gotlucky: Because you start claiming that they might be consequentialists instead, and that you have no reason to believe otherwise. How about you stop speculating into what these people believe? Maybe you just source them when you want to speculate? I'm going to stop wasting my time here until you start to take debating seriously. Source your shit. Reply to my arguments. Don't make me repost entire passages several times. Until you do that, we're through in this thread. I have other things to do with my time, and I'm not going to waste it with someone who only pretends to want to discuss a topic.
Because you start claiming that they might be consequentialists instead, and that you have no reason to believe otherwise.
How about you stop speculating into what these people believe? Maybe you just source them when you want to speculate?
I'm going to stop wasting my time here until you start to take debating seriously. Source your shit. Reply to my arguments. Don't make me repost entire passages several times.
Until you do that, we're through in this thread. I have other things to do with my time, and I'm not going to waste it with someone who only pretends to want to discuss a topic.
Have a nice day.
From the link, "for those of us who find the Objectivist derivation of ethics unconvincing" - "us" includes himself. He's not a non-cognitivist (thanks for the link, by the way) but that doesn't make him a moral objectivist.
Clayton -
Clayton: From the link, "for those of us who find the Objectivist derivation of ethics unconvincing" - "us" includes himself. He's not a non-cognitivist (thanks for the link, by the way) but that doesn't make him a moral objectivist.
If I am not mistaken, he is talking about Randian Objectivism, not lower-case-o objectivism. Just reading the whole post with no bias makes me conclude that he is "tentatively" a moral objectivist. He also seems to be in favor of intuitionism, which I conclude not only from the post, but from the fact that he said (in one of his blog posts) he liked Michael Huemer’s book about intuitionism.
Clayton, I re-read our discussion and your thoughts on David Gordon’s review of Thomas Nagel’s book. Would you say that your view of morality expressed here is consequentialist or deontological?
I think it is consequentialist but can be considered "formally deontological." On the one hand, the reason why X is bad is because it leads to suffering (undesirable consequences). Nevertheless, we are making statements of the form, "You should not" or "Thou shalt not", which are precisely the form of deontological statements. However, I think this deontology is merely formal because of uncertainty - no one really knows the limits of suffering and satisfaction. Hence, life-experimentation. No one knew for sure that BASE jumping was possible until someone did it. And now that people have done it, it's an open question-mark whether this is a satisfying and rewarding way to live one's life. Time will tell. But the key here is that the moral criterion (does it bring satisfaction?) is consequentialist.
Where the deontology factors in is in looking to the past and the corpus of knowledge regarding human nature. People have already tried living every which way you can - or cannot - imagine. More than 100 billion complete human lives have been lived out before you were born, and this number is even much higher when you consider our pre-human ancestors whose experiences doubtless informed the choices of our human ancestors, however indirectly. Some choices have been found to consistently fail to bring about satisfaction and other choices vice-versa.
I think this is why we have such strong norms against cheating in romantic relationships, for example. The temptation is immense - it is biologically hardwired, in fact. Yet the long experience of mankind is that it rarely, if ever, works out fortuitously. And it doesn't even matter if we can work out a biological theory of why people want to cheat or why it's hard to get away with it, etc. All that matters is we know that a) lots of people have tried it and b) the vast majority of them have failed to attain whatever satisfaction it was they were looking for, in the course of it. So, we could reasonably derive a deontological moral on this basis: "Thou shalt not cheat." Just don't do it. It almost certainly won't work out the way you had hoped. Billions of people before you have tried it and the vast majority of them have been made unhappy as a result. But, at the end of the day, the choice whether to use your life as yet one more "data sample" in the grand experiment of human life is yours... perhaps you have discovered the secret recipe for successful cheating. So, the deontological "Thou shalt not cheat" does not have exactly the same connotation as the Mosaic "Thou shalt not commit adultery", though I'm open to the idea it could be psychologically useful to go ahead and imbue it with such a connotation as a matter of managing/conditioning one's own behavior.
FlyingAxe: So, I am just trying to think in what way wave frequncies are different from information.
I just thought of those right now. I am not sure if that helps your query.
FlyingAxe: They are scarce (in a given area), that's true, but what does one own when he owns a radio wave frequency?
In Libertariania, nobody owns anything but hardware -- one of which ought to be a fire-arm for your own good, I reckon.
FlyingAxe: Frequency just describes the property of radio waves that one person's radio emitter produces. If my radio emitter producers waves of the same frequency, how can another person own them just because they share the same characteristic with the waves he produced first?
-- $XYZ to buy-out all of your equipment
or
-- $XY every year to you and in exchange you agree to cease interfering with his broadcast on the same frequency
-- $X every month to his security company to enforce his contract with your security company. Both of you would be nuts to broadcast radio waves in contravention with your own contracts and no security company will do without those clauses.
FlyingAxe: Even the scarcity of the frequency is merely scarcity in who will hear the message; no different in principle from scarcity of information.
The scarcity is in the wherewithall to defend contracts and property from vigilantes. In other words, if you can not afford to pay the security company to stop radio interference, then the scarcity is in your own pocket-book.
Clayton:
I think it is consequentialist but can be considered "formally deontological." On the one hand, the reason why X is bad is because it leads to suffering (undesirable consequences).
But what sort of statement would not be consequentialist? Even if you believe that moral statements are truths onto themselves, we can simply say that they are the goal. One might say that asking why they should be a goal is nonsensical, because they are a goal by definition. But clearly people have freedom of choice, so someone might say "I want to do X because it leads to good, and I want to do good." So, that's consequentialism of a sort. (I actually think that Kinsella may be this kind of consequentialist based on his latest anti-IP post.)
And all consequentialist preferences are also ended into some sort of intuitive preference. For instance, imagine someone who wants IP to be the law because he wants to promote creativity. If you ask him why he wants to promote creativity, he will either say: "Just 'cause" or "Because creativity good". And why is it good? Either good in itself, or because it leads to X, but the same question can be asked about X, and either we have an infinite regression of causes, or a circular argument, or eventually the end is some intuitive preference which one cannot justify except that it is the end.
The same goes for religious reasons ("I want the Creator's purpose for the world to be fulfilled") or egoistic reasons, etc.
The only difference I see is that some goals are held as "principled" and long-term goals, and others are held as "immediate" goals which cannot override the principled goals. But which goals are the principled ones is a matter of personal preference or some intuition.
None of that matters because he does not even understand what law is in the first place. What he is talking about is a rule or policy or some kind of enforced norm. None of these are law per se, in my view. It's like saying "I want 'farfignewton' to refer to a car"... well, too bad... unless people just start referring to cars as 'farfignewtons' for whatever reason, there isn't the slightest chance your wish will ever be fulfilled. Law is like language in this regard... it is what it is.
But, as I mentioned above in my unfortunate exchange with gotlucky, people can have different desires for the "purpose" of property rights in the society.
You hold (and so do I) that homesteading provides the clearest way for conflict resolution, so we should assign property based on homesteading. That assignment creates the law. When someone has a dispute with someone else, they (or a private judge) can decide who is right based on this law and this concept.
But someone else may hold that we should assign property based on urgency of need. I need to use something to support my starving family. You need to use it for luxury. Therefore, I should own it. The property rights should be assigned such that I own it. It's less clear than homesteading, but it's more pertaining to support of life.
(We could also say: follow homesteading in most cases unless it's a life-and-death vs. luxury.)
So, following one property assignment strategy vs. another is based merely on consequentialist reasons. Why are merely aesthetics and intuition in the end. I want to have clearest and most peaceful conflict resolution. My cousin wants to follow Muslim Shariat Law. My daughter wants the society to promote creativity. All those are different ends for assignment of property rights.
Where is the above analysis wrong? Why is it that homesteading trumps everything else in property rights assignment?
Another way to say it is that the theories of property rights of the disputants may be relevant to the arguability of the case itself. If one disputant asserts "I am emperor of the world. All property belongs to me, including this very arbitration room and you are my slave... Submit, slave!", it's going to be difficult to have a discussion/argument over the points of dispute themselves. Hence, there is some kind of "bare minimum property rights theory" that must be accepted for the duration of the argument by all parties, at least granting the full right of each party to own himself in the proceedings for the purpose of making his case. You and I have been over this before. Also, please see my articles on VR re. voluntary slavery for reference.
You hold (and so do I) that homesteading provides the clearest way for conflict resolution, so we should assign property based on homesteading.
I kind of dislike Hoppe's approach on this; I think that the first-use rule is simply part of human nature. We really don't need to give any arguments about how it works or doesn't work to prevent conflicts. I think it's fairly easy to argue how it does, in fact, prevent conflicts, and this probably explains why it is part of human nature, but we don't even need to go into this to simply say "it's part of human nature... so everybody understands - even small children - that if he was using it before you, it's his... unless you can bring some more convincing reason why it belongs to you than that you want to have it." I think Hoppe is making an intellectual assault in the direction of the Marxists who have what you could call a "zero-use rule", that is, that no one is entitled to appropriate anything from nature because, to do so, they must leave "less and not as good" than was there before, violating the Lockean proviso.
That assignment creates the law. When someone has a dispute with someone else, they (or a private judge) can decide who is right based on this law and this concept.
I still think you completely fail to understand the distinction I keep trying to make between law and rules. You keep using the word "law" as I'm using the word "rules". Now, most people use the word as you are using it and I fully acknowledge that... however, there must be some way to distinguish between emergent norms (what I call law) and positive-law or rules.
Positive law is like a rule in football... either you were over the line or you were not. The judge is basically a referee who offers a purportedly unbiased ruling when one player claims "he was over the line" and the other player claims "I was not."
Emergent norms - what I call law - is not like this at all... in emergent norms, there are no lines... there's just grass and fields and hills and valleys and built-up structures, and so on. Whatever rules there may be are simply whatever emerges from human behavior... if you enter someone's house without permission (even with no ill-intent), they will be outraged and terrified, and will probably call the police. The "positive-law illegality" of the act is a separate matter from the behavioral response of humans, which is the "foam" from which emergent-norms emerge - these are the true basis of what I term law proper.
You keep mixing the two. You keep saying things that sound to me like, "You and I think that it should be a norm that the rule of first-use pertains"... and I'm saying: either it does or it doesn't - how you and I or any other individual feels about it is irrelevant.
Yes - and this goes back to the Emperor-pretender property theory mentioned above... but we don't need to get very deep into the debate over the theory of property rights, all we need is some kind of prima facie presumption of self-ownership for the duration and extent of the dispute, as a matter of best-practice in arbitration. In other words, I would imagine that competent arbitrators might tend to have a kind of standard agreement something to the effect that "Both parties acknowledge that the other party is a human being who stands as a peer, fully vested with all the rights and privileges which are naturally held by any person by virtue of being human, including his self-ownership, his right to act in a way that does not aggress upon the person and property of others," and so on and so forth. Signing this agreement would probably be a condition for the arbitrator to hear the case and this would permit the arbitrator to clear the air of any pointless arguments over Marxist property theory by simply pointing out that the ground-rules for the dispute were already contracted with the arbitrator himself/herself prior to the commencement of arbitration and, thus, such matters are not up for dispute. For example, judge.me uses aequo et bono as its basic ground-rule for arbitrating disputes. There are no "laws" you can point to and say "he broke this law, he better pay me!" or "the law said I could!" - and this is a feature, not a bug, as there are no loopholes and there are no legal "gotchas"... there's just consideration of what is just and fair.
Why is it that homesteading trumps everything else in property rights assignment?
Because the rule of first-use is part of human nature. Everybody - even small children know - that if Alice was using something before Bob then, ceteris paribus, she has the better claim to own it. After so many posts, I don't see what there is to be confused about, here.
So, you use law as custom or social convention? Sort of the way we have language?
Because of my background, I have tendency to want to justify things, not just accept them as right because they are a certain way. For me, a certain way of resolving a conflict must be just because we can demonstrate that it's just. I want to be able to derive it and don't trust either my intuition (which of course exists) or a prevailing custom.
But I understand that it's silly to derive "the right way to speak". Language evolves, and the right way to speak is such that you're understood and deliver your ideas clearly.
But, as some friends on Facebook would ask me, why not accept then that many people in our society today see government as an integral part of the law (used your way)? When my mom's car was smashed by someone, she called me, and I told her: "Call the police." Whatever my views, that's the most commonsensical thing to do.
Yes, it is a very particular kind of social convention - social norm - that relates to the resolution of serious disputes (disputes serious enough to come to blows over).
Because of my background, I have tendency to want to justify things, not just accept them as right because they are a certain way.
That's fine and I think that's the job of law critics, which are a kind of law philosopher who ask "We know that X is the law, but should X be the law or is there a way we can refine X or can we look at Y to help us see X in a different way?" In this way, law critics can influence arbitrators who, in turn, can influence disputants by helping them think through for themselves what they consider to be just.
For me, a certain way of resolving a conflict must be just because we can demonstrate that it's just. I want to be able to derive it and don't trust either my intuition (which of course exists) or a prevailing custom.
I think that is one valid form of law criticism, though I don't think it is the only form of law criticism or even the best. Clearly, if someone intends to criticize customs/norms, he has to choose a starting point which is not a custom/norm from which to do so. So, whatever you choose to do criticism with is necessarily not a custom/norm. The natural question, which I think is unanswerable, is which is the best or correct place to stand from which to do criticism of the law? I think that answer can only be found by criticizing and seeing what happens. Some criticisms will be influential, others will not. Those that are influential will either have good impact or bad impact and we will then see whether they should have had an impact. And those that were less influential may, in time, receive more attention when other more popular criticisms have failed and fallen by the wayside.
Nevertheless, there are better and worse ways to speak... even the phrase "you're understood and deliver your ideas clearly" assumes this. And I think that law criticism is perfectly analogous to criticism of rhetoric and other kinds of communication. The law critic can't order people to think differently about the law, but he can suggest it and give reasons why they should and, if he is persuasive enough, they may follow his advice and either benefit or suffer from having done so.
Well, I think that it has to temper anti-statism... as I put it in my article on law: however bad the legal status quo is, it is all we have, so it's suicide to think of throwing it out. This is what people think of when they think of "anarchy" and the consequences are obviously disastrous... apocalyptic even. But I think that putting that right out front may actually help the anti-state message - "Look, we're not saying you throw out the statutory framework tomorrow... that's unthinkable... we're saying you take baby-steps away from the precipice of insanity on which we're currently teetering and with each step back you become stronger and more sane and more healthy and able to take bigger and bigger strides." There are at least a half-dozen positive steps we can take that will immensely strengthen and revitalize our legal and social order... without actually striking any statutes that affect private citizens or fundamentally revamp the government's legislative and court system. After taking those steps, we will be in such a stronger place that we can then begin talking about how do you safely dismantle the law monopoly and the bureacratic machinery of oppression without throwing society into disarray? At the moment, we are too weak to even think about this.