I have often heard it suggested that libertarianism is a philosophy or moral position where liberty is the ultimate value to which all other values take a back seat or something to this effect. The idea of “liberty as the ultimate value” is a corruption of classical liberalism - more in line with libertinism - and serves as just another statist narrative, as in this example. If liberty is an ultimate value, then even killing and war are justified in order to attain it. This explains the contradiction of the common sight of a pick-up truck with a military veteran sticker on one side and a “Live Free or Die” emblem on the other side.
Valuation is individual and subjective. “I value this old antique I inherited from my grandmother very much.” When valuation is rightly understood, the only possible ‘ultimate value’ is satisfaction itself. Satisfaction of one’s wants, the attainment of one’s own goal states is the only possible value to which all other values can be a means.
Killing and war cannot be justified by “liberty” because liberty is not an ultimate value. It is better to leave a ruler be who has many people in the grip of his power than to invade in the name of “liberty” only to have him pull the grenade pin and take down half his subjects with himself. Only an individual may decide for himself or herself whether liberty is a higher value than their own life. To make that decision on behalf of others is immoral. The extensive involvement of the US in dictator-toppling (dictators which, invariably, the US aided, abetted or even installed) is built square on the corruption of liberalism into “liberty at any cost!” People must decide for themselves what costs are bearable in the eradication of rulers and tyrants.
The tenor of the linked NYT article is basically, “Yes, NATO governments are killing lots of Libyans who were carrying on a more or less peaceful existence before NATO involvement but it’s worth it because some people in part of Libya have finally gotten to taste liberty.” Disgusting.
I think Ayn Rand and any other classical liberal already addresses this. Life is obviously above liberty and encroaching on other peoples lives or liberty is obviously a contradiction. So what was the point of your post again?
“The extensive involvement of the US in dictator-toppling (dictators which, invariably, the US aided, abetted or even installed) is built square on the corruption of liberalism into “liberty at any cost!””
Lol total non-sequitor and a strawman of libertarianism turning into “liberty at any cost”. As Walter Block repeatedly says, and others, libertarianism is a political philosophy wherein the only thing that politics should be concerned with is liberty. That doesn’t mean that people don’t have other values, etc.
I think when it comes down it, if you really needed a war or death to defend liberty, it’d be worth it. For instance, some woman who wants to avoid rape will need to use some amount of force to repel them. I don’t think that is libertine. Unless you think it is libertine to wear the clothes you want and not get attacked.
The problem with war and a lot of the ‘just war’ thing is that they have no interest in liberty. And it is not a matter of liberty vs. none. But about protecting the state and its interests, of course. But I can see if people fight a war on their own turf, if liberty is at stake. As I can understand someone who fights the US military to protect their own freedom from this aggression. (Though I’m not under the illusion that many who are fighting hold liberty as their absolute, they are fighting rather than not fighting. And pacifism will not gain them ‘life’ instead of liberty).
And there is the fact that when people think they are fighting for freedom or some violent act for freedom, usually it is suicide. It is not a realistic attempt at gaining freedom. There is no guarantee that fighting will gain liberty. So one can still value liberty above all and avoid fighting. If you can calculate reasonably. I suppose the guy in the pickup truck thinks that he is actually making a choice. But he hasn’t. And he hasn’t gained freedom.
I also think that if ‘liberty’ is a principle, you have to universalize it. So people who hold this as a value, will be breaking with principle if they deny it to others. So one would not kill someone else in order to attain it. For instance, in the case where I want free food so I kill someone to get it. This would be nonsense. It’d be like someone who holds Christianity as the highest value, but wants some system that will deny the others from going to church. Maybe so he can have the church to himself. Obviously, no one will think that. Neither is a zero sum game to get what they want.
How is it even possible to know one’s real values if one is not free?
Saying that a slave who doesn’t rebel against his master is valuing his life more than his freedom is an completely absurd way to see this situation. Only if the ‘slave’ were free to be ‘enslaved’ it would be immoral to attack the slave master.
If there are government shills on newspapers distorting this concept to justify their despicable defense of mass murder it doesn’t matter, they’re being dishonest and should be denounced for it.
But saying that by the very fact one is alive he may be accepting every abuse being inflicted upon him is an atrocious thing to say.
“Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about “policy”? In the first place, surely-again in Acton’s words-it must say that liberty is the “highest political end,” the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy. Highest political end, of course, does not mean “highest end” for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of importance for these goals on his personal scale of values. Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would beone in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends-to “pursue happiness,” in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase.”
If it is a political philosophy then, like all political philosophies, it is immoral and anti-human. Politics is always and without exception immoral because any political system, however small, necessarily violates the moral principle of universalizability (aka “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”). There is no proper goal of politics at all. To say there is a proper goal of politics is as absurd as saying there is a proper goal of crime because politics is necessarily criminal.
I’m becoming more and more skeptical that there has ever been a just war at all. This is not because I believe violence is never justifiable, it clearly is sometimes justifiable. It’s just that I don’t know of any form of organized fighting force that has ever been free of aggressive tendencies, though perhaps some have come close (medieval Europe, and maybe some tribal cultures). The idea of a highly organized yet purely property defensive army has never existed that I know of. So, every war has involved some aspect of aggression on both sides, even when one side was apparently just defending itself.
While the State is essentially a slaveholder there are some crucial differences. First, a slaveholder - in the usual sense of the word - is someone who aggressed against his slaves much more grievously than States can manage to aggress against their subjects. This is not because States are less immoral than slaveholders, it is simply an arithmetic consequence of the slave-to-slaveholder versus subject-to-Prince ratio. Second, States are in a more precarious position than slaveholders vis-a-vis the security with which they can continue expropriating their victims. Princes are regularly deposed by their competitors. This means that slaveholders don’t prepare themselves to ‘take the slaves down with them’ as States do. Most governments have contingency plans that involve calculated internment and/or extermination of their own subjects to defend against “bioweapons” and other such spectres. Such contingency plans are easy to re-purpose. We saw this pattern deployed with Hussein’s terrorization of the Shia majority and Mubarak’s terrorization of the rioters. But the long-term costs of political upheaval are much more grave than the first casualties… look at Iraq. It is a protracted political battle between entrenched powers seeking to undercut US imperial rule and other US-aligned political powers seeking to solidify the new colonial political structure. Over a million Iraqis have died in the cross-fire. Those million+ corpses have been “liberated” but not in the sense that we ordinarily associate with the idea of liberty.
No, I think we can acknowledge that the slaveholder is engaging in immoral and illegal behavior without being compelled to intervene. Intervention does not follow automatically from the existence of immoral or illegal behavior. I can imagine a charity which funds political liberation and I suppose that this could act as a rationalizing force on this kind of behavior since the killing of innocents by such a charity would entail legal liability. The US government is not liable in any practical sense for its war crimes and this is precisely why it is so aggressive.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that I have no business deciding to free a country from its government even if that means killing piles and piles of those very people in order to accomplish it. Strict liability should hold at every point. My only point is that the Establishment co-opts and corrupts the language of liberty in order to render it impotent. Ron Paul can sit up in a podium and drone on and on about liberty all he wants, but how many Iraqis or Libyans has Ron Paul freed? None! And what’s worse, he opposes funding the very organization which is responsible for freeing millions of Iraqis and is involved in the current liberation of Libya.
One could say that violence such as the Yakuza in Japan prevents much more possible violence than does say, the U.S. military and it’s defense contracting friends at Dyncorp or Xe. Even though the Yakuza kills and hurt, the scale is minimal and very localized, one might say harmless to the everyday person because it targets the anarchic violence and prevents it from ever becoming hazardous to the general public. One could say that that is preferable to the lunatics who endorse Dyncorp selling women in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia and the U.S military and/or the violence in the general rioting in EU/ME States today. They are both rooted in organized violence and both pay lip service to liberty. Which produces more liberty?
Is it moral relativism or absolutism?
Philosophy leads to justification, for the possiblity, through economic methodology and logic, the output of that economic theory when in practice is what brings us our politics, or, what is politically relevant.
EDIT: And as such, if the country, like the U.S. endorses, philosophically, the economic method of liberation, which appears to be war, (the most effective means of furthering the cause of liberty because it is the most profitable) then is it any wonder why we are where we are today? We seem to think that making money and liberating people correlate, no?
Of course depending on a person this can be just about anything. For example space exploration. As in: “OK maybe it is kind of wrong to tax low-income type of people, but come on we are talking about exploring the space - that is way more important than anything!”
People always want to force their priorities on other, and state is how you do it.
Wow, boy did you ever miss the point. But considering the thread you started, it seems like you’re well and truly feeling the urge to rant, so you defined your way out of it, thus setting up a strawman. Amazing contribution! claps Do you have a valid criticism of Libertarianism / Rothbard and Hoppe? If so, I’m yet to see it. And yes I’ve already read your ‘opinion’ on the matter, I think you’ll find that in the threads we’ve already discussed this - I’m still waiting for a response.
“Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property).”
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Does this not help clarify?
"For we are not, in constructing a theory of liberty and property, i.e., a “political” ethic, concerned with all personal moral principles. We are not herewith concerned whether it is moral or immoral for someone to lie, to be a good person, to develop his faculties, or be kind or mean to his neighbors. We are concerned, in this sort of discussion, solely with such “political ethical” questions as the proper role of violence, the sphere of rights, or the definitions of criminality and aggression. Whether or not it is moral or immoral for “Smith” - the fellow excluded by the owner from the plank or the lifeboat - to force someone else out of the lifeboat, or whether he should die heroically instead, is not our concern, and not the proper concern of a theory of political ethics.[5]" - Lifeboat Scenario by Rothbard, TEOL
Are such armies highly organized or ad hoc? It seems to me that the 24x7 professionals will win out every time. A Delta Force operative experiences more hours in real battle than 100 regular infantrymen, even ones that are forward deployed in armed conflicts. Such individuals are vastly more experienced in battle and, therefore, vastly more deadly.
The idea of farmers and factory-workers grabbing their ARs and banding together in City Hall is absurd (not saying you’re suggesting this, but I have heard it suggested). Professional fighters will mow down throngs of part-time fighters every time.
“When valuation is rightly understood, the only possible ‘ultimate value’ is satisfaction itself. Satisfaction of one’s wants, the attainment of one’s own goal states is the only possible value to which all other values can be a means.”
Since being alive is necessary in order to have goals isn’t life really the ultimate end?
I agree. To justify some sort of international pacifism by saying that people whom are literally enslaved by their government haven’t started a war to end their government that holds them by a noose, and therefore it would be wrong to help them? How does that make any sense.
Twist, ridiculous logic. The case of saving people in another country whom are oppressed is different only in magnitude from seeing a woman being aggressed against on the street and stepping in to stop the aggression.
Can you force people to be free? Heck no. But you can sure stop aggression against them morally all day long.
This is false. I’ve been working on a political theory in which the political system is predicated on individualism and produces a society free of aggression of any sort. And it is a system that would produce true freedom without hardly trying, because it rejects the socialist ethic of majority rule, among other new concepts.
If government is a group of people whom have a monopoly on coercion within a jurisdiction, then if they restrict their use of coercion to stopping aggression, they do a good thing. It is possible therefore, in principle, for a government to use force and never aggress.