There was a case recently where the Brazilian government wanted to build a large hydroelectric dam in the amazon, but it meant forcing out a small indigenous village of roughly 200 people. The dam would have been able to provide electricity to several million people, but obviously because this tribe had ties to the land they did not want to leave.
So under such a libertarian society, would you always favour with the indigenous people (assuming they hold property rights) rather than whoever is building the dam? If these people didn't want to relocate because of an illogical reason, and subsequently deprive millions of electricity, do you not they should be forced to relocate?
How would this situation be solved in a free market? Clearly from a utilitarian viewpoint, these people should be given compensation and forced out, but what do you think?
No, they wouldn't and shouldn't be forced out. Their rights are theirs to hold against the entire world.
I also think the utilitarian case cannot be made because it is impossible to define the greater good (maximum utility, ect.) in a coherent manner. All that can be said is that some individual's interests clash with other individual's interests. If they have to be forced out, no amount of compensation is sufficient to recompense them for their loss, or else they would have taken it for payment in the first place.
The Bomb19:So under such a libertarian society, would you always favour with the indigenous people (assuming they hold property rights) rather than whoever is building the dam?
Yes.
If these people didn't want to relocate because of an illogical reason, and subsequently deprive millions of electricity, do you not they should be forced to relocate?
No.
Clearly from a utilitarian viewpoint, these people should be given compensation and forced out, but what do you think?
How would you go about calculating the correct amount of compensation?
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
The Bomb19:So under such a libertarian society, would you always favour with the indigenous people (assuming they hold property rights) rather than whoever is building the dam? If these people didn't want to relocate because of an illogical reason, and subsequently deprive millions of electricity, do you not they should be forced to relocate?
How are the indigenous people depriving millions of other people of (more) electricity? To say that is to imply that those millions of other people are somehow entitled to (more) electricity. How exactly are they so entitled?
Otherwise, what Stephen and Daniel Muffinberg said.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
Well these individuals can and are willing to buy the electricity. Of course the level of utility derived from the project is subjective, but why should the rights of these indigenous people to stay on an arbitrary piece of land because perhaps of largely some religious/spiritual reason, trump the right of many people to experience an improved standard of living, better education and healthcare.
I think that because you subscribe to an absolutist moral viewpoint, you are looking for excuses as to why the indigenous people should be able to uphold their property rights when the obvious solution is some form of compensation. Again, of course the compensation is difficult to attach a definitive figure to, but that doesnt mean you should reject that altogether.
Being absolutist is a strength, not a downfall. It results from logical consistency. If a rule applies in one case, it applies in all cases if there is no objective reason to apply a different rule. The only alternative is adhocery, where different rules apply to similar instances simply based on preference and not on a rational criteria for applying a different rule.
In any other science, a relativistic position is regarded as a demonstration of intellectual confusion and contradiction. It is not as though sometimes the Pythagariom theorem holds and other times it doesn't hold. It's absolute. It is not as though sometimes the second law of thermodynamics sometimes holds and other times does not hold. It always does. The same is true for justice, at least if you are being systematic and consistent.
Also, to say that both parties have a right to the same land (in the case of "many people," it is a proximate right resulting from their right to an improved standard of living, better education and healthcare), is contradictory. Rights are exclusive justified claims to some specific good. Both parties cannot have a right to the land. Either the indigenous people do or the many people do.
The reasons why the indigenous people choose to stay on the land are irrelevant. Their right implies exclusive jurisdiction to the land. Also, the reasons for the many people to expropriate the property are irrelevent.
Check out this audio lecture from 37:57 onward. Hoppe provides some excellent reductio ad absurdums of the chicago school's position on law, which also serve as reductios for utilitarian wealth maximization in general.
This was discussed here using a slightly different example, but virtually the same question.
The Bomb19:why should the rights of these indigenous people to stay on an arbitrary piece of land because perhaps of largely some religious/spiritual reason, trump the right of many people to experience an improved standard of living, better education and healthcare.
Uh...okay, if you want to play that game, let's ask the opposite question. "Why should the will of some people trump the right of others to live on their own property?" Hmm.
Why does that question sound so familiar.
And more importantly...People have a right to improved standards of living? And who exactly is obligated to provide that? Who decides what constitutes "improved"? How "improved" does it have to be before the obligation is met?
Would you like to be moved against your will ? You probably see yourself belonging to the millions who are "deprived" of electricity, have you ever thought as belonging to one of the 200, deprived of their freedom ?
The Bomb19:Well these individuals can and are willing to buy the electricity. Of course the level of utility derived from the project is subjective, but why should the rights of these indigenous people to stay on an arbitrary piece of land because perhaps of largely some religious/spiritual reason, trump the right of many people to experience an improved standard of living, better education and healthcare. I think that because you subscribe to an absolutist moral viewpoint, you are looking for excuses as to why the indigenous people should be able to uphold their property rights when the obvious solution is some form of compensation. Again, of course the compensation is difficult to attach a definitive figure to, but that doesnt mean you should reject that altogether.
So you're saying that it is morally okay if 10,000 men force your mother to have unconsensual sex with them because it will satisfy the many?
No he didn't say that. Why are you putting words in his mouth?
It's a reductio.
I think the property of The Bomb19 can be put to better usage than how it is currently being utilized, so I'm just going to go ahead and take it. Don't worry, I'll give you 20% of its market value or so. Also anybody who thinks there is such a thing as logical absolutes is not thinking in a nuanced manner; you're a logic fundamentalist if you think that.
Daniel Muffinburg:It's a reductio.
Thank you. I really think people need to learn this. It gets really tiring when you illustrate the absurdity of someone's logic by applying it to a different case and have them come back and claim you're putting words in their mouth.
John, probably the only thing that rivals the missing of a reductio ad absurdum is calling somebody a name and then having to hear, "all you can do is resort to ad hominems"; forgetting that insults are only ad hominems if they are a substitution for an argument as in, "X is stupid, therefore he is wrong." There's no law against making the statement that you believe X is stupid.
True, that is also annoying, but even if the accuser is misattributing the fallacy, at least in that case they have a point. While simply calling someone names may not equate to a fallacy, it does demonstrate bad form, and shows a lack of emotional control as well as concern for courtesy in discourse. This, not to mention the fact that name-calling is most often the tactic of people who have no argument, or who are losing the debate. It is a way to attempt to save face (from observers as well as oneself), while at the same time trying to bring the opponent into the same distressed emotional state of the aggressor. It is a way for people who have lost the intellectual battle to attempt to get their digs in elsewhere. Like the kid who loses the race but makes it a point to claim "well at least I'm not poor like you and your family."
And while yes, there are examples of bullies who actually do win the contest and still feel the need to make it personal, the act still tells much about the character of the individual engaging in it.
It is one thing to match the tone and even the language of an opponent, but useless name-calling is just that: useless.
You don't even have to do that. Simply put, if the people really wanted the electricity and were willing to pay all the costs, it would be done. It's not like the indigenous land is the only possible land fit for producing electricity.
This is mostly about the blurred line of property rights that is quite common throughout the history of civilization. State's illegitimately claiming to own all land, it's nothing new, and it's very sad.
The Bomb19:Well these individuals can and are willing to buy the electricity. Of course the level of utility derived from the project is subjective, but why should the rights of these indigenous people to stay on an arbitrary piece of land because perhaps of largely some religious/spiritual reason, trump the right of many people to experience an improved standard of living, better education and healthcare.
Because, as far as I can tell, those many people have no such right. Can you show otherwise?
The Bomb19:I think that because you subscribe to an absolutist moral viewpoint, you are looking for excuses as to why the indigenous people should be able to uphold their property rights when the obvious solution is some form of compensation. Again, of course the compensation is difficult to attach a definitive figure to, but that doesnt mean you should reject that altogether.
Should I take this to mean that first you ask us for our opinions, and when you don't like them, you tell us to offer you different opinions? And what's wrong with an absolutist moral viewpoint?
Daniel Muffinburg:It's a reductio. Thank you. I really think people need to learn this. It gets really tiring when you illustrate the absurdity of someone's logic by applying it to a different case and have them come back and claim you're putting words in their mouth.
He phrased it as "so you're saying" instead of "that's like arguing." Usually when you put it that way you are looking for clarification and trying to present their argument in as favourable a light as possible.
it's not absolutism at all. It's being principled. Only propertarian anarchists are absolutists in that sense (who believe only in all mighty property rights and ignore culture, personality, etc.).
Nope, morality from first principles is in no way absolutist (again, it doesn't apply to propertarian morality, when everything, even ethics is reduced to property rights, which could be call quite silly). It's universal, which means, it applies to all people, not only some elite or chosen gang, like OP wants it to be (force indegenous people out of their property for greater good....guess whom? FOR CHOSEN GANG, and nope, indegenous people do not fall in that category).
I think killing a man is wrong. But I also think, that killing a man in an extreme situation where you are yourself in danger and this other man is an agressor it is justified act of violence. It's still bad in my view, but it's justified.
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
Of course the level of utility derived from the project is subjective,
I don't think these assertions are compatible. If utility is subjective, it means that you can't assign a cardinal number to quantify it. You can't say that Bob derives three units of happiness from eating a bar of chocolate and Jane derives five units and Joe only derives two units.
You are assuming that it is possible to assign cardinal numbers to preferences, because you need cardinal numbers in order to infer the existence of a sum 'happiness number' of all the people in the village and their wants subtracted from the hypothetical sum utility total of all the millions of people who would putatively gain from the proposed hydroelectric project. In order for your assertion of "clear" utilitarian benefit to be correct, utility cannot be subjective, and yet you maintain that it is.
What one can do to maximise utility, if utility is subjective, is use ordinal numbers to rank someone's preferences, if you allow them to demonstrate their preferences without interfering. If you give someone $5 as an unconditional gift, to set up an example, whatever they choose to do with it will demonstrate which of their preferences, regarding that money, is superior to whatever others they might have at the time. They will have a choice between saving the money, or spending it on whatever they like, and if they decide to spend it on chocolate, you know that this is what they preferred to all other options they perceived as available to them at the time.
In order to maximise everyone's subjective utility, you have to abandon the initiation of force in absolutely all cases, because people cannot demonstrate their preferences if they are being coerced into assuming other people's preferences. If utility is subjective, meaning that you can't assign people cardinal 'happiness numbers' and then add them all up in contrived groups and subtract that total from the total of a second contrived group, then the non-aggression principle must be adhered to absolutely in order to maximise utility.
I think that because you subscribe to an absolutist moral viewpoint
Are you an arithmetical absolutist if you think that 2+2 always =4? You can only dodge on that point if you decide that the symbols used to represent the numbers actually mean something else in your mind. Of course Arabic numerals, like any other symbols, are conventional. Try to see beyond the symbols, to the immutable logical principles they are supposed to represent. If everyone could do that consistently, the world would be a better place.
This is mostly about the blurred line of property rights that is quite common throughout the history of civilization.
You will probably find that the Brazillian state actually owns the land in terms of civil law. They claim almost the entire Amazon river basin because the King of Portugal once claimed that God gave it to him. Seriously, and these are the people who criticise us for antiquated thinking...
There is no "right" to electricity or education or healthcare.
With every new technological invention we are eager to slap on the label of "right" in order to provide the people with a service which will get us more votes.
Telephone? Let's finance a national system. How can we deprive people of the telephone? It's cruel!
Internet? Same thing.
Electricity? It's only been around for some 200 years and suddenly there is a right to it. The number of years is irrelevant anyway. No one has a "right" to anything which belongs to anyone else or which would require someone to force someone else to do something (some who are not purists might argue food and water, but that is a separate issue).
The 10,000 men analogy above is perfect. Paraphrasing, if killing 1000 3-year-olds can provide health care to one million people, should we do it?
Along the same lines, are doctors required to provide health care to an ill man if they find him. Does simply holding knowledge about something make someone obligated to act?
The opinion of people not affected by the project should not matter. As a praxeological matter, it is not likely that a small village would be able to withstand the onslaught of a well-funded community seeking to build a dam for electrical power, even in a private law society. This is because of the interaction between security and law - the well-funded community can afford to present a much bigger threat to the small community than vice-versa. The small community could likely be forced out.
What is different, however, is that it is very unlikely that the actions of the well-funded community would receive any sort of legal or other moral legitimacy. No free market arbitrator would be willing to whitewash the actions of the well-funded community forcing out the poor villagers. It would be a simple act of collectively-funded expropriation. This would make engaging in such behavior much more dangerous since the torts committed may be saleable. In this case, the villagers could sell their torts to a large corporation that specializes in suing aggressive communities that commit gross violations of justice in this manner.
So, I speculate this would be the kind of thing that would happen once and once only. Sure, the well-funded community gets their way, the villagers get forced out but then they sell their tort to a specialist who goes on to win a large award and the well-funded community ends up paying a lot more for their dam than they had anticipated. Would have been cheaper to just buy the land fair and square or find an alternative energy source. Future cities or governments considering forcing out poor people who stand in the way of major public works projects will then have to take into account future legal action that can be brought against them and modify their choices accordingly.
Clayton -
Stephen: Daniel Muffinburg:It's a reductio. Thank you. I really think people need to learn this. It gets really tiring when you illustrate the absurdity of someone's logic by applying it to a different case and have them come back and claim you're putting words in their mouth. He phrased it as "so you're saying" instead of "that's like arguing." Usually when you put it that way you are looking for clarification and trying to present their argument in as favourable a light as possible.
What difference does it make whether he was intending to shine a positive light or a disinfecting one? The point is he was pointing out the logical absurdity of the claim being made. "That's like arguing" is a prefix for providing an analogous argument. What Daniel was doing was taking the logic used to make the first claim and applying it to another situation.
If I say: "obsene people should be shot."
And someone replies: "What is 'obsene'?"
And I said: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
It's not "like arguing" I should be able to shoot whomever I decide....it is arguing I should be able to. That's literally what the argument boils down to. Pointing out that fact is not "putting words in the speaker's mouth."
Whenever you use the phase "So you're saying," when it's not what they're saying, its misrepresentative of their position, regardless of intent.
Nobody ever asked Bomb, under what conditions he finds expropriation acceptable, so he is clearly not arguing that gangrape is acceptable simply because a majority of individuals benefit, and only a minority are harmed. It may be an analogous scenario beacause the justification is the same in both scenarios, but that was not his original argument.
Reductios do not begin with "so you are saying..."
Stephen:Reductios do not begin with "so you are saying..."
Did you see the example above? "Reductio ad absurdum" literally translates to "reduction to the absurd". You are literally reducing someone's argument (and/or their justification for an argument) down to it's bare logic and simply applying it to a specific case.
If you were talking to someone and he said "all people who go by the name 'Stephen' should be shot in the face." (Granted, this doesn't have to be reduced very far, as it can be seen absurd on it's face, but we'll go there just to make the point.) It would be nonsensical for you to say "that's like saying I should be shot in the face." No, that's not "like" what he's saying...he is saying you should be shot in the face. You along with anyone else who goes by that name. (I of course have to assume you're not simply trying to claim it's "not what he's saying" because he literally didn't utter those specific words.)
Now, if you wanted to make an analogous statement (i.e. one in which you could use your phrase "that's like saying...") you would reply with something like: "You think everyone who goes by a certain name should be shot? That's like saying everyone who was born on a Tuesday should be shot. It's completely arbitrary."
Do you see the difference? With reductio you are reducing the argument—the content of the literal words the person actually stated—down to its logic, and simply applying that logic to a specific case (usually an absurd case), for the purpose of illustrating the fallacy in the logic...logic which was used to form an argument or the justification for an argument. You are quite literally taking the arument as it is stated and reducing it to its logical base...essentially getting at the root of what someone is actually saying (or at least providing an illustration of it).
In a "that's like saying" situation, you are doing nothing of the sort. You are simply presenting an analogous argument to make a comment about the actual argument being made. In the above case, you weren't trying to illustrate anything about the logic the person was using, or the implications of their statement. You were simply trying to make your own comment about the statement itself...namely, that it was arbitrary.
So for another example, suppose someone said: "We should raise taxes. Raising taxes always results in increased tax revenue." A reductio ad absurdum might be: "So you're saying if we increased the tax rate to 100% across the board, the revenue from taxes would be higher than it is now?"
Your response here would be: "No he didn't say that. Why are you putting words in his mouth?"
But obviously no one put any words in his mouth. The first guy literally said "raising taxes always results in increased tax revenue". All the second guy did was take that logic and apply it to a specific case...as, if what the first guy said is true, then a 100% tax rate should yield higher revenue. Your next response might be: "But that's not what he meant! His argument was just that we should raise taxes! He didn't say the rate should be 100%! You're reducing it to absurdity!"
Exactly.
So for another example, suppose someone said: "We should raise taxes. Raising taxes always results in increased tax revenue." A reductio ad absurdum might be: "So you're saying if we increased the tax rate to 100% across the board, the revenue from taxes would be higher than it is now?" Your response here would be: "No he didn't say that. Why are you putting words in his mouth?"
This is different because you're taking his argument to its logical conclusions. The logic of your intentionally false argument is the same as the logic of his argument in this case.
In fact this is not a reductio, but a proof by contradiction.
How could it have been proof by contradiction if I was putting words in his mouth?
The response was to John James`example. Not your post.
Question: What in The Bomb19's argument was I attacking?
Stephen: So for another example, suppose someone said: "We should raise taxes. Raising taxes always results in increased tax revenue." A reductio ad absurdum might be: "So you're saying if we increased the tax rate to 100% across the board, the revenue from taxes would be higher than it is now?" Your response here would be: "No he didn't say that. Why are you putting words in his mouth?" This is different because you're taking his argument to its logical conclusions. The logic of your intentionally false argument is the same as the logic of his argument in this case. In fact this is not a reductio, but a proof by contradiction.
That's like saying "in fact this is not a plant, but a flower." (see what I did there?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
I see. One is a form of the other.
I give up. You're both right and I'm wrong.
[Edit] It still seems to me to be an unfair way to phrase it ("So you're saying), but I can't really give a good reason why it's not a valid reductio.
It's not something I would write in a doctoral thesis, but I find it fair in this thread.
Stephen:I see. One is a form of the other.
Yeah...I was also referring to the way I used the opportunity to present another example of an actual "that's like saying" situation.
Stephen:I give up. You're both right and I'm wrong.
The Bomb19: why should the rights of these indigenous people to stay on an arbitrary piece of land because perhaps of largely some religious/spiritual reason, trump the right of many people to experience an improved standard of living, better education and healthcare.
Using the Bomb's argument, we can dismantle all of capitalism anyway and return to the current state of affairs :P