I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you? Your non-answers (repeatedly) betray the fact that whenever cornered you merely hand-wave your way out of the room by getting “tough” and by accusing the other party of not having enough “understanding”. It may have worked with others but it’s not going to work with me. I, too, have “stuff” that I don’t do.
Now, how about you “teach” me by answering my questions, for a change? It just may work better for everyone involved.
Z.
Sure you do. You don’t want to actually think this out; you want me to do YOUR thinking for YOU and tell you the answer. No, that just won’t do. You will have to think it through yourself. I’ll help, but you have to do the lifting yourself.
Now then, what is the nature of a belch vs the nature of discussion? That is to say: what is a belch? What is discussion?
Well that’s somewhat ironic because I think you are doing that - Hoppe not so much.
I think we agree that arguments must be consistent and that if an argument is not consistent it can be dismissed, no ? What Hoppe and others are getting at is that arguments that try to refute “self-ownership” are not consistent. For instance, take a look at this post from scineram [url]Estoppel - Argumentation Ethics - Aggression - #346 by scineram]
It seems that scineram is trying to attack the concept of self-ownership of, say, Mr Smith, and the only way he found to do it is to claim that Mr Smith is ‘owned’ by Mr Jones. Which of course begs the questions "is Mr Jones a self-owner ? " and “is Mr Jones ownership of Mr Smith legitimate” ?
Scineram thinks he’s proven that property is somehow arbitrary and yet he uses the concept of property…when trying to refute the concept of property. It seems scineram ‘argument’ is inconsistent and so ‘we’ don’t need to take him seriously.
I think it is you the one who wants to put the argument in mathematical/formal terms, not Hoppe. So IMO you are somewhat misrepresenting the position of the ‘objective moralists’.
That assumes that the only kind of valid logical proofs are formal proofs of the kind that show, say, that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2.
However, since we are dealing with ourselves, that is, we are humans (which are self-directed self-aware entities) discussing humans problems, we can’t put all arguments in formal terms. Yet you keep on asking for definitions AS IF it were possible to put the whole problem in formal terms. You seem to be asking for something that can’t be done.
Heh. And what does persuasive mean ? An argument should be persuasive only if it’s right. On the other hand, take demagogues who are ‘persuasive’ because they tell people what people want to hear, not what is true. Is that the kind of ‘persuasiveness’ you are referring to ?
Well, I think you are talking about three different things there
and although those things are interrelated, I don’t think you are seeing all the ‘correct’ relations between them.
It seems to me that being a hypocrite entails being [logically] inconsistent too.
Say A steals stuff from B, and of course A intends to keep the stuff. So, how’s A going to ‘argue’ that he gets to keep the stuff ? Will A invoke ‘property rights’ ? Can he do that in a consistent fashion ? I doubt it.
Same thing with statists. The statists get to give orders ? Well, so I do get to give orders too, and my orders cancel their orders. Which means that in practice they can’t justify any authority over their ‘subjects’. It’s a matter of logical consistency…
Yes, I admit that’s a likely explanation. And I have that same position except I think the idea that causes more harm than good is amoral utilitarianism =P
Thanks for the clear discussion, Juan.
Assuming scineram wasn’t speaking tongue-in-cheek (hard to tell), I agree you don’t need to take his statement seriously. If someone wants to use the concept of ownership in one case, but disavow it in another case without a good explanation why, then I agree such a person would be being inconsistent.
Well, I got that impression from words like “proof” and to some degree “(performative) contradiction.” If it could be shown that Hoppe was not aiming for a rigorous proof, but more just a strong argument, I would have only minor reason to take exception to his theory.
I don’t think I mentioned “formal,” but basically I agree that we can’t encapsulate the entire nature of a human problem in rigorous (and certainly not formal) terms. My comments can be seen as objecting to this same thing, by demanding a clearer statement of the “proof” of it - because I know none can be supplied. In other words, I’ve been “asking for definitions AS IF it were possible to put the whole problem” in rigorous logical terms because it has been my impression that Hoppe and others are treating the argumentation ethics as if it were a rigorous, logical proof. If it is not, I have nothing major to say against it.
By “persuasion” I mean very generally any verbal method of getting others to agree with you, so it could be honest, dishonest, or neither. Deliberately distorting facts would be a dishonest form of persuasion, but not all persuasion is dishonest, especially since not all statements are about facts. Regarding, “An argument should be persuasive only if it’s right,” I would say an argument (an honest argument) can only be persuasive if it is considered right or valid by the person listening. In particular, arguments that assume certain ethical positions and reason logically from those positions can be very persuasive, and valid, if the audience shares those starting ethical positions. I would be a lot more sympathetic to argumentation ethics if it could be presented in that way.
I hope I cleared up any fuzziness about persuasiveness above. It just means how effective the argument is at changing people’s minds (how many people it convinces, etc.). Of course the most persuasive argument isn’t necessarily the best one, and I hope it goes without saying that we want to avoid dishonest, flawed, and counterfactual arguments even if our aim is persuasion.
Re: consistency, since I don’t agree that morality can be objective (OR, I don’t see what you mean by that), I can’t make sense of that one. We may have to agree to disagree. Or if you can explain more clearly what objective morality means, we could try to clarify that. (If interested, see my attempt to clarify this concept with KoB on the previous page of this thread: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/estoppel-argumentation-ethics-aggression/6155/348.)
I think it’s just that we may have different impressions of what Hoppe is attempting, who his audience is intended to be, and what the role of his theory is intended to be. If I shared what seems to be your view of the overall nature/intent of his theory, I would probably not be objecting to it.
I don’t really think there is a logical problem with what the thief is attempting, just, as you said above, we certainly don’t have any reason to “take him seriously” when he argues by using property rights in his defense. In other words, he wouldn’t be very persuasive if he tried to invoke property rights as an argument to keep the stuff he took. Probably no one would be convinced. They would say, “If you really believed in property rights, you wouldn’t have stolen!” So it seems to me that whether he has in fact (logically) “contradicted” himself or is being (logically) inconsistent doesn’t need to be talked about. It seems superfluous even if it could be in some sense proven.
In summary, I’m saying I don’t think the logical analysis (even if correct) could add anything to the more familiar “hypocrisy” claim. Example from above:
Thief invokes property rights to argue that he should get to keep his loot. As a response, “You have performatively contradicted yourself” seems to add nothing to the more pedestrian statement, “If you really believed in property rights, you wouldn’t have stolen!”
For instance, if you called someone an “amoral utilitarian” would you mean that that person has no moral sense or moral feeling?
In this topic I only try to attack a supposed proof of self-ownership. Argumentation ethics claim its denial is inconsistent. My scenarios denied it, the point is they are not inconsistent. More precisely AE does not establish that they are inconsistent. It is an invalid argument to prove them inconsistent. Another proof might establish their inconsistency or be a valid argument for self-ownership, but AE is not.
You have a real problem differentiating between an assertion and a demonstration, sci.
Let me know when you decide to stop belching (i.e. making vacuous claims to superior understanding of the universe) and start discussing (i.e. answering questions posed by your counter-party) and I may consider responding.
Z.
Let me know when you stop being butthurt.
I don’t think that talking about proofs and contradictions means one is necessarily commited to a mathematics-like kind of proof. Even if the term “performative contradiction” sounds a bit more technical, I think it’s being correctly used in the context of AE and AE-like positions.
I’d say that the proof does rely on logic - all proofs must rely on logic. But unless we are dealing with explicit mathematical/formal subjects, we don’t ask for definitions all the time. Constantly asking for definitions seems odd to me, but if you think it’s a legitimate thing to do, then I think you are bound to define all terms you use, which for some reason you declined to do…
OK.
(My wording was a bit sloppy..)
What you now mention seems to highlight a problem. I wasn’t focusing on how persuasive AE or similar arguments are, not to mention that one can’t predict or even easily ‘measure’ how persuasive arguments are. My focus is whether the argument is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’,
It is true that an argument is ‘persuasive’ if the target of the argument thinks the argument is right, but that’s a tautology of sorts and a form of solipsism. Say, people who favor communism would be persuaded by commie arguments, That doesn’t mean that the arguments are ‘right’.
But that assumes the problem away in my opinion, and even if people share some ethical premises, they tend to reject the conclusions of those premises. For instance lots of people claim to not support theft, BUT favor taxation. It’s not that hard to show that taxation and theft are the same thing, yet people remain unconvinced.
I see. I wonder though why would we want to avoid using persuasive arguments (even if flawed) if our aim is persuassion ?
Say your neighbor likes to eat cat food. That’s his personal and ‘subjective’ taste and you don’t have a say on it.
Say you neighbor likes to kidnap people and turn them into cat food. That’s a different matter which doesn’t deal only with your neighbor’s ‘subjective preferences’. Whether your neighbor is justified in doing what he likes, or not, is a moral problem, and the ‘solution’ is not to just say that what is right is whatever an individual thinks is right for him.
That may be true to some degree, though I think you are not only objecting to the ‘style’ so to speak of Hoppe’s presentation but to the substance of the whole natural rights position ?
Even if he doesn’t explicitly try to argue his case invoking property rights, his actions are in a way not very consistent. He thinks he can use other people’s stuff (that’s why he steals) but he would object to people ‘stealing back’ from him, even without opening his mouth.
Yes. And isn’t that an appeal to logic and consistency ?
Yet saying “If you really believed in property rights, you wouldn’t have stolen!” is an appeal to consistency ?
But the claim of hypocrisy is based on a logical analysis. Furthermore, the concept of hyposcrisy is a moral concept. For people who believe in ‘subjective’ morality the concept should be practically meaningless ?
Well, agreed, The first statement is supposedly more scholarly but I don’t see a fundamental difference between the two. I’d say both try to describe the same facts.
Besides, the whole ‘theory’ is supposedly a philosophical investigation on the nature of morality or amorality or what have you, so scholarly or philosophical language would be used to varying degrees.
I’m saying that people who explicitly deny the validity of concepts such as morally right and morally wrong are technically speaking amoralists. A fair amount of utilitarians seem to belong in that category. Whether they personally have moral sense or moral feelings, I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t trust people whose standard of justice is to ‘maximize social utility’.
I think your scenarios assume self-ownership while trying to deny it so your counterexample is not valid. Whether you see that or not, I don’t know.
This is too easy. Once somebody dialogues, then they, themselves, have initiated - dialogue - and that person did not initiate physical aggression. Therefore either the people that don’t get AE or think mental farts[:P] somehow refute AE are protaganists or/and dishonest. To dialogue is to not initiate physical aggression. So everybody posting in this forum has proved AE by dialoguing, by communicating in a way that does NOT initiate physical aggression. What’s so funny is I remember the days in this forum when the so-called subjectivists/amoralists thought natural law theorists thought too much or some bunk version of that, yet, it’s really their own shadow they are boxing.
Post here in this forum as one venue that most people that visit this forum obviously all can see as a human action of all posters, and proof of AE happens. How many posts in this forum alone? Count those and that’s how many times AE has been confirmed. It’s as simple as that.
A dialogue is not the same thing as an argument.
But is it the 5-minute or the full half-hour?
I still think my Writing Ethics proof is better.
Z.
yeah, one begins with d and the other a. It doesn’t matter.
No wonder you don’t understand argumentation ethics.
No wonder you don’t.
I still think you don’t understand the nature of the concepts involved.
If you don’t understand how argumentation and dialogue differ as actions, then you don’t understand the very premise of argumentation ethics.
What is self-evident is not arguable any further. No initated physical aggression has occurred. That’s the proof in this action: posting in this forum.
Are you going to argue the truth of what argumentation is compared to dialogue? Are they NOT verbally communicating, ie. that which is consistent with posting in this forum? Even if I went: zljnl;dnfnqowinopiqn lwkr: and solely posted that, the self-evident proof of an ethical action needs no more explanation.