Illegitimate self-management?: A response to free-marketeers

Thanks to A Division by Zer0.

The universality principle.

If we look at the ethical principles and concepts proposed by politicians and their laws, by religions, by capitalist structures, by parents, by this or that philosopher, we find that, by and large, they share a few traits:

1. They are organized so that the elite does not have to follow them. Things that are wrong for a common person to do are praised when done en masse by the elite (control, lying, stealing, killing) and things which are good for a common person to do are disvalued by the elite (obedience, humility, allegiance).

2. They make a sharp distinction between members of the group and non-members/opponents (us v them), creating enemies everywhere.

3. No justification is provided for them, or if a justification is provided, it is of the “might makes right” variety.

Point 1 is explained by the nature of hierarchies (elites use their power against their subjects for their own interests). Point 2 is explained by the manichean worldview (the need to invent enemies in order to promote cohesion and silence dissent). Point 3 is explained by the fact that all these systems are stage 1 morality (since the principles are constructed and enforced for the interests of the elite, they have no non-arbitrary justification and are simply meant to be obeyed).

Not everything an authority posits is an ethical principle. A parent might tell you to look both sides before crossing the street, and this is sound advice, no doubt about it, but it’s not an ethical principle (i.e. it doesn’t tell you how people should deal with each other within the social context).

Now the question becomes, are these rules really ethical “principles”? Take gun control laws, for instance. State agents are not subject to these laws, while their subjects are. And yet the justifications one can bring up to let these dangerous agents handle firearms can apply equally to their subjects. Agents need to defend themselves from criminals, but so do their subjects (in fact, these agents are often the criminals one needs defending from). Agents need guns to enforce other features of the State, like taxation. But then we look at taxation and another contradiction arises. The State needs to finance itself, but so does every other organization and business that exist, so why is only the State allowed to use guns to do so?

We all have the same basic physical, mental, relational and social needs given to us by human biology and human nature. The basic principle here is that everyone has the same fundamental needs, and saying that some specific group of people is justified by these needs to do something that everyone else is forbidden to do is a logical contradiction. It is an attempt to centralize power in the hands of a few. We find that most supposed “ethical principles” are actually of this type.

There are three different kinds of ways in which such statements can be contradictory: by not applying to all people, not applying to all times, or not applying to all locations. Gun laws are an example of the first kind. Bible rules are an example of the second kind, as Christians often argue that many rules were only given for the sake of a specific era. Laws in general are a good example of the third, insofar as there are many differences in laws between various “countries,” but they are all said to be valid within their own territorial context.

We can therefore define the universality principle as such:

An ethical principle or system is invalid if it is asymmetrical in application (to locations, times or persons).

There are also such things as personal opinions. Needs are never expressed in the same way. We all have different preferences, and statements asserting one preference over another are not ethical principles but merely attempts to elevate preferences as ethics. If someone says “I think everyone should have to eat strawberry ice cream, and no other kind,” we should rightly consider this as a joke, since the statement does not express any universal need.

People often try to justify the ever-changing rules of the Bible by saying that God was compensating for the fact that the people of some past era were unable to understand reality as well as we do now, and that therefore simpler, more straightforward rules were needed. This argument, however, would only work if the previous rules were simply vaguer or more general restatements of the new rules, which they are not by a long shot. No Christian church now preaches the death penalty for breaking the Ten Commandments, for instance, which the Bible clearly prescribes. Also, no Christian now supports slavery, even though the Bible very clearly sought to normalize it.

Likewise, we can point to a multitude of evil laws which used to be enforced. It does no good to say that people back then were ignorant, since all that adds up to is that ignorant people were allowed to use force to maintain evil laws. People being ignorant or not ignorant does not make the law any more universal, given how much they contradict.

The universality principle does not tell us which ethical ideology is correct, but rather how to identify a whole class of incorrect ones. In that sense, it can also be called a razor (like Ockham’s Razor, which lets us identify a whole class of incorrect beliefs). In a sense, it is very much connected to the principle of equality, since equality cannot obtain if the principles that regulate society apply differently to different people.

This puts the emphasis on Anarchism being an ideology of process, not of results. Hierarchies use fluid rulesets so they can best control outcomes in their favour in any given context. Of course, I am using a figure of speech: the individual actors within hierarchies only act in what they perceive is their self-interest, but the result is the same. By making equality primordial, Anarchism leaves outcomes in the hands of the individuals who work towards them. Statist theories are based on the premise that desired outcomes justify coercive processes (might makes right, the end justifies the means); Anarchist theories are based on the premise that egalitarian processes justify their own outcomes.

Granted, there is a sense in which this is not exactly true. A government does not generally commit to actions which entail vast disapproval within its host society, since it cannot engineer consent to an infinite degree. And Anarchists are always disappointed when they try to free people only to see them reproduce the same patterns of oppression that made them victims. Obviously governments have some concern about processes, and Anarchists have some concern about outcomes. But the fact that Anarchists are concerned about outcomes to a certain degree does not imply that they wish to inhibit universality to a certain degree. Rather, I think the Anarchist is beheld to a certain belief that when confronted with a choice between an egalitarian solution and a hierarchical solution, people will eventually choose the egalitarian solution, perhaps once they have observed for themselves that the solution they were indoctrinated to believe in doesn’t work as well as the new one.

THE SHORT FILM BP DOESN’T WANT YOU TO SEE.

The impossibility of transferring exterior obligation.

There is a common assumption that the existence of exterior rules that are believed to be worthwhile, or that are imposed by force, necessarily implies that those rules must be followed by the individual. More precisely, we assume that an exterior obligation, such as a legal obligation or a divine obligation, necessarily entails moral obligation or ethical obligation.

To understand why this is impossible, we must first make the difference between inter-subjective truths and objective truths. I use these terms because they are more convenient, and most people understand them, but let me specify exactly what I mean.

By “inter-subjective truth,” I mean a proposition of which the truth-value is dependent on belonging to a specific group or groups, outside of which the proposition is plainly false or absurd. An example of inter-subjective truth would be “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united as three persons in one Godhead.” To a Christian, this proposition is self-evidently true. To anyone else, it is nonsensical.

By “objective truth,” I mean a proposition which can be evaluated by anyone, a universal truth which does not require belonging to a specific group in order to evaluate as true. Propositions such as “what goes up must go down” or “the sky is blue during the day” can be immediately verified by anyone regardless of group affiliation, therefore they are universal. From the believer’s perspective, the trinity proposition I gave is seen as equally objective, but this is an optical illusion, easily dispelled once we look at it from the eyes of a non-believer.

Of course there are grey areas between these two kinds of examples, but I only need the general principle to make the argument: inter-subjective truths are dependent on group affiliation and the myriad of beliefs that such an affiliation entails, while objective truths are accessible to everyone in the same way.

Every belief system, every ideology, every institution, has fundamental premises and attendant beliefs. These premises and beliefs do not have to be explicit. we can, for instance, discuss of the premises of the democratic system without having to rely on what voters or politicians themselves say. We deduce them from analyzing systemic features. To an inter-subjective truth, belief in the group it depends upon is a fundamental premise; just as we can only agree to any proposition if we already agree to its premises, we need to already belong to the group, and agree with its attendant beliefs, in order to agree with the inter-subjective truth.

An obligation is a kind of proposition which pertains to requirements put upon an individual, either by the individual himself (moral obligations and ethical obligations) or from some other source which may or may not involve the individual’s consent (such as legal obligations, divine obligations, work obligations, contractual obligations, social or cultural obligations). I am particularly interested in obligations which are imposed by some exterior determinism, more specifically legal obligation and divine obligation, because it is these which are most commonly used as replacement for morality and ethics, and often as an open attack against morality and ethics.

For example, you might see something which states that “buying alcohol for minors is not just wrong, it’s illegal.” Taken literally, this is an objective proposition, as anyone can verify for himself that it is indeed illegal to buy alcohol for minors, but it seems to me that the statement is actually trying to use illegality as a tool of intimidation or guilt. It tries to establish some further obligation from the fact that the law exists (i.e. it’s not just a moral obligation, it’s a legal obligation too, which presumably commands even more obedience). Now, it is not clear at all that buying alcohol for minors is wrong in a moral or even ethical sense, but the statement of illegality puts all such concerns aside. It is illegal, therefore one should not do it.

In general, when we talk about the law, not only is the capacity to distinguish right from wrong replaced by obedience, but often people will claim that the law outright dictates what is right and wrong, even when there exist laws which are clearly unethical to any thinking person (I am not here referring to the underage drinking laws as, while I believe they are wrong, I do not believe they are self-evidently wrong).

Likewise, one may hear that “homosexuals need to repent from their sins, as God condemns them.” It is not clear at all that homosexuals are in fact reprehensible and deserving of such obligation. The condemnation only makes sense within the Christian worldview, as one must believe that God exists and that God can condemn people, therefore it is also inter-subjective.

So the question is, how does legal obligation or divine obligation translate into moral obligation or ethical obligation? How does a rule that exists within a specific belief system become a universal rule? Let’s look at a fictional attempt to establish this, between a Christian and an atheist.

C: “God says that homosexuals are sinful.”
A: “Uh, okay.”
C: “That’s why you must never commit any homosexual acts.”
A: “Hang on. First, you said God says it. I am not going to dispute that: you’re the Christian, you would know. But now you’re saying that I have to follow this rule. Why?”
C: “Because whatever God says is what you should do. God is the ultimate standard of morality.”
A: “You are welcome to believe whatever you want about God, but I don’t believe in God, so I am not really bothered by any of this. What you think God says has no more relevance to me than what you might think Santa Claus says.”
C: “But God is real, and he will send you to Hell if you disobey him!”
A: “So, might makes right then. That’s ultimately what these things always reduce to, isn’t it? Once again, I understand that you believe that God is real, and that you believe in Hell, but you haven’t proven anything to me. Unless you can prove to me that God is real and how I can verify the validity of God’s commands, all you have to give me is a threat of force. I might be scared by a threat of force if it is real, but acting out of being scared does not mean I accept any obligation as being valid.”

From the unbeliever’s perspective, such attempts are circular and cannot break free from their dependence to a specific belief system. No matter what belief the Christian brings up, it is dependent upon the worldview that generated it. And here is the problem in attempting to transfer obligations from an exterior determinism to the individual: no matter how big a mass of propositions you accumulate as “proof,” that mass remains tethered to the worldview which generated it. Adding up a hundred inter-subjective truths does not, and cannot, produce one single objective truth.

The only way to counter this fact, for the believer, is to try to link the mass of propositions to some objective truth, which can then act as validation for the entirety of it. But this inevitably leads to ridiculous results. For example, some have claimed that acupuncture was “validated” by a study which showed that sticking needles in people at certain places can reduce pain. But acupuncture is an ancient belief system laden with pseudo-scientific beliefs; it is silly to claim that the whole belief system we call acupuncture is validated by someone sticking needles in people. All that the study proves is that sticking needles in people can reduce pain.

If the Christian continued our fictional discussion, he might say something like:

C: “Well, it’s actually easy for you to see that there is a God. After all, can the entire universe, and all the complex things in it, come to exist by chance? That’s impossible. There must have been a designer behind all this.”

There are flaws with the argument itself, and I don’t think I have to point them out. But beyond that, even if we accept the Christian’s argument as valid, we are no closer to validating the whole mass of propositions that came before it. Even if we did discover that there was a designer behind the complexity of the universe, this would in no way validate the whole belief system of Christianity; all it would prove is that there exists some designer that made the universe, whatever that designer is. All Christian arguments which attempt to rely solely on objective truths lack specificity, because they are no longer linked to the specific belief system they are dependent upon; and all the Christian arguments which appear to do the same job but have specificity are always still dependent upon some element of Christianity, such as the Bible or the person of Jesus. There is no way out of this quandary.

The same reasoning applies to legal obligation, for the same general reasons. In fact, if you replace “God” by “the law” and “Hell” by “jail” in the fictional discussion above, you’d get pretty much the result you would get by debating a statist (although, unless one is in a society where homosexuality is illegal, “homosexuality” should be replaced by something else). And you are liable to come up against the same two kinds of arguments: those that are depend on some element, such as democracy or some “service” (such as health care, schooling, roads), and those that lack specificity because they try to lean on some supposedly objective truth (such as the belief that man must be controlled). But it is impossible to go from legal obligation to moral obligation, because no accumulation of legal truths or legal obligations can ever give us a single objective truth.

This whole process also applies to evaluations, not just obligations. You often run into some knuckle-dragger who believes that killing innocent women and children in some pointless foreign war is perfectly valid, or that Noah’s Flood was a wonderful act, or similar genocide-supporting or murder-supporting nonsense, which is just plainly, self-evidently incorrect and evil by any human standard. I have examined in the past exactly how people come to be so mentally corrupt. Now, you can have the exact same kind of dialogue than I described before, with the same kinds of objections. The only difference is that, most of the time, you are taking them by surprise when you ask them to justify their evaluations, because they tend to be implicit. Because of this, their answers are more likely to be just plain insults rather than serious objections.

On all of these points, the believer may try to end the conversation by explicitly stating a threat of force, as I did in the fictional dialogue. The believer may also try to argue that this threat of force is the result of a voluntary or even consensual process (for the State, this is the “social contract” conceit; for Christianity, this is “original sin” and “they chose to disobey God”). Finally, the believer may try to argue that submitting to his authority of choice fulfills some strong inner desire or need. None of these have any relevance to the problem of transferring obligations. They are just red herrings and not worth wasting any time on.

To summarize the argument:

(1) Any moral obligation towards an exterior determinism would have to be objective (to exist independently from group beliefs and language).
(2) Obligations generated by any exterior determinism are inter-subjective.
(3) It is impossible to go from inter-subjective propositions to objective propositions, as any given sum or network of inter-subjective propositions must still remain grounded to the belief system.
(4) Therefore, moral obligations cannot be generated by any exterior determinism.

Phil Davison, GOP Candidate, Delivers Stark County Treasurer Speech, 9 8 2010

This video elicits only one question: how many lines of coke?

Db0 on the NAP and why it’s useless…

Db0 discusses how the Non-Aggression Principle is really a shallow principle which only takes substance when coupled with a specific view on what is or is not acceptable in a given society. Because the capitalists couple NAP with “self-ownership,” their usage of the NAP becomes a tyrannical one.

While it’s easy to understand that someone “aggresses” when they steal something from another person (which is why most other moral systems do not require a NAP to label theft as wrong), things get pretty murky when one goes beyond that. Do I “initiate force” when I use a productive machine without paying rent? How about if I pay only enough rent to cover the cost of the machine? Do I “initiate force” when I toil the unused land that is owned by someone else? How about when I trespass?

This is further complicated by the claims of the NAP proponents that the NAP does not excuse any and all acts of self-defence but is rather limited by the level of aggression. We’re informed that it does not in fact, grant the right of shooting trespassers. But this again does not really clarify the matter. Whereas in literal aggression, one is always aware of the level the initiator is using (threats, shoving, punching, lethal weapons etc) and can respond in kind, in this extended field of aggression you’re left to comparing apples with oranges. What is the correct response to someone trespassing your property? Trespassing on their property? Forcibly taking them out? Threatening to shoot them and then follow through if they don’t comply? The truth of the matter is that unlike literal aggression, you cannot discover how you can respond in kind intuitively.

On the issue of “self-ownership,” see my entries Self-ownership is a meaningless concept and The confusion of self-ownership