A prostitute doesn’t sell herself because she wants to bring down the state, she does so for money, for survival. She is ultimately at the same level as a coach roach living in someones house.
Right, but the libertarian recognizes these people as a hero in the sense of the phrase “everyday heros”. Maybe Block couldn’t think of a better word and wanted to be provocative. I can’t think of a better term offhand than something boring like, “oppressed migrant worker”. Anyhow, I don’t feel like arguing this one anymore =)
“Positively accepted” is extremely broad though, I thought you meant that the society found his actions (i.e. fishing for himself) to be good, like a model citizen.
It is broad if we try to assign a single preference across society, rather than stay focused on individuals. Some people like rough sex with strangers, and others call it rape. Still, the person on the receiving end of autistic exchange clearly either likes, dislikes, or is indifferent to the other’s action (if genuine indifference is even truly possible).
I think you can make a better definition. And Mises’ view makes hard to reconcile with altruism.
Maybe I can make a better technical definition, but these ideas just popped into my head. I don’t see why my definition doesn’t work with Mises on autistic exchange though.
I’m not sure how the giver’s speculation makes him any less than an egoist. However, if you like this pet definition of altruism, fantastic. It doesn’t contradict my own definition of hero. Remind me next time, and I’ll rearrange it to suit you better.
If we define “altruism” as zero-sided exchange because there is always at least psychic profit on the part of the giver-egoist, it makes the word meaningless since it has no practical application in our world. Altruism, to me, means doing good for others without either a claim of obligation held by the gift-receiver or an expectation of mutuality on the part of the gift-giver.
I see the point in your definition of hero, but we’re left with just an arbitrary consensus on what is “noble”. “Hero” and “noble” are of lesser importance to me, and trying to define them seems to require a secondary factor, like the extremity or grandioseness versus the mundaneness and everydayness of the action.
I’m interested in the “goodness” or “badness”, in the moral-legal sense, of certain categories of action. I think the same type of motive is behind Block calling these people heros. I’ve been studying the phenomenological philosophy of social acts and states of affairs (Sachverhalt) by people like Edmund Husserl and Adolf Reinach, then trying to incorporate this philosophy with Mises’ praxeology and Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. Mises failed to develop a working theory of justice, and I think that AE needs both more underlying philosophy, since “argumentation” contains multiple social acts which “act in different ways” (to terribly oversimplify it), and extrapolation, through concepts like estoppel. Anyhow, I can’t get into all that here/now but this discussion was helpful, thanks.