Ok, but this doesn’t mean that there will be no war in a stateless society. It means you don’t think there will be. Time to find out. If you’re right, you’re right.
Anyone suggesting there won’t be is likely utopian. That is why I said you need to make sure you understand what the argument involved is. We argue that without the state able to shift its costs onto the taxpayers that war is more cost prohibitive, hence less likely to occur and its financing incurred dipping into the pockets of those whose preferences it serves.
This is also testable sort of. If wars occur less often in a stateless society then you’ll be right. Now we just have to define “less often.”
But that doesn’t make it correct or incorrect. Just as I stated earlier, we can attempt to prove the frequency of heads and tails when flipping a coin. We may land 70% heads on series of 10 tosses. We would be fooling ourselves however if we believed that it will land heads 70% of the time every time.
This is fundamentally the problem with a posteriori.
Well, that may be, but I won’t back something that hasn’t been proven to work. Just like I won’t buy a car that hasn’t been proven to run. You could tell me that logically the car must run, but until I’ve test driven it and seen it work, I’m not going to believe you.
You say that a stateless society will have less war? Show me. If you can show me what you say you can show me, I’ll buy your policy plans. If you can’t, I won’t.
But thats the point. Empiricism cannot prove anything other then likely hood. It does not prove absolutes. You must disabuse yourself fromt he concept that empirical evidence proves things as absolutely true or false.
Let me ask you then. What are the chances of you landing Heads or Tails when flipping a coin?
It can prove whether or not a hypothesis is correct. If you make a prediction and it turns out to be incorrect, your hypothesis must be incorrect. So what’s the hypothesis? That without a state there would be less war, right? Ok, first define “less war” and then get your stateless society and show me that your prediction was correct. If it is, I’ll have to admit you are right.
This would be like if I challenged you to a fight and said there was no way you could beat me but then you did. Obviously, my statement would have been incorrect as you could, in fact, beat me.
Over a large enough number of tosses, the odds are supposed to even out to 50/50.
Anyways, this thread is going nowhere.
This may be true, there may always be nations, law, war, etc. I see no reason to think otherwise. But all war is is a legal term that a nation uses. So long as people comply by whatever law they allow themselves to be governed by they will most likley punish those who refuse to obey said law. So long as people comply to be governed by a law/ code conflict seems inevitable. Likewise so long as people desire things they can take by force violence is inevitable. And I think so long as people can justify violence in someway it will be more prolific.
To quote Stirner: “The state calls its own violence law and that of the individual a crime”. There is a difference. War is a legality just as The Mona Lisa is only art because you say it is so. War is different than violence. War is a legal term seeking to justify violence and collectivise it., you have to accept the premise for it to exist as that term. The thing is though, if you accept war that means you accept whatever cause it is that you wish to put above yourself; unless of course people follow your (or the group of people with mutual interests) cause and put your cause above their own. In other words, you are the cause.
What would be idealisticly preferable though from a “peace perspective”: collectivized goals, laws, justifications, subsidies and control of violent agents, etc; or people just taking stuff because they can, stripped away and naked from any sense of righteousness and “justice”? I would tend to think the latter of the two. I can’t prove it, but it seems reasonable.
No it proves if a hypothesis is incorrect. It is very difficult to prove if something is correct, hypothetically speaking.
Accept that over a large number of tosses they don’t even out to 50/50, not even close, and never will. Empirically speaking they never do and never will. I’m glad you agree with me than that empirical evidence does not necessarily prove anything.
Your specifically asking for concrete evidence which is suppose to prove something. I have tossed a coin on my desk once and it landed heads. I have just proven to you that this coin will always land heads.
War as a defence do create peace. It is the same principle as in a micro scale.
If people never defended themselves crime would be a very profitable endeavour and run rampart. We need to defend ourselves against crime to stop and discourage crime.
As the criminal organisations grow in size this type of defence will eventually become war by definition.
I don’t think there is any sensible case for that violence is right or wrong in itself. For it to have a moral value it need to be in context.
Initiating violence is wrong, responding to it is not.
You can put other perspectives then purpose to this as well. Such as who the agent is. A case can be made that wars committed by governments are always wrong regardless of purpose for instance.
Also keep in mind that actual results have nothing to do with the moral merit of an action. Consequence based morality is a horrible idea for many reasons that won’t go into now.
So the allies stopping the Nazis might have had a desirable result but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it was the right thing to do. A free society defending itself by voluntary means would have been right. Forcing people to there death is not, regardless of what the goal or consequences might be.
Strictly speaking, war is always involuntary since you can’t not pay for it. That’s a decision made by others, and then collectively taxed.
And I don’t think you’re going to convince bloom to adopt critical rationalism. 
Empiricism may be flawed at its core, but it’s still a very useful methodology, and people grow attached to it, thinking that they can prove positive claims about the universe… when in fact they are just approximations.
Do note however bloom, the conclusion that “flipping a coin should have approximately 50/50 chance of head/tails” is an apriori statement as well, based on statistical premises. I realize you like to test premises in reality, but do note that it can never prove statistics, praxeology, or anything else wrong, it can cast doubt on the application of its premises to reality, but as a closed system, praxeology is not wrong just like math or statistics are not wrong.
May I add that war can’t be seen as just an aggregation of group violence, because while the small group of gangsters may all be voluntary joined together to screw with others, the state isn’t ever voluntarily taxing people to defend or attack against foreign threat. So even if the soldiers weren’t drafted, they still have had money stolen from them and are being paid back by killing and dying basically.
And when someone talks of war.. I always think like “your friend Bob hit my friend Joe, so I’m going to hit you and that’s justified”. It’s always a slugfest of aggression that started long before any bullets were shot.
Right. But after 1000000 tosses, not so much.
The dictionary defintion of war as violent conflict is very loose “armed fighting between two or more countries or groups”. But if we talk as war as only something done by nations you are right it is never right even if there is no draft etc. Corporations could however wage legitimate wars against organised crime or states I think.
Innocents will be put in danger, but that argument against war doesn’t really hold. The risk bystanders get hurt is increased when you choose to defend yourself against a mugger rather then give him your money also, and saying you can’t use enough force to necessary to defend yourself regardless would make defence in any form pretty useless. We can use some proportionality principle, but if we talk of war there is danger to your or your clients life so then there wouldn’t be any restrictions anyhow.
Uhm, the axiom of action doesn’t apply to cars…
Let me just put it this way to make it fairer: if war happens “less often” in a stateless society, that observable phenomenon will lend credence to the claim that “with stateless societies there will be 'less war.”
If war is just as common then the hypothesis will not necessarily be disproven but the results will not give credence to the claim.
Still, the problem remains, an-caps must find a way to get their free society first, all these speculations are meaningless to me without something to observe. Again, I don’t care if that’s not philosophically tenable for the people on the Mises forum, it’s worked pretty well for me so far. I have nothing against apriori ideas but every idea requires a test PARTICULARLY when we’re talking about public policy.
lol, is this a joke?
OK how about this? Screw the idea of the an-cap revolution, it most likley won’t happen anyway. However the concept of war as anything other than collectivized violence, the concept of following someone else’s “righteous” cause, and the endless justifications people construct for their actions are usually just nonsense anyway, so why bother participating in it?
Also, I think we can look to at least some empirical evidence for the correlation between collectivized/authoitarinism and a higher degree of violence. Off the top of my head in social psych we have:The Milgrim Experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Asch Conformity test. I am sure there is much more to look into.
The SPE is a little different from the Milgram and Asch experiments though. But I think they do show weaknesses in human psychology. That’s another topic.
War, in my mind, is a natural human activity. It’s not something that any social plan is going to get rid of.
Also, one of my favorite sayings is “if you want peace, prepare for war.” I think that to discourage war one needs to make the cost to the other party so potentially high that they won’t want to fight. This is how, in many ways, war can lead to peace. If the other side is too scared to fight they won’t fight.
The basic premise being that people will often fight if they think they can win and get away with it. I know this is not in agreement with many of the premises of AE which says that people don’t want to fight but will do so if they think there’s no other way to get what they want. In other words, that people will choose peaceable interaction over war (or violence, aggression, coercion whatever) if given the chance. I think that’s naive. Mine is people will pick war over peace unless there’s some reason to choose peace. In my mind, people will take what they want unless they have a reason not to.
For me, it’s peace that requires an explanation, not war.
Now why bother participating in war? Hmm. To me, this answer is embedded in my understanding of the world, it’s like an unspoken premise. But I’ll leave this one for later.
This is exactly the reason that a state is likely to wage constant wars. The cost of warfare can be passed along to the citizens. As you said “to discourage war one needs to make the cost to the other party so potentially high…” impossible with a state around.
Again, this is an argument against a state. If people will fight when they can get away with it (when there is a inbalance of power) how does giving one organization ultimate power not lead to violence/war?