But right and wrong are ultimately meaningless terms.
That sounds just like an opinion…The fact seems to be that the majority of americans don’t give a damn. Probably they are convinced that right and wrong are just matters of personal preference…
Lilburne, I agree that Bush has murdered over one million Iraqis. I gave a bad example.
Wrong. He didn’t murder a single Iraqi. The SOLDIERS murdered them.
Juan,
I’ve been quite clear in my explanations. Your complete misinterpretation of what I wrote stems from lazy reading. I will not explain myself to you further, because you have no interest in understanding the true meaning of my arguments. Like I said, I don’t mind your knee-jerk snarky comments, but I do mind you twisting my words around, potentially confusing future readers. I believe such willful obfuscation constitutes trolling. If you persist in that, I’ll (of course non-bindingly, as I’m not a moderator) ask you politely to stop posting in my thread altogether.
However let me point out, in case anyone forgets, that murder is just a legal term. As the great philosopher AJ has demonstrated, or maybe just asserted, natural rights don’t exist. And the soldiers who murdered the Iraqis did so within the legal framework of the US government. Within that framework the soldiers are certainly not murderers but patriotic public servants. Oh and the public considers them ‘heroes’ - whatever that means.
Or perhaps you don’t understand your arguments yourself. You know, the idea that you are coming up with a “New Libertarian Ethic” is perhaps a bit far-fetched ? Maybe you need to do some learning before embarking in such grandiose project ?
I believe you are wrong in that regard too.
Your thread ? Is that a joke ?
What do you two mean by agent-dependent/independent?
Should I give up ?
Basically subjective vs. objective morality.
Well, I define agent-dependent valuation as the ‘grounding’ of ‘ought’ statements to the individual’s empathy. See Danny’s post for more details.
I will avoid using the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ to define the above terms because I discovered about ten different definitions for each term. I do not want people to equivocate the multiple meanings of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’.
So his question was, “Do you believe in the objective value of freedom?” If so, he would appear to be under the impression that placing two words side-by-side automatically creates a meaningful term.
Edit: And thanks, AM, but I think this is derailing the thread, so I’m willing to leave it as it is.
Thank you. I do agree that such words are imprecise, but that was not the full gist of my post. I don’t necessarily reject the use of such words altogether, but ask that in each context they be meaningfully defined - and that means not referring to some equally ill-defined word.
On the topic of definitions, which I believe are the source of 99% of the confusion on all issues here, I always wished more people would respond to this post I made a while ago on redefining terms. If you wish to continue discussing word usage as a subject, which I highly welcome especially given your unique view of semantics, let’s do it there or a new topic so as not to derail this important thread.
First, I never stated in clear terms that all morality was mere optimization. So, I suggest you keep your psychologizing to yourself, unless I paid you to do that (to which then I must ask you not to bring my mom or dad into it either… 
). Anyways, aside from my poor attempt at humor, there’s a grain of truth in my words, in that I never clearly made it the case that it’s solely optimization that’s at the heart of morality. Rather, my case is simpler: optmization is the side effect that all moral conditions are a series of ought statements. In fact, many non-moral statements are merely ought statements, in which a person must choose from their own scale of values that which they think is good and choose to fight that which they think is evil. To ignore causality when facing moral considerations is to be at best a fool and at worse suicidal as some moralities call for the entire death of families to “save face” or some other arbitrary sense of honor or collective “soulfulness”. And then what is the purpose of a morality that in contrary manner destroys its adherents? What realm do they go to in annihilation? So, I can’t say doing good for so-called goodness sake is indeed good at least for me.
@ the OP
Ultimately, values and norms are action produced phenomenon. They are demonstrated through action. While values themselves are not a part of physical reality and thus cannot be considered true or false themselves, whether or not individuals hold them is a part of physical reality and is provable.
I don’t know if you would consider that to be a natural rights expalination, but there is an epistemological solution to the problem you posed.
If ‘ought’ ‘is’, how would we know? Either way, the burden of proof lies on the one asserting the existance of an ‘ought’ that ‘is’.
The way out I see is thus:
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Nature is good
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Natural law is derived from nature
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Natural law is good
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One ought to follow the good.
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Thus one ought to follow natural law.
Of the two premises 1 and 4, 4 is uncontroversial however 1 is not. It is though defensible: the most robust defence would rest on nature being created by a good God. If this were the case then the above argument would be sound.
"Rothbard’s actual argument is much more subtle and complex than the sketch embedded in my mind. He relies heavily in his defense of self-ownership on a point of fact. Everyone in reality is in control of his own will. If I obey another, I must always make the decision to do as he wishes; and the threat of violence on his part should I follow my own course leaves the situation unchanged. I must decide whether to accede to the threat.
“So what,” you may say. "Even if Rothbard is right that you cannot, in some sense, alienate your will, how does he get to the conclusion he wants? From the fact that you control your own will, how does the ethical judgment follow that you ought not to threaten violence against another self-owner? Isn’t Rothbard guilty of that dread fallacy, the derivation of an ought from an is?"
To our imagined objector, Rothbard would demur. He does indeed derive an ought from an is, but he denies that he is guilty of fallacy. Instead, he maintains that ethical principles follow from the nature of man. Because man has free will, it does indeed follow that he ought not to be coerced by others. (Unless of course he initiates violence: then, Rothbard holds, one may respond with all necessary force. “Tolstoyan” is not, in our author’s vocabulary, a word of praise.)
Is Rothbard right? If he is, he has overthrown the dominant way of doing moral philosophy today. In making his case, Rothbard displays his remarkable scholarly ability to extract just what he needs from a vast array of sources. The works of little-known Aristotelian philosophers, e.g., John Wild and John Toohey, S.J., figure to great effect as Rothbard builds his argument. (In conversation, Murray often spoke of his admiration for Toohey’s work.)
Rothbard bases his system on self-ownership and defends that principle through an ethics of natural law. But it is not only in the foundation and consistent elaboration of his system that he displays his dialectical skill. I was again and again amazed, as I went through the book, how often Rothbard anticipates the objections of critics."
~ David Gordon
Yes, well. It’s the same debate time and time again here.
Sometimes I like to be reminded of why I hold the position I do and see what new challenges the opposition has designed, but without anything new to add, it gets boring quick.
Even though man has ‘free will’, why we ‘ought’ to not ‘coerce’ others? Rothbard denied ‘slavery’ because he wanted to not violate the ‘free will’ of humans. Kant made a similar mistake of rejecting treating humans as a ‘means’. However, he has define ‘slavery’ in TEoL arbitrarily, just like how Kant has defined which scenarios constitute as treating humans as a mere ‘means’ arbitrarily. For example, Rothbard categorized contracts on promises, parental obligation, and anti-abortion laws as forms of ‘slavery’.
We see those examples as arbitrary because we can categorize about any action as slavery. For example, anti-murder laws enslaves the would-be murderer in a sense because it forces the murderer to restrain himself from acting out his desire to murder someone. Blocking sunlight from a farm enslaves the farmer in a sense because it forces the farmer to buy artificial lighting for his crops. Marriage contracts enslave the wife in a sense because it prevents her from cheating on her husband. (Similar to how anti-abortion contracts enslaves the woman in a sense because it prevents her from aborting her child.)
Restricting would-be murderer to act out his desire to murder constitutes an ‘inaction’ for the murderer. However, Mises classified all forms of ‘inaction’ as ‘action’. Therefore, restricting the would-be murderer to act out his desire also constitutes an ‘action’ against the murderer. Therefore, all laws enslave one party at the expense of another. For example, prohibiting pedophiles to have sex with prepubescents restrains their freedom, thus constitutes as a form of slavery against the pedophile. Contrastingly, if we allow pedophiles to have sex with prepubescents, then it constitutes as a different form of slavery, a form of slavery against the prepubescent. So all laws function like a ‘zero-sum’ game. On one side, there exists the ‘slaveowner’, on the other side, there exists the ‘slave’. The would-be murderer is a ‘slave’ to the would-be victim of murder. The wife is a ‘slave’ to the would-be cuckold. The would-be pedophile is a ‘slave’ to the prepubescent. If murder, adultery, and pedophilia were legalized, the reverse would be true: the victim of murder is a ‘slave’ to the murderer; the cuckold is a ‘slave’ to his wife; the prepubescent is a ‘slave’ to the pedophile.
Rothbard labeled anti-abortion laws as ‘slavery’ while he has denied anti-murder laws as also slavery. This shows Rothbard’s arbitrariness in classifying whether an action constitutes ‘slavery’ or not.
This also sounds circular. Rothbard did not want anyone to ‘coerce’ anyone, without defining what ‘coercion’ means. He has defined ‘slavery’ as a form of ‘coercion’, but we showed that he has defined ‘slavery’ arbitrarily. The word ‘coerce’ also has disputes. Some will label emitting one billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air as ‘coercion’ and some will not. Proudhon might label the private ownership of capital and land as ‘coercive’ while Rothbard might not. No one can label if an action constitutes as a form of ‘coercion’ unless he gave specific examples of situations that he has defined as ‘coercive’. However, Rothbard treats the word ‘coercive’ as if the word itself can derive whether these specific scenarios violate the word.
On chapter 28 of TEoL, even though he has noted the problems with the word ‘coercion’, the same arguments apply with the definition of ‘violence’, which libertarians define as ‘the violation of property rights’. See my above post of how it is still arbitrary to classify whether if an action falls under ‘the violation of property rights’. All of the arguments above applies to ‘violence’ as it applies to ‘coercion’.
Laws against murder is making murderers not murder? Clearly Thoreau’s statement: ‘Law never made men a whit more just’ does not sway you.
You are clearly lacking in understanding of Rothbard’s work. The law is not about punishment or preventing individuals from doing things. We have free-will therefore I can go on a murdering rampage tomorrow, law or no law regardless. What law does is establish reparations for the violations of rights. On the issue of abortion, the rights of a fetus do not supercede the rights of a mother on her property [ her body ] therefore the mother can evict the fetus from her property. To coerce the mother into keeping the child is akin to involuntary servitude to the fetus itself.
A clear contradiction of yourself. If you had actually read the 28th chapter of Ethics of Liberty, the very first paragraph in fact, you would of see this statement.