Identifying circumstances that suit an argument type (consequentialist vs ethical)

Economics Political Theory
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Note that the thread, why I don’t believe in the non-aggression principle, accumulated a number of long-winded posts about many conflicting ethical claims and related circumstances. It demonstrates how easy it can be for the intellectual to weasel his way out of libertarian ethics, and how hard it can be to convince the ordinary person that such ethics are valid.

My experience conversing asynchronously through internet forums is that the ethical argument is less effective using this medium (as opposed to face-to-face conversations).

Whenever I escalate the stakes in ethical debates by using the democracy-as-gang-rape argument, usually nobody responds directly. I would hypothesize that they feel such a claim must be absurd for various reasons. When I tone it down to the taxation-as-violence argument, people argue that “violence” is an incorrect word to use, or that property rights are arbitrary, unfair, etc. So in order to keep people engaged, I debate with them about consequentialist arguments, especially those they put forward. This seems to stimulate more discussion.

I’ve had little experience debating people face-to-face using ethical arguments, but here is someone who has… (also, anyone know how to embed videos?)

The person in the first video got exasperated by the discussion, and the person in the second video admitted it was okay to use force. Meanwhile, these people didn’t have a clue that there actually was a ‘free market’ argument against the status quo, and I believe they would have thought twice about their state-solves-everything attitude had the consequentialist argument been deployed.

Adam Kokesh neglected the opportunity to refute their argument for a minimum wage, and also to point out that government actions are behind the escalating costs of healthcare. I don’t think it would have taken any longer to discuss than the time Adam used to explain libertarian ethics. There is no need to descend into the endless statistics and detailed economic theory that Stefan Molyneux warned about. Nor is there a need to force anarchism down people’s throats at any given opportunity. All that is required is a sound understanding of economic principles and an ability to convey their application. I think Peter Schiff does an excellent job of this.

I think ethical arguments are effective when it involves finding the logical conclusion of someone else’s argument by asking them conditional statements. E.g.

“You say that healthcare is a right. Do rights exist only once they have been passed into law, or do rights exist regardless of what the law says?” If they answer with the former, then healthcare is not a right because it’s not law. If they answer with the latter, then the next question is:

“Do people have the right to keep all the money they earn?” If the answer is no, then anyone has the right to take other people’s earnings without their permission in order to pay for their own healthcare, regardless of what the law says.

On the other hand, I assume it is harder to float libertarian ethics by initiating such a debate, because you are the one who has to prove the existence of certain morals, and it gets complicated with things like original appropriation and “society”. People may be more receptive to an ethical debate if they initiated it.

When I first stumbled upon a libertarian party’s website, and saw the phrase “taxation is legalized theft”, I thought, gee, that sounds right. Did I then hurl myself into libertarian activism? No. I was too skeptical that all hell would break loose if we privatized and deregulated every road, school and hospital. It was only after careful deliberation driven by political homelessness that I jumped on the libertarian bandwagon. Although, it might have been the “taxation is theft” slogan that influenced me to carefully deliberate.

Furthermore, at that point I had never seen the many fantastic videos on youtube by the likes of Stefan Molyneux and Larken Rose. I think those videos are great because they point out that something is probably terribly wrong with society, and it’s possible that libertarian ethics are the solution. However, I still think that most of the voluntaryist-type videos leave newbies hanging. There are a lot of comments along the lines of, “So, we should just have chaos instead?”.

As for the transition to anarcho-capitalism, I had to be absolutely sure that it was not some flimsy ideology that didn’t work in practice. Of course, some minarchists have converted to anarchism based on moral premises, so ethical arguments could work more effectively for the not-so-cultish objectivists.

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I agree.

Most people that I’ve conversed with found it difficult to understand why taxation is theft. Their counter-argument basically boils down to: “Property is a normative idea. An ought idea. Property is whatever the society decides it’s ought to be. Our society decided that property is private and unalienable, unless the state decides to redistribute it to the less fortunate.”

Also, they find it difficult to grasp that the purpose of the law is to resolve conflicts. They think the purpose of the law is to do good. Which includes resolving conflicts, but also involves helping the less fortunate. The chain of reasoning to convince them otherwise is too long for a single conversation. (Not that I get the chain myself completely.)

When I responded with non-aggression principle, recently someone said that “it’s not aggression if it’s not your property; so, saying it’s aggression if the state taxes you is begging the question”.

Of all the people I’ve had the ethical and economics arguments with, only one person was swayed by the ethical argument (after she read Bastiat’s The Law) more than by the economics consequentialist argument: my wife (at the time we were dating). :slight_smile:

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Technically, they would be right in that the status of property is whatever the law says it is. But that doesn’t make whatever the law says just. The law used to say that blacks could be slaves. So, why is their response at all a convincing counterargument?

Probably the quickest way to demonstrate that the purpose of law is to resolve conflicts is to show that it is the only constant among not only all systems of law (e.g. statutory law) but also even among states that have the same system of law (e.g. USA and Cuba). So, what they are really saying is that they think the law ought to do good. But then, what is considered good? Who gets to decide? That’s a whole ‘nother can o’ worms.

I really hope that wasn’t their actual response, because in no way is it begging the question as they phrased it…Taxation is aggression pretty much by defition. What it really is is legalized theft. Literally.

Wiktionary defines “theft” as “the act of stealing”, which it defines as “(transitive) To illegally, or without the owner’s permission, take possession of something by surreptitiously taking or carrying it away.” Other definitions from “google define” state “without the owner’s freely-given consenst” instead of “without the owner’s permission”. I like that better as it is more accurate. Regardless, taxation is just a legalized form of theft.

All theft is aggression. All taxation is a type of theft. Therefore, all taxation is aggression. It’s not circular.

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I am an ancap and I agree with this quote 100%. I personally think that moral justifications of property are unconvincing, unreliable and reality seems not to care much about them.

Students for Liberty article advises libertarians to adopt consequentialist approach
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Most people that I’ve conversed with found it difficult to understand why taxation is theft. Their counter-argument basically boils down to: “Property is a normative idea. An ought idea. Property is whatever the society decides it’s ought to be. Our society decided that property is private and unalienable, unless the state decides to redistribute it to the less fortunate.”

As far as that viewpoint consists of: ‘property is a social construct’, then they’re right.

I’ve had a conversation with someone who argued wealth redistribution and taxation is not theft because [paraphrased] “some people like rich kids did not earn their money gifted from trust funds/inheritance” and thus were not truly creating or owning legitimate wealth as defined by ‘society’.

Nevermind this implies that a poor child inheriting or being gifted money by their hardworking parents in say, Zimbabwe or Burma or North Korea, for example, is fair game to have his earnings taken from him and ironically given to others because he “didn’t earn it legitimately” according to the wisdom of the central planners.