I surmised as much. I’m just asking you to be explicit (and consistent!) concerning your position. Realize that your apparant axiom of human worth, the emperitive to sustain human life, lacks as much justification as any other philosophy of ethics, and is less internally consistent as, say, Rothbards.
Charles, if libertarianism is a purely faith-based position, then I can’t possibly hope to accomplish anything besides to show that it leads to conclusions that no one who doesn’t accept that faith-based position would think are absurd. And I’ve done that. I don’t think, though, that the people here would be happy to call libertarianism a faith-based position.
Zefreak, you write:
But…well…you’re wrong. So now what? Are you going to provide an argument for why my position is inconsistent or unjustified? Are you going to provide an argument in defense of Rothbard? Or are you going to expect me to just tuck my tail between my legs and say, “Oh darn; I’ve spent the last several years studying philosophy (including Rothbard), and I think I have a pretty good handle on things, but apparently Zefreak thinks I’m wrong…crap, I lose”?
so you don’t hold that all rights are property rights? if tom doesnt have an absolute right to that which belongs to him, i.e. his cabin, or his body, then he certainly lacks an absolute right to his body. if the right is relative, you are at moral relativism, which on analysis is simply nihilism.
Never said there would be punishment. Let’s reread this dictionary definition of mercy again:
mercy
|ˈmərsē|noun ( pl. -cies)
compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm
This clearly shows it is within Tom’s power to punish and within Tom’s power to say it was wrong. Yet, Tom being the free-thinker and free-willed moral person he is, let’s say, decides compassion and thus mercy. It is called ‘no harm - no foul’ and you play on. You are focused on the event as being wrong without even allowing Tom to consider and by taking this leap of decision making you are inquirying into repercussions.
Tom in mercy has freely chosen Klemm is innocent. I arrive at the same conclusion without befuddlement, which unfortunately you do due to having to violate liberty along the way. I don’t. I apply a simple exercise that retains rights. You have to go on tangents for ‘special circumstances’, etc… I keep clearly delineated boundaries intact which provides the structure for logic. Your scheme unfortunately gets a bit cloudy. Yet in my more direct route I have kept simplicity and you have detracted into complications.
Not if Tom saw no harm and reached out with compassion. My moral system stays intact for all parties involved, including the integrity of rights. Unfortunately yours involves a lack of integrity and needs of special definitions, conundrums, etc…
Oh yes he can decide, just as Klemm can decide to go into the cabin or not. I leave liberty intact. Your scheme coerces Tom’s free choice to bias Klemm. I’m not placing a bias on this event at all. Tom and Klemm still keep their free-will intact.
Nope again. No coercion necessary if Tom accepts Klemm’s doing with liberty.
I am sorry Dan but libertarianism is precisely a faith-based position. You will never objectively prove right from wrong without appealing to either God, karma or the supernatural. Ultimately, you will turn around and around in circles to no end. There is no bridge between the “is-ought” divide.
You must start off with an axiom that states that something is morally wrong.
its all right here isnt it. so how am i to tell ‘an action’ apart from ‘circumstances’. arent they fused together?
if i say taking a book that is mine is an action. and taking a book that is not mine is an action.
what are the normal circumstances of taking a book that is mine?, or the normal circumstances of taking a book that is not mine?. does ‘normal circumstances’ have any meaning?
if we get more specific…
taking a book that is in my house which is my book and reading it at 3am on28thmay2009 is an action, and so to is taking a book from a book store without paying at 3am on28thmay2009 is an action.
what are the ‘normal circumstances’ of these?
…and. what is proper justification?. you are trying to justify ‘infringements’ of property rights, what are you going to appeal to? empathy?sympathy? good feeling? interpersonal comparisons of utility? what that woman who makes it that not P told you? you are certainly not referring to any competing property rights and trying to determine a priority in two conflicting rights. have you wondered why not? it is the obvious way to deal with a right based morality…the reason you dont take that approach is that it can’t be done. two peoples negatives rights to their respective properties are not in conflict, unless one aggresses the other, or both agress the other. certainly tom has not agress Klemm, so we know which way that argument goes…
Quantity of time spent studying a subject has nothing to do with comprehension, obviously.
You can start by attempting to justify your particular humanist philosophy using logic, not appeals to emotion. If you fail to do so, please explain to me how Rothbards philosophy, based on self-ownership, is more deserving of criticism than your own, which is based on the categorical imperative of human sustenance.
If there is a negative property right, then Klemm must refrain from using or damaging Tom’s property without Tom’s permission or else he has violated that right. Further, if there is a negative property right, property ownership is legitimate. If property ownership is legitimate, then the use or damage of that property by others, without the owner’s permission, is illegitimate.
I’m not here to justify my belief in the existence of negative property rights. If you deny their existence, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I offered Tom’s potential defense as a reason for Klemm to respect Tom’s rights, not as proof that those rights exist.
Nirgraham, you wrote:
I don’t see why we would think that all rights are property rights. It seems to imply that violating one right is morally equivalent to violating any other right, which surely doesn’t need to be the case, and it seems odd that we would want to treat this issue as settled simply through our definition of terms and not through a substantive argument. It seems like there’s a pretty significant difference between what I do when I take someone’s car as opposed to what I do when I take someone’s life, no? It’s at least not so obviously the same that we would want to say that there’s inherently only one kind of right, and therefore it would be irrational or inconsistent to claim that it would be morally the same to steal as to kill. Doing that would seem like a great way to trick yourself into a hasty generalization, no?
Wilderness, I take it that you accept the non-aggression principle, right? So in the disjunction, “punish or harm,” I took you to rule out “harm” as illegitimate, therefore leaving “punish” as the thing Tom was supposed to be considering. Was that wrong?
– because actions must involve physical matter, the boundaries of which are claims to title.
no. taking someones life is idiomatic. its a metaphor. it is shorthand for damage their body so that the brain malfunctions beyond hope of repair. and how does a ‘negative right to life’ differ from a ‘negative right to bodily harm’ (you could adjust that to bodily harm with terminal damage to the brain…)
Charles, you wrote:
This, I think, is not exactly right; you need to start off with some sort of value judgment. This is the axiology of the moral theory. The problem that I’m trying to identify here is that these guys haven’t provided any judgment about what’s valuable. They’re just talking about property rights as if they just ought to be respected well…just because. But what are property rights? And why does it make any sense to attribute value to them? If the contention is that it’s really property rights that are valuable in themselves, then fine…but…well…really?
Of course there’s a huge difference. That doesn’t make them not property rights violations. All property is not equal. There is a huge difference between what you do when you take someone’s car as opposed to when you take someone’s TicTac.
right
Let’s reread this definition with patience this time, maybe that will help:
mercy
|ˈmərsē|noun ( pl. -cies)
compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm
Mercy doesn’t mean punish or harm as this definition clearly shows. It clearly reads compassion or forgiveness. Are you asking something else?
This one sentence sums up the distance the thread has travelled. More than half a dozen people have presented literally dozens of counter arguments, and the answer from Danny Shahar is,
which I suppose is a marginal improvement from
You have changed the goal posts by bringing up demands for justifying value.
Property rights are simply claims of what actions should be judged to be moral and immoral. Us libertarians tend to construct convoluted methodologies for arbitrating disputes over those claims but ultimately, they are simply claims. I.E., my word against yours.
Forgive me but I can not help but ask if you are serious. Re-read what you wrote: You want these guys to provide judgement about what is valuable. Nothing has to make sense to attribute value to them – we simply do!
Edited To Add:
Concerning your objection to libertarianism depending upon a moral axiom at its root, I will fefer to a previous discussion led by a libertarian which I believe we can agree is certainly superior to both of us:
The alternative is slavery. Either I have the right to exclusively control the fruits of my labor, or I don’t. That is a true dichotomy. If I don’t, I am a slave.
“Where there is no property there is no justice’, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid” - John Locke