it is handy to have a tool that lets you defeat someone else’s argument on their own terms, without having to destroy their whole error-ridden worldview. those who attack argumentation ethics as being unsound1 miss the point: it doesn’t need to be sound, it just needs to destroy any opposition arguments that are based on the same unsoundness. and there are a whole lot of arguments based on objective ethics!
in other words, the unsoundness of argumentation ethics is feature, not a bug. Hoppe knows what he’s doing.
1technical point: you can have a sound argument based on a false premise; what you cannot have is a sound argument based on a noncognitive (nonsense) premise. “all dogs are white, therefore Fido is white” is a sound argument, though the premise is false. “all dogs blicksthlezorp, therefore Fido blicksthlezorp” is not a sound argument, because the premise is noncognitive. in short, it is not an argument at all. what Hoppe does is make an unsound “argument” that, though it not even be an argument at all, looks like an argument to objective ethicists since it takes the same form as the “arguments” their beliefs are based on, so it has the required effect. it is an eminently practical tool for changing certain people’s minds.
No you can’t. The definition of a sound argument is one which is both valid and has only true premises. If it has a false premise, it no longer meets the definition of a sound argument. Come on guys, this is elementary logic.
I would say that the soundness of an argument containing nonsensical premises is indeterminate. Also, it is possible to have a valid argument containing nonsense (Lewis Carroll constructed hundreds).
That would help with much of the post, but not all of it. For instance, this part would still be wrong:
I concede that arguing (validly) from false premises (that your opponents share) can be an effective rhetorical technique, but arguing against an invalid argument by creating another invalid argument (except when you are giving another example of an argument that commits the same fallacy) doesn’t seem like a good idea. In any case, that post was a mess (even if its message might be important) and should be rewritten before the author requests that we give it serious consideration.
Yes, doing that would be a correction, but one that would violate your proposed fix of of replacing “sound” with “valid”.
Right, but that shows that there is more wrong with his post than simply being unfamilar with the way we use certain terms in logic. I am interested in what he is trying to say (since I had previously dismissed Hoppe’s argumentation ethics as silly), but would like to see a less confused rewrite before I respond to the point he is actually trying to make.
If that is the case, he shouldn’t have shiften between using it as a logical term and also in a “ordinary sense”.
Zanglebert Bindledack, lets try that one more time.
I’d suggest that you abandon using these moral arguments altogether. Not only are these arguments incredibly dubious, they’re also incredibly corny. No one takes them seriously anymore.
If you’re interested in a more sophisticated approach to the defense of libertarianism, I’d suggest checking out some of Jeffrey Friedman’s articles over at critical review. Perhaps start with his article, “what’s wrong with libertarianism?”
ABSTRACT: Libertarian arguments about the empirical benefits of capitalism are, as yet, Inadequate to convince anyone who lacks libertarian philosophical convictions. Yet philosophical libertarianism founders on internal contradictions that render it unfit to make libertarians out of anyone who does not have strong consequentialist reasons for libertarian belief. The joint failure of these two approaches to libertarianism explains why they are both present in orthodox libertarianism—they hide each other’s weaknesses, thereby perpetuating them. Libertarianism retains significant potential for influencing the modern world because of its distance from mainstream intellectual assumptions. But this potential will remain unfulfilled until its ideological superstructure is dismantled.
I find that moral arguments are more effective with everyday people “on the street”, but that epistemological (A. Jasay and F. A. Hayek) and consequentialist (D. Friedman) arguments are better for an academic audience.
I don’t think that it’s ever a good idea to use bad arguments, even if the person “on the street” won’t realize it. This strategy will backfire on you in the long run.
I agree, but don’t think moral arguments are necessarily bad arguments, but they will have one or more premises that can’t be shown to be true using mere logic or our best scientific theories (or any empirical fact for that matter), so must rely on subjective feelings or preference. I might have a good argument that my friend should try a certain kind of food because he likes other kinds of food that have a similar taste, but the argument would cease to be a good one when used for someone that doesn’t share that particular preference.
My current belief is that Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is a bad argument, though.
I agree with this too, however, arguments that rely on subjective feelings and preferences are hardly the sorts of arguments that libertarians usually present. I also think that it’s generally unwise to convince people to think in moral terms. This sort of thinking usually returns with a vengence: negative rights lead (logically) to positive rights, utilitarian arguments lead to redistribution, etc.
As brainpolice hinted, I do not think positive and negative rights are, or can be coherently distinguished. It is usually easy to rephrase a liberty as an obligation.
Please offer a rephrasing of your totally bogus obligation(my positive right) for you to keep me well fed as a seemingly plausible liberty (negative right)
lol, here’s what happened: i wrote the post without the footnote first, posted it, then reread it and decided it needed a footnote, so i edited it in. turns out i misinterpreted myself! the footnote is completely irrelevant. i wasn’t using sound in the logician’s sense (nor was i mixing it up with the logician’s jargon word “valid”). i was using it in the everyday sense of “bullshit” or wrong. when i wrote the footnote, though, i was thinking i had used it in the logician’s sense of “valid”, so that made the post completely incomprehensible. should’ve left it as it was.
here is what i meant to say:
<those who attack argumentation ethics as being bullshit (because it is incoherent) miss the point: it doesn’t need to be coherent, it just needs to destroy any opposition arguments that are based on the same incoherence. and there are a whole lot of arguments based on objective ethics!
in other words, the incoherence of argumentation ethics is a feature, not a bug. Hoppe knows what he’s doing.>
in short, i was just re-emphasizing and driving home the implications of trulib’s point.1 i felt it was just sitting there and needed more applause, or needed some extra commentary to show why it was such an spot-on point.
1which was: “if there is such a thing as objective ethics, i.e. if it is possible to show that one ethic is correct and all others are incorrect, then the libertarian ethic is the only correct and true theory of ethics.”
It is only “easy to rephrase a liberty as an obligation” when you confuse the legal concepts of rights/obligations with liberties. Rights (and their corresponding obligations) are created by agreement or the command of the sovereign (and are verifiable by evidence from written contracts or legislation), but liberties are simply feasible acts that do not violate conventions against torts like murder, rape, theft, etc… Not only are rights not synonymous with liberties, they are rivals. Libertarians do immense harm to their cause by continuing in this confusion of legal terms which probably originated with John Locke.
Good effort Zang, but Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is broken six ways from Sunday. As you and trulib have pointed out, the question of whether his argument is even subject to evaluation rests on whether or not you accept the incoherent premise that there is such a thing as “objective ethics.” But even if you do accept that incoherent premise, the argument is fatally flawed anyway. And then Murphy and Callahan pointed out a few more errors that apply even if you ignore those previous two fatal ones.
As the above show, argumentation ethics is so broken that it begs for a new term to describe how broken it is. A term for an argument that is wrong at every level which it is possible to be wrong on. I propose the term fractally broke-ass.
Argumentation ethics is empty formalism for many of the same reasons why the categorical imperative is. It can only convince someone who already accepts the premises that argumentation ethics, by its very nature, does not actually argue for. This includes the presumption of universalism and of course a neo-lockean conception of property. If one engages in such logical formalism consistently, without it being ideologically colored, one is left with no real normative content, I.E. “logical consistency” can only be given a context relative to favoring a particular value equation and such a value equation is the begged question.
In its most crude form, argumentation ethics is nothing more than a fallacious argumentation tactic in which one attempts to automatically shut down all dissenting views without even trying to make a positive case for anything by basically reading the norms of one’s own worldview into the fabric of logic and linguistic practise as such, thereby generating the bogus claim that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong a priori via the law of non-contradiction. This kind of attempt to reduce ethics and politics to metaphysical absolutes is rationalist tomfoolery par excellence.