Bridge the Is-Ought gap.
What kind of material do you think the bridge ought to be made of ?
I’d prefer logic, but if you can make it out of balsa wood I’d be equally impressed.
Why is that the standard? Why would you accept the existence or objective ethics, morality, law, or whatever if this is demonstrated. It seems neither sufficient nor necessary to establish objective ethics.
I never said it was “the standard,” its what I would need for proof. I’ve already made it clear that I don’t think natural rights or objective ethics are necessary, whether they exist or not.
yes, who needs life, liberty, and property. they are not necessary.
of course this is handie-dandie sarcasm
You said, “Yet not all the Greeks agreed to the rules, nor were they ever proven as being. Its as silly as utilitarianism and the social contract theory in my opinion.”
What do you mean by proven as being? Obviously, some Greeks agreed to certain rules. Don’t those rules exist than for those Greeks?
Also, what if there is some logical form that social conventions regarding the use of property must conform to for them to be justified or defensible?(A pure critique of legal convention, if you will) Would this count as an is statement, or an ought? It would kind of be both wouldn’t it? Since it is a statement which describes reality, it would be an is statement. Since it also describes individual’s value scales, it would also be an ought statement (at least for anyone who feels compelled to argue that one should hold some proposition to be true).
Are forms not in existence?
@ the OP
Capitalism is the economic system under which factors of production are owned privately.
Socialism it the uneconomic system under which factors of production are under social control.
Capitalism is simply the more economically efficient than any other system. Given that capitalism presupposes a non-invasion of any persons property, every exchange is beneficial to all parties involve and raises social utility. Given that all other possible systems, full blown socialism or any of the possible variety of mixed economies, are predicated on invasion of original property owners (this is how social control is achieved), there are many forced exchanges where one party benefits and the other is made worse off. Therefore, socialism or any soft variant will have lower social utility than under capitalism.
In addition, capitalism is the only economic system which is morally defensible. Socialism uses property expropriation to acquire social control over factors of production. And invasion of innocent original appropriators can never be justified.
I’m not 100% sure why this is.
A big part of the answer i think is that we spend most of our highly impressionable years in a socialist (public) school system, educated by socialists (who of course are not going to bite the hand that feeds them, so to speak).
Another big reason, imo, is the widespread methodology of radical empiricism (logical positivism), which holds that nothing about reality can be know with absolute certainty. Then we need to try everything out. In a social context, this means you have to have a socially engineering state which experiments with this tax and that regulation, observes the effects, and adjusts accordingly. Only through such a process of discovery can we arrive at an optimal social utility.
Just my guesses.
In the cases of religion, I would say that neither can be established by any non-arbitrary criteria. They are both bases on texts containing unverifiable accounts. They are both equally arbitrary and are matters of faith rather than truth.
As far as AnCap and Socialism go, there are properties inherent in both systems which can be used to pass judgment on their comparative efficiency and justness. (see above)
Check this out.
Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein
“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.” - Albert Einstein.
Its a pretty harsh rebuttle of what you just said.. I hope you can disprove it 
I read through it and here are some of the most obvious problems that I came upon:
- Einstein claims that the economic laws that are valid for today’s “phase” will not be valid during the “phase” that socialism will bring about. How will the nature of man be magically changed with the coming of socialism? In what way will economic laws no longer be valid?
- Einstein talks about the ‘real value’ of products and how workers are not paid according to the ‘real value’ of the products they produce. Of course, there is no such thing as ‘real’ or ‘intrinsic’ value.
- “Production is carried on for profit, not for use.” Einstein is thoroughly confused about the nature of the capitalist system. How can capitalists achieve profit if not by selling their products to those that wish to consume them? The rest of this paragraph is equally confused.
- “In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.” Einstein has once again comitted a fatal flaw. He fails to realize that the method by which the resources are allocated (as Einstein might say, production is adjusted), is by pricing signals. The desires of consumers is reflected in prices. The pursuit of profit is how the wants of consumers are satisfied. Of course, Mises has a pretty good argument against what Einstein is proposing here: http://mises.org/econcalc.asp . Actually, I guess Einstein gets around this problem because when his socialist paradise comes about these economic laws will no longer be a problem…right?
This article is hardly a harsh rebuttal–it is littered with fallacies. Of course, a person who is not an expert on social and economic issues has a right to opine on the subject of socialism. However, Einstein severely embarrasses himself and betrays his ignorance in this article.
Sure, the rules can apply to the Greeks who agreed to them, but not ALL. Yet natural law is contingent on universal validity, which still hasn’t been proven.
It doesn’t really describe an individuals value scale, the individual would have to overlook his value scale and conform to the given social conventions.
Universally valid form? No. (At least, it hasn’t been verified that any exist)
Thank you.
Pretty crappy for a “harsh rebuttle” I’ll respond soon when I’m near a decent keyboard… Hold onto your seatbelts folks! Ryan’s gonna take on Einstein!!!
Just some stuff Laughing Man needed to be called out on:
Yeah, Keynesians use emotivism like that too. Wait, what?
- One can be a non-cognitivist and not be an emotivist (one can be, say, a quasi-realist).
- I highly doubt that the logical positivists got to together and thought “how can we marginalize those natural rights guys?” to which Ayer responded “emotivism!”.
I presume you’ve read Down’s An Economic Theory of Democracy, or Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent ?(If you’re read Mueller’s Public Choice III, Brennan and Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision, Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action, or any other works in the Public Choice tradition, let me know). I’m just curious, because calling Public Choice “rather silly” sort of leads me to the conclusion that you don’t really know what James Buchanan said, ever.
I mean, you’re a libertarian, so is it really “rather silly” to model political actors as self interest rather than benevolent altruists, or in other words to look at politics without the romance?
(It’s interesting that you’d call a school of economic thought started by a Nobel prize winner and continued by many other eminent economics “silly”).
It’s curious that you should say that. It’scurious because you’re saying to LibertyStudent “look, unless you have objectively established the morality of property rights you can’t defend them in practise!”, which sort of leads a situation in which, according to you, nobody need ever defend their property rights.
In fact, how any violation of property rights can ever occur must be seriously perplexing to you.
But, an economist needn’t make any claims about the initial distribution of property rights in order to assert that a double coincidnce of wants will lead to read. Now, of course, economists do make assumptions about property rights (i.e. when the economist says that a price ceiling will cause a shortage they’re assumption that people won’t just start stealing from the producers) and some economists have done economic analysis on property rights (Barzel, Rothbard, Demsetz, De Soto).
So, the fact that Rothbard, Miller, Den Uyl & Rasmussen had wildly different intepretations of Aristotle than, say, MacIntyre is of no importance?
When dealing with ethical propositions, which we are here, individuals who comment that there is no true or falsity in them are emotivists. Non-cognitivists are a general theory that there is no truth in a general arena. Since we are talking about ethics, it is emotivism.
Emotivism is a natural result of only actualizing what can be empirically tested in the world.
I’m well aware of this relative unanimity concept and I feel it is completely absurd.
Hold on while I point all of those wonderful nobel prize winners who invented such great economical theories. I actually have a shrine in my room of them.
Unless you do have property rights, then how can one claim anything in the first place before even trying to defend it?
Have we suddenly devolved into the bizarro world where an exchange doesn’t presuppose there is property or a service that both parties hold? Exchange is only possible through trading of goods or services, such an exchange presupposes a form of property rights.
Define ‘wildly’. Is natural rights theory exactly the same thing as the days of Aristotle? No. That is why I said ‘Natural rights theory has undergone little change’ Rothbard himself admits that he propounds a theory based on Aristotelian / Thomistic theory. Roderick Long and Geoffry Plauche too.
Let me try with some neutral examples. Do space and time exist? They are after all not empirical observations but the structure and form of physical reality which must presuppose any empirical observations. Are they also not universally valid? Does not every actor intuitively understand these action produced phenomenon?
The question was not regarding universal validity. It just seems incoherent to regard rules that at least some ppl are following as non-existent or incoherent.
Well, I posed this as a hypothetical. My main question was this, is there such a thing as an invalid or impossible value scale? Are there not objective constraints on every individuals value scales? And if so, wouldn’t this form (structure, ect.) that every value scale must conform to constitute both an ought and an is proposition? I believe the answer to all of these questions is yes.
Some examples of impossible value scales:
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(100)
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(101)
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1 unit of good X
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(103)
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2 units of good X
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(105)
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(106)
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(4)
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going to the movies and not going to the movies
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(6)
Well, Wikipedia says otherwise (and I’d scan a chart in Alex Miller’s book and upload it here to further prove my point, but I don’t have my copy):
Now, I understand this doesn’t prove anything, but generally people would agree that emotivism isn’t the only type of non-cognitivism. But I’m glad we agree that there was no maliciousness on behalf of Ayer & Co. Their metaethical beliefs followed from their logical positivism, they weren’t trying to marginalize anybody.
OK, so let me get this straight. You’re going to write off the entirety of Public Choice because you disagree with the unanimity principle? (I’m not even sure what it means to “think its absurd” or "disagree with it means. On the same note, Rothbard’s criticism of Pareto optimality completely misses the mark.)
Seriously, this is what happens when people base their views of Rothbard’s caricatures. Nobody (seriously, nobody) actually thinks that solely because a policy is Pareto improvement (or possible Pareto improvement, or if it satisfies the unanimity principle or whatever) it is better. No, these are ways of comparing various proposed policies in terms of their efficiency. For one thing most authors will assume their normative assumptions are arbitrary to some extent.
As I said, if you’re writing off the whole of Public Choice because of one principle you find disagreeable, you’d better be acquinted with the works I cited.
- Williamson, Hayek, Friedman, Ostrom, Smith, Buchanan, North, Coase primarily, and others besides, have made great contributions to economic science.
- You’re missing the point, whether or not you like the economics of the Nobel laureates in economics, by calling Public Choice “rather silly”, you’re writing off the work of great minds such as Buchanan, Tullock, Ostrom, Caplan, Higgs, Boettke, Brennan, Cowen etc as being a waste of time.
By picking up a shotgun and pointing at anybody who comes near! But you’re really missing my argument, you’re saying that I can’t defend something unless I have a normative right in it. That’s fair enough, but then theft is impossible in your world and the state is legitimised!
OK, once again, you’re missing the point! To the best of my knowledge, Alasdair MacIntyre (a proponent of Aristotilian ethics) is a Marxist. Rothbard (an alleged proponent of Aristotilian ethics) was a self described “radical libertarian”. The idea that they all really agree on the rules, just isn’t true.
You be bustin’ strawmen’s heads left and right.
We’re dealing with the belief that factual claims cannot be derived from ethical propositions. Base subjectivism in the sense that ‘killing is bad’ does not establish an objective value statement.
No, you asked if I knew about the unanimity principle and I replied. Now you think I just deconstructed public choice because I rejected it. There are many more reasons to think it absurd.
Explain how the state is legitimized and how theft is impossible under the argument I give.
Please, give me some of his titles. I would love to see how a Marxist defends virtue ethics and natural rights.
You stated that economists don’t have to establish an account of property rights before discussing how exchange works. Exchange is only possible if the property or service being given is private, obviously not if there is communal ownership of property and obviously not if nobody owns anything.
I just want to say I found the entire essay exceedingly poor in refuting any aspect of the postive nature of capitalism so I’ll just blow up the pillars upon which Einstien builds his entire foundation and not bother with destroying the rest.
- So Mr. Einstien, you don’t like the capitalist system. Now let’s pretend for a moment that the way you describe capitalism is the way that it is in every particular. So you want to replace this system where workers are exploited by their capitalist masters with the system of socialism. It’s all well and good to say that socialism is just “A centrally planned state that is trying to reach ethical social goals” so how do you want to do this? You propose that a coersive monopoly on the use of force should go into the houses, factories, and ECT of the capitalists and take their property. If they resist by attempting to protect what is theirs through force they will be shot, if they survive they will be sent to prison. You advocate replacing this system of VOLUNTARY explotation through force, through guns. What ethics are you proposing? Answer: There are none.
Seriously how the hell could somone who fled Nazi Germany advocate this??? Those “social goals” you were talking about, well guess what? In a certian case those social goals were exterminating an entire race of people. In fact this race and religeon happened to be particularly wealthy and prosperous on the most part. What happened to them? They had their lands confiscated by force and were killed if they resisted. Then they were sent of as cattle into camps, some of them lived in a sort of hell where they helped attain the goals of society through laboring all day every day to construct weapons of war until there was little left but bones covered up by stretched skin. They were the lucky ones. The others were shoved into the camps and starved and shoved into ovens, shot, tortured, until their bodies were piles so high that tractors had to be brought in to trample thier bones into dust.
Wasn’t this a perfectly acceptable social goal? Far more than 51% of the german population adored the Furer and gave him undivided loyalty. By doing this Germany became the strongest country on the face of the earth, the confiscation of jewish lands and release of capital was an important part of this because it released a large amount of land and capital to be used by new people. They also rid themselves of what they felt were undesirable elements of society.
So why would any of your social goals be any different? You propose forcful theft of property and the deaths of all who may resist. And even if these people relented thier property willingly wouldn’t you have to be worried about that small but important part of the population from rebelling and attempting to reap revenge upon evil that took from them? To secure society wouldn’t all undesirable elements have to be eliminated?
Where is your toy morality now? There are no property rights. No one is entitled to anything so why should anyone be given anything? They aren’t entitled to shit! Why not just burn everything? It makes just as much sense once you’ve violated property rights. Why are humans important at all in the first place? They can’t acquire wealth or indeed do anything that isn’t directly authorized by society.
It’s nonsense
- The way you propose to do this is by bringing in the state. What is the state? It’s an extortion racket. Statism is evil anyway you look at it. It’s a portion of the population FORCING the other parts to do things by threat of death. It has its origin a few thousand years ago back when a religeous cult began forcing its wims upon others. For one who overturned much bullshit in the relm of phisics you sure are awfully blind when it comes to realizing what tools you are attempting to achieve social equality with.
Also maybe if we didn’t have a state we wouldn’t have to worry about it being corrupted… Hmm?
- I think that it’s easy for you sitting in your ivory tower to talk about what motivates people. I for one am certianly not motivated by society. I’m motivated by things I like. I’m not on this forum replying to you because I feel society wills it. I’m here becuase I like to talk philosophy/politics and kicking Einstiens ass makes me feel like a genious.
Now what is society? Can you touch it? Can you feel it? Can you be it?
Society is merly a group of people BUT they do not think as one, they do not think as a hivemind and are therefore they aren’t any specific entity. No group of people has any more importance and any others. Society, as a living thinking entity, does not exist and therefore is indeed the same or even less important than any individual.
So it is perfectly possible to be happy without even being part of a community. END GAME.
- So exactly how would your socialist system run? How would they know the wants of the people? How would they know if they were doing well to fill those needs or not? How would they diversify to fit small groups? How would they calculate huge portions of the economy all by themselves?
In every case in history the state has done a worse job than private companies. It’s always the same the more control the worse it is, and now you dare to suggest the entirity of our economy should be controlled in every aspect. Just flicking through Mises’ socialism would refute the possibility of such a system working.
“I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful in each of us, a combination of our efforts, a great chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interests that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you differently either has his hand in your pocket or a pistol to your neck.”
- Captialism is voluntary exchange. That’s all it is. Those evil employers you were talking about? They make themselves, their workers, and their costomers better off. Why is this bad??? The wealth of society increases and of course somone has to come along and feel that there’s a problem with it! You can say that workers are being payed too little but that’s how much that they agree to and they can always advance by providing more and more for society.
Regulating the economy is regulating human action. Human behavior is economic behavior. Economic freedom is human fredom, and to justify relinquishing these freedoms is enslavement.
Man A wants some of Man B’s oranges. In return he gives man B some of his Apricots. They agree on a price and they exchange and they both believe they are better off. NO! WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS FORCE BOTH OF THEM TO SPREAD THEIR FOOD AROUND TO MAN C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y AND Z AT GUNPOINT!!!
Why the hell would you listen to somone who proposes running the lives of billions by his own whim?
Entrepreneurs plan the structure of production and recieve capital if they do a good job. Capitalists invest in production and if they invest in sucessful products they help supply demand and recieve capital back. Buyers and laborers produce goods for a wage (or profit) and buyers get goods they desire at a price they want in return.
Alot less menacing in you talk about non-violent interaction the way it is.
- There is no way to prevent corruption in the government because that’s all teh institution is, a blight upon human kind.
BAM!