I’m a so called “voluntaryist” though.
Hallelujah! Holy humanist comin through!!! You were baiting me the whole time?! I bet you know what I’m gonna call you next…
I really don’t thinks its much to assume that you don’t know what voluntaryism is. But I haven’t baited you and I’m not a humanist.
I guess it is kind of silly to say that rhetoric can be dishonest. Isn’t that a human-specific quality?
I think that voluntaryism is a dishonest rhetorical term because it makes one’s beliefs seem more pluralistic than they can possibly be. I here people say “I am okay with socialism as long as it is voluntary”. That doesn’t mean anything to a socialist because they think that socialism is voluntary, and capitalism is aggressive against workers.
If we look at what wikipedia says (if you disagree please say so)-
"Voluntaryism, or voluntarism,[1] is a philosophy that opposes anything that it sees as unjustifiably invasive and coercive. Voluntaryism regards government as coercive, and calls for its abolishment, but, unlike a number of other anarchist philosophies, it supports strong property rights which it regards as a natural law that is compatible with non-coercion.
The goal of voluntaryism is the supplantation of the state by a voluntary order, in which political authority is reverted to the individual, and association among people occurs only by mutual consent. Voluntaryists believe voluntaryism itself should be the means to achieve this goal, rather than forceful action."
This is just Anarcho-Capitalism repackaged to look nicer to certain kinds of personalities. Just like how some people call themselves leftists even though they support market anarchism. The thing is that there isn’t anything voluntary about property rights, violence is required to maintain them. The only people who don’t use violence are Tolstoyan pacifists.
I do disagree actually, but only on some points that aren’t really relevant.
Voluntaryism isn’t an attempt to repackage anarcho-capitalism, in fact, voluntaryism is older than anacho-capitalism. Now, “market anarchy” is a repackaging of AC in my opinion. Nothing in the wiki definition says that violence cannot and should not be used to defend property. However, we half to understand that their won’t be a uniform theory of property, that’s a statist concept. Just like law, the optimal system of property can only be found by competing systems. It would most likely differ depending on geography and culture.
I dunno man… Fundamentals of Voluntaryism
Lots of talk of human rights this, and property rights that. Well I guess you are a liberal, after all.
Read it, disagree. (And I never said I wasn’t a liberal)
I so badly want different Ideas about property to be safe from one another, but someone really needs to go into detail about how they can co-exist.
Do you think different laws can co-exist?
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” - Batiat#
Yes, The reason why is that people will respect the same basic meta-legal principles of property rights. It creates the context for competing law systems to arise. Saying that the market that comes from a certain variation of private property can account for “competing” ideas of private property is guilty of the stolen concept fallacy. The market (the economic market, not the market of ideas or action) is genetically dependent on the property rights that form it.
You shouldn’t have a problem at all if you think people will respect meta-legal principles.
I will have a problem if they are left anarchists who have an ideological problem with commonly accepted meta-legal principles.
If they are commonly accepted, it will be of little problem. Everyone has some ideological differences.
No, actually I think you totally miss the point. Property rights are indeed voluntary. Why? Sure violence is needed to DEFEND them…but not necessarily to maintain them. See what happened there? If nobody uses violence against you FIRST, then you never need violence to maintain property rights. You need violence to maintain property rights only when someone first uses violence against you. Using violence in a defensive manner is still adhering to voluntarism by the person that is defending. It’s the person that initiated the violence in the first place that has broken the voluntary nature of things.
edit - I do think voluntarism and anarcho-capitalism are just two ways of saying the same thing though.
This is part of why I’m not a voluntaryist, although I think some of my reasons are different from yours (I have “thick libertarian” reasons in addition to the problems of ambiguity). It does reduce to a misleading claim of pluralism in that behind the rhetoric is the presumption of a context of the person’s property norms in the first place. So saying “you can peacefully be integrated into my social framework” is misleading when there are fundamentally clashing contexts for what is considered “voluntary”. It is “tolerance” only within the boundaries of the systematic context that the other person disagrees with in the first place. The function of this is either trickery to get people to come to your side or simple naivety on the part of the voluntaryist (as in they really don’t realize the fundamental incompatibilities in question).
But I also object to voluntaryism (as a manifestation of “thin libertarianism”) on the grounds that it often ends up looking like a ridiculous form of reductionism in which all notions of ethics are reduced to nothing but non-aggression (and of course non-aggression is defined through the lense of a particular theory of property rights). I don’t buy into the formula, “whatever is voluntary is ethical” - there are things that are nominally voluntary (at least in the weak sense of asquiscence to power given the circumstances) that I consider questionable or oppressive. I find simple “voluntaryness” to be nice-sounding intuitively, but at best it is necessary but insufficient. That is, I’m more of a robust anti-authoritarian than a voluntaryist.
If “voluntaryism” and “pluralism” are stretched in a completely open-ended sense, to the point where any concievable form of government can be absorbed into it, then I think the whole concept of anarchism implodes. You just end up with a somewhat more decentralized framework in which anything ranging from monarchies to democracies control somewhat smaller geographical areas. Any significant basis with which one could possibly distinguish anarchism from non-anarchism dissapears. At best, you’re left with localized states, which could, despite the normal senses in which decentralization can be said to be beneficial, be just as and even sometimes more oppresive as any state reigning over a larger geographical area.
So I sort of object to “voluntaryism” from two different angles at once: either it is “fake pluralism” or it is pluralism stretched so far as to render itself superfluous. The closest thing to a resolution that I’ve seen to this dual-directional issue is what Roderick Long calls “generic universalism, specific pluralism”. Or, in my own words, “contextual pluralism”. It’s a classic philosophical issue of the general vs. the particular, in which too much in either direction seems to collapse. Insisting rigidly on a singular model in too broad a sense becomes hard to distinguish from the basis for a new state. Being completely indifferent to norms in the name of pluralism, however, strikes me as devolving into anomie (which could be compatible with any type of state). I readily admit that if a coherent synthesis that is practical cannot be made, I am forced into the position of a “philosophical anarchist”.
This is true of any ethic or property theory.
But only one theory is fully grounded on the concept of self ownership.
The concept of self-ownership is itself ungrounded, or at best circular and cartesian. I already went in circles on these forums about that issue long ago though, so I’m not going to repeat that in detail now.
Good points all on voluntarism. It’s just the same old definitions game as all the rest. In the end it all hinges on the definition of “aggression,” “involuntary,” etc.
John Hasnas’s common-law conception of anarchy is looking better and better. It is the only theory that seems to account for everything and explain how and why it will all work. I still hold to anti-monopolism as the basis, but I believe common law will be what results from having no monopolies.
Thats really the point, less rigidity more competition, also there isn’t any reason why you couldn’t have overlapping governments within any one region, so the idea it being more oppressive than any state seems silly. Anarchism in the classical form simply isn’t obtainable, nor desirable in my opinion.