I’m always suspicious of someone who is in a rush to declare a conversation over, when he won’t address direct queries.
I repeat, for what seems like the 3rd time,
Then how can they justify it?; “well, I didn’t need to infringe his rights, but it was so convenient.”
Haha no worries about the lack of sleep; I’ve been there.
Sterba’s definition is not entirely wrong; I’ve definitely heard that sort of thing argued before. And to the extent that libertarians do argue that way, they open themselves up to criticisms on issues of property theory. This is because property rights represent right-of-way conventions, and there are an infinite number of ways that you could organize right-of-way conventions so that legitimate uses of liberty would not come into conflict. Sterba is contending that libertarian versions of those conventions don’t take into account positive liberty, and therefore don’t actually maximize liberty. (Obviously, there are objections that can be raised to the idea of “measuring” liberty, but they would apply just as much to the libertarian argument as to Sterba’s counterargument.)
But not all libertarians need to argue this way, and indeed many don’t. At least one of the objections Sterba brings up to his own view, for example, are coming from other kinds of libertarian views. The objection that identifies his expansions of freedom as morally illegitimate, for an obvious instance, comes from a more Nozickian or Lockean tradition; it’s based on the idea that property is morally akin to an extension of oneself, and it is illegitimate for that reason to treat property as open game for “social distribution.”
Liberty student, the answer to the question of “to whom justification needs to be offered” is controversial; I tend to like the reasonable person standard, but there are certainly a fair share of good objections to that view. Ultimately, I’m not sure I can give a definitive answer.
On your second question, the justification would be based on the idea that you can do anything you want as long as you don’t infringe upon anyone’s rights without being able to justify doing so. In the cabin example, the fact that I will otherwise die serves as a justificatory reason for my breaking into your cabin. I do what I want to do; I infringe upon your rights; I can justify doing so because if I don’t do it, I will die. I therefore don’t violate your rights.
If you can’t explain who the justification is delivered to, then how could you possibly endorse this system? It seems to me that the concept is not complete.
This is circular. You claim that you don’t believe there is a need to infringe on someone’s rights, but that it is ok if they can show justification (need).
If it’s my cabin, and you break in, I will resist you. Would I be violating your rights by defending my property from your infringement? Or does your justification trump whether I think your justification is valid or not?
In other words, if you make poor choices with food, money and shelter, is that a perpetual license to violate my rights?
So this means that my rights are conditional whether or not you live or die? Does this mean that my property can be taken by you anytime you are under duress, since duress seems to be your standard?
How is this not socialism?
Well the problem of to whom the justification is due goes like this: The basic idea is that the justification has to be impartial – a person can’t justify doing something to someone based on a moral principle that’s completely inaccessible to them. But there’s a problem with this, because lots of people are stupid, ignorant, or unreasonable, and therefore impartially reasonable justifications won’t appear impartially reasonable to them. There’s also a problem with the fact that clearly you can’t be expected to actually justify the infringement before doing it, and it’s possible that you could be in a position where you’d be considering infringing upon someone’s rights where you’d never actually have the opportunity to explain yourself. But if you have an impartially legitimate reason, these things shouldn’t matter. Accordingly, there’s an idea that what matters is what a reasonable person would accept as impartial justification. And I like this idea. But there are objections to it, and I don’t want to suggest that I can answer all of them.
As for the question of whether you’d be justified in stopping me from breaking into the cabin if I was justified in breaking in, the problem would presumably arise from an assymetry of information, and therefore a genuine conflict could genuinely arise where both parties were acting permissibly in infringing upon each other’s rights. The idea that I’d be justified in breaking into your cabin is at least partly based on the idea that if you knew for sure that I was harmless to you, and that I was freezing to death outside, you would be unjustified in refusing me access to your cabin. But since you can’t necessarily know this for sure, you could be justified in resisting my entering your cabin (you’d be infringing my rights, but your perception of my actions as an invasion and a potential danger would justify doing this).
With regard to the question of the conditionality of your rights, I’d say you have the rights all the time, but that they can be infringed in some situations. So they aren’t conditional (as in, they never go away), they’re just never absolute in the way that you’re saying. It doesn’t mean that property can be taken anytime someone’s under duress, though perhaps one could argue that extreme duress could be used as justification (and perhaps one would want to argue that compensation would be warranted by such a taking).
Finally, it’s not socialism because it simply has nothing to do with socialism. Or at least, not any way I can tell; can you potentially explain what you think socialism is?
Sorry again Danny. What you say strikes me as mostly semantics. I confess I wasn’t aware of the origin of the term, although it seems the concept is not a creation of Berlin.
I took for granted that ‘negative freedom’ and individual rights are facets of the same idea. So, you’re using a different defintion ? Which is the ‘correct’ one you say ? Maybe - maybe not.
Indeed. Or in reality, a proof that negative liberty means more or less what I think it means and so Danny’s assertion is nonsense.
Negative liberty is, among other things, according to Berlin, “what an actor should be left to do.”
Now…
The idea that A should be left to aggress against B is false, according to libertarian morals. A has no negative liberty to (should not) aggress against B, so when B uses self-defense against A, B is not constraining A’s negative freedom.
Am I right Danny ?
all valid point LS, furthermore, this is equivalent to redefining right over property from being , mine to determine what is done to the property and my right ot exclude others from it, to myself and other people who have justifications get to determine what is done to the property and myself and other people who have justifications have a right to exclude others (and each other!) from it.
Juan, Berlin was just trying to categorize different traditions, so you’re right to say that he didn’t invent the concept. But the term “negative liberty” pretty much comes from that essay, so if you want to talk about something different it’s kind of confusing if you don’t use a different term.
The “normative slip” isn’t anything of the sort, as Berlin says that “the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the the answer to the question…” Obviously more would be needed to make the normative leap, but he’s not suggesting otherwise. The negative sense is simply the absence of constraints; the relevance of the concept for philosophy is for answering the question of what kinds of constraints are justified.
Your statement at the bottom of your post isn’t quite right because it involves positive liberty as well as negative liberty (“positive” liberty is the set of alternatives that are available to a person). So you’d want to rephrase it like this:
The idea that A should be left to aggress against B is is false, according to libertarian morals. A has no moral claim to the positive liberty to aggress against B, so when B uses self-defense against A, B is not constraining A’s negative freedom in a way that would be morally objectionable.
Obviously, I’m not going to agree with that, but that’s how you’d phrase it to fit it into Berlin’s definitions.
Nirgraham, the thing is that you’d still have the right to your cabin even if someone were legitimately infringing on that right – it would still be your cabin. The rights aren’t really being redefined; the boundaries stay in the same places that they would be in the more rigid libertarian theory. It’s just that we’d be acknowledging that crossing the boundaries shouldn’t be thought of as being so absolutely proscribed. Think of it this way: who would blame the guy for breaking into the cabin to avoid freezing to death? Wouldn’t we understand? We certainly don’t have that understanding when it comes to murderers, thieves, and rapists.
This seems wholly un-libertarian to me. I’m attracted to the notion that voluntary relations define a free market, not rights infringements that meet some social convention. Add a monopoly on force to back up the justification of rights violations, and we’re within the wheelhouse of a minarchy.
Liberty student, the first one is fine the way it is. Judith Thomson puts it well:
Suppose a man has a right that something or other shall be the case; let us say he has a right that p, where p is some statement or other, and now suppose that we make p false. So, for example, if his right is the right that he is not punched in the nose, we make that false, that is, we bring it about that he is punched in the nose. Then, as I shall say, we infringe his right. But I shall say that we violate his right if and only if we do not merely infringe his right, but more, are acting wrongly, unjustly in doing so.
The second one is fine too, but I could see it being a little confusing. To say that a right is conditional is to suggest that you can have the right to something under certain conditions, but when those conditions don’t apply, you don’t have the right. Since I agree with the first bullet point, it should make sense why I don’t think that rights are conditional. To say that rights are absolute is sort of different – to say that rights are absolute is to say that all infringements of rights are violations of rights. I don’t believe this to be true.
The third one is basically right, but doesn’t capture my entire point. I was saying that need or duress can – in extreme situations – be used as justification, but it isn’t the case that anything that could conceivably be called “need” or “duress” would be sufficient for justifying an infringement upon rights.
More semantics ? You say A has no moral claim to the positive liberty to aggress. I said A should not aggress because aggression is not part of negative liberty. Both formulations amount to the same thing ?
Also, Berlin did not make a slip (I was being ironic - sort of). Berlin meant that negative freedom is what an Actor should be left alone to do.
Finally, I’m not sure what you mean when you say “Obviously, I’m not going to agree with that, but that’s how you’d phrase it to fit it into Berlin’s definitions.”
You don’t agree that self-defense is legitimate ? Or you still claim that self-defense is an example of libertarians advocating constraints on negative freedom ? Or ?
Well talking about a positive action isn’t a matter of negative liberty; it’s a matter of positive liberty. Positive liberty is about what one can do; negative liberty is about what constraints are being placed in one’s way. So talking about aggressing would be talking about an exercise of one’s positive liberty (aggressing is something that a person does, rather than a constraint on someone’s actions), and your point is that there is no right to aggress, which is basically like saying that the aggressor does not have a moral claim to the positive liberty that he’s exercising by aggressing. It’s semantics to the extent that you’re not saying what you’re trying to say, and I’m trying to show you how you could say it in a way that would use the terms correctly.
For example, your idea that “A should not aggress because aggression is not part of negative liberty” would get you into trouble if that’s actually what you meant. If something is wrong because it’s not part of negative liberty, then all action is wrong, because action is not part of negative liberty (only constraints on action are). And you wouldn’t really want to adjust your statement in order to say that an exercise of positive liberty is wrong if and only if it infringes upon the negative liberty of another person, since that would rule out self-defense. What you would seem to want to argue is something like the view that aggression is wrong because it infringes upon the negative liberty of others in a manner that is not justified (presumably, you have in mind that the justification would need to be in terms of an ongoing infringement of one’s own negative liberty – that is, self-defense – but other kinds of infringements, like those involved in enforcing property rights, would seem to also fit into your views).
As for what Berlin meant with the word “should,” I think it would probably be useful for you to go back over the paragraph from which that quotation comes (it’s right near the beginning; I think the second page). He’s using the terms for a discussion of historical liberal traditions, so it’s not really about what he thinks at that point. But as a liberal himself, there’s no doubt that Berlin would want to deny that negative liberty is something that should be taken into account in a moral theory.
Regarding the part of my rephrasing of your argument that I don’t agree with, I guess the question amounts to one of what constitutes aggression. I think that when most libertarians talk about aggression, they have in mind a number of actions that I would not find obviously objectionable – the term “initiation of force,” for example, is often used interchangeably with “aggression,” as if the “non-aggression principle” prohibits “the initiation of force.” However, if the term “aggression” is used more restrictively, then there’s a chance that the problem will disappear, though I would be concerned about the possibility of including the wrongness of aggression in the definition of the word (the way that the wrongness of “murder” is contained in the word, as it means “wrongful killing”). So I guess I don’t necessarily disagree (for Quinean reasons), but I’m hesitant to endorse the position without knowing more about what the position is actually saying.
Bit late returning to the party.
Well LS I’d say that I feel like I agree with you. A right is invalid if one can find one situation in which the consequences it leads to are unacceptable; that is the use of mind games - to determine whether one’s premises lead to ridiculous conclusions.
I was merely saying that with my conception of self-ownership and non-aggression it seems obvious that there could be no moral way to force defendants to accede to judgements even if their guilt was proven. That their guilt could never be proven goes without saying, and thus even if they promise to do whatever the judge rules beforehand, there can be no justification to enforce this contract violation violently. There can be no doubt the the court is aggressing on the individual if they force them to accept a judgement, when they (a) cannot prove his guilt, and (b) cannot prove the validity of the specific punishment.
While it is agreed that the conclusion of a murderer receiving no punishment and making no restitution is not optimal, it seems clear that if the case for his guilt was strong, he willl be shunned, and that the opposing scenario; where innocent parties are jailed or made to pay for crimes they didn’t commit is even worse.
Desolate, when you say “A right is invalid if one can find one situation in which the consequences it leads to are unacceptable,” you seem to rule out the possibility of softening the concept of rights so that they can remain valid even though there are situations in which they might be infringed. The problem is sort of like this:
Since I think it’s rather important that we don’t reject (1), it makes sense that I would think we would need to soften our conception of rights. If there’s a controversy about (2), then this could be offered:
As for the issue of punishment, I don’t think that’s obviously true that there is no justification to violently enforce a contract or a judicial ruling, for much the same reasons as I brought up when we spoke earlier about rape. But if you insist on pacifism (except in self-defense against ongoing aggression?), then that’s okay; just understand that you aren’t taking “the libertarian line” on this issue.
I can definitely see why you would want to be hesitant about imposing judgments on people out of the blue that had the chance of being wrong. But most libertarians have attempted to seek some understanding of how a procedure could be justified without implying that each of its outcomes would be independently justified. So Rothbard and Nozick, for example, talked about private judicial entities that people would voluntarily opt into and agree to be bound by. The idea here would be that even if a court couldn’t justify imposing individual judgments on people, we need so badly to have a system where judgments can be imposed that we would need to find a way to justify doing it somehow in order for society to function. One answer – Rothbard’s answer – is to have people opt into the system and shun those who don’t.
The problem for you in going down that road is that you don’t like the idea of enforcing contracts. The typical libertarian answer is going to be built on the idea that if you agreed to follow the court’s ruling, then it would be no injustice if we imposed it on you. But if you disagree, then you’re going to end up committing yourself to a more pacifistic position that a lot of people are going to find implausible (including myself).
Danny, “softening of rights” is a cute way of saying compromise rights.
I can only speak for myself, but I am here because I want my rights without compromise. And I suspect I am not alone.
I can get compromised rights through political action. I don’t think your notion of rights is compatible with individual sovereignty. Not to be “in your face”, but I’m not even sure what you are proposing is libertarian.
You make a huge leap in (2). You are making the assertion that Klemm’s right to life transcends Tom’s right to property as a material fact.
Your argument is based upon (2) being true, which we’re arguing it is not. If you change (2) to false, your entire argument fails.
I think you’re much too smart to make an unintentional argument with a premise that everyone else has clearly rejected, without defending or explaining that premise.
Why is Klemm’s life superior to Tom’s rights?
Well, I said:
If there’s a controversy about (2), then this could be offered:
On the first issue I’m not totally sure what I believe, and I am receptive to your ideas of “softening” rights. So I will sit back and think about it for a while. Would you be able to explain a bit more how “soft” rights would “work”?
On the second issue you’ve grasped my stance, but I disagree with you. I think aggression is always unacceptable. For example, in the Rothbardian system you described, one might agreed to abide by judgements, but later wish not to accede to one, for example if one was innocent, or if one felt the judgement was overly harsh. Surely you’ll accept that despite the free market mechanism with which poor judges are weeded out, there will be mistakes; for example were I to agree to abide by a judge’s rulings, then be sentenced to death for stealing something I didn’t steal, I would find it coercive for someone to impose that judgement on me.
Explain to me how it isn’t coercive to impose a judgement that someone doesn’t agree with on them? Also, how does the negotiation over terms function (described by many AnCap authors) with a judge whose words are law?
(5) has a non sequitur embedded within.