The point is you don’t have any right to liberty, no negative rights, no positive rights, nor obligations associated. You have no obligation not to aggress as I already said, nor do you have a right to. Nor was the point ever to argue against the state as an organisation, at least in correspondence with the OP
Wildeness,
Why do you keep writing about “intellect?” As you correctly stated, we aren’t talking about the same thing. I’m trying to stick to natural law/objective morality ala the OP, that simply hasn’t been proven. Just as if the OP said “If objective morality luminiferous aether doesnt exist, what justifies libertarianism the propagation of light?”
It doesn’t matter if intellect was used in an attempt discover or verify aether, as it hasn’t. People even still try now. Like those who believe(d) in the aether, you simply haven’t given a single fact showing what you are so certain of. Rather, you have showed that other people believed it as well, and they used their intellect. So was Lorentz, so was Morely, so what? No proof is no proof. (And calling the lack of aether aether! is just wrong)
Angurse are you a positivist? Does proof, in your mind, mean empirical validation?
Right now I’d take any form of validation, logical, empirical, whatever… If you are going to call something a law should you not base it on something verifiable in some manner?
There are causal chains, that is, each action has a reaction or an effect. Suppression of freedoms always lead to some kind of revolution, and this is true of any society in any epoch. Now, this doesn’t mean that humanity will one day know absolute freedom and be free from coercion, but it does mean that there will always be those who are willing to fight for it, in the intellectual arena or whatever. This obviously isn’t the proof you demand, and I can’t give it to you because human action cannot be expressed in a mathematical formula; the physicists have an easier endeavor. But what you can say is that supporting freedom, at any and all costs, is at the very least admirable, and bettering the condition of society has to be ‘the right thing to do.’ Why? Well, I believe in God.
This is why Hayek says that classical liberals believe in socialist ends but not in socialist means.
I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’ve said at all. In fact, I think the complexity of human action makes the idea of an objective ethic an utter impossibility.
Then we agree. I wasn’t attacking you, but I know the two uses of liberty are often conflated and I was just making sure.
nandor,
If you regularly refrained from stealing your grandmother’s social security check for no other reason than that such self-restraint “felt right”, would you call such an impulse “mystical fantasy” tantamount to religion? Moral feelings are a fundamental part of our psychology; there’s nothing mystical about them.
The question, though, is why is it trans-societal? There are universal laws of man which extend to all places and all times; but are there any such moral laws (without talking about religion)? And if monotheistic religion is the sole reason, then maybe we’ve been too quick to dismiss the virtues of such religions.
Are you implying the non-monotheistic ancient Greeks were devoid of morality?
Moral feelings are trans-societal because empathy is a natural, evolved feature of the human psyche.
I should have been more general.
That’s just a fancy way to say it’s been handed down to us by society. Unless you’re saying it’s genetic, somehow.
That’s exactly what I’m saying.
“A neurological approach to empathy”:
"The data reviewed in this essay show that the intuition of Adam Smith – that individuals are endowed with an altruistic mechanism that makes them share the “fortunes” of others – is strongly supported by neurophysiological data. When we observe others, we enact their actions inside ourselves and we share their emotions.
Can we deduce from this that the mirror mechanism is the mechanism from which altruistic behavior evolved? This is obviously a very hard question to answer. Yet, it is very plausible that the mirror mechanism played a fundamental role in the evolution of altruism. The mirror mechanism transforms what others do and feel in the observer’s own experience. The disappearance of unhappiness in others means the disappearance of unhappiness in us and, conversely, the observation of happiness in others provides a similar feeling in ourselves. Thus, acting to render others happy – an altruistic behavior – is transformed into an egoistic behavior – we are happy."
Cool, I’ll into it.
Thanks for that! I’ve been interested in mirror neurons ever since I came across them as an answer to a certain problem in philosophy of mind, specifically the “how do we know that other people are actors” question. Lilburne, have you read anything of Thomas Metzinger’s? He uses cognitive science and neurobiology to inform a materialist theory of consciousness. He references empirical studies on split brain syndrome, the false hand illusion, OBE delusions and lucid dreaming and attempts to explain this phenomena. The result is imperfect but definitely a major step in the right direction.
Because that’s what I’m talking about. fairly simple.
edit:
that’s what this discussion has been about.
I am certain that natural means intellect in the context of natural law of human nature. That’s all I’ve said. You’ve been going on tangents.
strawman (this whole aether tangent)
Your deception in this whole discussion has amounted to numerous strawmens and tangents.
Natural means intellect in natural law tradition.
Lilburne,
If it’s our evolution which has detemined us and consequently our psychology doesn’t your defence of libertarianism to fall to one massive genetic fallacy?
I have read a few pieces with very different opinions when it comes to split brain syndrome. I have heard some people say that a person acts as though he will have two separate minds, while at the same time other people will say that this is not the case. So I always take what people say on this issue with a grain of salt.
But my question to you is how do you account for qualia? I assume you aren’t an eliminativist. I always have trouble grasping how qualia can be accounted for in purely physical terms. One last thing I want to know is what is your response to the zombie argument? Do you think zombies are conceivable?
Esuric:
In answer to your question, I would say—yes.
What makes moral (or ethical) laws universal is that human actions have co-present accompaniments. Moral or ethical actions, just as economic (catallactic) actions, have necessary accompaniments. The action and the corresponding accompaniment constitute the law.
Two examples I have used in the past which demonstrate the fundamental idea are:
Walking toward one location is always accompanied by walking away from another location.
And, if one makes an automobile more aerodynamic in order to increase fuel efficiency, the automobile must necessarily be harder to bring to a stop.
In these examples, the “means” (walking to a location, increasing the aerodynamic efficiency of a car) have accompaniments which may not have been the primary intention of the person utilizing these means (walking away from a location, making the car harder to bring to a stop).
The laws of human action are of the same nature. When a person seeks to acquire additional units of some good or object, he generally isn’t trying to decrease the value he attaches to each unit, but by the law of marginal utility, this is a necessary accompaniment to acquiring additional units.
The law is universal because the action specified (acquiring an additional unit) has a necessary accompaniment.
Moral or ethical laws are universal, because acting in regard to another person has necessary accompaniments just as walking to a location, making a car more aerodynamic, or acquiring additional units of a good.
The question then becomes: What is moral action or ethical action? That is, how do we conceive moral or ethical “acts”?
And, what are the necessary accompaniments to such acts?
When we answer these questions, we are on the way to discovering and formulating moral or ethical laws of human action.
If you are familiar with Mises’s writings, you know that he said again and again, that economics (catallactics) is the only elaborated branch of praxeology. There are other realms of praxeology that have not been expounded and elaborated.
Action is goal directed activity; it is “trying to.” Moral or ethical action is “trying to” with respect to another person (another mind). Trying to help someone, trying to harm someone, etc…
Psychological action is “trying to” with respect to one’s own mind (i.e., thinking or reasoning…“trying to” figure something out, “trying to” solve a problem, “trying to” control one’s emotions, etc…)
Thus, there remain entire realms of human action that have not been approached by Menger’s exact theoretical science, what Mises calls praxeology, and what Hayek calls the Pure Logic of Choice.
There are universal moral, ethical, and psychological laws. But there is as yet, no science of such laws. The reason is, libertarian ethics has been approached as a normative discipline rather than as a branch of praxeology.
In my opinion, one day this will change.
I’m not familiar with Metzinger. I plan on dedicating one of my future “study obsessions” to cognitive science, starting with Steven Pinker. I’ll definitely look into Metzinger then. Thanks!
I am an eliminativist in the sense that I believe there are neural correlates for all experiential phenomena or ‘qualia’. I do not think qualia poses a problem for materialism, considering that experience of qualia can be manipulated physically in a controlled setting. I side squarely with Metzinger and Dennett and consider qualia to be a largely unhelpful term that is way too much like Plato’s perfect forms.
Obviously, I think that the zombie argument is easily countered. If a zombie is completely indistinguishable from a human being, including sensory organs and brain function, then I think it would be conscious and experience ‘qualia’.