A pox on all of Walter Block’s houses. The interpretation of libertarianism that he promotes reduces to an anti-social, atomistic, anti-consequentialist, relativistic worldview that treats everything but the NAP in a vacuum as being irrelevant. The problem is that social philosophy cannot be reduced to just the NAP by itself, or statism and anti-statism, that there are independant reasons outside of the NAP for considering certain ideas and social customs to simply be incorrect and have negative consequences. Libertarianism does not obligate anyone to be neutral about “social” or “cultural” questions, and the tendency of libertarians to brush off such concerns as irrelevant is part of precisely why most people don’t take them seriously in the first place. Because, ultimately, the likelyhood of obtaining and sustaining a free society has a vital causal relationship with the values of the people in a given society. A narrow philosophy of anti-statism in a vacuum, that acts as if any philosophical starting point is just as good as any other for a free society, reduces to a shallow husk that self-detonates.
I have to agree somewhat with what you are saying [ except the pox part, NAP man [:P] ] Perhaps I have yet to fully realize all of Block’s writings but he seems only to talk about the most basic of libertarian philosophy. Perhaps philosophy isn’t his strong suit and I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, I feel like if I were to ask him:
Dr. Block, How do you feel about Iranian women not being able to do one of the most basic rights of organizing a public fashion show on their own property and is there perhaps hope that libertarianism can solve this crisis?
He would simply say ‘Iranian women…why should I care about them?’
Then stop reading my statements through a lens of naive libertarianism.
The a priori can not lead to a false conclusion.
A libertarian revolution will not happen in the status quo, the situation will have to change dramatically.
How about we anaylze what I said because you’ve proved that you did not understand it:
Economics is designed to study the causation, and concatenation of economic phenomena; its use is mostly negative, hence being the dismal science, and it tells man more of what he cannot do than what he can do with his society.
Note here that I am not saying that economics cannot make predictions, but that the predictions in make are not close to the accuracy of those made by the physica sciences. Neither Mises, nor Schiff would be able to predict how long a depression might last, in fact, they could only give guesses at what would by the GDP growth for any nation for any quarter, or what would be the value of the dollar next year. The physical sciences on the other hand, can yield extremely rigorous predictions that puts the predictions of Mises, and Schiff to shame. In addition, predictions in the social sciences are qualitative, and we can only guess at what the quantitative statistics would be.
Basic Hayekian use of knowledge in society here.
If it is outside of law (rights), then it is personal and potentially social (social justice). That’s still a libertarian approach.
My wife’s mother has a cabin at a lake in a community that holds assembly and sets rules backed with repercussions. People that live there sign onto these rules. One rule: Dogs are to be restrained at all times. The communities repercussion if not: Beach pass or dock excess or etc…is taken away. Different repercussions can be applied. That’s a community contractual issue based on the contractual usage of the communities property (the beach, dock, etc…). The community voluntarily pays into these common areas for upkeep and usage.
I see social justice being able to apply to racism and sexism in ways that the law doesn’t need to step in and intervene. Ostracize being the largest encompassing definitional form, ex. don’t shop there, don’t talk to him/her, etc… Voluntary actions.
I agree Nitroadict, and that’s exactly how I view it too. For as long as I’ve been in this forum I’ve never understood this needless spiral/decay.
You are engaging in doublethink. You state that a priori is susceptable to error then you state it cannot lead to a false conclusion.
That doesn’t answer my question and shows that you are not so apolitical.
Again you dodge the question. How are Peter Schiff and Ludwig Von Mises able to make predictions concerning economic business cycles? Are you implying that Austrian predictions of perhaps the biggest boom/bust cycles were mere luckly guess work?
Well looks like you answered my question. Congradulations everyone who is an Austrian, I guess through enough trial and error we actually have to be right once in a while. I would ask you how physical science predictions could be any more ‘valid’ then social science predictions. This wonderful positivist approach is rather amusing. Are you by chance a Popperian?
No, the logical deduction of the a priori is susceptable to error, not the a priori itself.
I can give an analysis without giving my political opinions - I don’t live in a world where all everything I do is libertarian apologetics. In addition, our knowledge (again, basic Hayekian knowledge theory) cannot fully comprehend all the factors that are necessary for truly understanding our contemporary situation, and much of that information, by the time we actually gather it, is already mere historical data with little relevance to the future.
They weren’t that rigiorous of predictions as far as predictions go in other sciences. Saying that a bust will occur in 2007, or 2008 is not that rigiorous of a prediction. There are far too many factors at play in the social sciences for true predicting, and, as Hayek asserts: “economic theory is confined to describing kinds of patterns which will appear if certain general conditions are satisfied, but can rarely if ever derive from this knowledge any predictions of specific phenomena.” (Hayek, [B-13], Studies, p. 35.)
The predictions of the physical sciences are far more outstanding than those of the social sciences with respect to predictions, that is just a fact; knowing that does not make one a positivist, or Popperian, and the fact does not make the physical sciences any more valid.
I’m going to strongly suggest you don’t throw an ad hominem at me again.
What is a priori but the logical deduction?
Do to free will, nothing is in absolute. However we can deduce what is more likely to happen.
It was not rigorous to predict something that a majority of your discipline said was a near impossibility? I take it by your eagerness to degrade the Mises prediction that it poses a threat to your thought process.
You are to give evidence to sustain such a claim. Simply stating ‘its just a fact’ is not enough to establish that natural science predictions are somehow better, more valid then social science predictions.Yet I noticed this wonderful doublethink yet again. You claim that physical sciences are no more valid then the social science and yet you also claim that the physical science predictions are ‘more outstanding’. So we are faced with a dilemma..if the predictions of a physical science are more valid then a social science [ higher rigor, greater chance of success, more precise ] then would it not logically follow that the physical science itself asks more of its practitioners then those in the social science thereby making physical science more productive, advanced, precise…in so many word, more valid.
You will have to explain to me how calling your approach positivistic and asking if you are a straind of positivism is in fact attacking your personal character. Let alone explain how all these replies I gave towards your argument are nothing more then an attack on you for remember, ad hominem is disregarding the individual’s argument and attacking solely him.
The a priori judgment, and the logical judgment of that a priori judgment are two entirely different things. While the judgment itself is true, the logical deduction of that judgment is falliable due to semblance, which is an error that we subjectively accept as true.
Free will has absolutely no relevance to the subject matter, abosolutely no relevance.
Deducing what is most likely to happen involves a quantitative analysis since we need probability theory to infer what are the chances of each event occuring. However, with economic predictions, the prediction is what the predictor himself subjectively believes will happen, it is not necessarily the most likely event to hapen; a predictor could predict a black swan, to use N.N. Taleb’s terminology, even though a black swan is an event which is, by definition, not likely to happen.
No, it was not that rigorous of a prediction. It may have been a great prediction, but that does not mean that it was a rigorous prediction. And what is “your discipline”? Are we so swift to throw aside my warning?
And my post above:
The physical sciences can predict: eclipses, the trajectory of objects, the velocity of objects, the age of a substance by its half-life, ect. ad infinitum. The social sciences cannot match those listed predictions.
I stand by that. The social sciences are not about predictions.
The validity of a science is not measured by how neither “outstanding” its predictions, nor how productive its results are, but rather how well its theories describe the phenomena at hand.
No, an ad hominem attack is an attack against the credentials of person in order to weaken the strength of his conclusions. I don’t need to go through a long deduction of how calling someone a positivist on these fora is an attack against their character as well. In addition, such personal information is irrelevent to the discussed matter.
What? Are you saying if you are a positivist or not that is personal information and thus to bring it up is an ad hominem attack? Please say no.
Context is everything.
Why are you purposly censoring my statements?
I’m taking some time off the fora, frustration has been consuming me and clouding my judgment, so I won’t be responding to any posts of mine for a while. If you respond to me though, I will get back to them once I return.
I’m willing to forgive and forget if you return my username. We don’t even have to talk to each other again.
There, show is over. Moving on.
That’s his appeal honestly. As you become increasingly more radical, there are less people who appeal to that mindset. Block drops bombs and doesn’t waste time prettying up the message. The sheer amount of outreach he does is amazing.
Every day I pray for the childishness to end.
That is why I like him too, there is a certain face value honesty with someone who does not make his message pretty…
I don’t pray, I just ignore it…
Block doesn’t claim to know what he does not know. That outrages the philosopher class, who claim to know what they cannot know.
As we’ve seen revealed earlier this morning and yesterday, there are sects of libertarianism who only pay lip service to voluntarism. When Block takes voluntarism to its unlikely extremes, it shows how divergent actually respecting the freedom of others is from the sort of society certain sects desire and promote.
He’s asking it as an open ended question. People see it as dismissive, but he’s pursuing the socratic method. Explain why HE should care about an Iranian women’s fashion show, when he has a massive body of work, supporting the most extreme conceptions of property rights today.
This LL conception of “every cause is my cause” is ugly and dangerous because it implies collectivism. When someone chooses not to participate? POX ON THEIR HOUSES. We’ve seen it all before. You’re a bad person if you don’t care about each and every injustice.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time defending him, because I suspect based on recent posts, you don’t have as much interest in libertarian theory, as some forms of libertarian philosophy. And my experience with that disconnect, is that it can’t be crossed. The philosophers want an idealized world regardless of theory, and the theorists want the freedom to choose as much, or no philosophy if the mood strikes them.