It is possible in theory that a government could have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and never aggress, but it is also possible in theory that everyone in America could burn all their cash tomorrow at noon.
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Implying killing isn’t justified in pursuit of liberty.
As I pointed out in a thread somewhere, my recent mindset has been that moral norms exist to limit competition for power. The relevant response to your statement, then, is: who has the most liberty? Obviously, it is those with the most power, and though they may not kill directly they certainly commission the requisit killing.
The human brain is good for recognizing patterns and overcoming obstacles to power. Who are you to say killing is not justified?
“Since being alive is necessary in order to have goals isn’t life really the ultimate end?”
Wouldn’t this just mean life is not the ultimate END, since it implies that life is just the MEANS? If so, following the same premise you provide, it makes the goals one has a more likely candidate for the ultimate end.
Not to nitpick, but moral norms exist to resolve disputes and hopefully to prevent disputes. If they limit competition for power, then it is a by-product.
True, the whole role VS function thing. But I think (I hope) I’m able to get my point across. The assumed purpose being to convince people “evil” is “wrong”, the actual effect being to limit competition for power.
So who’s to say killing isn’t justified in the pursuit of liberty? Clearly, the story of history is that liberty is achieved by rejecting moral norms.
Well, social and moral norms aren’t always in line with liberty, . But the state is even worse. The state fucks with moral norms. Instead of people resolving their conflicts and having the results become norms, the state just dictates what things ought to be, and pretty much all of it is against liberty.
In my opinion, killing in and of itself is neither justified nor unjustified, in pursuit of liberty or whatever. The circumstances are entirely relevant. To me, the means are more important than the ends, or the ends do not justify the means. Murder for the sake of liberty is perverse, in my opinion.
Murder for the sake of liberty is perverse, in my opinion.
Clearly there is an element of truth in what you say, because it seems the most powerful people don’t do the killing. Rather, they commission people with nothing to live for to do the killing for them.
Maybe it just has to do with the human brain’s dislike of eliminating value, and we percieve extreme value and potential in other humans.
But still, isn’t your statement “murder for the sake of liberty is perverse, in my opinion” influenced by the moral norms you value, which are severely influenced by general moral norms throughout history which, in my theory, are perpetuated to limit competition for power–which is really limiting competition for liberty?
You’re confusing liberty with enslavement (of others). You’re essentially arguing that the enslavement of others is the highest attainable degree of freedom which is like saying that committing murder is the highest attainable degree of moral behavior. When we speak of liberty, we are speaking of the liberty of the population but not a communitized or averaged liberty (which would still include enslavement).
Social norms can conceivably serve any end which Nature has in mind and, of course, they clearly do presently “limit competition for power”. However, it is a fallacy to conclude that because something is natural that it is, therefore, moral or as it ought to be.
The appeal of liberal philosophy (as I adopt it), is that it simply asks each individual to calculate right and wrong on the basis of his own satisfaction alone, without respect to the “higher duties” that others ask him or train him to take upon himself and which he would not otherwise have taken on. Without “self-sacrifice”, the system of enslavement-through-cooperation collapses and, with it, the grand monopolization of power which is characteristic of the statist social order.
Some people say “we will always have government” - if you define your terms sufficiently broadly then I guess this is true, but so what? The point is not to eradicate government, the point is to eradicate the severe disconnect between our innate moral sense and civic life which has become morally nihilistic and completely unmoored from the facts of human nature. The path forward is to move the locus of government power to smaller scales and reduce political aggregation so each individual’s voice is not one in a billion but one in a thousand or one in a hundred.
And all of this - calculation of right and wrong on the basis of one’s own satisfaction and scaling down of political structures - is accomplished through two words: originary secession. The moment you stop obeying govrnment statutes because you believe in them and, instead, only out of prudence, you have thereby left the ranks of the self-sacrificial, self-enslaving statists and joined the ranks of those who recognize, with Max Stirner, that the world is their plaything and it is theirs to consume however they see fit to do so. You can attach whatever word you like to it. Some people call it “sovereignty” though I prefer to call it simply liberty.
Clayton -
No. I have yet to find a really good way to explain why this is incorrect but I’ll try by pushing it to the extreme. Physical reality is necessary in order to be alive which is necessary in order to have goals, so isn’t physical reality really the ultimate end? Or - since the physical world must obey the laws of logic - we could push it one degree further and say that logical consistency is necessary in order to be physically real which is necessary in order to be alive which is necessary in order to have goals, etc.
The other way to see this is mistaken is to look at something that does bring about satisfaction (achieves an end) but which is antithetical to life - euthanasia. People don’t just euthanize themselves because they’re looking for thrills or whatever but because the pain which they have to endure in life is simply unbearable/unmanageable. Ending their life altogether - rather than continuing on a trajectory of foreseeable, long-run, intense suffering - is actually what satisfies those who make this choice. If life were the ultimate end, this should be impossible. People do it, therefore, it’s not impossible. QED.
By saying life is the ultimate end, you’ve displaced the subject from the self and placed it somewhere else. I am me, therefore, my ends are whatever satisfies me.
Clayton -
People do things all the time that are non-conducive or even antithetical to their ends though. This doesn’t mean that they don’t actually hold that end, only that they are unaware how to properly achieve it. There are cops who honestly believe that what they do is the primary factor in public safety - they are wrong, but this (on its own) doesn’t falsify the claim: “I want to protect peoples property, therefore I will confiscate other peoples’ drugs.”
Also, the whole “life as the ultimate end” is interpreted 2 different ways (even objectivists disagree over what Rand meant). So the first is the literal, survivalist sense. The second, is in the sense of the good life, flourishing, eudaimonia. This sense is MUCH more in line with satisfaction, it is just one step removed. We seek satisfaction because we seek eudaimonia. The benefit of this, over simple satisfaction, is that it avoids absurd proscriptions like “if murdering a bunch of children makes you happy, and you want to be happy, then you should murder a bunch of children.” Instead, we realize that satisfaction through murder doesn’t line up with what it means to be a eudaimon, which is why you seek satisfaction in the first place.
I really don’t see how eudaimonia is at all removed from satisfaction. Terms like “the good life” and “flourishing” embody subjective values, which means they go right back to satisfaction.
Strictly speaking, the absurdity of a proscription like the one you offer above is subjective. Even if everyone were to agree that it’s absurd, that doesn’t make its absurdity any more of objective.
Becuase you can’t achieve eudaimonia by doing whatever you want. Eudaimonia is highly individualized – my flourishing isn’t the same as yours – but it isn’t a subjective thing. I can be wrong about what ends are constitutive of my ultimate end. I may think that living in my parents basement drinking all day is a good thing, but pursuing that end would not be in line with my own flourishing as an able and intelligent man.
And just to be clear, this isn’t my own random musings or even what I necessarily believe, this is just the standard neo-Aristotelian position of people like Long, Plauche, Rasmussen, and Rand.
I disagree. Even putting aside Aristotelian ethics, we can agree that throughout history and in most cultures, killing kids for the fun of it has been seen as an extremely immoral act (extreme in contrast to something like lying). Let’s assume that you’re right, and that this is just the subjective valuations of individuals, that the vast majority of humans for as long as we can look back just happened to share the similar feeling that killing kids for fun is wrong. Doesn’t that strike you as a little bit too much of a coincidence? Don’t you think there is a reason why people agree on this?
I mean, maybe you do think that its just a random occurence, and thats that. But I think that’s a strange position to hold. If you watch National Geographic and see a mother bear protect her cubs, you don’t say “oh gee, that bear just values protecting her young. Its totally subjective to that bear.” Instead, you recognize that its in the bear’s very nature to do that, its just a fact about what mother bears do. And if you see a bear abandon its cubs, this wouldn’t change that fact, it would just be an annomaly. So when we get to humans, why does the attitude suddenly change?
This is either a reflection of uncertainty (endemic to action, see Mises HA) or pathological (mental disease of some kind). Which is it in the case of those who choose to euthanize themselves?
OK, then I think what we’re really talking about is different levels of satisfaction or simply long-run versus short-run satisfaction. Would you disagree that the best life is one that is not only satisfying in the living but also satisfying in the remembrance? But this doesn’t involve constructing a standard of virtue or right-living external to one’s own satisfaction. It simply requires taking into account long-run satisfaction, that is, the exercise of foresight regarding the long-run consequences of one’s actions.
The problem with qualifying satisfaction as the sole measure of virtue is that any other measure is arbitrary and insensible to the individual. It is arbitrary in that as many arguments can be made for any particular virtue as against it. It is insensible in that the individual cannot rely on his in-built senses (pleasure/pain/agreeability/satisfiability/etc.) to make choices, he must consult some arbitrary (because external) reference.
One might argue that the maladaptedness of the human brain to its modern environment makes such “externalization” of morality inevitable. However, I think it is the role of a healthy social order to cause “external” moral standards to be internalized by remapping the costs and benefits of different courses of action. It might actually feel good to simply kill the guy your wife cheated with. But the problem is that his entire family and a good chunk of their friends and the society at large will support retaliation against you, possibly even capital retaliation. That changes the balance - is it worth dying to kill the guy your wife cheated with? Probably not and the result is that, while we have more cheating, we have less killing and vendettas which could be argued to be a good thing on net. Only time will tell.
But the point is that the social order converts the “abstract” ideas of right and wrong into concrete costs/benefits that can be directly sensed by the individual in terms of his own satisfaction. This is much like the process whereby all the information relevant to the price of oranges is compressed into a single number - the price - which you can use to rank the choice of exchanging money for an orange against all the other courses of action you might take instead.
Clayton -
Absolutely agreed. However, what about this fact is not captured by the observation that your short-run ends may be antagonistic to your long-run ends? Isn’t flourishing, then, just the “whole package” of satisfaction; getting “the most possible satisfaction out of a whole human life” rather than “do what is the most satisfying to you at this instant without any thought to the long-run consequences”?
Clayton -
How not? If you don’t think “flourishing” is a value, then what do you think it is?
It depends on whether you value anything higher than living in your parents’ basement drinking all day. Regardless, satisfaction is your ultimate end.
Yes, we can certainly agree to that, but that agreement is irrelevant to my point.
I do think there’s a reason why the vast majority of people agree on it the vast majority of the time. Again, however, that agreement and the reason for it is beside the point.
Think about commodities that have been used as money throughout history. Was there anything that prima facie said those particular people had to use that particular commodity as money?
Any attempt at trying to prove that any value judgement is somehow objective runs head-first into the is-ought problem.
How do you reconcile this with Austrian-school economics, which adheres rigorously to the fact of subjective value? The existence of behavioral norms in no way makes those norms objective in the sense of “this is how they must be”. They’re only objective in the sense that they’re observed. There’s no independent force in the universe which dictates behavioral norms in advance.
So yes, I’d say that a mother bear deciding to either protect or abandon her cubs involves valuation, and valuation is necessarily subjective. The fact that most mother bears happen to protect their cubs in no way obviates this. You can consider this to be a strange position to hold all you want, but that’s also a necessarily subjective value judgement.
killing kids for the fun of it has been seen as an extremely immoral act
I don’t know if this statement is historically true or not.
If you watch National Geographic and see a mother bear protect her cubs, you don’t say "oh gee, that bear just values protecting her young. Its totally subjective to that bear.
Lots of species don’t care that much about all their young all the time. There are “runts of litter”,etc. It’s probably best to say that some mothers protect some of their young most of the time. Some rodents eat their young, some reptiles will abandon a litter to die as it is convienent, some bears will only choose one cub, etc.
But this doesn’t change the fact that when it comes to humans, it can change simply “because it can”. We could look at one million and five statistics and some freak of nature accident like finding penicillin which would protect weak humans that were predisposed to death just like every other animal before them (before this freak accident medicine probably killed more than it saved BTW) .
We are not “humans” as a catagorical imperative to act, the category is not a stagnant biological term - but a term of convenience when dealing with a specific set of rules that we name and come up with. We are not de facto “Man-Apes”, but unique actors.
Furthermore, who says that anomalies and the extremely improbable are not unimportant? Things like the bullet that shot Archduke Ferdinand, the meteor that killed the Dinosaurs, 9/11,etc,etc,atc are things that will rock any given model at any given time
I think there is a danger of a type of confirmation bias that could happen.
I’m kind of busy at work, so I’m only responding to a few points. Don’t take it as a dodge from the other ones.
No, but there are factors that effect one commodity becoming money over another. Non-perishibility, dvisibility, recongizeability, etc. – these factors effect what becomes money and what doesn’t. That gold and silver became monies is no coincidence, its simply because they were desireable commodities which also met the various other criteria better than any other commodity on hand.
Ceteris paribus, if gold didn’t have these properties (even if it was still highly desired), it would not have become as widespread a medium of exchange as it did.
I think the is-ought gap is over-extended and invoked as a quick excuse without being properly understood. I also think that you have something else in mind than I do when you talk about value judgements being objective.
Simply put, some values are constitutive of others. That is, you can’t actually achieve some ends without also aiming at a variety of other ends.
If you value end X, and end X requires that you also value Y and Z, then you ought to value Y and Z.
Everyone values end X, therefore everyone ought to value Y and Z.
This is roughly the logical format of the neo-Aristotelians. If you think this runs aground of the is-ought gap, than so does any statement about means and ends, such as “if you want to satisfy your hunger, than you ought to eat something.” The only places you can argue the syllogism above is whether or not there are constitutive values, and whether or not everyone holds the same end. I’m not going to argue those points though, because I don’t agree / understand the justifications for them.
First off, I’ve never seen someone use objective to mean “this is how it must be.” The statement “that tree has green leaves” is objective, but it doesn’t mean that under different circumstances, it couldn’t have been otherwise. And I don’t think I implied anything that would suggest some independent force in the universe which dictates norms in advance.
But regarding Austrianism, I don’t see a problem. Value subjectivism, as it relates to AE, is simply the fact that the value of goods comes from the various individual preferences for that good, and not from the nature of the good itself. It says that if someone acts, it is because they value the expected end of that action over all other expected ends. This is all that AE requires regarding value subjectivism.
So if it turns out that we can say “that value was incorrect,” or “this value is moral, but not that one,” this hasn’t changed a single thing. If I point out that some items became money becuase people recognized inherent traits in those items which made them better mediums of exchange than others, then again, this hasn’t change a thing.
Haven’t read any of the thread..
Liberty isn’t a value at all. However, it is a precondition to express values.
I’m not sure I even agree with that, but I wanted to throw it out there.
I agree with that but I don’t think a lot of libertarians do - they hold liberty (themselves and others being free) as a summum bonum.
Clayton -
Oh libertarians only claim to hold it as the highest good. Most of us, at least those of us who live in America, will probably never move to another place that has more liberty (certainly there are, even if Americans always claim America is the freest nation).
So, while we might say liberty is our highest good, our actions speak otherwise. For most of us, we could probably say that, ceteris paribus, we value freedom more than anything else.