I don’t know what you mean by decisions (laws) having “no normative force, on their own”. Any conflict will involve asking which party was in the right and which party was in the wrong, and answering this question requires referencing a code of ethics.
Your last sentence is true, but I do not think it is not at odds with what I am saying. The reason these decisions worked was, must have been, because they were in tune with the sense of ethics held by members of society. A court which assigned property rights in a manifestly unjust way (like not recognizing rape as a crime) would not work, would not minimize future conflicts, precisely because individuals would not want such unjust laws. So we are talking about the same thing. By definition, those laws that work best are those laws that prevent future conflicts and those are the laws people demand.
What is egoistic libertarianism? And what do you mean by ruggedly individualistic?
I have never denied that many conflicts could be resolved without resorting to formal (coercive) law. Certainly voluntary law can work to resolve many conflicts (though in my opinion some coercive law is necessary), and much social order comes from customs rather than law. Like those discussed in Order Without Law.
Can you please explain the difference between lawful and legal?
Do you not think we should have some idea how the kind of society we are advocating might work? I mean we can always emphasize that these are speculations and it is not about us wanting a particular societal structure, but I know I did not fully embrace anarchism until I had some idea about it might work, and I think the same is true of other people. Was it not the same for you?
Can you expand on your last sentence at all? Like maybe give me an example of the kind of work with the right focus in your opinion.
Paypal has a dispute resolution system that doesn’t require any state sponsorship. American Express does also. If you are skeptical about a merchant you can elect not to do business with him if he doesn’t accept a form of payment that has a built in form of dispute arbitration that both parties have accepted
While I understand that some form of generally-accepted legal principles (what I’d call “the law”) would emerge in any stateless society, I don’t agree that there would be firms selling laws per se. I also see no reason to believe that law, security, and insurance will necessarily be provided together by certain firms.
On another note, why would settling a particular dispute necessarily result in a law? Regardless, I think institutions like private property are essentially inherent in human nature, so you wouldn’t have to worry about PDAs which don’t consider apple-stealing to be a crime. Nor do I think there’d be much competition (if at all) over general legal principles.
I agree that this is how law originally integrated with the human moral sense but I don’t think this necessarily holds any longer. We are too far removed from the ancestral environment in which our moral sense evolved to expect that what strikes people as “moral” will make good law. Furthermore, whenever you have a dispute, there is always an amoral element of selfish special-pleading. Yes, I dented your car but you shouldn’t have parked it there. And so on. People always have a million excuses for why they are not at fault.
The issue at stake is that law is not merely an output of human action, it is also an input to human action. This is the case with any cultural artifact - look at the strongly themed nature of art or music or food from different parts of the world… these themes emerged as the culture fed back into itself, great ideas are not merely output, they are also input to other great ideas. When making decisions in a natural order, the individual would not only have to ask himself what feels right or wrong but what is legal or illegal. The difference between natural order law and statist (dual) law is that, I believe, the distance between what feels right and what is legal and what feels wrong and what is illegal would tend to a minimum.
No, I don’t reject it, at least, not as far as I understand it. I am me, so I can only know those things that are a part of my experience. Hence, I am limited to my individualistic evaluation of truth. When I make decisions, I am the final authority on the motion of my body, there is no “superorganism” above me, issuing commands to me, whether through my genes or my psyche. Such metaphors are useless and misleading, at best. However, I do think we can use an evolutionary approach to apply the principle of rationality (pursuit of individual self-interest, i.e. survival) to a wider swath of human behavior than just economics (catallactics in Misesean terminology?) I think that the problems of law, security and even morality cannot be solved with the methods of catallactics alone, you need a bigger hammer and I think that evolutionary psychology is just such a hammer. The arguments made by Steven Pinker, for example, are very “praxeological” in nature, even if he does not conscientiously use praxeology. Starting with certain “givens” or “premises”, we can deduce certain things about our ancestral environment and, from that, we can further explain - with some help from empirical science - why people speak or act the way they do in a wide range of behaviors, both coercive and voluntary.
Anyway, I just think that there’s a lot of groundbreaking work out there to be done, in large part exactly because of the long and fairly successful suppression of the social sciences by the State.
Do you agree or disagree with the belief that the vast majority of people are born with moral instincts?
Regarding special pleading, I think it happens more often today because fewer people have been taught to own up to their actions – otherwise known as “personal responsibility”. Also, I’d wager that special pleading is much more prevalent in accidents than in cases of intentional harm.
You didn’t address methodological individualism. I asked because you seemed to be making a claim (or implying it) that society has different rules of human action than individuals.
cr113: “Government will almost always have the superior firepower over private citizens. Therefore government will almost always be able to force the resolution of a dispute on a private citizen.”
gocrew: “And when the government is in the wrong? Who shall resolve the dispute and force the resolution on the government?”
Then you get a new government. I’m not saying it’s a great system, but I firmly believe that with no government the winners of serious disputes will generally be the more powerful, not the one who is “right”.
Clayton: “I think KC Farmer has just about nailed it. cr113, you’ve not responded to anything in my post or answered KC Farmer’s post. Why don’t you take a look at these?”
Did you have a specific question? I hate this format, it’s impossible to have a really good discussion without a parent-child type of posting system.
I’ve already addressed this from one angle. Another angle is used in this post (not directly addressed to you). Have you read it?
Why will government “almost always have the superior firepower over private citizens”? What counts as “almost always” to you? Regardless, can you provide any proof that your assertion must be true?
You seem to be overlooking the fact that private citizens can join together for a common purpose. Get enough of them together, and they may well have more (combined) firepower than the government in question.
That’s interesting. It seems like you’re making a “heads, I win; tails, you lose” argument. Without government, the stronger party wins the dispute; with government, the stronger party (in this case, the government itself) wins the dispute. So what’s the real difference between government and no government?
Other things can be criticized here, such as whether there’s only one dimension of “strength”. (There isn’t.)
How do you define “nation”?
By the way, I wrote two responses to you, here and here, that you don’t seem to have addressed. Why not?
Autolykos, I’m sorry if I don’t respond to all of your posts. I’m not used to this sequential format. I really like the quality of users posting here but this format really sucks, in my opinion.
Autolykos: “That’s interesting. It seems like you’re making a “heads, I win; tails, you lose” argument. Without government, the stronger party wins the dispute; with government, the stronger party (in this case, the government itself) wins the dispute. So what’s the real difference between government and no government?”
The government doesn’t win the dispute, it picks the winner and forces the resolution.
Autolykos: “You seem to be overlooking the fact that private citizens can join together for a common purpose. Get enough of them together, and they may well have more (combined) firepower than the government in question.”
Many of these anarchist theories such as ostracizing and banding together are based on a flawed assumption, in my opinion. They assume that everyone knows the TRUTH about a dispute. How can you ostracize someone or band together against someone if you don’t know the facts of the case?
Yeah, I second that. No, I didn’t have a specific question, it just seemed to me that a lot of the stuff going on in your conversations was addressed by my first post in this thread.
Of course. Everyone except sociopaths is born with an innate moral sense and an innate capacity for moral instruction. I think of it exactly as Steven Pinker describes the human capacity for learning language… we know from studying how children learn language that there seems to be a set of hard-wired “language modules” in the brain that are there no matter what and, in addition to that, there are other modules in the brain that enable us to effortlessly learn the language(s) with which we are surrounded as children. I think that the moral revulsion at murder will be there no matter how someone was raised… Mowgli would be as horrified at murder as an ordinary human child. But he wouldn’t know to keep his hands to himself or how to sit at a table or not to eat with his hands, and so on. These are learned moral behaviors and they aren’t just Emily Post etiquette… violating someone’s personal space can be sexual assault. But the circuitry that enables us to relatively effortlessly assimilate these mores seems to be already there in our brains. People (not just children) are extremely sensitive to the moral norms of the social context they are in, even if it is foreign. They swiftly pick up on the moral norms and attempt to adapt to them. Watch the movie Meet the Parents to see this “clash of moral expectations” illustrated. A lot of fiction derives humor from the awkwardness that inevitably arises from these kinds of situations.
I think you have to assume away human rationality to hold your position.
OK, I’ll have to brush up on what MI is… I read that section of Human Action a year or so back and I don’t remember the exact definition Mises used. I remember feeling that I roughly agreed with what he said.
I’m not sure what you mean by “society has different rules of human action than individuals.” I don’t agree with the idea that “society” is anything more than the aggregated actions of individuals. I do believe that my interests do frequently comes into conflict with the interests of others. It is in my interest to take your bicycle. It’s in your interest not to have your bicycle taken. Solution: bicycle lock. That a lock is necessary is itself evidence that human interests stand in conflict with one another. While I whole-heartedly assent to the argument that harmonious human society follows from the division of labor and exchange, leading to a flourishing of those who pursue the economic means (productivity) and eschew the political means (theft, murder, etc.) over others, I think that the painting of economic harmony rests on a canvas of security and law that permit us to escape the constant losses of widespread property rights violations. Even in a stateless society, people will need to lock their doors, buy burglar alarms, install LoJacks in their cars, and sue one another for fraud and so on.
I understand, and I also have issues with the format, but I’d appreciate it if you read my earlier responses. To make it easier for you, I linked to them in my last post.
What about when the government itself is involved in the dispute?
There’s no reason to assume the converse, that literally no one else would know the truth about a dispute.
I wasn’t arguing that people necessarily will band together, just that the possibility always exists. Do you see the difference?
You seem to be implicitly looking for a guarantee. News flash: there’s never a guarantee for anything. The government, contrary to your perception, doesn’t provide one either – indeed, it can’t.
No, I won’t “come on” and I honestly don’t care whether I’m “getting weird on [you]”. I will continue to ask you how you define “nation” until you give me an actual answer.
I wouldn’t consider how to sit at a table and not to eat with one’s hands to be moral behaviors at all. I guess we have different definitions for “moral” and “morality”. My own definitions for these terms concern physical harm. Offending sensibilities is not part of morality, IMO.
And what do you mean by “keep his hands to himself”? It seems like you’re lumping that in with table manners, so I’d figure you mean not to fidget. But then you talk about how invading someone’s space can be sexual assault.
How so? That’s a rather extreme accusation you’re making. Can you provide some explanation?