Notice how far off the mark you are in understanding what you’re talking about here (I’ll depersonalize this):
So person A says: ‘As a critical thinker I don’t believe in natural rights.’ Person A is in fact a stupid thinker, one of those evolutionary unfits that nature rejects cause death isn’t life but they don’t realize that and go and join a death cult. It’s wild and fantasical, but death cult none-the-less. So let’s see what person A has rejected when person A rejects NR:
Since person A doesn’t believe in natural rights, person A has to die right now. They have to commit suicide. And they kill themselves not out of sadness either nor for samurai honor. Person A kills him or her self out of stupidity because they cling to some fallacious philosophical utopian, anti-free market, death cult. So Person A joins the death cult and rejects NR. So person A now needs to reject life - and be dead. To reject liberty - and be an inanimate object (in other words, be dead, due to once was a living, animate person). To reject property - and be dead (cause even a slave is still their own self, so, total annihilation of self needs to happen).
So person A clinging onto some distorted form of what anything means in life rejects natural rights and so out of ignorance person A joins a death cult kills him or her self. Evolution doing it’s thing killing the stupid person A’s of the world, and meanwhile life on earth flourishes.
I think that act utilitarianism is contradictory towards libertarianism. Rule utilitarianism are really just unannounced natural rights theorists [ to the point where they hold things like respect for property, liberty, self ownership etc as general rules. Doing such engages an individual towards respecting those ‘institutions’ for what they are and not simply because of what they produce. ]
On the question between deontological and consequential, I find myself more in the deontological camp, there are good consequences to natural rights so I wouldn’t say it can be purely justified in such a method. Like a blend of 80% deontological and 20% consequential.
Quote: Mises and Austrian Economics: A personal view - Ron Paul
The strongest motivating force in my political activities is to live free since I was born free. Liberty is my first goal. The free market is the only result that can be expected from a free society. I do not accept individual freedom because the market is efficient. Even if the free market were less “efficient” than central planning, I would still prefer my personal freedom to coercion. Fortunately, I don’t need to make a choice. Austrian economics upholds the market’s efficiency, and that reinforces my overwhelming desire and right to be free.
It’s a messy world, so why limit options? It will always be messy. People are so often trapped by self-imposed constructs, even ones intended to make them free. To think something as complex as society will fall into neat pigeon holes that conform to some axiomatic calculus is not realistic. In fact, much of it falls on its face right out of the gate.
How can you have defense without it giving rise to a state? Who is going to control the defense? Does it give itself directions? Does it decide what a threat is? Does it decide what it’s budget is?
What do you do with crazy people? Put them in for-profit mental institutions? How does that work? Are there zoning laws to forbid a toxic dump in a residential area? Can children be hired? Pee in public? Yell fire in a theatre? Who owns the airwaves? Can someone sell their property to a foreign military? Is there such a concept as foreign? Diplomats? Treaties? Trade agreements?
Economics talks about rational man, but that is for models. I watched Ted Haggart go from a nationally televised spiritual leader who had the ear of the president, to… something far different. Without making judgements, I can say he was not self-consistent. Among the good, there will always be thieves, perverts, and killers, and most of them will try to form a government.
I basically oppose the state on the ground that it creates a separate group of people with separate moral rules. And in no way can work in any way possible. Since it relies on monopolies and forced monopolies have no reason to enforce or respect “rights” – or deliver a service.
I generally define socialism as a worker ownership of the means of production. So whether that is possible or not, it is not possible under a state. And neither is a market. So socialism and markets are an impossibility under statism. Since the state neither makes people own means of production or private property (as seen by the joke of “public” property which no one owns as well as the continual theft and destruction of property in every state). What happens in the future, whether capitalism or socialism or back to nature systems or whatever… no consistent system can occur under the state. All measurements are arbitrary and irrelevant.
The state is the ultimate limiter of options. All that remains is for people to overcome the intellectual affliction that renders them subservient to it and its depredations. There is no room for such an institution in a world that is “messy”, meaning, not easy to categorise and nothing more and nothing less. If you cannot imagine how the market will deal with a service the failing is yours, and not the market’s, i.e. free interactions of individuals.
I shouldn’t of used that term at all. From the Greek, beyond physical. I am perhaps wrong to consider theology a branch of metaphysics? I was trying to impress that ethics can be discussed without the use of religion.
I find this to be an age of Marginal Morality. What is the best way, if any, to improve this general lack of ethics? I don’t find this to be so narrow as a question to confine it to rules or acts. Do all men fundamentally know the difference between good, and bad? Do some only know what is good or bad, for what is so for themselves? How can one convey to the hoi poloi, that there exists a need to be moral? If most sane men are aware of what is good, and what is bad, than why does there exist a general lack of moral action to begin with? It could be that the release of personal power to state power has created an indolent majority. Even so, good men should still act good.
I disagree. I think my lack of imagination might be your problem too if you want to attain your goals (our goals?). It is my imagination that runs simulations on what an initially stateless society looks like, and I see any number of very real ways something that looks like a state emerges. If you can shed light on where I am wrong, it would go a long way toward the much bigger problem of teaching 100 million other people that they will be fine without the things they currently know as security, and to support a better society without any misgivings as to whether it can deliver on its promises.
The first time an economic slowdown caused a sharp spike in unemployment, those affected would cast around to assign blame, and now you have your first disenfranchised group. They have to be acknowledged.
The large banks and other powerful corporations will not just leave things to chance. They might start having weekly meetings in which the begin to set an agenda. If they see defenses as little more than a militia with low odds of making major weapons purchases, they may decide to assume the roll of… commander in chief of security. What mechanism stops that?
If law is practiced in a free market framework, who gets to be the final, highest court? It would be all too easy to churn clients by purposefully rendering unfair decisions to improve the chances that the petitioner would seek a second opinion - an appeal, if you will. They would have the power to play musical monkeys with people, and there would be no guarantee that any new ‘fairer’ court would not slowly drift into a self-serving attitude.
Even without a state, people would still want to petition over things they might see as wrong in some way that offends them. Just because there might not be a law against selling cigarettes to children does not mean some people will not organize against it. Groups with causes again, and they will look to encroach on liberties. You can tell them no, and tell them no again, but they might not stop until their own liberty and freedom is taken away from them. Keeping the peace is usually done through an agent that people end up agreeing to submit to. Either that, or people do not recognize any authority over them, and keeping the peace is impossible.
That is just a tiny fraction of what I think are real issues which cannot remain unaddressed and without some type of accommodation. Dismissing them as unimportant would ensure a state would evolve. The banks alone would make sure of it.
I was simplifying for the sake of a parenthetical. You’re absolutely right.
I realize this, which is why I don’t subscribe to any such view; however, I believe that is how many people ultimately decide what the “best” social system is, and I have no doubt that some would-be libertarians would attempt to justify it on such grounds.
jus⋅ti⋅fy
–verb (used with object)
2. to defend or uphold as warranted or well-grounded: Don’t try to justify his rudeness. (dictionary.com)
In any case, I never attempted to justify it objectively. I’m well aware that my support of libertarianism is rooted in subjectivity. I don’t have to create a logic proof in order to say that cats ought not to torment mice, and not every argument I could use would necessarily have to appeal to logic.
The universe, reality, the world we live in. “Natural rights” supposedly exist without being defined nor protected by anyone. In any case, I really have no interest in participating in an argument over natural rights, because the discussions become just as heated as religious debates.
You’re right. I didn’t meant what I ended up writing. I suppose what I was trying to get at is similar to what Ron Paul said in Conza88’s quote: “Austrian economics upholds the market’s efficiency.”
It’d be your own primarily. If entrepreneurs are restricted from finding solutions to “problems” then none but the most ad hoc, primitive ones will arise, regardless of whether advocates for statism can “imagine” them arising or not. The thing is these issues have been addressed in anarchist literature so why they are routinely brought up in ignorance of it is beyond me.
Consequentialism is no less arbitrary than anything. You could argue that libertarianism benefits the most people the most if that interests you. However, you might alternatively prefer to maximize your own material wealth regardless of anyone else’s status.
Seem we won’t get anywhere without more accurate terminology. What you just described I would call utilitarianism. To be clearer, I would say individual consequentialism, meaning what is “right” is what benefits oneself the most, in whatever sense - physical, emotional, religious, metaphysical, etc. At the end of the day, is not everyone an individual consequentialist with respect to their own selves?
I believe this is called ethical egoism, although you may have been aiming for rational egoism; it depends on what you meant by your use of the word “right.”