I've posted a Blog Entry that I'd love to get Feedback on. http://determinedindividualism.blogspot.com/2012/06/all-human-science-starts-with.html
I've started from Mises's The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science and added what I believe is a sound basis for understanding in a value-free context categories that lead to the fields of Ethics and Politics.
Ethics as a field of study arises out of our use of knowledge to choose action. Since by definition action aims at substituting a preferred outcome for an expected outcome the normative question is inherent in human action. That a priori fact of human action is sufficient to generate all of the categories in Ethics, and more so, it's empowering to the cause of liberty. Right/good and wrong/bad are subjectively and individually generated results of the human mind in the pursuit of human action. That's value free. Knowledge (The Epistemological Layer) is the substrate upon which we form these judgments. Reality (The Metaphysical Layer) is the crucible within which our knowledge and our actions (the result of preferences) is tried and tested for truth/accuracy.
For Politics, the essential source is one of Conflict. Conflict arises when two intended realities (the ends of action) by two different human actors attempt to merge in reality. The field of Politics arises out of the desire for human beings to bring to the socio-economic playing field a sense of order and predictability such that we can individually pursue our own ends with a reduced risk of failure.
My blog post is here : http://determinedindividualism.blogspot.com/2012/06/all-human-science-starts-with.html
I'd love comments and feedback.
David B
Very nice! I have an article dealing with some of the same issue (but with respect to law) here. Also, I'm working on a new article/book (it began as a substantial rewrite of this) that specifically deals with the issues of ethics from an Epicurean/Misesean perspective.
Clayton -
I am hesitant to hijack your thread but I can only say that I heartily agree with your epistemological observations and I'll reproduce here the most finished chapter of my new article as a response. Hopefully, we get some good discussion going.
Awareness and Final Knowledge
The problem of morality – what is right and what is wrong – is also a problem of knowledge. How do we know what is right and what is wrong? For that matter, how do we know anything? What does it mean to know?
Conscious awareness[1] (or awareness, for short) is the sole body of knowledge. That is not to say that I cannot analyze the objects of my awareness or divide knowledge into a taxonomy or organize particular objects or relations into universals. But it is to say that there is no standard outside of myself to which I can appeal to check or verify my knowledge. All forms of knowledge are merely sub-headings within the only book of knowledge I have – my awareness. Awareness is the final – that is, only – criterion of truth.
… this item of knowledge—I am thinking, so I exist—is the first and most certain thing to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way
René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Section 7
Note Descartes’s use of the phrase “most certain”. Stated differently to emphasize his meaning: “I am thinking so, I exist is the … least uncertain thing.” I may doubt whatever I please but I cannot doubt anything less than my awareness – both the simple fact that I am aware and the specific content of my awareness.
Final knowledge is knowledge that is less uncertain than any other knowledge. Note that final knowledge is not to be confused with absolute knowledge. We have no access to absolute knowledge, that is, knowledge in which there is no uncertainty at all. Final knowledge, on the other hand, is simply that knowledge which is less uncertain than any other knowledge.
For the sake of analysis, I have chosen to break up the problem of the soul[2] into three pieces: perception, cognition and desire or appetite. This separation is based on my own introspection and is different from that employed in neuroscience, psychology or even the philosophy of cognition. This division is as arbitrary as the divisions employed in other fields and, therefore, cannot possibly conflict with them.
Perception can be further divided into two pieces: sense perception and memory perception. Sense perception is everything which comprises my awareness of the present. Memory perception is everything which comprises my awareness of the past.
Cognition is the “inner voice” that is capable of reasoning through difficult problems, drawing conclusions, constructing hypotheses based on perception, predicting the future and identifying patterns in the past, among other things.
Desire or appetite is the hunger pang that motivates action. If the soul was comprised solely of perception and cognition, the human being would be no different than a calculating device that idly waits for instructions and programming. It is the urge to act – our appetite - which compels us to move and interact with the world.
In this division, I have not overlooked the will. However, the will is not properly a piece or component of the soul. Rather, when we speak of the “the will” we are employing a hypostatic metaphor, as when we speak of “Time itself.” The will is not a thing. The will is the motion of the soul.
My awareness as it relates to memory perception is final. It is conceivable that I am misremembering the past and that the world has, as a matter of fact, unfolded differently than I remember it unfolding. However, if this were the case, there is still nothing outside of my own awareness with which to correct the mistake. Hence, any argument against the general reliability of my memory must be more uncertain than my awareness itself.
My awareness as it relates to sense perception is final. The thought experiment of the “brain in a vat” illustrates this problem. What if I am not what I think I am but, instead, I am a brain in a vat of warm saline water connected to a mad scientist’s supercomputer that is simulating the world around me? This is a logically possible situation. However, if this were the case, I would still have no other senses outside of those which are part of my awareness to which to compare. No philosophical argument could possibly imbue me with greater certainty in the reliability of my sense perceptions than the perceptions themselves already possess because I could make such arguments even if I were a brain in a vat.
My awareness as it relates to cognition is final. It is conceivable that my brain is unreliable and deduces false conclusions from true premises or fails to perceive the glaring inconsistencies in the axioms with which it operates. However, if this were the case, I could not perceive the mistake since the sole means I have to diagnose it – my reasoning – is the very thing that is compromised. Every argument by which I am convinced is cognized to be true only insofar as I comprehend it and I believe that its axioms are consistent and its deductions are valid. Since there is no external cognitive reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the faults in my own cognitive abilities, I have no choice but to simply accept the fact that it is possible that I may be mistaken or deluded about my true nature and the true nature of the world.
Whatever its origin, every belief I may have about theology or neurology or mathematics or cosmology or quantum physics must stand judgment before the throne of my awareness. I cannot have certainty through proxy, which is the fallacy of any appeal to authority. Certainty or even confidence is a state of mind not a fact residing within a physical object or within an abstract idea or within the mind of someone else. My beliefs in the unanalyzed arguments and claims of scientific authorities are more uncertain in my mind than those arguments and claims which I have analyzed and which have the assent of my cognitive faculty.
Finally, my awareness as it relates to desire or appetite is final. This is a sub-species of the brain-in-a-vat problem. It is conceivable that I am the subject of a grand hoax and that my values and desires come from a source external to myself or are really aligned against my own true interests. Nevertheless, I could never perceive the mistake since I only come to know my desires and appetites through their immediate effect on my state of mind. There is no external reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the mistakes in my valuations. Hence, any argument regarding what my appetites ought to be must be less certain than my own immediate awareness of them.
It is conceivable that I am expected or required by a deity or the Universe to act according to the desires and wishes of all mankind or all living things or the Universe or the deity himself, instead of acting according to my own desires. However, no matter how fervently I try to shrug off my appetites and adopt the desires and wishes of something or someone outside myself, I can only do so as a fulfillment of my desire to act according to the wishes of that thing outside myself. That is, when I act on behalf of others, I act by virtue of my desire to fulfill the desires of others. Even if I obey God’s command to stop desiring some sinful experience, it is only because I more strongly desire the peace of mind that comes from being in good standing with God than I desire the forbidden pleasures of the sinful experience.
If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.
Mix Stirner – The Ego and Its Own[3]
I detect errors by recognizing inconsistencies within my own awareness, not by comparing my awareness to something outside myself, which is impossible.
But if the brain be out of order and the man says "Twice four are two," instead of "Twice four are eight," or else "I must go to the coal to buy the wharf," instead of "I must go to the wharf to buy the coal," instantly there arises a consciousness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless condemned,-condemned as contradicting the inner law-the law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain should act, whether it do so or not.
William James – Principles of Psychology, Chapter 1
None of this is to suggest that I am infallible. It must be admitted that I make mistakes. The man in ancient times walking through the desert who believes he sees a shimmering ocean of water just near the horizon has made a mistake. But note how he detects his mistake – by approaching closer to the mirage until the shimmering is revealed not to be water, regardless of its superficial resemblance to water from the distance. The poor man dying of thirst in the desert does not need to understand the thermodynamics of convection and how thermoclines in the air alter the refractive index and create a mirage in order to realize that the mirage is not water. Upon approaching the mirage and finding only more sand he will realize his mistake, no matter how puzzled he may be by the propensity of dry land to appear, from a distance, like water when it is hot and brightly lit.
The man who has forgotten the date of his dentist appointment does not undergo an existential crisis regarding the reliability of all his memories. Rather, he consults the present state of the world to reconstruct the past, that is, he looks in his day-planner and finds what its present state is. There, he expects to find a mark – which hopes or suspects that he made in the past – “Dentist appointment: May 13, 2:30pm”. Using this evidence of the past, he is able to reconstruct the events as they happened on the day the appointment was made well enough to get to his appointment on time.
The man who reminisces about the good times with a friend and finds they each have a contradictory account of what happened on one particular night of carousing performs the same action as the man who has forgotten an appointment. He consults another friend to see where the balance of testimony lies. When he finds that two or three others remember things unfolding differently than he himself remembers them, he thereby detects a contradiction between his own memory and the facts of history as they are. In this case, instead of a day-planner, the evidence is the brains of his companions (or, at least, their reports of what is in their brains).
In the case of sense perception, there are a wide variety of different errors which we can experience. If you look up in the clear, blue sky, you will see small, faint dots and shadows slowly swirling around[4]. Do you, for a moment, believe those artifacts are actually there in the blue sky itself? Of course not, because when you move your eye, the artifacts themselves move with the eye. That is, you perceive that there is a correlation between the artifacts and the direction you are looking, not between the artifacts and the arch of the sky itself. It is by comparing these facts of awareness with those facts of awareness that you detect errors in the presentation that awareness gives of the facts of the objects of awareness.
A more extreme example is hallucination. In the circumstances where hallucination occurs (consuming hallucinogens, high fever, etc.) the individual is not in full possession of his cognitive faculty and is, therefore, in no position to compare this fact of awareness with that fact of awareness. However, at the conclusion of the hallucination, the individual might wonder whether the hallucination itself was “real” while what is supposedly “real” is itself a hallucination. Despite the apparent difference, this problem is solved no differently than the visual artifacts in a clear, blue sky – the internal consistency of the facts of non-hallucinatory sense perception is what gives them “reality”.
In the case of cognition, we detect errors by the presence of pure contradiction in our basic beliefs and conclusions. The science of logic tells us that there are only two possibilities when contradiction arises – either we must revise our basic beliefs or we must eliminate as invalid one of the contradictory conclusions. If both our conclusions are equally valid on the basis of our basic beliefs, then we are left with the choice to either revise our basic beliefs or proceed in a state of quasi-delusion.
Because I can detect mistakes in my awareness, I know that I make mistakes and I can conceive of the possibility of avoiding making mistakes in the first place. In the case of the man in the desert who saw a mirage, if he survives and sees a mirage again in the future, he is aware of the possibility that he can be mistaken about the presence of water by virtue of his memory of his past mistake. In the case of the man who has forgotten something, he is aware of the possibility that his memory may fail him and he might insure himself against this eventuality by leaving physical evidence of past events so that they can be reconstructed at a later time without the direct aid of specific memory of those events.
The story of Hansel and Gretel illustrates the importance of choosing wisely in how to aid one’s memory. Hansel and Gretel have been led deep into the forest by the witch when.
… they fell asleep and evening passed, but no one came to the poor children. They did not awake until it was dark night, and Hansel comforted his little sister and said: "Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again." When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – Grimm’s Fairy Tales
We perceive errors in the facts of awareness by detecting contradictions or inconsistencies between them. Hence, it follows that what we deem to be non-erroneous facts of awareness are all and only those facts of awareness which are consistent with each other. Awareness itself is experienced as an indivisible whole so the facts of all the faculties into which I have divided awareness for the sake of analysis – memory, sense-perception, cognition and appetite – are all liable to be compared with one another as well as with themselves and to either reinforce the “picture” of awareness or, else, to contradict it.
If the facts of awareness contradict each other, this either forces a revision of the picture of awareness or the detection of an error in the respective faculty. Of course, it must be the case that this process is almost always happening without the slightest thought or effort on my part, that is, this “picture-building” process through error-detection and picture-revision is something that my brain is designed to do automatically.
The comparison of facts of awareness between two or more individuals is simply multiple instances of this same process of picture-building based on the facts of awareness. The much vaunted superiority of objective knowledge over subjective knowledge is often exaggerated or, at least, over-simplified. In the same way that you become more intimately familiar with the appearance of an object by looking at it many times in succession than by looking at it only once, so the same phenomenon when perceived by many people at once is more intimately familiar to those people, as a group, than it is to any one of them. The difference is that the faculties of your awareness permit your past and present selves to converse, unmediated, among each other regarding their many observations of the same phenomenon whereas if different individuals independently observe the same phenomenon, they must communicate through external means with each other in order to compare their observations.
Nevertheless, from the point of view of each individual, the knowledge in the group is still less certain than his own awareness until he is able to fit the group’s knowledge with his own in a self-consistent manner. But when ranking the knowledge of others, the individual should have more confidence in the knowledge of a large group than in the knowledge of a small group, ceteris paribus, for the same reason he should be more confident in his own observations of a phenomenon the more often he has observed it.
Socrates discusses this topic when he probes Theaetetus on the nature of knowledge and then proceeds to provide an account of Protagoras’ views on knowledge:
‘Once more then, Theaetetus, I repeat my old question – “What is knowledge?” Take courage, and by the help of God you will discover an answer.’
‘My answer is that knowledge is perception.’
‘That is the theory of Protagoras, who has another way of expressing the same thing when he says, “Man is the measure of all things.” He was a very wise man, and we should try to understand him. In order to illustrate his meaning let me suppose that there is the same wind blowing in our faces, and one of us may be hot and the other cold. How is this? Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who is cold, cold to him who is hot. And “is” means “appears,” and when you say “appears to him,” that means “he feels.” Thus feeling, appearance, perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only a “facon de parler,” by which he imposed on the common herd like you and me; he told “the truth” (in allusion to the title of his book, which was called “The Truth”) in secret to his disciples. For he was really a votary of that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be relative; nothing is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all is in motion and mixture and transition and flux and generation, not “being,” as we ignorantly affirm, but “becoming.”’ [Emphasis added]
Plato - Theaetetus
Socrates relates that Protagoras said man is the measure of all things. Stated differently, no proposition can be more certain than that my soul is the measure and judge of all things. The truth of any other proposition can only be judged by virtue of the fact that this proposition is true. The compromise of conviction of belief in this proposition cripples my ability to think about myself, about my peers and about the natural world. It is always the result of fear. That is, acceptance of your standing in the world is not a matter of arguments, evidence and debate; it is a matter of maturity and self-development.
The finality of conscious awareness should not be confused with the Absolute. Nor should it be taken as a license to attempt to impose belief or assent to facts on others.
… some philosophers were ready to overrate the power of human reason. They believed that man can discover by ratiocination the final causes of cosmic events, the inherent ends the prime mover aims at in creating the universe and determining the course of its evolution. They expatiated on the "Absolute" as if it were their pocket watch. They did not shrink from announcing eternal absolute values and from establishing moral codes unconditionally binding on all men.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, chapter 3.1
The fact that I do not converse with the Absolute, that is, that my every belief is always and necessarily less than absolutely certain does not alter in the slightest the fact that my awareness is the sole body of knowledge to which I have access. The knowledge I have by virtue of my awareness is final knowledge, that is, it is the least uncertain knowledge. All other knowledge – even, or especially, knowledge of the Absolute – is more uncertain and, therefore, must be held more tentatively.
[1] I mean by this subjective experience, including all the respective faculties which constitute subjective experience, not merely the senses.
[2] I am using this term advisedly and nearly synonymously with “mind” or “self”
[3] Accessed from http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/enee.html July 2012
[4] These are called “floaters” and are bubbles or other impurities in the gel within the eyeball.
Clayton,
Good it looks like I'm not the only one looking in this area. Mises in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science said that he thought that Politcs may also flow out of Praxeology, but he didn't see how.
My argument is that a clear definition of a dispute (or conflict in my terminology) is the essential a priori concept from which the entire field of Politics. By Politics I mean both the science which would be purely theoretical (Philosophy) and the technological application (Law/Politics in practice).
So, incompatible intended realities is my best definition of a conflict. But I note that it's an Epistemological conflict, NOT a metaphysical conflict. Avoidance as you term it in your discussion is about estabilishing social norms and rules that provide a higher level of certainty in your actions within a social context. The unit that precedes conflict and over which there can be conflict is an intersection of four parts.
Note, that intersection is the beginnings of a relationship between a human mind and reality which one might see as leading to a concept of property. It's possible for those two plans that each involve one such intersection to be incompatible with each other. Note that it's a conflict at the level of the human mind and the intentions of the actors. Reality has no problem. We do. When we seek a resolution we are seeking to answer the question, "Who has the right of way?"
I believe viewing it this way forms a basis for understanding how a concept of rights exists. Property rights when defined within the norms (loose and informal) or within the laws (formal and more rigid) of a society flow out of creating bounds and conditions for such a 4-way intersection of time, matter, space and mind.
Note, there is no right or wrong introduced here. If we view a society as a complex system, the questions we should be asking is about how the norms and laws that we create send signals to the various actors in the system, and what side effects those have.
Just a couple notes in response. I agree that conflict is the root concept that resides behind the origin of social norms, at least, those having to do with conflict. An argument could be made that there is another "half" of culture that subsumes social norms that arose to enhance or impel cooperation (e.g. sociability itself, holidays, festivals, dancing, music, etc.) But - from a liberal philosophy point of view - this is not an important distinction precisely because such social norms must, by definition, be voluntary. It's where people are making threats, extorting and forcing other people to do things they'd rather not do - as an integral part of the culture - that captures the attention of liberal philosophy as a matter of social criticism.
Also, I thought of trying to reduce conflict to space, time and material but I think it's deficient. What is sound pollution? Is it really a conflict over matter? Do you own the vibrations of the air molecules in your apartment as well as the molecules themselves? What is radio jamming? Is it a conflict over the RF vibrations of all the empty space and matter where the radio signal spreads? I think that the most general term is physical resources which might encompass any real thing. The only purpose of pointing out that conflicts are regarding physical resources is to rule out from the outset that conflict is ever actually over intangible things, for example, ideas, beliefs, feelings, patterns, and so on. The man who is on trial for a belief is merely being aggressed against since there is actually no conflict at all.
Another point, my goal has simply been to move Political and Ethical Analysis to a more sound footing.
If we accept human society as a complex system, if we accept the human mind as a complex system, It becomes less important to control the output and more important to setup feedback loops properly. Or more importantly setting up the negative feedback loops so that they're wired more quickly and more directly back into the system. Many of our laws are simply designed to delay the negative feedback from specific actions, but it doesn't stop the feedback from coming back in, it just forces the negative feedback to become louder. Think of the malinvestment in the business cycle. It comes back, it has to. But it just takes longer and becomes more painful.
In the second paragraph, I would treat matter/energy as the same thing for the purposes of this discussion. Your missing my point slightly by trying to establish the "right" way of resolving the issues instead of providing a sound basis for analyzing the issue. Using your own property (stereo, radio transmitter) that generate side effects outside of your own property is not incompatible with what I've been saying. The dispute over vibrations in the air in your apartment go to the fact that the actions have violated your own property. Norms/laws constructed socially attempt to establish bounds and conditions for aggreeing to the "offense" and the "cure".
If you and I go about establishing a system of juriprudence, we may offer logical and principled bounds and conditions for such eventualities. That doesn't change the fact that the essential dispute is a case of such an intersection of the 4 parts I've described. Radio waves preventing mine from being picked up by a receiver doesn't alter my transmission, but it does alter the reception by another.
trying to establish the "right" way of resolving the issues instead of providing a sound basis for analyzing the issue
No, I'm looking at the basis, see my illustration of the man on trial for what he believes. Such judicial cartoonery is so obviously wrong and counterproductive that we should be able to derive some litmus test to determine whether something is actually a conflict or not, that is, whether it even merits to be heard at law.
Let's say Alice discovers that Bob believes in Scientology. Alice hates Scientology and is offended by the mere fact that Bob is a Scientologist. She tries to persuade Bob not to be a Scientologist but he won't change his mind or ways. So, Alice decides to sue Bob for his belief in Scientology, claiming that he must pay such-and-such damages for being a Scientologist. Should such a dispute even be heard? I would argue that any reputable arbitration agency in an unhampered law market would not even dignify such a suit with a hearing.
The reason is that a belief is never a harm to anyone because a) ideas are not scarce so nothing is being "taken away" from anyone and b) an idea resides completely within the property of the person who believes it, that is, in his brain, so it can't possibly "damage" or "interfere with" the property of anyone else. The same is true of all the other intangibles I mentioned, most notably patterns which has massive implications to patent and copyright law. If conflict over a pattern is not even permitted to be heard at law because there is simply no conflict at all, then intellectual property law would instantly become moot.
This is not "solution space" it is "foundation space". What are the proper foundations for legal dispute?
@Clayton
Every so often Thomas Jefferson gets things right:
But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
@gotluck: Great quote!
You're asking a secondary question that assumes facts not in evidence in my proposition. What is a legitimate dispute? That's implied by legal. I'm simply trying to provide a basis for dispute prior to the provision of a system for resolving it.
My basis is intentionality + incompatible intentions. So you have 1 reality + N intended realities. if N1 and N2 are incompatible you have a potential for dispute. If two actors ACT to put N1 and N2 into play, you have R1 decide the outcome. In the Scientology example, there are events in reality left out that would raise it to an N1 and N2 scenario. I don't know anything about the contents of your mind, EXCEPT through actions I perceive in reality. Those actions (for me to perceive them) and interpret them as must result in changes to reality or I CANNOT have anything to object to.
In your paper you detailed some examples of avoidance mechanisms in nature that have evolved as mechanisms for avoiding disputes. Even without knowledge on the human level you find dynamic biological systems and social communities that through selective pressures evolve mechanisms that promote survival. In them we find the beginnings of the types of systems we see as dispute resolution, social norms for dispute avoidance, behaviors that economize action, whether it's pack hunting behaviors etc. But in human society we see these systems writ large and complex. They still operate on the same types of principles.
An interesting side note. If I'm crazy and I think I can read your mind, and I think I hear things that I object to, then I have a problem. But when I DO SOMETHING about that objection (that's perceivable by you) THEN you and I may have a dispute. It takes two to dispute. Teasing these things out from inside a system of jurisprudence may not be easy, but I believe it's a reasonable goal. First providing a basis for understanding the existential pressures that lead to systems of governance, regardless of the scope or form is a reasonable goal. I would argue that even without the foundational axioms I'm offering common law evolved out of the everyday arbitration decisions that played out in earlier civilizations.
In your scientology example it was lacking specific effects in reality that were objected to, and specific effects or outcomes in reality that were desired instead of those. Someone's belief is a second order effect that isn't known directly, but only through first order effects (speech acts, etc.)
My basis is intentionality + incompatible intentions. So you have 1 reality + N intended realities. if N1 and N2 are incompatible you have a potential for dispute. If two actors ACT to put N1 and N2 into play, you have R1 decide the outcome.
Yes, the term I use is "mutually exclusive ends". Someone is going to be disappointed.
In the Scientology example, there are events in reality left out that would raise it to an N1 and N2 scenario. I don't know anything about the contents of your mind, EXCEPT through actions I perceive in reality.
Of course - but that's precisely the point that gets skipped by many (statutory) laws that prohibit all kinds of things like "copying", "blasphemy", "treason" - even money laundering - and so on. There is an utter failure to specify what it is that constitutes a wrong under such laws. They prohibit intangibles so they have nothing to do with real conflict. In order for an actual conflict to exist, there must be two distinguishable realities, as you put it, that could be brought about... one in which party A gets their way and one in which party B gets their way. In the case of these intangible crimes, the existence of a "dispute" is always a one-sided charade orchestrated by a kangaroo court and is nothing but simple aggression dressed up in the robes of law and theology.
If you look at the crime of, say, unbelief (I assume this is still punishable in strict Sharia countries), there are not two "realities" only one of which can come about. Every outcome of the case is indistinguishable with respect to the offense charged. You can't say that writing a recantation of unbelief is the outcome desired by party A and not writing a recantation of unbelief is the outcome desired by party B because party B isn't charged with the crime of not writing a recantation of unbelief, he's charged with the crime of unbelief itself. The writing of the recantation is just taken to be evidence of the cessation of the crime.
So, pointing out that these kind of non-torts are not even a matter of law is a crucial preliminary step in defining exactly what is law versus a charade making a pretense at being law. Other considerations of legal practice are also relevant to this point (e.g. absence of conflicts-of-interest).
Those actions (for me to perceive them) and interpret them as must result in changes to reality or I CANNOT have anything to object to.
So we agree!
That wasn't an oversight, it was intentional. The point is that it doesn't matter how/why Alice is objecting to the "Scientology belief in Bob's head", the point is that she simply can't have a conflict with something inside Bob's head... and this point bears emphasis because a great deal of human law has historically and still presently - even in Western law - concerns itself with what is going on in people's heads!
I see now that we do in fact agree.
One of my goals in this type of a deconstruction is not to criticize directly things like patent laws, or "blasphemy" laws, or even "treason". I'm more interested in just classifying clearly the laws in terms of conflict. In a court case for example, we are arguing about N1 and N2. We should make clear what N1 and N2 are. As I'm thinking about it, and it occurs to me that another potential dispute resolution construction might be brought before an arbitrator would be N1 happened, N2 is what I wanted and reasons X (from our commonly accepted legal code) provide that my N2 had precedence, thus I want N3 ordered (and submitted to) by the actor in N1.
For example, in patent law if I write a document that describes a new type of knife and make it public knowledge in a particular way (Patent Office), and another man either through his own ingenuity or through hearing about or reading that document makes a knife that matches my description, what are the N1 and N2? N1 might be the knife-maker + a set of atoms of metal + some composite plastic, the time component might matter matter IF that's part of the patent definition, the location component would only be relevant in terms of the arrangement of the atoms relative to each other. N2 would be the patent-holder and the identical set of atoms, a time component described in the patent, and any other arrangment of those atoms other than one that matches the patent.
Let's reframe this same example without the patent laws and construct an equivalent N1 and N2. For example, imagine our kids playing in the backyard, and one picks up a stick, breaks off the branches, rubs one end on a concrete sidewalk to make a point, and then starts throwing it in the dirt as a spear to entertain himself. The other sees this process and the result, and decides to make his own because it looks fun to throw a spear in the dirt. The first child then asks me to break the second child's stick... Or he asks me to force the second child to give him the stick... Or the child one asks me to force the child two to give child one a quarter for each stick the child two makes now and in the future... Or perhaps, he just tries to break or take the other's stick...
I'm not judging the conflict, I'm just trying to draw it out in sharp relief. I think that's the value that Praxeology brings to both the theory and practice of conflict resolution or "Politics".
Now, the secondary benefit that I hope to help bring out is the ability to more clearly trace and examine the feedback effects of certain types of political technology (conflict resolution in practice) and that such analysis would form a useful tool for the technologists of politics.
In Austrian Economics, many great insights come out of Praxeology. I'd like to mention a couple and then ask a question. One interesting insight is how one good in a barter economy becomes money through instances of indirect exchange. Prices are another interesting phenomena that are clearly understood in Austrian Economics, they represent the aggregation of a vast amount of raw information about supply and demand for certain goods. It then becomes blatantly obvious that any manipulation of those prices represents a distortion of those signals such that actors become convinced of information that's not true.
Is it possible that similar insights might not pop out as we analyze politics (theory + technology) from a Praxeological point of view? For example, one supporting argument for Natural Property rights is that a well protected right of individual property rights provides a level of stability that makes it easier to save and invest in productive capability. Such capital investment provides a basis for the type of productive and technological improvements we've seen in the last 300 years. That doesn't make Property Rights, "Right" in some metaphysical sense. But it makes it pretty clear from a complex systems analysis point of view, it becomes more likely for people to engage in productive efforts that have a longer range payoff. Conversely, in systems that use a communal type of ownership (owned by none and all) it becomes clear that the risk of losing/wasting an invest in capital rises as the time to gain a productive result increases. Restated, if someone might come in an take over my car plant at any point, is it worth the investment of time an money to construct a car plant? This one's fairly obvious, and we all know it, but how can we use similar analysis of other examples?
Another interesting point that I keep coming back to, this is all subjective. The societies we get emerge from the rules we set, from the values we hold dear, from the ways we resolve disputes. From the knowledge constructed to help us navigate this world, we get results that reality plays out in an absolute way. In Politics and even in the Ethical underpinnings of Politics, we fail miserably in that the modeling we use in these arenas fails us miserably in practice. How can anyone not see that the latest Obama healthcare bill will fail miserably if the goal is to provide affordable quality healthcare to as large a population as possible? How can anyone not see that if the goal is to improve the quality of the cheapest and lowest level health care that the latest Healthcare Bill will do the exact opposite, it will decimate the low end health care system. Prices will go through the roof, and healthcare providers will stop providing services they can't make a profit from.
Anyway, you're forcing me to think much more deeply about this, and I appreciate it.
One of my goals in this type of a deconstruction is not to criticize directly things like patent laws, or "blasphemy" laws, or even "treason". I'm more interested in just classifying clearly the laws in terms of conflict.
My interest is the same. However, two points - first, it often helps to construct thought-experiments to illustrate a point and second, at some point, the "rubber meets the road" and you're no longer talking about philosophy of law but legal practice. I think the two can be profitably separated but I also think that philosophy of law stands in relation to legal practice in the same regard that the philosophy of science stands in regard to oil production or weather forecasting. That is, there is an occupational distinction between theorists and practitioners and a lot of things that theorists like to think about don't necessarily have any bearing on the real world and many of the problems practitioners have to solve through "practical means" are too complex to be tackled by theorists.
But this even more the case in law precisely because of the "feedback effects" you're talking about - in my view, law is what people hammer it out to be so the job of the legal philosopher is not only to work out the metaphysical preliminaries of law but also to go out and act like a "biologist of law", that is, look at law as it actually is and perform analysis on that - why is the law this way rather than that way (in particular, why does real law deviate from that which might be constructed on "pure rational theory"), how did this law come to be, can we predict how other areas of life are likely to come under new developments in law on the basis of how past laws have emerged, and so on.
But for me, the key issue is that a dispute that is ostensibly over a patent/copyright (any IP) would not be a dispute over a "pattern", whatever else it might be. This is worth pointing out because a lot of people seem to believe that patterns can be disputed over. They simply cannot be for the same reason that a belief in your head cannot be disputed over. I agree that it is possible to attempt to use lawsuits to construct IP rights but the key is that the disputes could never actually be over "patterns".
I've been reading Max Weber lately. You should take a look.
I recommend reading David Friedman for a utilitarian approach to answering the kind of questions you want to answer (his arguments are nearly praxeological in many cases). While I don't agree with his methodology in many cases, I think his general approach is worthy. He constructs a hypothetical social order, tweaks some conditions versus the real world, then reasons out some of the possible consequences. Keeping Weber in mind is good for staying "grounded" while engaging in such thought experiments.
Well, I think this is more in the realm of pure sociology - taxonomizing the sorts of rules that actually emerge and their actual effects, to whatever extent possible. Of course, social norms are just one part of the social order but I think the analysis you're looking at here is more sociology than philosophy of law (of course, there's plenty of room for overlap and give-and-take at the boundaries between the disciplines).
Great! This is by far my favorite topic now, so I'm happy to discuss. Plus, it's nice to see that another human brain has come to similar conclusions that I've come to - feels like a bit of a sanity check.
It might be this should be a separate post. However this is an interesting thought that has been rolling around for a few days. There's a lot of thinking historically (mine) that's led me to the components, and I'll fill in a little about that.
As a young man, finding myself, I spent a lot of time reading religious materials from eastern cultures at the same time that I was re-reading the Bible of my own religious upbringing. An interesting component to me was how much commonality there was in some ways.
Another aside, I recently read Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, and in chasing some of his internet presence I found a point he made that seemed interesting to me, which was if you want to know about the kitchen of the future compare the kitchen of today with a kitchen from a hundred years ago, and compare that to one 1000 years before that. One of his points in his larger discussion was that prediction is insidiously difficult, and in fact actually impossible to do in practice if not in theory. However, his point with that example was, the newer the tool, concept, or process, the less likely it is to "stick", the tools, processes, and concepts that have survived for long periods of time are far more likely to survive.
Still I haven't arrived at the central idea of this post, but I make those points to suggest that there's something of value and useful about these ancient texts and religions that have survived for so long because of the fact that they've survived so long.
In a translation of Tao Te Ching that I was introduced to as a young man in the military, the author explains the phrase Tao Te Ching as "How Things Happen". The divide was between "how" and "what". Tao is "How" and Te is the "what." Te is the reality that we encounter, the ever-changing always dynamic world around us: the creation, as some religions would term it. Tao then is the underlying nature of reality that provides the constant unchanging rules for the way in which Te, the dance of reality, occurs.
-Trust me I'm going to connect this to Ethics and Politics shortly
In the Introduction to "The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science" there is a section called "1. The Permanent Substratum of Epistemology". Mises says
[E]verything is in a ceaseless flux, says Hericlitus; there is no permanent being; all is change nd becoming. It must be left to metaphysical speculation to deal with the problems of whether this proposition can be borne out from the point of view of a superhuman intelligence and furthermore whether it is possible for a human mind to think of change without implying the concept of a substratum that, while it changes, remains in some regard and sense constant in the succession of its various states.
Note here, that you find in the "ceaseless flux" an idea expressed in Taoism of the "Te". Yet you also find that underneath it, we infer "the concept of a substratum that, while it changes, remains in some regard constant in the succession of its various states." This would be the "Tao" or "How" in "How Things Happen".
How and What. All of man's knowledge seeks to serve a dual purpose. Apprehend the how, to model and predict the what. Observe the Te, intuit the Tao, predict the Te.
We do this to what end? Our actions aim at specific ends, we desire specific results. Our actions are necessarily speculative. All modeling is done in reference to a "present" which has already passed. All of our actions aim at modifying a future which has not yet occured. We run the risk of being wrong, and getting ends that we don't want.
In short, our knowledge production, aims at certainty of results. In the natural world we observe, reliably, a duality of how and what. We seek principles, rules, laws, knowledge, models of how, to predict the what. Our natural sciences are highly effective at this.
Note however, that even as good as they are sheer complexity enters and no matter how good our understanding of the "How", uncertainty creeps back in very rapidly as we play out our imagined futures. Weather prediction is an amazing real world demontration of this phenomena. We can get it kind of right, but no matter how sophisticated it gets, the complexity problem means that the farther we get from now, the more detail we need in the initial conditions of our model. We simply can't model accurately very far into the future.
The modeling we do, that is successful in predicting, is based on rules which we can rely on, which are given to us as fundamental properties of the "How" of reality.
Why would we not seek such certainty in all our endeavors? Now on to the fields of Ethics and Politics. Note that how is the rules, and what is the outcomes. In Politics we seek certainty of results. All action is speculation, and it seems unlikely that men will engage in actions they find highly risky unless obviously the potential reward is very high also. Be that as it may, our actions will also be aim at increasing our ability to attain certainty in new ways where it does not currently exist by altering the playing field. Politics and Law function in this way. They attempt to provide a level of certainty about how other human beings you encounter will act when they encounter the results of your actions.
I say all of this to get to what I think is in important distortion that occurs, that needs to be identified as such, and which warrants very careful and sober acknowledgment as it can actually devastate our societies when it occurs.
In action we seek very specific "Whats". We seek to put the world into specific states. We do that by acting in accordance with the "How". In law and politics if we focus so hard on the "What" that we become arbitrary in the "How", we end up making all action more risky. Certainty about "How" results in predictable causal chains. Focusing so hard on the "What" in our socio-economic conditions that we become capricious in the underlying rules of our political and social systems we will in fact achieve the opposite of risk reduction.
That's the distortion I believe we see. Seek equality before the law. Don't seek equality of results. So many of the political argumentation we have today rests specifically on this very distortion.
Now, if I were to remain value-free in my analysis of our world, I'd say that the theory of evolution combined with praxeology (and economics) is probably the best tool we have for providing some analysis of our human societies, both historically and in the present.
So, let's imagine 50 thousand years ago, on a remote island, there is a population of one thousand humans. And for whatever reason, the majority (say 80%) of the population finds obesity to be more attractive than to be thin and lithe. Let's assume that what we know today in medicine holds as true for this population, so we know that the obese members will live shorter periods of time, and that they will encounter a significantly higher rate of different diseases. Let's say also that the environment is for the time being able to support eating at a level and in a manner that produces such obesity.
Now, we know from a basic understanding of the world, that over a long period of time different pressures will arise on that population, and at some point, whether through overcrowding or through changes in the ecosystem, natural or otherwise, the food supply will become a scarce resource. At this time, the surviving thin and lithe segment of the population, previously considered "ugly" and perhaps even outcasts and subhuman, will begin to thrive relative to their obese compatriots.
The slimmer members will probably find it easier to reproduce and survive under these altered conditions, those who find them attractive will find their genes get propogated more often and over time, slim will be the new fat... It will become "beautiful".
In this thought experiment, note that the underlying rules never changed, obesity caused all of the same issues it always did. It was inefficient, it was damaging to the members, it was "less fit", it could not continue to succeed if conditions stayed the way they were. But conditions were such that the necessary evolutionary pressures (selection) weren't operating in that vector, though it was highly likely they would at some point. In effect an inefficient mechanism was thriving locally, even though in the long run it couldn't outcompete the more efficient one.
Another note, what would it be like to be the skinny guy, in the obese time? It would suck, you'd be the ugly duckling.
When David Friedman, talks about using economic analysis on law, it's interesting, in that he focuses in on efficiency, and how efficiency there's a hypothesis that common law is common law because it's efficient. I'll grant this is highly likely. Law that consistently produced inefficient results would not thrive, law that did would. It makes a fundamental sense. Another thing we would imagine to exist in common law is some mechanism that resists changing historical precedent. I can see this emerging for a specific reason, IF the law might change arbitrarily and capriciously, speculation (all action) becomes riskier. So, I would expect to find those who can set precedent in interpretation of "good law" to be highly suspicious of setting new precedents that violate historical precedent.
The risk in setting a new precedent is to destabilize society such that something akin to the "FatLand" example above happens in our society.
In fact, however, I would argue that this has indeed happened. Now, what do we know about reality? No matter how hard we try to force a specific what, if the causal analysis doesn't accurately reflect the "How" of reality, it's doomed to failure. This is the one boon for the anarcho-capitalist, and the austrian economist. The downside is I feel like a Thinlander in Fatland... I know it will come my way, but how long do I have to watch and wait?
In the long run all of our sciences, not matter what the realm will converge on providing stable "how" models that help us achieve results with less risk. I'd state that as an axiom, we may see local disruptions that operate in the opposite direction, but in the long run it'll work out that way.
As a follow on, in seeking redress before a court, one person is claiming that another member of the society has violated the how, in achieving a what. The how is produced by us. And it's judged by us. But the results of the society so based are judged evolutionarily in competition with other societies.
Even more so, it's entirely possible that one of the reasons that we haven't discovered intelligent alien life, is because there is a technology hurdle we're encountering that we is extremely difficult to get over. Can our social sciences (the ones built on top of the epistemological layer rather than the metaphysical layer) catch up technologically with our physical sciences? Our physical science based technology has created existential risks, and is advancing such that new ones become possible every day. There are two bottlenecks through which we must pass in order to survive. The planet earth is a single point of failure, and the sun is a single point of failure. Our current technology level puts us in the position of being able to destroy the earth, or at least the life on it pretty easily. At the very least, human life would get demolished, and back down the evolutionary tree we go.
Our social sciences are lagging far behind, IMO. Given a stable political system (the tech) with certain features, which might arise out of a sufficiently advanced set of social sciences (politics, law, economics, others?) we might be able to rapidly scale the physical sciences technology tree and establish stable human life outside this planet, and eventually outside of the solar system. If that happens, we break out of the bottleneck, but if not...
@DavidB: Great thoughts and I want to commend your writing style, as well.
our actions will also be aim at increasing our ability to attain certainty in new ways where it does not currently exist by altering the playing field. Politics and Law function in this way. They attempt to provide a level of certainty about how other human beings you encounter will act when they encounter the results of your actions.
I will point out that I don't think law cares about certainty or stability unless we are talking about statutory "law" (which I don't consider to even be law). I think that stability is an inadvertent byproduct of law that arises out of the "feedback effect" that law produces on the social order.
In fact, I think that to be really general, we have to push back further than law itself and look at social norms. Max Stirner in his book The Ego and Its Own underscores the fact that utility is the fundamental relation in which humans stand with each other.
Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.
In other words, humans are "users" - we use the environment to bring about our ends, we shape it, push it, crush it, dig it, whip it, whatever it takes to get what we want. This is the "how" you talked about. And we do this to bring about a "what".
But what has to be realized is that the social order itself is the single most important "how" that is at anyone's disposal. If you want to communicate with your father on the opposite coast, you do not need to get in a car and drive there to talk to him. You can pay people to carry a letter to him or to allow you to use the communication lines they've buried in the ground, or whatever. And, in so doing, you are using these people to your ends (speaking to your father).
Social norms, then, are the "code" or "science" that dictates what inputs will generate what outputs. If you use a lever, you can lift a very heavy object. This is a principle of the science of mechanics. Using the right "how", you can generate "whats" that you could not with a naive approach (e.g. trying to lift a large boulder with your bare hands). But the same is true of the social order - if you want to send a letter to your father, you're going to have to pay someone to do it... simply going down to the post office and screaming at the clerk or hitting him over the head will not get your letter to your father. There are correct and incorrect "how"s and choosing the wrong "how" - like trying to lift the boulder with your bare hands - will not bring about the desired "what".
And this very fact is the feedback on human behavior. It is why you abridge your natural impulse to simply seize what you can take and destroy whatever gets in your way. Law is merely a more ritualized/formalized version of the informal/widespread social norms that affect your behavior almost every moment. For this reason, the problem of "what the law should be" ought to be strictly separated from the study of "what the law is" because there is no clear path between the two - statutory "law" is certainly no solution.
I agree whole heartedly. In fact I would argue that all the "user" of any legal/political tech cares about is a "What" result, he's asking for. Law can't care, it's a byproduct of the only thing that does care, us. But as consumers of a system that provides for this kind of "How" certainty for more reliable "What" generation, we are concerned with the "How" that we are consuming. In this case the "How" by which our common legal systems or political institutions achieve the "What".
We depend on the one who stands in judgment to produce a What consistent with our common How. As a consumer of that service, I'm could give a damn about How, I want the What that I want, How be damned. So we depend on that third party to apply a consistent and healthy How for us.
Also, the description of stability as an "inadvertent byproduct" is apt, IMO. But I think it flow out of a more general analysis of complex systems. For a complex system to be stable, it must have negative feedback loops. So, one would expect that social norms which are wired as positive feedback loops would create instability and rapidly destroy those societies, or they would decay and be replaced by new norms that were wired as negative feedback loops.
In looking at sexual reproduction (double helix DNA and meitosis) one finds a variety of mechanisms designed to prevent mutation from occuring and from compounding, while at the same time allowing adaptation and through selection non-fatal beneficial mutation through variation to occur and to accumulate.
Nassim Taleb describes such systems as anti-fragile. Please shake, I have mechanisms built in to adapt to and thrive in chaotic uncertain environments. Well I would expect human culture, language, institutions, norms, etc. to evolve in such a way. Like someone said, that doesn't mean you don't have local reversals, which is what I believe we see in modern social democracies. There are some aspects that are good, but we got derailed from the central Liberty concept, and have started to focus on egalitarian what's instead of libertarian how. We're pointing equality at the what of reality instead of the how of legality...
It's interesting you're poking at another way of looking at things that I use. Back when I first started thinking about how Politics arises as a predictable naturally occuring phenomena, one of the books I was reading was Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and I started thinking about design space vs. implementation space. Another idea that dovetails is emergent systems, or emergent design. Now, when I look at it in this way I think about how a substrate with a set of simple rules gives rise to a more complex system. That complex system will then produce a system which has it's own rules, the simple rules of that system might then give rise to a new complex system that emerges out of the simple rules of the underlying system.
So, if the standard model of physics is correct, the fundamental particles give rise to matter/energy as we know them, which in turn gives rise to matter in all of it's forms, which appears to be driving an interesting cosmological engine which results in the phenomena we see on the celestial level, stars, producing heavier matter, producing planets, blackholes on a larger level supporting and driving star creation, anchoring galaxies, etc., etc. Now, we see the heavier elements produced in stars resulting in elements that form the basis for organic chemistry. From basic organic chemistry you see new more complex phenomena emerge, eventually reaching cell structures from proteins. and you mSo organic life would be yet another emergent system. It's never so simple but let's just assume that life develops feedback mechanisms which results in cellular colonies which specialize, through natural environmental pressures, and eventually as they benefit colonies you see the emergence of a type of cell we think of as nerve cells. We have a rapid feedback mechanism.
At some point we have human minds, with language and social interaction, etc. So it seems to me, that all of our social phenomena are emergent systems that arise out of the nature of the substrate. Now, it's not just the human mind, there will be other factors, the environment we're in, there's the praxeological nature of the mind. There's the lizard brain mechanisms, there's going to be feelings and emotions that play a role in how these systems emerge.
So, law is an emergent system, which plays a role in the emergence of our social institutions, which plays a role in the emergence of specifc individuals in the society where those institutions interact, which plays a role in the evolution of the law produced.
For some reason we're so caught up in the What of the reality we are experiencing, through our realtime awareness of anything, that we're not spending sufficient time on the How from which our What emerges. Perhaps this is why the young learn Confucius, and the old man learns the Tao. The young man just wants the rules, the old man learns to pay attention to the underlying nature of reality directly by viewing reality, so that how becomes obvious when it occurs in the what. The young man just wants to know how to do the thing he wants to do.
FYI, I love the use stance you describe, in terms of the individuals relationship to EVERYTHING, including I'd guess the mind and body of the self. It's interesting I play pool on a team that competes for fun. I spend a fair amount of time teaching, and one of my primary points to someone I'm talking to is to learn to get the useless parts of the brain out of the way, and setup the brain to learn which is what it's very good at. Using one's brain effectively can be a hard thing to learn to do sometimes. Because of the nature of the mind, to construct narratives and rehearse and judge, you can forget to apply it where it can help, and tell it to STFU where it can't.
I'll stop here...