How would you answer this cause I need compass as to what you’re saying. A dog, statist, and libertarian are alive. Have they not fulfilled the end life (birth-death cycle)? Yet I know there is difference between them.
I say life is the ground for a more ultimate end, cause if the ground is swipe away the rug is thereby pulled from under this ultimate end, then this ultimate end (flourishing/quality) like a house of cards - falls/degenerates. This is why life, liberty, and property are flourishings, but flourishings that conflate to rights. Life is a flourishing, but there is more to flourishing than life (birth-death cycle). Cause there is a good way and a bad way to live life in my opinion. And a statist is a worse way to live life whereas a libertarian is a better way to live life. Worse and better by who’s standards? Quality, I say, and we argue this in the forum every day and night.
No it doesn’t cause of free-will. To know what human nature even is takes a lot of discovery and humans have yet to discover the potential of what it even means to be human.
Are you not human?
Nobody is saying human nature is fixed. You are, but it’s obvious human nature is not fixed. Human nature is evolving. That’s what it means to be human.
It’s prone to it if you don’t understand what it means. And if somebody argues for an innate, mechanistic, Newtonian human, then that person can be intellectually argued against. It’s perfectly ok to not have decided on what it means to be human. Some arguments are better than others though when trying to figure it out. There’s billions of people on this earth each demonstrating what it means to be human and how they apply and put that humanness into action leads to either good or bad outcomes. So it takes some foresight to weed through this, trial and error at times, and we make mistakes at times and other times we are more successful.
I didn’t argue for an innate, mechanistic, Newtonian human. I argued against using “human nature” in a transcendental and prescriptive sense, when “what is human nature?” is a descriptive/analytical question. Most of philosophy is plagued by the language of “human nature” in the sense that people tend to project onto “human nature”, confusing their personal value judgements with “the meaning of life” and “human nature”. Take Shopenhaur’s pessemism, for example: this could be seen as the result of him projecting his negative value judgement of life onto “human nature” and turning it into an entire philosophical system (of course, he also simply was borrowing from the bhuddists).
I’m was talking about the very meaning of “natural”, I.E. that which is within the limits of the material universe and its laws. To say that something is not natural is to say that it is not within the limits of the material universe and its laws or that it is “supernatural”. “The nature of X” are the laws that determine its limits and define its very being. It therefore does not make sense to conflate “nature” in this sense with a prescription (I.E. ethics). Someone does not literally “cease to be a human being” in any broad sense as soon as they act against your ethics. In fact, this would imply that there is a fixed “human nature” that is intrinsically good, and on this basis condemn people as “inhuman” for not living up to the ideal. But this just underscores my point: that it is fallacious to use “human nature” as an ideal and to conflate this ideal with the descriptive definition of a human being.
The idea that you “act against your nature” when you commit an unethical act is to conflate an ethical ideal of what human nature should be with the descriptive definition of what human nature is. This was my point, and the conflation is inherent in such a concept.
Well, I never said there was an ideal. I’ve repeated that there are billions of people demonstrating what human nature is on this earth now.
Well it depends on the ethical - descriptive argument for any individual human whether they reject, accept, ponder, put on the back burner, or some other decision process that that individual finds to be human nature for him or her self.
Wow, I think Danny is right for the most part in the scenario. It does seem right for Klemm to break into the cabin. I donno about his terminology though.
Yes, I don’t disagree. BTW I think you mean “reduce” to rights. Life is definitely the basis of all values and many of them are expressions of forms of it.
I was thinking conflate because I think life is a (moral) value, but can also be a right. Thus a (moral) value and right: two conflating as one (life). Whereas there are numerous (moral) values that are not rights at all.
That the one can be decomposed into the other. I understand how you’re using the word “conflate” though; I guess if you said they can “be conflated” it wouldn’t sound so awkward.
You guys still at this? Non-consequentialists are funny.
They are both moral acts. Just as Mises understood a time axis to economics, so too is there a scope/time axis to ethics. What is moral for Klemm and what is moral for Tom would not be subject to the same criteria for a society in which they both existed, which is a different scope. Again, this is a singularity in libertarian thought, because libertarian thought address the ethics of societies.
Consider the trolley question. Runaway trolley heading towards 5 innocents. You may pull a switch to send the trolley to another track where there is only 1 innocent. What is the moral act?
You can read a lot of opinion on the matter, but IMO the individual moral act is pulling the switch. But this would not be the same thing as contemplating moral collective action. I think we’d all be repulsed (except Donny) by the idea of public policy or law that stipulated authority to commit manslaughter in this situation. But then not many of us would think a person had done evil if they pulled the lever, although we might feel they should be subject to pertinent legal repercussions for the act.
Trying to divine atomic ethical truths from libertarian ethical thought is futile. It’s like trying to use Austrian economic theory to predict individual behavior. They are both ultimately the same thing, and both derived from observing optimal results. If collectivism worked better we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
And to be clear no college of collective ethical thought can address this. This case is an ethical paradox for all of them, except maybe the most radical anarchist.
The real lesson to be learned from this case is that the most ethical thing from a collective point of view (which is where libertarianism comes in) is to recognize that collective policy that justifies Klemm stealing from Tom is a moral hazard for the society as a whole. If it’s just Tom and Klemm as the last humans alive, it’s irrelevant. If there’s a possibility other people will come along, or there’s a society in which they both exist the question becomes very very different. We don’t know if Klemm is in this situation from misfortune or it’s self inflicted. But we do know society as a whole will be affected adversely by collective ethics that says it’s ok for Klemm to steal or murder.
If one must die, then you choose the death which represents the least moral hazard to the society.
Oh yeah? How do you decide which consequences are moral?
This doesn’t make any sense at all.
We did the trolley problem already here. Your position was demolished.
This doesn’t make much sense either. “Divine atomic ethical truths”?
Well I don’t know about this. I’d go with a civilized man standard, contra Danny’s reasonable person standard.
Reason is not enough to establish morality by itself. What brings about moral restraint is realization of higher productivity brought about by using more roundabout production methods and a more extensive division of labour. Only individuals who have a relatively lower time preference operate according to principle rather than gut instinct. For this reason, the closest thing one could come to an objective theory of morality (apart from legal ethical theory) is Mises’ ‘rightly understood interests.’ So whether or not Klemm is justified, in a non-legal, moral sense, in breaking into Tom’s cabin, depends on whether both Tom and Klemm are civilized. If they are both part of a division of labour, than Klemm could still consider it worthwhile for Tom if he breaks into his cabin and saves his life. If he dies this will lower Tom’s productivity of labour and impose a cost on him. If he is willing to repair the cabin or pay for its repair so that Tom notices no difference whatsoever than it is obviously worth it from Tom’s point of view. Now if Klemm is a social parisite (criminal, civil servant, or welfare bum), maybe saving his life is not the right thing to do. Whereas in the previous scenario (Klemm is a productive member of society) it would seem that Tom would want him to break in and save himself, now he might want him to die. So the moral thing to do would depend on who Tom and Klemm are IMO.
I don’t, especially not for you. Why do you think you that you can decide for others? And whatever your answer, how is that not authoritarian in essence?
You don’t believe in freedom if you don’t believe in freedom of thought. A libertarian moral realist puts themselves in a difficult paradox, but it’s needless. As a libertarian you have all the tools but as a consequentialist you refuse to pick them up. What makes an action you propose upon me ethical or not? It’s the same answer libertarian consequentialists would tell Klemm.
“Why not ask?”
You walk the path of freedom so far, but when it comes to thought.. you get a bit shy? And no I’m not saying you want to force people to think the way you do, but you do seem to be proceeding that there are some absolute ethical truths everyone can get to that are somehow logically resultant from libertarian thought. I don’t think there is. But a better question is, why do you want there to be? If you could convince yourself of your absolute ethical correctness why would this make you different from collectivists?
No one put forward my position. The closest to my position I am aware of was Hayek’s latest writings. My position is that ethics are not one dimensional. What is ethical individual action is often not ethical collective action. Generally and ideally speaking ethical collective action (ie political action) would be the intersection of what all members of the society agree it is. That’s why the USCon enumerated such a limited set of powers. There was no a priori truths that guided the framers, they merely enumerated what they all agreed on and didn’t address the rest. Thus the USCon is (or was rather) a rare exemplar of legal document that is also ethical.
Well whatever you think Tom and Klemm will act the way they act and sans a societal context (and the two alone do not compose a society since they have interests that are biologically impossible to reconcile) our thoughts on their ethics are moot. I mean seriouysly, would you characterize Klemm or Tom as ‘evil’? That is my whole point. Libertarian ethics do not and cannot address this situation. If one of us was on the island, with our own well protected and defended loaf of bread (as it would be:) and we were trying to determine what OUR best course of action, then our ethics begin to apply. That’s a much more interesting question, actually.
