Answering no third solution: contracts do not magically create ethics.

David Z., of no third solution, thinks he can reinterpret Block’s Corollary (i.e. the argument that belief in property logically entails belief in criminal activities like sexual harassment, and so on, being justified as long as they occur on the criminal’s property) in a way that somehow proves capitalism right. Here is the reasoning used by David to show the correct “anarcho”-capitalist view on these matters:

To the extent that Block believes an ambiguous employment agreement grants the employer unlimited license to molest his employees, absolutely he is a raving ass…

If she did not agree to be sexually harassed because these terms were not presented to her, then there was no meeting of the minds, and on general principles of law and reason, the uninvited and unwelcome intrusion into her personal space—indeed her being—is in-fact coercive, and worthy of derision…

If she did agree (in which case it’s not harassment), and later decides she is no longer satisfied with the arrangements, then no the employer is guilty of no specific wrongdoing, and yes she ought to leave.

Let’s make this clear. David’s whole objection to sexual harassment, or, we assume, any other breach of a person’s rights in the workplace is… that the contract is too vague! Apart from that, he sees absolutely nothing wrong with sexual harassment!

This sort of vulgar, simplistic simulacrum of “moral reasoning” that “anarcho”-capitalists spout whenever they are cornered highlights very well the hollow nature of their ideology, and ultimately its subjectivist underpinning. For the “anarcho”-capitalist, price is purely the result of desire expressed as paying or accepting amounts of money (subjective theory of value), and morality is purely the result of desire expressed as contracts. No real-life consideration ever enters their picture; no principle, apart from “to the strongest go the spoils.”

In David’s worldview, if there is an agreement (i.e. desires are aligned with each other), then the very nature of the action changes. “[I]t’s not harassment” any more. The sexual harassment of a boss on her secretary becomes foreplay, we suppose. And if she refuses to have sex with the boss, why, she should be fired. That’s only reasonable, isn’t it?

Sexual perversions aside, other people’s desires do not change the nature of an action. At our current workplaces, we are forced to accept the partial or complete surrender of our right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and some other freedoms so basic that we don’t even think about them (such as the right to choose our own clothes). We sign contracts clearly stipulating these and other indignities. Does this make attacks against free speech, privacy, and so on, moral? By what magic does a piece of paper transform the very facts of reality that make something unethical, into something ethical?

Certainly few people actually want to have their rights taken away. But we have no choice but to accept this state of affairs if we want to work. There may be a voluntary component (no one, after all, forced me to sign my employment contract at gunpoint), but there is no choice and no consent possible. Consent cannot exist without viable alternatives.

Let us be clear. “Anarcho”-capitalists tout voluntaryism as the alpha and the omega of ethics. But any Anarchist should reject this view. The concept of voluntary action without consent, theoretical freedom without actual freedom, in short of contractual anomie, is a bitter joke and the opposite of what Anarchists stand for.

Voluntaryism is only workable, if at all, in the idealized version of capitalism proposed by Austrian economics and “anarcho”-capitalists, as discussed by Walter Block. Benevolent overseers will steal even more surplus from the workers to compensate himself from having to swallow his pride in foregoing pinching women’s butts. What a fantastic world we are presented with, what social progress this would engender! And this is supposed to be an Anarchist ideal?

No, don’t be fooled by lunatics like Walter Block and David Z. This has nothing to do with Anarchism. It is the Anarchism part of “anarcho”-capitalism that attracted me to that fraudulent ideology, and it is the Anarchism part that got me out of it. Capitalism is the fraudulent part, that which contradicts and hollows out any principles that the Anarchism part may bring to the table.

David Z. also argues that using the Block quote against “anarcho”-capitalists is a straw man.

Does it boil down to “property” at some level? Kind of, but not really. At least not entirely, as Tremblay presumes. “Property” is not the whole story, nor is it even a crucial determinant in evaluating this scenario. Block is wrong, not because of his belief in property rights, but because an argument resting solely on this premise is as stupid as a football bat.

This is pure hypocrisy on David’s part. Property is the whole story. Without the property claim, there would be no reason to try to measure what limits can be put on the owner’s sovereign control, since no such sovereignty would actually exist. It is only because a property claim exists that he can indulge in such fantasies as determining when it is all right for a single man to engage in criminal activities on his own property.

It merely shows that there is no difference between the claims of a monopoly of force called “government,” and a monopoly of force called “propertarian.”

David Z. also contends that I am defining the Block Corollary as “a singular, authoritative “anarcho-capitalist” ethos.” I agree with him that doing such a thing would be ridiculous. Indeed, I do know that most “anarcho”-capitalists do not defend sexual harassment (although, yes, some actually have defended Block’s position in the past). But this only shows how utterly incoherent their position is. If property is valid, then sexual harassment must be valid as well. If sexual harassment is invalid, then property, and “anarcho”-capitalism, are nonsense.

For another refutation of David’s amoral subjectivist propaganda, see Does private property facilitate sexual harassment?, by Division by Zero.

The moral and ethical problems of childbirth.

I am not saying that anyone who gives birth to a child is immoral or unethical, but I am saying that there is a profound tension between moral goals, or ethical goals, and having children.

First, the moral aspect. It is a sad fact of life that many babies are born dead, deformed, mentally impaired, and so on. It is a fact that most children are abused by their parents or siblings (be it psychologically, verbally, physically or sexually) and that such abuse can inflict profound trauma. It is also a fact that many people lead unhappy lives and end up killing themselves. It is also a fact that many people lead happy and fulfilling lives, and although we obviously hope that all people do, we know it’s simply not possible.

Accepting all these facts, how can we then justify the grave moral implications of having a child? How can we justify bringing into this world a new human life which may end up to be a source of great suffering?

It seems to me that by having children, people are saying “this world is good enough for my children.” But by saying that, they are making a decision for that other human being, not for themselves. And herein lies the linchpin of my moral argument: in making children, we are no longer only assuming risks for ourselves, we are in fact delegating it to other human beings. If someone replies by saying “of course there’s a risk of any human life coming out bad, but risks are a part of life,” I would reply “yes, and you are allowed to take as much risk as you want, but you are not allowed to arbitrarily and dictatorially decide how much risks others should assume.”

The breeder might also sidestep the issue completely by claiming that he bears no personal responsibility for his child’s possible deformities, mental problems, sufferings, or future desire towards suicide. But this seems like a rather dubious argument, if only because the birth of the child is, with absolute certainty, a distal cause of all those things. If the child had not been born, he would not have suffered. In the same way, the lack of ability of most parents to raise children adequately is a distal cause of many different traumas and ailments in adults.

To clarify, here is an example. Suppose an adult is hit by a car and dies in horrible suffering (something that happens regularly, no doubt). Are the parents’ methods responsible for his suffering? No, that can’t be (unless, I suppose, they taught him never to look both ways before crossing the street). So in this particular case I would not put a direct blame on the parents. But I would blame them distally for giving birth to a human life which could end in horrible suffering.

I consider this to be a grave moral problem. Whether any given individual does end up well or not, we need to justify our risk-taking made on the back of that individual.

On to the ethical problem. Assume (as Anarchists do) that the burden of proof for the validity of a hierarchical structure is on the believer in that structure. Given this, how can we validate parenting as a hierarchical structure?

The standard example trotted out by pro-breeding Anarchists at this juncture is that of a baby crawling onto a street with heavy traffic. On this, we all agree: it is entirely justifiable for the parent to take his baby off the street so the baby doesn’t get killed. No disagreement on that point (although my objection here would be that it is not at all necessary for the saviour to be a parent, making the example completely irrelevant to parenting as an exclusive claim on the child).

However, this example completely sidesteps the problem by taking a specific behaviour as a standard of the whole system. It is not “whether it is justifiable for a parent to get his baby out of the way of a crowded street” that is in question, but “is parenting justified as a hierarchy.”

So the question arises, how is a hierarchy justified? As Anarchists, we reject utilitarian arguments for hierarchies. The justification for pulling the child off the street is as such: it is necessary because the child would die if we didn’t do it. But saving lives is not a sufficient justification. Police departments save lives but also ruin and destroy many others. Fire departments save lives, but their basis for existence (taxation) is coercive and undesirable.

I think it is fair to declare the following two principles to be sufficient and necessary for the justification of a hierarchy:

1. It is necessary for human survival/development or social survival/development.
2. There is no alternative possible.

So that if having a fire department was found to be the only possible solution to life-threatening fires, we would find it justifiable (while not necessarily desirable) to maintain them, despite the coercion involved.

The position that, in today’s society, parenting is necessary for human survival and development is uncontroversial. But is there any alternative possible?

Forms of communal child-raising have been tried by small groups, but their success is iffy at best, mainly because the aberrations people received in their own childhood are stimulated easily when they become parents themselves. They have been indoctrinated to believe that children must be totally controlled, and surrendering the child-raising function to a community means that they can’t have or ensure total control over the children, indeed leaving the children “too much freedom” by having them be watched by others who have less desire to control these children which are, of course, not theirs. So it seems that, at least for now, we are at an impasse.

Thus there can be legitimate reasons to consider parenting to be a legitimate form of hierarchy. But its acceptance is, at the very least, problematic, and validating widespread oppression of children in the name of a social aberration represents something that Anarchists should try to shy away from, I think.

The standard objection always remains “we just need better parenting methods.” Anarchists seem to have a double-standard, insofar as they wouldn’t even give this objection a hearing if it was about any other hierarchy, but they give it a lot of credit when it’s about parenting, probably because they believe parenting is necessary (in the same way that statists want to “reform” government because they believe government is morally necessary).

Personally, I don’t think we can afford to give legitimacy to a system that gives rise to so much abuse and coercion, and that itself makes it harder to bring about a society where the individual can desire to actually be free (and join our movement, even) without bumping into his own aberration and neuroses. Even if most Anarchists believe that parenting is necessary, they should at least not be supporting it. It may be tactically inconvenient, but insofar as any Anarchist movement goes, we obviously have to look at the long run more than anything else. And in the long run, fighting against the multiple facets of child abuse will get us much farther than fighting for it, no matter how popular it is.

“Anarcho”-capitalists support sexual harassment: more on Block’s lunacy…

So I posted that quote from Walter Block about sexual harassment being AOKed by property theory… and I have been told of the publication it’s from, The Libertarian Forum. I thought, well, maybe in context it seems more rational. As it turns out, I was totally wrong. It is actually worse than the quote indicated.

But the sad thing is, it really shows the logical consequences of the belief in property. Once you accept that much degree of control over other people’s actions, then you can justify any degree of control. “Anarcho”-capitalists will complain that Block’s ravings are not indicative of their beliefs, but they will remain utterly unable to explain why he’s wrong without contradicting their own beliefs (in fact, some ancaps who have talked to Noor about this have said that they agree with Block, which shows how utterly bankrupt their ideology is). Please keep in mind that Walter Block is one of the foremost representants of the ancap ideology.
(bold is mine, and all remaining errors are the fault of Acrobat Reader)

Another type of pinching or sexual harassment is that between a secretary and her boss. Although to many people, and especially to many people in the women’s liberation movement, there is no real difference between this pinching and the pinching that occurs on the street, the fact is that the pinching that takes place between a secretary and her boss, while objectionable to many women, is not a coercive action. It is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere because it is part of a package deal: the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job and especially when she agrees to keep the job. A woman walking along a public sidewalk, on the other hand. can by no means be considered to have given her permission, or tacitly agreed to begin pinched. The street is not the complete private property of the pincher, as is the office. On the contrary, if the myths of democracy are to be given any credence at all, the streets belong to the people. All the people. Even including women.

There is a serious problem with considering pinching or sexual molestation in a privately owned office or store to be coercive. If an action is really and truly coercive, it ought to be outlawed. But if pinching and sexual molestation are outlawed in private places, this violates the rights of those who voluntarily wish to engage in such practices. And there is certainly nothing coercive about any voluntary sex practices between consenting adults. The proof of the voluntary nature of an act in a private place is that the person endangered (the woman, in the cases we have been considering) has no claim whatsoever to the private place in question, the office or the store. If she continues to patronize or work at a place where she is molested, it can only be voluntary. But in a public place, no such presumption exists. As we have seen, according to accepted theory at least, the public domain is owned by all, women included. It would be just as illegitimate to assume that a woman gave tacit agreement to being molested on the public street because she was walking there as it would be to assume that she gave tacit agreement to an assault in her own house, because she happened to be there.

There are many other cases of actions taken against women that are not strictly speaking, coercive. Or more exactly, there are many other instances where many women feel put upon, but where there is no coercion at all involved such as referring to women with sex organ-linked expletives. the sexual double standard mores; many rules of etiquette such as the ones concern who proceeds whom out of the elevator. the encouragement of the mental capacity of boys and discouragement of girls, the societal opprobrium of women participating in “men’s” athletic activities; the pedestals that women are placed upon. There are two important points to be made with regard to these insults and other exacerbations which do not constitute coercion. 1) Although considered reprehensible by many, none of these actions actually constitute coercion, therefore it would be illegitimate to outlaw them. Any attempt to outlaw them would involve the mass violation of rights of other individuals in the society. After all, it is the right of free speech that gives us the right not to utter things that everyone agrees with – which do not need free speech protection in any case, but the right to utter reprehensible things, things in poor taste, boorish things. 2) To a much greater degree than realized by many, certainly to a much greater degree than realized by many who consider themselves advocates of women’s liberation, these reprehensible but non-coercive actions are engendered by reprehensible coercive activities. Were these coercive activites to cease, the free market would tend to rid us of many of these reprehensible but non-coercive acts.

Let us consider the case of bosses pinching secretaries and see how the market would tend to eliminate such unwanted activity, were the coercive and reprehensible activity of taxation to support government bureaucracy eliminated. In order to see this, we must first understand what the labor economist calls “compensating differentials”. A compensating differential is an amount of money just necessary to compensate an employee for the psychic losses that go with a job. For instance, consider two job opportunities. One is in an air-conditioned office, with a good view, with pleasant surroundings and pleasant companions: The other is in a damp, dank basement, surrounded by evil smelling fellow workers. Now there is some wage differential large enough to attract most people into accepting the less pleasant job. This will vary for different people, depending upon their relative tastes for the working conditions in the two places. There might even be a negative compensating differential for those who prefer the basement job. They would be willing to take a salary cut rather than move to the office job.

The same analysis can be applied to the case of the office pincher. On the assumption that all women would prefer not to be pinched, and that bosses vary in their desires to so indulge, there will be a whole range of wage rates paid to otherwise equally productive secretaries, depending on the proclivity of their bosses to engage in sexual harassment. There will be a positive relationship between the amount of sexual harassment and the wage rate that the bosses find thay must pay. But now contrast the boss of a private business with the boss in a government bureaucracy. Even on the assumption that both bosses on the average have the same proclivity to engage in sexual harassment, it is clear that the private boss will have to pay for his little gambols, while the public one will not. The secretaries of both private and public pinchers will have to earn more than the secretaries of the non-pinchers. The compensating differential. The main difference between the private and the public pincher is that the extra money comes out of tax monies for the latter and out of his own money for the former. Even in the case of a private boss-pincher who is not the ultimate owner of the business, the same applies, only now slightly more indirectly. The ultimate owner of the business, in addition to losing money if he himself is a pincher, also loses money if any of his executives are pinchers. So in addition to having a monetary incentive to cut down on his own pinching, he also has a monetary incentive to try to stop all the bosses in his company from so doing.

This might not seem like much of an incentive to stop pinching. But it is an improvement over the public case where these disincentives are completely lacking. This way of looking at the problem, however, has more merit than might be readily apparent. One reason pinching does not come to an abrupt end even in the private market is because many women are by no means unalterably opposed to being pinched, as we have been assuming. But the analysis can be applied to the more realistic cases where women are being harassed and mistreated and do object.

Feel free to reproduce this Block quote in part or in total, in any media you can get your hands on. Spread the word. Digg it!

NOTE to all the ancaps who are itching to reply that “sexual harassment is a form of aggression and is simply wrong”: that’s exactly our point. Capitalist property theory allows any form of injustice as long as it’s done “on one’s property.” Insofar as property theory entails that sexual harassment, and other such aggression, is validated, it necessarily contradicts justice. In order for you propertarians to refute us, therefore, you can’t just say “sexual harassment is just wrong”: you need to show that property theory does not entail that sexual harassment is validated. The fact that sexual harassment is not acceptable is a problem for the propertarians, not for us.

The sexual harassment problem was not reversed by capitalism, but by a radical movement (feminism). Block’s childish theory was proven wrong.

For further analysis of this Block quote, see the entry “More baloney…” on Bowers of Paradise and the entry Does private property facilitate sexual harassment? on Division by Zero. Also see more horrid Block quotes at the Voluntary Property Blog.

For more ancap bigotry, see Stephan Kinsella Lies To Defend Bigot Hoppe, as well as the many other entries written on other blogs on the subject of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s bigotry and its widespread support in the ancap camp.

A very special commentary…

McSweeney’s Internet Tendancy, one of my favourite humour sites on the web, has a funny bit with extracts from a fictional commentary of Lord of the Rings by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It’s in four parts, so check the whole thing out. It’s pretty funny.

CHOMSKY: Gandalf is screaming, “Fight! Stand by your posts!” It’s all he knows, fighting.

ZINN: And any attempt at peacemaking, any attempt to avoid war, is, in this ideology, fear and weakness.

CHOMSKY: “Kill the trolls!” Gandalf is hollering now. “Bring them down!” Of course he wants the trolls killed. They’re tangible proof that the Orcs have mastered their very limited environment.

ZINN: You see the walls of Minas Tirith up close here. Albert Speer would have been proud. Notice the grand scale, the “great works” emphasis of Gondorian architecture. The fascist uniformity of their battle dress. Compare it to the folk artwork of Orcish armor—their improvisatory use of shrunken heads and Mannish skulls, for instance. There’s something very beautiful about it to me.

CHOMSKY: A perfect example of what Ruskin valorizes as the Gothic aesthetic.

Walter Block on… basic human decency.

And why the “anarcho”-capitalists don’t have any… (human decency, that is)

Consider the sexual harassment which continually occurs between a secretary and a boss . . . while objectionable to many women, [it] is not a coercive action. It is rather part of a package deal in which the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job, and especially when she agrees to keep the job. The office is, after all, private property. The secretary does not have to remain if the ‘coercion’ is objectionable.

That’s it, isn’t it? It’s the voluntaryist fallacy. That’s what turns these reasonable people into monsters. Whatever is not “coercive” according to property theory is therefore just fine, and you can love it or leave it. That’s exactly the same reasoning that statists use to defend the nation-state.

Voluntaryism and “anarcho”-capitalism have to be exposed and demolished as the evil ideologies that they really are.

Thanks to division by zero.

I’ve Converted To EVERY Religion (Just In Case)