Roderick Long Interviews Me, Part 2

Appearance on Agoric Cafe

The first of my two appearances on Roderick Long's Agoric Cafe is now posted. We discuss a variety of issues. Part two will be posted next Sunday.

 

Replace Your Divots

I am not, nor have I ever been, a golfer. I did golf once, just before the turn of the century, and I disliked it. Nevertheless, I live by a cardinal principle in golfer etiquette: Replace your divots.

A divot, of course, is a chunk of turf that is dislodged by a golf shot, leaving a hole on the course. Golfer etiquette requires that you should put the divot back in the hole if that's possible. This is a common-sense act of consideration for other golfers because a ball in a hole is hard to hit.

We can readily see that Replace your divots is simply an application of the principle Be considerate of others. And that's another way of saying, Respect others. You can easily find many appropriate applications of the principle in everyday life.

We can go a step further. If Replace your divots is a worthy principle, then Avoid creating divots in the first place if you can is a worthy corollary. Off the golf course, avoid creating divots would include covering your nose and mouth when you sneeze and cough even when you're not in the middle of a serious pandemic.

We might be tempted to place this principle within rights theory. For example, the owner of the golf course probably has a rule, a term of use, that you must replace your divots. As a contractual matter, then, you are obligated to do so. Failure to comply is to violate the terms of your contract and hence a violation of the rights of the property owner. This reasoning is also used to show why falsely shouting fire in a theater is wrong.

I have no beef with that take, but there's more to the story because even if it were not a violation of someone's contractual rights, it would still be wrong to ignore your divots or falsely shout fire when it could endanger people. (You may shout fire, however, in a crowded online chat room. Context matters.)

Can this moral point be proved? Well, yes, in the sense that Aristotle thought ethics could be validated. Whenever we act we aim at an ultimate good: happiness, the good life, flourishing -- call it what you will. We can't help it because the idea of an ultimate end is baked into the very notion of action, which is the means that gets you there. (Sounds like praxeology, doesn't it?) "Every art and every kind of inquiry, and likewise every act and purpose, seems to aim at some good: and so it has been well said that the good is that at which everything aims," Aristotle wrote to launch his Nicomachean Ethics. "If then in what we do there be some end which we wish for on its own account, choosing all the others as means to this, but not every end without exception as a means to something else (for so we should go on ad infinitum, and desire would be left void and objectless),—this evidently will be the good or the best of all things."

What plausibly (or intuitively) appears to advance flourishing you may reasonably presume to be good. But such presumptions are in principle defeatible by evidence or by a clash with other well-founded moral principles. A Socratic inquiry would uncover such conflicts.

In the Aristotelian and Spinozan sense, the flourishing of rational social animals -- that's us -- is advanced by, among other things, reason-based relationships with other people (that is, no force, no injustice). I'm better off surrounded by people who live by reason (even if only by semi-conscious habit) than by irrational people. So I want to encourage other people to be rational, which in part means dealing with them on the basis of reason and respect. QED.

For more, I recommend Roderick T. Long's important monograph Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand and my "What Social Animals Owe to Each Other."

Things-in-Something Else?

My newest least-favorite phrase in the English language is things-in-themselves. Oh the fallacies packed into that innocuous-looking phrase. There is no such thing as things-in-something else, and it cannot be that to have a specific method of perceiving reality ipso facto means one cannot perceive reality. (See two posts by Roderick Long here and here).

TGIF: Libertarian versus Welfare-State Property Rights

Last week I set out Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long’s argument that libertarianism can’t be reasonably dismissed as strange. (A modest objective, to be sure.) After all, Long writes, mainstream libertarianism holds that each individual has a right not to be aggressed against, aggression being defined descriptively (not normatively) as the initiation of physical force. What’s weird about that? To those who object that libertarians believe in only that right and no others, Long responds that other alleged rights, say, positive welfare rights, would have to conflict with the right not to be aggressed against, making for an incoherent theory. As I summed up the argument:

If people had rights in addition to the right to be free from aggression, that would indicate that they had enforceable claims against others whose alleged rights violation did not entail the use of aggressive force. (If it did entail the use of aggressive force, we would ... not be talking about an additional right.) That would in turn indicate that the one whose alleged other right is violated could legitimately use force to compel others to act in a certain way. (Remember, that’s an important part of what it means to have a right.) But since by stipulation those others had not used aggressive force, the force used against them in defense of the alleged other right would itself entail aggression.

In other words, Smith’s right to be free from aggression would clash with Jones’s proposed other right. That is incoherent, unless we dump the right not to be aggressed against -- which would open up a horrendous can of worms.

But that was only one half of Long’s paper. It’s worthwhile to look at the second half.

TGIF: How Many Rights?

So, libertarians, how many rights do people have? One (say, the right to life, albeit with countless applications)? Three (life, liberty, and property)? Or an unlimited number (the right to do this, that, and the other, ad infinitum)?

Because part of any strategy to achieve a fully free society presumably includes persuading nonlibertarians to be libertarians, formulating a clear answer to my question seems worthwhile. The simpler the answer the better (other things equal), because getting people to think about moral and political philosophy, especially when we appear to be challenging the reigning view, is tough enough without needlessly making it tougher.

TGIF: What Social Animals Owe to Each Other

If I were compelled to summarize the libertarian philosophy’s distinguishing feature while standing on one foot, I’d say the following: Every person owes it to all other persons not to aggress them. This is known as the nonaggression principle, or NAP.

What is the nature of this obligation?

Read more.

Roderick Long on Anarchism and Objective Law

I enthusiastically recommend Roderick T. Long's "Why Objective Law Requires Anarchy," which responds to one of the most common libertarian (and Objectivist) challenges to market anarchism. Here are a few highlights intended to entice:

. . . I see anarchism as the logical conclusion of the checks-and-balances approach. The point of checks and balances is to put a brake on the tendency of political institutions to aggrandize power by arranging it so that a power grab by one part of the system will trigger opposition by other parts of the system. This was the idea behind the U. S. Constitution, with its federalism and division of powers. Unfortunately, it failed, as the supposedly antagonistic parts learned the benefits of working together to oppress the people. From an anarchist perspective, the problem with the minarchist version of checks and balances is that it does not go far enough; the opposing parts are too few in number, and too closely linked together in a single overarching institution.

I once opposed anarchism precisely because I was so convinced (largely as a result of reading Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine) of the importance of constitutional structure. I assumed (as Paterson had) that there is no constitutional structure under anarchy. But it now seems to me that precisely the opposite is true: the competitive market provides a much more sophisticated and complex constitutional structure than any state monopoly. . . . 

The fundamental question is this: under which system—market competition or government monopoly—is abuse of power more likely?

But the problem is not one of evil motivations alone. Even a state run by saints would face an informational problem. Just as the most well-intentioned central planner would be unable to make objective decisions about economic production, consumption, and distribution, because the information generated by the spontaneous market order would be inaccessible to him, so without the competitive, evolutionary process through which law originated and developed before the state, a centralized legislature would be unable to make objective decisions about which legal rules and procedures work best.

Roderick Long Hits Another Homerun

In Tea and Sympathy, Roderick, with amazing brevity, captures what's wrong with the tea-party movement.