happens all of the time on this forum, usually by people of the self-described left-libertarian persuasion.
I’m totally not as familiar as Danny is. For example, I couldn’t make the argument he did the other day that it was ok to coerce someone to take their property to help someone else. I don’t know enough philosophikal stuff to make that argument. And likewise, I just don’t dig deep enough into Marx to come up with fringe points that may or may not be compatible with Austrianism. I just know that Marx’s ideology in action slaughtered millions of people.
But maybe I’m just being judgmental. Ignorant and judgmental, go figure.
No, but it’s necessary to have a fruitful discussion on the topic.
-Jon
Geoffrey, to be honest, I’m not sure where I got the idea that perfectionism was an aggregative view. The first thing that popped into my head was Gaus’ discussion of perfectionism in “Liberal Neutrality: A Radical and Compelling Principle,” but he writes:
More generally, contemporary perfectionists argue for government programs that either discourage people from seeking goods that they would not want if they appreciated and acted upon good reasons (cigarettes, other drugs) or else endeavor to provide people with goods that they would want if they were enlightened, or could properly appreciate good reasons (e.g. public broadcasting, art galleries).
And that’s definitely an individualistic description. So I don’t know what made me think that.
With regard to the use of the term “teleological” as an aggregative term, I’m definitely comfortable with the original use of the word; a lot of people currently working in the Aristotelian tradition still use it that way. The examples that pop into my head right away are Paul Taylor’s discussion of “teleological centers of life” in his book, Respect for Nature, and Robin Attfield’s argument in “The Good of Trees” (been talking about environmental ethics, can ya tell?). It’s just that a lot of people have taken teleological views to refer to broader conceptions of the good which span across individuals, and I think it’s okay to allow them to use the term that way. Aside from the inherent difficulties in interpersonal measurement of any plausible conception of “the good,” do you think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the use of the term that way?
In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned: Danny mentioned one in particular that I would strongly recommend. He’s not an Aristotelian, unfortunately, but David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice is a superb book despite that. Another really good contemporary Aristotelian is Henry Veatch. His theory of rights isn’t quite right, but his other work is excellent. Although not a libertarian, Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is a good book that helped resurrect natural end virtue ethics. Chris Sciabarra has some interesting books on Ayn Rand, Hayek, and dialectical libertarianism. I’ve found some useful ideas in Hannah Arendt’s work, although, again, she’s not a libertarian, e.g., The Human Condition. H.B. Acton has a wonderful, shockingly neglected, book The Morals of Markets and Related Essays. Two other good books on morality, markets and business are John Hood’s The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good and Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright’s Culture and Enterprise: The Development, Representation and Morality of Business. I’m also a fan of Nietzsche; although many of his ideas are wrong, he’s very thought-provoking and one of the few philosophers who is actually fun to read. Lester Hunt, a libertarian, has a interesting book Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue; this chapter in particular is interesting for us.
Otherwise the person with less familiarity should just sit there and receive the conclusions and judgment of the person with more familiarity?
You’re easily Danny’s equal on these subjects. Do you agree with him about Marx and Mises?