Sigh. You’re still confusing something. My conception of libertarianism does not entail nosiness or intolerance. You’re still confusing theoretical considerations - what counts as virtue, what grounds the obligation to respect rights - with practice.
In short, because that’s what mathematics IS. But in this context it’s not pointful to pursue that discussion. A non-mathematician can’t be expected in general to have any appreciation of what mathematics IS, nor to discuss the definition of the field. It’s off-topic and foredoomed. Suffice it to say, for something to be published in a math journal, taught in a math department or studied by a mathematician, it is necessary and sufficient that it be a form of enquiry based on axiomatic reasoning.
–Len
You indicated that your definition of libertarianism is bound up with your definition of virtue; that’s how this whole discussion started. So if you can call the rest of us on the forum “libertarian” without inquiring into our motives, then you’re using one word to describe two different things. Doing that is rife with possibilities for confusion and misunderstanding.
–Len
Actually the catholic church here is not a big concern. It used to be, I guess, when the spaniards firstly landed in south america, but right now the socialists and the fascists have the upper hand - just like in the rest of the world. Conservatives(fascists) here keep their ties to the church - but that’s another world-wide phenomenon - as I said, church and state are usually sides of the same coin.
But I wasn’t really complaining about the church(es), but about the fact that parents use coercion to get ‘their’ children to conform to what the parents think is good - except it is not.
Can this manipulation be preventd ? For the time being, I suppose not. Is such manipulation in line with libertarianism ? I don’t think so…
Wait till the logicians come marching in here, insisting mathematics is a subset of formal logic (as some of them have)…
How do empty formalisms apply to man divorced of his context? If non-aggression is rooted in his very nature (from which the right to liberty stems), then it implies there is something more fundamental than it. Non-aggression, as a floating abstraction, means little more than nothing.
-Jon
Whenever the person wants to take that right. It’s their body. They should use it the way they want.
Not sure what you mean by that, or whether it’s directed more at me or Geoffrey.
To me, non-aggression is a moral principle; the one and only moral principle that can be enforced with force. It’s also the one and only law, since law is defined to be “that which can be forcibly enforced.” Anyone who holds that principle is a libertarian. Is that what you mean by “divorced of its context”?
To Geoffrey there’s “more,” though I’m not sure yet whether that includes anything that libertarians (in my sense) lack. To me there’s “more” as well: I’d like to live in a free society surrounded by fellow-believers in my particular form of Christianity, with lots of home-schoolers raising their kids with the same values as mine. But all of that’s in addition to libertarianism per se.
–Len
No, I mean in virtue of what the alleged axiom exists. What is it that renders it an axiomatic principle? Why is it contradictory to deny it? If you must appeal to something even more foundational, it simply is no longer an axiom. There’s a reason it’s a performative and not strictly a logical contradiction.
-Jon
What makes an axiom an axiom is that we choose to assume its truth. There are various arguments to try and convince you to adopt it, but in the end no axiom is anything more than something we choose to believe. Even the axioms of Euclidean geometry are nothing more than assumptions: for example, convincing arguments can be made that, in reality, there’s no such thing as a “straight line.” We choose to believe in “straight lines.”
It’s not. Hoppe, and philosophers in general, can be obsessed with asking, “But is it truly truly true?” They oftentimes convince themselves that they’ve managed to prove something “truly true,” but they’re always wrong: they either assumed what they wanted to prove; or else they proved something other than they thought they did.
Exactly. Whether defining words, or proving statements, there eventually comes a point when you have no choice but to go in a circle–either defining a word in terms of a word you’ve already tried to define, or else proving a statement in terms of a statement you’ve already tried to prove. When you realize that you can’t escape circular reasoning, you break the circle by declaring one word a “basic undefined term,” or declaring one statement an “axiom.”
Mises did have some facility with this concept, by the way. When he speaks in Human Action of “ultimate givens,” for example, he’s doing what I just said. Human desire is an “ultimate given,” which simply means either that we admit we can’t actually define “desire,” or else that we can’t actually prove that “humans desire.” So human desire is a definition or else an axiom, take your pick.
The “performative contradiction” doesn’t prove what Hoppe wants it to, though. He claims it proves that you own your body, in the sense of exclusive use. But it doesn’t prove exclusive use: it only proves that you can use it suficiently to argue. It doesn’t prove that I can’t or shouldn’t use your body for food later that evening.
With enough tweaking, Hoppe’s argument does prove convincingly that everyone believes himself to be a self-owner, which is useful rhetorically, but it fails to prove that everyone actually IS a self-owner.
The bottom line is that I’m a self-owner because I say I am, and if you attempt to cook and eat my body, I will attempt to take your life in self-defense. If you win, I’ll go to my death insisting that I’m a self-owner, and you’re a criminal. Powerful people today believe we aren’t self-owners: for example, all statists ultimately believe that. And if they want to cook and eat us, they can–we aren’t powerful enough to stop them. Self-ownership is an axiom (in Hoppe’s system), because we assume it and cling tenaciously to it. It isn’t an axiom for statists.
–Len
What I’m saying here is not unusual. It derives from a commonsense view of morality shared by many ethical theories. There’s no need for confusion or misunderstanding. There’s no difficulty in saying that particular people claim to be libertarian and by their words and deeds do indeed appear to be libertarian. On this basis we can even reasonably say that they are libertarian. We could turn out to be mistaken, but so what? That’s not an indictment of ethical theory. It’s an epistemic failure of judgment on our part, perhaps one that couldn’t be reasonably avoided but still. (This is akin to the distinction between praxeology and thymology.)
I’m sorry, but that’s just not a good enough definition. It may suffice as an internal description of your discipline to fellow practitioners of your discipline but it doesn’t serve to distinguish your discipline from others that are different in important respects. I shouldn’t have to get a Ph.D. in theoretical mathematics to be able to enter a discussion on the matter. From what I can glean from various internet sources, the subject matter of mathematics and its methodology are not conducive toward the study of human action along the lines of methodological individualism, at least not in the way that praxeology (and thymology) study it. And I don’t see how praxeology would be better served by becoming more “mathematical.”
Len, why take that axiom as opposed to some other axiom then? How does one “choose” the truth of something? I fail to see how this is not just another form of unabashed relativism, of a concealed “might makes right” view.
-Jon
That’s fine, but it’s unhelpful to confound your ethical theory with liberty. It’s more than liberty. I have my own “liberty plus,” and no idea whether you fit that standard or not–but confounding it with liberty itself is counter-productive. Libertarians are “lovers of liberty,” period. That’s a lower standard than “exemplary human beings,” or “good Christians,” or “saints,” or “enlightened beings,” but it is what it is.
Ignorance of facts not in evidence is hardly an “epistemic failure.” An epistemic failure is a flaw in your reasoning process. Ignorance of some particular fact is nothing more than ignorance.
–Len
I can make lots of convincing arguments for that axiom, just as I can for the worth of assuming “straight lines.”
But it would be enlightening, I think, for you to consider what it means for a specific act to be “objectively wrong.” The sun is objectively hot, even if the universe were sterile of all living things. It actually causes ice to melt, regardless what anyone thinks about that or whether anything in the universe is even capable of thought. What would it mean to say that murder is “objectively wrong”? If only two human beings exist in the universe, Cain and Abel, and Cain kills Abel, what is the manifestation of the “objective wrongness”? Cain may well have no conscience concerning his deed. If he won’t accuse himself, nothing else in the universe will accuse him. The moon will not frown at him. What is the objectively observable quality of “wrongness” here?
There are only two ways to answer. My answer is that Cain isn’t alone, and God condemns him: this is a pretty good working definition of “objective wrong,” where God’s opinions are the rest of the universe’s objective facts. The only other answer, omitting God, is to invent some form of karma: somehow Cain is tainted with some sort of “mark,” which is invisible to any objective detection, but which nevertheless makes him inferior to himself without the mark. In other words, the universe itself mystically “frowns” on him.
I guess you could call that “conditional relativism”: if you dismiss God and karma from your thinking, then there’s no objective definition of wrong. Unfortunately, that’s the fact. If you try to objectively define wrongness, without God or karma, you’ll come up empty. You’ll find yourself inexorably forced to say, “IT’S JUST PLAIN WRONG, DAMMIT!” Which is a textbook example of an axiom.
Eudaimonistic arguments fail because they beg the question: they effectively define “humanity” such that a certain morality is intrinsic to it, and “immoral” humans are mystically inferior. Randian “life as the standard of value” arguments also beg the question: why is life “the standard of value”? They’re also blatant non-sequiturs: how the heck do you get from “life is the standard of value” to “all intellectuals must smoke cigarettes”? Consequentialist or utlitarian arguments fail because they sometimes endorse aggression. And moral absolutism is just another name for picking certain axioms.
I’m an absolutist in two senses: first, that I cling to the NAP absolutely–to the death, mine or yours, if necessary. Secondly, I believe that the golden rule is God-breathed, and therefore “objective” for all of us in the universe who ain’t God. I simply realize something many do not: it is utterly impossible to “prove” the NAP. If you think you have a proof, I will find the flaw in it. If you expend your life on it, you’ll never find one, because there isn’t one to be found.
–Len
Well now, you yourself agreed (if I remember correctly) that someone simply not using violence against you doesn’t mean they are a libertarian. Am I right? On what basis can you say this if you ignore motivations? And here you say that libertarians are “lovers of liberty,” but what counts as love of liberty? Not just anything can count as love of liberty surely, because then you wouldn’t be able to say that someone simply not violating your rights by itself does not make them a libertarian. I don’t think you can say that someone has a love of liberty as such, if the primary reason they don’t violate your rights is out of fear of punishment. I don’t think you can say that someone has a love of liberty as such, if their own liberty is the only liberty they care about. These people are not libertarian. So I think you’ve essentially conceded my point. Perhaps we quibble over the strictness of the standard, but you’ve accepted some standard.
Okay. We could mistake someone for a libertarian through a flaw in our reasoning process (innocent or not, humans aren’t perfect at processing all of the facts available) or ignorance of certain relevant facts. Either way, it doesn’t undermine my point.
For it to be objectively wrong would mean for it to be wrong independently of the judgement of the individual, such that their judgement can either accord with it, and be correct, or not accord with it, and be incorrect. Why exactly a being such as God or mystical elements such as karma are needed for this is beyond me.
How you know that such a proof cannot be found is a matter of mystery to me. Does study of mathematics give one insight to some sort of divine realm of knowledge? Is it, as a matter of logic, an impossibility?
-Jon
That question suggests confusion on your part. A killer who happens not to have killed anyone yet doesn’t hold the principle of non-aggression. He isn’t yet an aggressor, only for lack of opportunity. To be a libertarian, one must believe that the NAP is absolutely binding upon all humans. But it makes no difference why he thinks it’s binding. It’s perfectly fine if the thinks it’s binding because aggression invokes bad karma, and he’s afraid of bad karma.
The NAP is a belief not an action. I don’t care what motivates your belief. You apparently misunderstood me to be saying that I don’t care what motivates your action. Does this distinction clarify?
Dogged insistence on the absolutely binding nature of the NAP. Why he thinks it’s binding, I don’t care. He can think Zeus “said so,” or that aggression brings karmic consequences, or that aggressors are all going to hell. As long as he agrees that it’s binding, he’s in.
I declare that the NAP is binding on all humans. I’ll defend it, to the death if necessary. But if two people on the other side of the world want to aggress against each other, I do not feel any positive obligation to intervene personally. In that sense, it could be said that I “don’t care about their liberties.” Does that make me a phony libertarian in your book? If so, we’ll have fun fleshing out these positive obligations a bit. Are we all obligated to be caped crusaders, in order to be true libertarians?
The standard is endorsement of the non-aggression principle as binding upon all mankind. You seem to have a stricter standard. That is, it appears that you might condemn someone for affirming the binding nature of the NAP, if you don’t like his views concerning why it’s binding.
In my case, for example, I believe first and foremost that it’s binding because God uttered the golden rule. I further believe that eventually the world will be purged of all aggressors by a mighty act of divine intervention. That the golden rule is marvelously fair, symmetrical and lovely is a compelling, but secondary, consideration.
–Len
Right. And if it’s a fact of reality independent of any individual’s opinion, then it can be determined by repeatable experiment. So what exactly does a wrong-o-meter do to identify wrongness?
Pursue that question all the way to an answer, and you’ll realize why either God or karma is necessary. Namely, there’s no such thing as a wrong-o-meter, and such a thing cannot possibly exist even in principle. This is clear because “wrongness” is a judgment, and a judgment cannot exist if there is no judging mind for it to exist in.
Yes. As a matter of logic, no statement can ever be proven without first assuming something. If you assume nothing, you have no tools to prove anything with. In this case, you can’t even build an empirical case until you have a repeatable experiment that distinguishes “right” things from “wrong” things–at which point, you can at least draw up plans for a wrong-o-meter, even if building one is prohibitively expensive.
–Len
That is the definition of tautology.
There doesn’t need to be a God or karma for the idea of “wrong” to exist; logical, rational human beings can make that judgement.