I think we can all agree about one thing: Ruritanian philosophers suck.
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this?
One person I know argues (on another blog, not this one) that a libertarian is or could be a rule utilitarian. That is, a rule utilitarian is a utilitarian who believes that the way to maximize happiness is to follow a certain rule or set of rules, such as the NAP. Violating the rule(s) might seem to increase happiness in the short term, but would result in lesser happiness overall, or in the long run.
I’m not convinced that that’s the way to go, but it is a variation on utilitarianism that I rarely see mentioned or suggested.
The problem with rule utilitarianism is that it would be no different from act utilitarianism in the long run because there would be just too many exceptions to the general rules (i.e. don’t kill unless this and that).
I don’t see why this has to be if the rule or rules were well-designed. The NAP, for example, doesn’t say don’t kill, it says don’t murder. Killing is justified if its defensive, to keep from being killed.
There will be exceptions but they would not be prevalent in daily life. See also Do Act and Rule Utilitarianisms Collapse into Each Other?
There’s also the question of whether utilitarianism with such strong commitment to rules is a form of utilitarianism at all.
-Jon
What qualifies as a “market society”? Could it be that these people simply prefer a different mode of living than you and are acting voluntarily with that end?
Now you are assuming something entirely different. I agree that we have no commitments to respect non-rational animals, no matter how similar they may be in other ways. However, nothing in the proposed situation suggests a lack of rationality in the Waldavians, rather, it only suggests that they are far less advanced technologically. But simply being less advanced technologically does not imply that they are without rights, such a principle would lead us to dehumanizing the Amish and carried to its logical conclusion, any society that is less technologically advanced than our own.
Yes, that’s true, but it doesn’t stop there. Killing is justified when it maximized utility. So there’d be a long list of exceptions that would make it exactly the same as act utilitarianism.
For example you cannot kill except when (long list).
A market society is a society founded upon private property and exchange. If a society forbids this, it is socially backwards and inevitably technologically incompetent.
The Amish are a technologically advanced society. They are perfectly able to arm themselves with nuclear weapons should they see the need to. They only differ in lifestyle, that is they prefer not to use technology. That does not mean that they lack technology.
What qualifies a primitive society is not the lack of technology but the lack of complex social organization, from which it follows that technology cannot be sustained. While it may not be ethical to treat them as animals, such people are comparable to children learning to integrate society: they are under the ownership of their parents who are correspondingly responsible for their actions until the children acquire the faculty to function independently.
What if the members of the society voluntarily agree to accept a communal ownership of property and voluntarily agree to refrain from exchange. How would this be inconsistent with the market? Cannot market participants decide to forbid private property on their property - that is, they decide to jointly own property under the rule that no one may control it exclusively?
How do you figure? In actual fact, is it not the case that the Amish lack advanced technology? I do not mean lack access to technology - I do not disagree they have that. But any primitive society might very well have access to technology; they simply prefer their lack of technology and current lifestyle to having the technology and losing what they would have to give up to get it.
What qualifies as a “complex social organization”? Couldn’t a hunter-gatherer society be simply a “lifestyle” (a la the Amish) rather than a “primitive society”?
I don’t see this as an obvious or inevitable objection. If sticking to the rules is expected to maximize utility, while deviating or making exceptions to the rules is expected to diminish utility, why wouldn’t it be considered utilitarianism?
I never said it’s obvious or inevitable. It is just something that makes me doubt it.
-Jon
Precisely my point. The rules are no different than what you would do under act utilitarianism, or else it isn’t utilitarianism at all.
No, you’re not alone.
Such an agreement makes no sense. Joint ownership and communal ownership are not the same thing. Joint ownership is exclusive of others and thus private property that can be sold if the owners choose to, but communal ownership cannot make any claim to exclusion, and thus a colonizer can take control of all the property without anyone being able to claim otherwise.
Again, technology here is irrelevant. Social organization is what defines primitivism. Primitives do not have the choice to adopt a certain lifestyle or another, they are stuck in one. The Amish, on the other hand, are fully integrated into the market society. They make a lifestyle choice, fully informed by economic calculation, to consume certain goods and avoid others. From what I recall, they have also grown quite wealthy from this choice.
It is not necessary to colonize the Amish because trade with them is already available. That is not the case with primitive societies.
Believe it or not, when pressed into defending their system, anarcho-collectivists will respond that they retain the right to defend their holdings. Of course, without some sort of right to private property, this is impossible. That sort of leaves their critique of private property being quasi-statist in tatters.
-Jon
They’ll just trot out the old “possession vs property” false dichotomy that they’ve concocted. Granted, there is a difference, but they take it to a level whereby it is a false dichotomy.
It’d be utterly pointless though in this case, given that they’re dealing with a problem of whether their commune can legitimately defend itself against the aggressive energies of another entity, commune or otherwise. If they believe they’re entitled to forcefully repel/exclude the aggressor, they’ve conceded the argument for private property rights (rights independent of anyone else’s approval) and that their right to self-defence is in no ways contingent on some sort of societal approval. The same problem rears its ugly head when it comes to dealing with those who leech off the commune or otherwise disrupt it internally. Out the window goes the notion of automatic entitlements to certain resources… The only recourse they’d have is an abortive attempt to some sort of social contract justification for rights. But even that destroys their arguments that property is “authoritarian” or “state-like”.
-Jon
Communal ownership, understood as joint ownership of all current members of the community, can certainly exclude the colonizers.
So is your entire criteria of a complex social organization simply whether or not they trade with outsiders? Seems like it runs into the problem of an advanced, but xenophobic, community.