What would you suggest be the word used to describe a person who is a proponent of libertarianism (the political philosophy)? I have always considered a libertarian to be a proponent of libertarianism. Are you suggesting that a libertarian is a follower of a particular ethical philosophy? Would you then say that libertarianism is a political philosophy with a set of followers, some of whom are libertarian and others who are not?
+1,000
I don’t know what a political philosophy is. What is a political philosophy?
If the person in question supports aggression, then they are a statist. If they embrace the market, they are a libertarian.
See above.
I would say that most people are full of crap and call themselves things, whether it is Christian, or anti war or small government or libertarian, and don’t in any way embrace the means and ends attached to those labels. I have a low regard for people who talk a good game and act contrary to their stated beliefs.
As stated in another thread, I think the key here is that I am a consequentialist libertarian and you (I presume) are a deontological libertarian. This seems to clear up pretty much everything you and I argue about.
The NAP isn’t dependent on natural rights.
As I said, the NAP in the context of moral relativism doesn’t make sense. It is just one persons Idea of what constitutes aggression against another persons. If people have different beliefs regarding ownership of resources, then can each can come to the conclusion that the other person is violating the NAP.
If we’re all gonna switch to Micah’s definitions, then for the record I’m a moral nihilist!
A pretty important part of Misesian philosophy is that rightness is utility. That’s why it’s all subjective.
Different people use the same words differently. Around here, being a Misesian doesn’t mean being a moral nihilist. It’s only the people like Vichy who try to be sensational and say that they think that morality is crazy or whatever. But it’s all just a stupid word game. Arguing about definitions is an endless road. I try to stand above the strife, and I suspect that you should too. It’s not a path conducive to figuring out how the world works.
That’s actually what everybody does though!
If we can’t agree on a language how are we supposed to have meaningful conversations about how the world works? It seems to me that the easiest way to talk about how the world works is to agree on an authoritative source for language, not because it’s more accurate of a source than any other but because provides a Schelling point. A dictionary seems ideal to me since every word in the language is defined (save a very few words very new to the language), it is easily accessible to everyone and in almost all cases it’s definitions are the ones people use without thinking about it.
If we agree to have different definitions for any given word then we’ll spend all of our time discussing our definitions rather than discussing an interesting topic. This is especially true if I don’t know which words are being used differently by the other parties because I then can’t safely assume that any given word they use is intended to mean what I assume it does. By having a common language we can now effectively communicate higher level topics besides the language itself.
It seems that the worst case is to do as you suggest and just assume that any given word in use means what you think it means and not discuss the definition nor agree on a source for the definition because this can only lead to miscommunication.
On the means to fulfilling our value judgements.
We beat the other people into submission because we can. They try the same, but usually lose.
Basically, Mises recognized that the reason why morality came about was because for most people, if other people do well, then they do too. The division of labor is more productive than isolation. So the greatest good for the greatest number is what maximizes their utility. It grounds utilitarianism in a non-metaphysical philosophy.
But I would say that the greatest good for the greatest number thing is sort of a relic. Even though that’s why Mises called his philosophy “utilitarianism”, I don’t think that it’s particularly expedient to keep bringing it up. It’s more useful to just ask what your ultimate ends are, and what the means would be for them. It’s usually not any sort of “the greatest good for the greatest number” stuff. You would need to have extremely long time horizon to feel the strain of stealing stuff on the division of labor. Probably.
Anyway, don’t take this last section too seriously. I’m not confident about this stuff. It’s just an attempt.
You are a consequentialist, but I am not sure you are a libertarian.
Your issue isn’t with moral relativism, it is with interpersonal relationships. If people have different beliefs of what consititutes ownership, and everyone does, since none of us see things exactly the same, at the same time, for the same reasons, then there may be a conflict. And conflicts require resolution.
This is still not an issue for, or exclusive to, the NAP. You would have this problem with or without the NAP, the NAP only describes a principle that both parties could hold and agree upon, thus reducing the amount of conflict, and increasing utility for both actors.
Btw, aggression in the voluntarist sense is the initiation of physical force. That narrows down a lot of gray area.
“This is because rothbard believed in natural rights. However, there are no such things as natural rights. The NAP does not make sense in the context of ethical relativism.”
Nope, negative.
"Nevertheless, by coming out with a genuinely new theory (amazing in itself, considering the long history of political philosophy) Hoppe is in danger of offending all the intellectual vested interests of the libertarian camp. Utilitarians, who should be happy that value freedom was preserved, will be appalled to find that Hoppean rights are even more absolutist and “dogmatic” than natural rights. Natural rightsers, while happy at the “dogmatism” will be unwilling to accept an ethics not grounded in the board nature of things. Randians will be particularly upset on the satantic immanual kant and his “synthetic a priori”.
Randians might be mollified, however, to learn that Hoppe is influence by a group of German Kantians (headed by mathematician Paul Lorenzen) who interpret Kant as a deeply realistic Aristotelian, in contrast to the Idealist interpretation common in the U. S.
As a natural rightser, I don’t see any real contradiction here, or why one cannot hold to both the natural rights and the Hoppean rights ethic at the same time. Both rights ethics, after all, are grounded, like the realist version of Kantianism, in the nature of reality. Natural law, too, provides a personal and social ethic apart from libertarianism; this is an area Hoppe is not concerned with." ~ … pg 2, http://www.hanshoppe.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/liberty_symposium.pdf
“I think the key here is that I am a consequentialist libertarian”
Response?
“As regards the utilitarian position, the proof contains its ultimate refutation. It demonstrates that simply in order to propose the utilitarian position, exclusive rights of control over one’s body and one’s homesteaded goods already must be presupposed as valid. More specifically, as regards the consequentialist aspect of libertarianism, the proof shows its praxeological impossibility: the assignment of rights of exclusive control cannot be dependent on certain outcomes. One could never act and propose anything unless private property rights existed prior to a later outcome. A consequentialist ethic is a praxeological absurdity. Any ethic must instead be “aprioristic” or instantaneous in order to make it possible that one can act here and now and propose this or that rather than having to suspend acting until later. Nobody advocating a wait-for-the-outcome ethic would be around to say anything if he took his own advice seriously. Also, to the extent that utilitarian proponents are still around, they demonstrate through their actions that their consequentialist doctrine is and must be regarded as false. Acting and proposition-making require private property rights now and cannot wait for them to be assigned only later.” - HHH, Economics and ethics of private property, p354
I find it hilarious that some here are all about actions & principles, non hypocrisy and yet their own very own refute their notion of it.
Nope, negative.
"Nevertheless, by coming out with a genuinely new theory (amazing in itself, considering the long history of political philosophy) Hoppe is in danger of offending all the intellectual vested interests of the libertarian camp. Utilitarians, who should be happy that value freedom was preserved, will be appalled to find that Hoppean rights are even more absolutist and “dogmatic” than natural rights. Natural rightsers, while happy at the “dogmatism” will be unwilling to accept an ethics not grounded in the board nature of things. Randians will be particularly upset on the satantic immanual kant and his “synthetic a priori”.
Randians might be mollified, however, to learn that Hoppe is influence by a group of German Kantians (headed by mathematician Paul Lorenzen) who interpret Kant as a deeply realistic Aristotelian, in contrast to the Idealist interpretation common in the U. S.
As a natural rightser, I don’t see any real contradiction here, or why one cannot hold to both the natural rights and the Hoppean rights ethic at the same time. Both rights ethics, after all, are grounded, like the realist version of Kantianism, in the nature of reality. Natural law, too, provides a personal and social ethic apart from libertarianism; this is an area Hoppe is not concerned with." ~ … pg 2, http://www.hanshoppe.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/liberty_symposium.pdf
I dont understand what the point of this passage was? This passsage neither proves that natural rights exist nor that the NAP makes sense in the context of moral relativism.
As I said, if one does not accept natural rights, then what constitutes aggression will differ from person to person.
“I dont understand what the point of this passage was?”
lol. You didn’t? (1) He didn’t just accept natural rights. So you were wrong. AND so are those who have previously in this thread claimed Rothbardians cannot accept more than one set of objective ethics. Rothbard himself is walking proof that is wrong. Try again.
“This passsage neither proves that natural rights exist”
It wasn’t meant to. You’ve rejected, I don’t care.. I’m not going to waste time trying to convince you of it. And yet performative contradictions are fun. Argumentation ethics ya’ll, keep trying to argue that you cannot argue. Will post the below for you to consider then.
“nor that the NAP makes sense in the context of moral relativism”
And what is your point here?
“As I said, if one does not accept natural rights, then what constitutes aggression will differ from person to person.”
That’s great. And as I pointed towards, different interpretations of what constitutes aggression doesn’t change the fact that:
“Whether or not something is true, false, or undecidable; whether or not it has been justified; what is required in order to justify it; whether I, my opponents, or none of us is right - all of this must be decided in the course of argumentation. This proposition is true a priori, because it cannot be denied without affirming it in the act of denying it. One cannot argue that one cannot argue, and one cannot dispute knowing what it means to raise a validity claim without implicitly claiming at least the negation of this proposition to be true.”
"With the a priori of argumentation established as an axiomatic starting point, it follows that anything that must be presupposed in the act of proposition-making cannot be propositionally disputed again. It would be meaningless to ask for a justification of presuppositions which make the production of meaningful propositions possible in the first place. Instead, they must be regarded as ultimately justified by every proposition-maker. And any specific propositional content that disputed their validity could be understood as implying a performative contradiction […], and hence, as ultimately falsified."
“The law of contradiction is one such presupposition. One cannot deny this law without presupposing its validity in the act of denying it. But there is another such presupposition. Propositions are not free-floating entities. They require a proposition maker who in order to produce any validity-claiming proposition whatsoever must have exclusive control (property) over some scarce means defined in objective terms and appropriated (brought under control) at definite points in time through homesteading action. Thus, any proposition that would dispute the validity of the homesteading principle of property acquisition, or that would assert the validity of a different, incompatible principle, would be falsified by the act of proposition-making in the same way as the proposition ‘the law of contradiction is false’ would be contradicted by the very fact of asserting it. As the praxeological presupposition of proposition-making, the validity of the homesteading principle cannot be argumentatively disputed without running into a performative contradiction. Any other principle of property acquisition can then be understood - reflectively - by every proposition maker as ultimately incapable of propositional justification.”
“(Note, in particular, that this includes all proposals which claim it is justified to restrict the range of objects which may be homesteaded. They fail because once the exclusive control over some homesteaded means is admitted as justified, it becomes impossible to justify any restriction in the homesteading process - except for a self-imposed one - without thereby running into a contradiction. For if the proponent of such a restriction were consistent, he could have justified control only over some physical means which he would not be allowed to employ for any additional homesteading. Obviously, he could not interfere with another’s extended homesteading, simply because of his own lack of physical means to justifiably do anything about it. But if he did interfere, he would thereby inconsistently extend his ownership claims beyond his own justly homesteaded means. Moreover, in order to justify this extension he would have to invoke a principle of property acquisition incompatible with the homesteading principle whose validity he would already have admitted.)” ~ HHH
I could speak Misesian while you speak Vichian. That would be fine.
Two things:
- If I were to accept that we would have to use the same words the same way, I still wouldn’t think that a dictionary would be a good source for this kind of discussion. Dictionaries mostly codify ordinary language usage. You wouldn’t go to a dictionary for the definition of some word in physics, would you? So why would you do that for economics? If I were to accept this, I would say that we should pick some authoritative text in our circle and stick with that. I would go with Human Action for this topic.
- As I alluded to in the 1st section, I don’t think that we would have to agree on what language to use. I could speak one while you speak the other. I mean, that’s what we all do anyway. Different people use the same words differently, every word means like 7,000+ things, and there are like 1,000 synonyms for everything. It’s not necessary for me to use the same definitions that you do; it’s just necessary that you know what I’m using, and I know what you’re using. Past that, it’s just a stupid word game.
It’s always a bad idea to claim (like you did earlier in this thread) that somebody misused a word. As if a definition could be wrong or something. So what’s there to do in these kinds of situations? I try to use the clearest and simplest language possible, and I refuse to challenge anybody’s definitions. With your definition, I’m a moral nihilist. Whatever. That’s fine. That would be a momentous concession for most people here, but it’s totally fine for me. I simply don’t have any pet definitions. Most people get some sort of complex of associations with their words, and just can’t switch. The phrase “moral nihilist” is disgusting to them; they couldn’t possibly be that. Or whatever. But I simply don’t care. They’re just words.
I try to lead by example. I don’t attempt to impose any of my definitions on anybody; I simply do my best to disambiguate their language, and make mine already unambiguous. If they find that I ask all the right questions for them to find that it would be more useful to adopt my style, that’s great. And if not, that’s fine too. I think that it would be better to reserve the word morality to refer to our means/ends for how to interact with each other, but it’s not a big deal if you don’t agree. I’m prepared to use the word my way in my posts while understanding that you’re using the word your way in your posts. Doesn’t matter one bit. We’ll be fine.
The conclusion is that it’s useless to quibble about definitions. Just take a look at how your recent arguments have gone.
Per the last section, I don’t agree. After you establish how you use a word, I don’t need any extra instruction.
Unfortunately it would be pretty hard to make a safe assumption ever.
Almost every argument on this forum is a gigantic definition failure. It would be nice if we could make a bunch of safe assumptions about how everybody’s using their words, but unfortunately that’s hardly ever the case past the simple grammatical words and the other super common ones. Past that, it’s a wreck.
But I don’t think that trying to impose your definitions on somebody else is a good idea. It would be better to simply ask them for clarification until you know how to interpret their words, and otherwise just lead by example with how you use your words. If you try to argue about definitions, you’re always gonna find yourself in one of these spirals. You’ll talk about it all day and get nowhere. There will be a lot of bad feelings too. It’s just not worth it.
You probably know this by now, but I definitely don’t think that we shouldn’t discuss the definitions. I just don’t think that it would be a good idea to argue about them. Just lead through example by using the clearest ones yourself, and otherwise simply spend a lot of energy making sure that you’re interpreting their words correctly. You guys can use different definitions all you want as long as you know it. We all do that anyway.
I am uncertain what definition of consequentialist ibertarianism the author is using but the way he argues against it indicates to me that it is not in line with my definition of the term. This page gives a description that is in line with my views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialist_libertarianism
You are making the assumption that I agree with the author on this topic.
You bring up some good points and I can appreciate how my assertion that someone’s definition of a word as being incorrect was not conducive to discussing the topic at hand and I can also appreciate that due to the nature of language there are no absolute definitions, only popular ones.
I have noticed this exact same problem in almost every thread here which is why it seems like something in need of a solution. Your suggested solution is to teach by example using only simple easily definable terms. While this works, it tends to result in very verbose statements that could be summed up in a single word or two but instead take a paragraph to explain. I agree that for the more complex terms the dictionary tends to fall short. However, even in physics the dictionary definition for terms doesn’t directly conflict with a physicists definition. The dictionary may not delve as deep into the definition as a peer reviewed journal article might on the subject but it doesn’t directly contradict. For example, if you look up the definition of an atom in a dictionary it doesn’t contradict what a physicist knows, it just isn’t as detailed. The problem I had was that one person’s definition of a word was in direct conflict with the dictionary definition.
The reason I prefer a dictionary over a book is because a book doesn’t provide easy access to it’s definitions. Perhaps if this site had something along the lines of a glossary then I can see how that would be preferrable to a dictionary because the site could then add additional depth to the definition of various terms/phrases.
I do agree with you that as long as I understand how the other person is using the word and they understand how I am using it we can converse. Again though the problem is that we will end up spending the vast majority of our time defining terms rather than actually communicating about topics. As a software engineer if I want to speak with another software engineer on a topic it can proceed quickly if we are both using complex words we have a mutual understanding for. I can tell the same thing to a non software engineer but it would likely take me a book or two worth of text to simplify it down to words that he understands.
It’s by using complex mutually agreed upon words that allows us (humans) to communicate about complex and abstract topics. If you take that away we lose some ability to communicate about complex or abstract topics due to resource constraints (time, working memory, etc.). Your suggestion that we learn to utilize other people’s definition makes thinking about a topic more difficult because internally we can’t assign it to a single word and utilize our brains natural chunking mechanisms to contemplate the topic. We could replace our definition with their definition but this not only takes significant time to retrain your brain but also when I leave this forum to go talk to other people in the world about something I then have to retrain myself back to using the popular definition rather than the local definition.
“I am uncertain what definition of consequentialist ibertarianism the author is using but the way he argues against it indicates to me that it is not in line with my definition of the term. This page gives a description that is in line with my views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialist_libertarianism”
Haha, that is exactly what he is addressing. I’d suggest you labor to understand the points raised and then address them.
“You are making the assumption that I agree with the author on this topic.”
And which author is this? That comment was directed at others, since you haven’t been hammering on about that. Yet you also fall under the consequentialist category.
Let’s try again:
"Let me start by asking what is wrong with the position taken by Mises and so many others that the choice between values is ultimately arbitrary? First, it should be noted that such a position assumes that at least the question of whether or not value judgments or normative statements can be justified is itself a cognitive problem. If this were not assumed, Mises could not even say what he evidently says and claims to be the case. His position simply could not exist as an arguable intellectual position.
At first glance this does not seem to take one very far. Indeed, it still seems to be a far cry from this insight to the actual proof that normative statements can be justified and that it is only the libertarian ethic which can be defended. This impression is wrong, however, and there is already much more won here than might be suspected. The argument shows us that any truth claim, the claim connected with any proposition that it is true, objective or valid (all terms used synonymously here), is and must be raised and settled in the course of an argumentation. Since it cannot be disputed that this is so (one cannot communicate and argue that one cannot communicate and argue), and since it must be assumed that everyone knows what it means to claim something to be true (one cannot deny this statement without claiming its negation to be true), this very fact has been aptly called “the a priori of communication and argumentation.”
Arguing never consists of just free-floating propositions claiming to be true. Rather, argumentation is always an activity, too. However, given that truth claims are raised and settled in argumentation and that argumentation, aside from whatever it is that is said in its course, is a practical affair, it follows that intersubjectively meaningful norms must exist-precisely those which make some action an argumentation-which have a special cognitive status in that they are the practical preconditions of objectivity and truth." ~ The Economics and Ethics of Private Property p.314-15, Hoppe