Probably not. But hey, talking past each other is a libertarian art.
I made a sociological remark of sorts, if you want to call it that. Or a psychological remark. I said that some people claim supernatural knowledge about right, wrong and what the correct preferences are or should be. And I implied that people with such a mindset can’t be that comfortable with a philosophy based on laissez-faire.
Now when you say that I’m arguing ‘moral values’ I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
(Also, it seems you are using the term ‘moral values’ for things which I would call preferences.)
Well I probably wasn’t clear enough - my mistake. I wasn’t trying to hide anything in particular.
(modus operandi ?) No, there probably is some noise in the line. What I said wasn’t clear to you (I can be blamed for that) and your remarks were not clear to me (I can be partially blamed for that too…)
It depends on what preferences they have. I believe in God, but I have no idea how to explain God. I think I have to reason and be responsible. I have my own free-will and therefore even though I recognize a God I can still quirk it or lose it just like any other human. I also could succeed and flourish in anything I put my mind to, if I’m careful enough.
They are virtues and goods that do not conflate into rights. They can’t be shown to be universal though all humans can act these goods and virtues. What this means is these virtues and goods (moral values) are individual flourishings/pursuits. Rights on the other hand are universal for a flourishing human and society. Without rights humans don’t flourish. Rights are therefore required for human(s) to flourish. Rights are inherently moral values, but not all moral values are rights.
I recognize three rights: liberty, life, and property.
The list of virtues and goods (moral values) that are not rights is very long. Any one of these moral values (these virtues and goods) will have a human flourish:
"In Rhetoric 1362b0-28 Aristotle lists a number of goods and some of the virtues that he also discusses in the Nicomachean Ethics. Rasmussen and Den Uyl summarize the list of goods as 1) intellectual ability (including speech), 2) intellectual pursuits, 3) health (including action, pleasure and life), 4) friendship, 5) honor, 6) wealth, 7) beauty, 8) justice, and 9) artistic pursuits.
Of the moral virtues (and their corresponding vices of excess and deficiency), Aristotle discusses 1) courage (the mean between rashness and cowardice); 2) temperance (licentiousness and insensibility); 3) generosity or liberality (prodigality and illiberality/meanness), a minor virtue regarding getting and spending; 4) magnificence (vulgarity and pettiness/extreme stinginess), a major virtue regarding getting and spending; 5) magnanimity (vanity and pusillanimity), a major virtue regarding honor and dishonor;… Aristotle also discusses five intellectual virtues: 1) art or technical skill/knowledge, 2) scientific/philosophical knowledge (of the universal and necessary), 3) practical wisdom or prudence, 4) theoretical wisdom, and 5) intuitive wisdom."
The list of moral virtues is much longer than goods, and neither of these lists are complete to say the least. A pursuit/exercise in scientific/philosophical knowledge will flourish the individual in this faculty of their life. A pursuit/exercise in courage will flourish courage in the individuals life. Etc, etc… But these are not rights. These are moral values.
Yes. I think particular morals or values are preferred. It depends on which ones and what individual. These can become socially persuaded or argued, but are not rights issues.
[:D] Yes modus operandi. And I can be partially blamed for that too.
Well, I was rather focusing on revealed and organized religion (as opposed to personal revelation), and the use of that system as basis for ‘rules’, tradition, etc.
Now I see where you were coming from. Well, I did read Nicomachean Ethics, partially. Not my cup of tea. I have a Spanish and an English version of the book and both struck me as oddly translated.
The problem I see is that some of the ‘moral virtues’ Aristotle talks about makes almost no sense. For instance
So, he’s talking about luxury spending ? How is that really relevant ? Also notice that what he says is something tied to the Greek language… There’s also
All that is pointless to me. Aristotle is not saying anything substantial IMO. In a market economy people ‘give’ and ‘take’ voluntarily whatever amounts they feel like. The idea that there’s some proper amount or ‘mean’ between excess and defect doesn’t say much.
Anyway, I think we’re still partially talking past each other.
(as a side note, in Aristotle’s moral system slavery was ‘natural’ - an idea libertarians might find problematic =] )
I think the relevancy or not is due to the preference or not of this particular Artistole quote and what he was trying to persuade others to think what was virtuous. I find it unconvincing and really couldn’t grasp his point. So to me it seems irrelevant as well.
As to your comment on rule oriented religion, which I’m not associated with, if people want to join a church so be it. As long as they don’t feel the urge to go on a coercive crusade, which would mean sadly - war. War is sad. I’m not for war. I think there are better ways. If events due to an individual(s) or Godly perspective comes down to war, then I think that is a great tragedy. To justify war in God’s name is a cop out and slides into an argument about who or what God is. I really don’t think we can know these answers. So try to live a moral life based upon what I find to be right, and at one point in time I thought the State was ok, thank goodness I don’t anymore. Knowledge is what is important. It’s important to know what is moral or not. And knowledge is something I have to learn/acquire, so, God really doesn’t become an issue for me on these matters for it takes an effort on my part.
I agree. I don’t think there is a “proper” way other than what the free market at any given time is doing. And the doings of the free market are in constant flux.
Well, I don’t think Aristotle was perfect in an NAP way. But he mentioned courage and intellectual pursuits to be goods and virtues and I really can’t disagree with that. Aristotle preferred some aspects in his moral system that I find to be wrong. And slavery being within the scope of rights, a lawful society that recognizes rights could easily have stepped in and applied charges to some Greeks who had slaves. I think it would be the virtuous thing to do, and falling within the scope of rights helps provide clarity to this preference of mine - to rid slavery.
For me, a libertarian is someone who is against regulations, licensing laws, public education, subsidies, pre-emptive war, alliances, zoning laws, public roads, public parks, victimless crime laws, public libraries, torture, and government welfare.
Generally, libertarians also seem to have differing views on animal rights and rights of children, babies, and unborn children.
As to the Mises community, I think we are generally in agreement that government without consent is an unjust government, and as such, anyone who does not consent to a government should be able to secede from it and not have to obey its laws or pay taxes to support it.
Behind personal and economic freedom there is the much more fundamental idea of legal freedom, never being subjected to another man’s laws.
That is what a libertarian believes. That laws are universal and cannot result in subjection.
Juan,
Maybe this will help provide more clarity to what I’m saying. Taken from this:
“To keep the difference between the two types of justice clear, it will help to rename them: 1) We have political justice which pertains only to rights and is legitimately enforceable. And 2) we have social justice which pertains to our moral obligations to others and is not legitimately enforceable.” - Geoffrey Allan Plauché
Moral values, virtues, and preferences can be obligations argued, protested, have social repercussions (differentiated from political used in the context in the quote), individual repercussions (again those outside of political justice as used in this quote), etc… but not legitimately enforceable. All of these are in tune with helping to cultivate a good society defined by the community of individuals. This is the scope of schools, books, parenting, individual meditation (thinking), and any other educational means on cultivating what is a flourishing human. Rights on the other hand are intellectually pursued and taught, but are also legitimately enforceable if we are to encourage the liberty such that a diversity of human(s) flourishing will take place.
Well, I picked a couple of passages more or less at random, but they are at least partially representative of Aristotle’s take on some subjects. It seems that some of the things he considers moral virtues may actually be individual preferences. And even in cases where the mean position is a good idea in paper, it’s hard to know how that is to be applied in practice.
I agree that courage and intellectual pursuits are ‘good’ and virtuous. Anyway here’s my take on moral values, rights, et cetera.
I’d say that some activities can only be seen as (arbitrary) preferences. For instance, smoking pot…or drinking beer. Now, some people, mostly, or only based on traditional grounds would argue that there’s something morally wrong about those activities, but I think they are making a category mistake since preferences are morally neutral.
Then, one can say that courage is a moral value, but one can’t legally demand that people be courageous. (we agree on that idea and terminology it seems).
Finally, I see non-aggression as a moral value too (the fundamental moral value actually) but this moral value can be demanded of others and put in terms of rights to life, liberty, property.
I’m slightly surprised by G. Plauché using the term “social justice”…It’s a term that I thought was commonly used by the left (not saying Geoffrey is a lefty =] )
I haven’t delved into the mean position. I haven’t found it attractive enough to pursue, but I may come back to them. I have priorities on what I’m trying to learn and so sometimes some things, such as Aristotle means, get put on the back burner by me at this point. So I don’t know enough about them to show if there is any practical use or not to them.
Curious… Did you notice any moral virtues of Aristotle’s that are not individual preferences. I thought they all were individual preferences. The goods seem to be inherent faculties of an individual, so, we have them, but skill and talent make particular goods better or not depending on what the individual pursued to enhance in their life.
I pretty much agree with you here. I would make the slight of hand difference that I can see somebody saying these might quite possibly be considered morally wrong, but I might think they are really events of preferences and are morally neutral. So we can disagree on drinking beer being a preference or something good/bad, but as long as they don’t coerce me into their moral system they can think all they want about how good or bad drinking beer is. It really doesn’t bother me. But I see your point, which is they quite possibly are making a category mistake. But what do I think about smoking pot and drinking beer might be a better way of answering this: I don’t think they are bad. In fact I do the latter. If the former wasn’t intervened upon by the State and made illegal I might even try it. I don’t see it as something bad. I don’t see smoking pot and drinking beer as having anything to do with rights. I think we agree.
agreed
I completely agree. I think the NAP is a moral value that conflates into rights.
Well by social justice he never says in the article that law intervenes. Social justice is not a rights issue at all. A social justice example would be this:
A store owner, Bob, will not serve black people food in his restaurant. Bob has every right to do this on his/her property. The community at large doesn’t like how this store owner, Bob, treats black people. So the other businesses in the town stop serving and allowing Bob to enter upon their properties. Bob is now being shunned. Nobody’s rights are being put into question, but the community doesn’t like how Bob treats black people. Bob gets the hint and Bob having a hard time getting supplies for his restaurant starts to serve black people and the community embraces Bob once again. That’s social justice.
Of course the KKK could turn the scenario around and call their shunning of black people social justice. This is why social justice is not universal and doesn’t qualify as a rights issue.
I would be pushing to shun Bob and I have had many black friends. I don’t see the problem, but I think the KKK and other race discriminators are idiots. But yes, that’s my moral preference and I think social justice is Bob being shunned and him finally changing his mind to letting black people back into his restaurant again would be good for society.
What do you think?
A libertarian to me is one who believes that coercion in any realm(economic, personal, cultural,ect.) is immoral, inefficient, destructive and counter productive. Individuals reciprocating, working together and volunteering is peaceful, moral, constructive,creative, and efficient.
Right, but that is his point in writing the book, that they’re difficult to achieve in practice and so it’s necessary to form good habits from youth to make it easier. Rand and Rasmussen and den Uyl extract the libertarian elements that can be found in Aristotle’s work regarding his virtue ethics (you’ve probably read Rand, but you should read works by the latter two to see how virtue ethics can be made of use in libertarian theory, especially their Norms of Liberty and Liberty and Nature.) One doesn’t need to subscribe to everything he says to be called an Aristotelian broadly speaking. He was confused on some things (like slavery, and to a lesser extent money, though he never reached definite conclusions on it), and a lot of what he said was in the context of his host society, which itself could’ve been better in many respects.
I agree, a reductio ad absurdum is an extremely efficient method in testing the consistency of any system, including ethics. Of course, I disagree that the particular conclusions you refer to are absurd.
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Vague, amorphous, is not and cannot be justified.
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Is not justified by your own admission.
There seems to be a number of so-called libertarians who dilute the philosophy with misguided attempts to make “life” and the sustenance thereof an entitlement. To imagine a man (and god forbid, his family) perishing from want is unnatural, even “absurd” to these people.
It really is a shame that ethics cannot be derived from nature. Intuition and “common sense morality” (argumentum ad populum) are lousy methods.
Neither is novel, and 1) needs to be demonstrated. 2) is false according to Austrian econ.
And that’s why Wellman is committed to anarchism!
I think we clearly showed in the Sterba thread that lifeboats are all about a removal of context, and then proposing a reduction based on intuition.
“Klemm has to sit down and die”. “Klemm has to ask Tom not to kill him.”
To place someone else’s well being above your own (altruism) means we cannot have a self to do in the first place. It’s irrational. No one can have a samitaran duty if they also exist as a sovereign individual.
Frankly, I can’t answer that off the top of my head, sorry! Aristotle’s system is a bit convoluted, and since it didn’t appeal to me, I’m kinda biased. Perhaps you should take a look at it yourself (when time allows…)
It does bother me a bit =] Or rather, I sense there’s something wrong with people who think they have the moral high ground when they actually don’t (and yet act as if they did).
I see. Well, I wouldn’t call that justice. I mean, boycotts can be just or unjust in terms which are not strictly legal. If the majority of people in a town wants to boycott say redheads, they can achieve that without technically violating the NAP. But boycotting people one doesn’t like just because isn’t something I’d call ‘just’. It’s true that there can be legitimate reasons to shun people, but it gets tricky (or seems tricky to me at least).
Thanks Jon. I’m aware of Rasmussen and den Uyl, mostly because you’ve previously mentioned them =] I’ll see if I get around to read some of their work.
It also doesn’t work in a free market. I try to stay out of the value discussions, or at least not pick a side, but I feel fairly confident that free markets will be inclusive, and where they are exclusive, people will pay dearly for that privilege. So dearly, there will be very little exclusivity.
I think most of the people on the left who fret bad market outcomes (racism sexism, bossism HA!) aren’t thinking like an entrepreneur, and likewise the people who think that they will be able to be much more selective in free markets also aren’t thinking like entrepreneurs.
And everyone in a free market will be selling their labour/productivity, so no one will be able to escape entrepreneurship like they do now via the state.
ok.
Well, I can agree with that in the social sense. Somebody thinking they have the moral ground would bother me too. I guess what I meant is I wouldn’t try to use physical self-defense on them for spreading their voiced opinion. I don’t think you would either, correct?
Yeah, social justice isn’t the justice of the legal/rights sense as you point out here. It’s a use of the same word with different adjectives to try to make distinct the two concepts: political justice (rights, law) and social justice (not a rights, law issue). I don’t know of another word for the latter. If I did I guess I would use it instead for clarifications sake.