Morality is how law develops. This isn’t some Rousseauian fantasy where the great legislator can make up laws and people atune their moral value to it after.
Not only is this outright nonsense (there is no ‘morality’ with which to develop law), it is glaringly ahistorical. Legal systems arise out of the actual arbitration and power of the people involved in legal disputes; they are nothing more than a means to serve the interest of those involved in legal disputes. The ‘function’ of society (in the mechanical and not the teleological sense) - and the order and jurisprudence which underly it - is to improve the efficiency with which people may exploit one another from their own perspectives, and within their own framework of ideas and aims.
All other views are romantic nonsense, any society based on anything other than power and self-interest would instantly collapse for want of coordination and sustainability.
‘By expressing your ultimate ends and then, through economics and other sciences, proving that the existence of “the state” is means to not achieving those ends.’
And why should people care about your ultimate ends without somehow adding in a sense of universal justice?
‘Why should I want a claim over “any sense of universal justice”?’
Because you are failing to see that if ethics is just a matter of personal preference then implicitly there is no right/wrong ethical system. It becomes normative, in the sense that all is equal. Let us say you happen upon a thief. He prefers to steal your wallet, you prefer to keep it. You cannot lay claim that his preference are wrong. How could you praxeologically resist his actions without establish a normative statement of values which center around a universal sense of justice in which you are no longer being praxeological?
‘And the major flaw of the market is that it is not in a state of “perfect competition”. What I mean is that, whether or not reality conforms to a model, like what you are saying, the “perfect competition” model, or whatever, is not relevant to whether or not it is true, at least not directly. What I am saying might be uncomfortable to hold; but that does not impair its validity and soundness. If you want to try to disprove that it make sense, do it; but just appealing to your model of what you would like the situation to be and then blaming reality for not conforming to it is not helpful.’
I’m not saying there is such a thing as ‘perfect justice.’ However, the market has a normative guide implicit throughout its development. It has a goalpoint which would indicate positives like property property, non-violence, voluntarism. I’m not expecting justice to catch every criminal or right every wrong but there is a sense of what justice should always be irrespective of what it is now.
Not only is this outright nonsense (there is no ‘morality’ with which to develop law), it is glaringly ahistorical. Legal systems arise out of the actual arbitration and power of the people involved in legal disputes; they are nothing more than a means to serve the interest of those involved in legal disputes. The ‘function’ of society (in the mechanical and not the teleological sense) - and the order and jurisprudence which underly it - is to improve the efficiency with which people may exploit one another from their own perspectives, and within their own framework of ideas and aims.
All other views are romantic nonsense, any society based on anything other than power and self-interest would instantly collapse for want of coordination and sustainability.’
Show examples of societies developing law and people atuning their moral judgement concerning that law after it is established. Either that or stop your trite soapboxing about power addiction.
Your views on both morality and law are hysterically naive. You’d be laughed out of court, so to speak, by anyone with a background in philosophy or law.
Is theft illegal because we all think it’s immoral or because we all want to be protected from thieves? I don’t have to think something is morally wrong to want it to be illegal, I simply have to think that I’d be better of if there was a rule against behavior that I didn’t value.
A better question: if the law is about what is and is not moral, do you consider every law in existence today to be moral? If not, how can these immoral laws possibly be tolerated by people?
Andrew, I’m pretty sure de Sotto addresses this on page 20 of Money Banking Credit and Business Cycle.
THE DISCOVERY BY ROMAN LEGAL EXPERTS OF THE
GENERAL LEGAL PRINCIPLES GOVERNING THE
MONETARY IRREGULAR-DEPOSIT CONTRACT
THE EMERGENCE OF TRADITIONAL LEGAL PRINCIPLES
ACCORDING TO MENGER, HAYEK, AND LEONI
This is true. Wilderness also seems to have an infatuation with classical Greek philosophy and Aristotle. May I recommend trying some contemporary analytic philosophy? Oh wait, they are all positivists, right? (It’s funny; there is more truth in Language Truth and Logic than the collected works of most classical philosophers, and I think Mises would agree)
Liberte, Do yourself a favor and stop banging your head against the wall. Some ideas are fixed in stone.
This is true. Wilderness also seems to have an infatuation with classical Greek philosophy and Aristotle. May I recommend trying some contemporary analytic philosophy? Oh wait, they are all positivists, right? (It’s funny; there is more truth in Language Truth and Logic than the collected works of most classical philosophers, and I think Mises would agree)
What’s terrible is that they are preaching an imaginary version of Greek philosophy. I consider myself something of a Neo-Aristotilian of a doxastic slant, and I’ve done a fair amount of reading in classical philosophy and logic. I think there is quite a bit wrong with much of modern analytics and positivism (which some philosophers, such as Jaako Hintikaa, would agree with). However, these forum pseudo-classicists fail to understand two fundamental points:
That in the Greek ‘ethics’ has a much less pretentious meaning, and it merely implies contingent formulas for finding modes of successful action given general, empirical human traits. The majority of Greek philosophers were no more trying to prove prescriptive morality or monistic ‘human nature’ than a financial adviser is trying to say he knows how to use your money better than you do. They are in fact regurgitating a Christian, Renaissance and Rationalist butchering of classical doctrines which is as absurd as it is inaccurate.
Classical teleology was generally mechanistic (function as what things actually produce), and was not intended to be normative in any sense. Indeed, whether one agrees with Aristotle’s concept of ‘telos’, the idea that something could act against its telos (given sufficient conditions) was logically impossible. In an Aristotilian system natural law can not be violated. If it happens it is in strict accord with identity and necessity. If a man has behaved a certain way, no alternative existed. To say his action was ‘a violation of natural law’ is sheer gibberish.
“Your views on both morality and law are hysterically naive. You’d be laughed out of court, so to speak, by anyone with a background in philosophy or law.”
Just bs dismissals.. with a side of an “appeal to popularity” & “authority” to boot.
If law is just a matter of behavior that establishes an environment in which goals are more easily obtained then why listen to law when your goals aren’t in tune with it? Why don’t we storm the halls of Congress and put policitians up against the wall? We desire the elimination of the current state do we not? What better way to eliminate them? Why follow the law of non-violence? Our goals seem to have been around for centuries yet we can simply see them come to fruition with a small act. Also why is it that in cultures that did not experience Roman legal theory have laws similar to them? It is not as if murder was legal in Eastern cultures that were largely isolated from the West until the West opened them up. Also my comment was that morality comes before law, not law before morality. So engaging in and establishment of moral practices is required to discover that this is an environment in which goals are more easily obtained.
I understand people’s need for a security blanket, but I don’t understand how people justify saying me shooting somebody (for any reason) is objectively wrong, but a tsunami hitting the coast and killing hundreds of thousands is not. Neither is “wrong”, both are probably undesirable to those in the situation, both are caused by nature. It just so happens that the former took a shit load of complex chemicals (and possibly some quantum states if you believe some of the latest theories) to cause one, and it only took one tectonic plate ramming into another under the ocean for the other.
‘I understand people’s need for a security blanket, but I don’t understand how people justify saying me shooting somebody (for any reason) is objectively wrong, but a tsunami hitting the coast and killing hundreds of thousands is not. Neither is “wrong”, both are probably undesirable to those in the situation, both are caused by nature’
You shooting someone is not caused by ‘Nature.’ You shooting someone is caused by you. You act purposely.
And Malthus has the most convincing defense of private property, right?
The state is always “against you.” Your interests directly conflict the interests of the state, whether you know this or not. This is why the state requires a monopoly on force.
Prove it. Or in other words, prove that my brain isn’t working based on chemistry and mechanics which is to say, on different principles than the earthquake and tsunami.
Edit: I’m not denying that I have goals, nor that I act to achieve them, I’m denying that the goals I have are picked differently than how an earthquake picks the time that it occurs.
‘or in other words’ doesn’t work. They are not mutually exclusive. Your brain is evolved, it is part of nature, there are causal chains there like in geology. This does not mean that there is no ‘agency’. Do you deny that you posted with any purpose? Do you think it makes sense to verbally challenge a rock or tsunami to ‘prove something’ ?