New Blog!

Its time to say goodbye to Blogger and TechnoEudaimonia. I've moved on to greener pastures: The Examined Life, hosted by WordPress. I'll leave this one up for the time being; there are some half-way decent posts buried somewhere in here.

A New Kind of Journal: Libertarian Papers

Stephen Kinsella and Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute have started a new, online-only academic journal called the Libertarian Papers.  It has a slimmed-down editing process and will accept submissions from anyone.  Each article is posted as a separate blog post, as soon as it is ready, instead of being released in issues.  To add to the goodness, the Papers are using Creative Commons Liscense, so kudos to them for that  (I guess Kinsella finally felt guilty about being a patent lawyer :-) ).  As a sneaky side note, Roderick Long is on the editorial board, so lets see if we can get some left-libertarian stuff published!

List of Random Stuff that I'm calling a Blog Post

1. This will be my first post aggregated to Anarchoblogs, so to all reading, hello! Also, I'd like to take this oppurtunity to once again mention the Forums of the Libertarian Left, a great place for agorists, mutualists, geolibertarians, voluntaryists, libertarian socialists, decentralists, and other left-libertarians to discuss theory, history, and tips, tricks, and strategies on smashing the state.

2. Happy birthday Pierre-Joseph Proudhon!

3. If you will, vote for Kevin Carson's policy recommendations to the Obama administration on Change.gov.

4. That's about it. I'll close with Aristotle Quote #2:

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

Rasmussen & Den Uyl and Carson on Property Rights

I just got my copy of Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl's Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order, and I would recommend to anyone interested on a neo-Aristotelian approach to ethics and rights-justification.  While I was reading, I discovered a very interesting parallel with none other than Kevin Carson, suprisingly enough.  The passage below is in a section about justifying Lockean property rights:

In terms of specific situations and social setting, how to cash all
this out in terms of positive law and rights will be difficult and
beyond the purview of abstract moral and social thoery.  We believe a
good deal will be practically dependent on actual agreement.  Herein,
for us, lies the proper, and extremely important, place for social
contract theory.  What people are willing to agree will impact
significantly on the specific rights structure of a given society,
although it will in no way be decisive about the moral quality or
character of such a society.  Perhaps pouring cans of tomato juice into
fluid mediums (wombatron: a reference to one of Nozick's examples in Anarchy,
State, and Utopia) would be an acceptable procedure for detirmining
boundries in cases of original acquisition in some strange land of
tomato juice fetishists.  Similarly, a community of artists might
settle upon criteria of visual perspective in their society (for
example, you own what you can see) in cases of original acquisition. 
We find it highly improbable that these criteria would command
consensus; but then it is also unlikely that the Puritanical idea that
one ones what one can physically labor upon would be the only
acceptable principle of original acquisition in all societies either.

The above could just as easily apply to, say, abandonment, instead of original acquisition.  This parallels Carson where he talks about competition and arbitration of competing property meta-systems in Mutualist Political Economy.  The implications of this are interesting: given that mutualist property rules really only fundamentally differ from a traditional Lockean system in what constitute abandonment of property, one could easily ground a mutualist society in R&DU's neo-Lockean system.  More tenatively, one could even justify a form of Georgism, although I am less sure on how to go about that.

On a side note, this post has got me interested in grounding mutualist and individualist principles, such as mutuality, within a neo-Aristotelian ethical framework.  Look for more on that sometime.

Website of the Week #3: Forums of the Libertarian Left

(yes, I know that it's been more than a week; I'm working on posting more often)

If you are a mutualist, agorist, geolibertarian, voluntaryist, left-Rothbardian, decentralist, libertarian socialist, or any other individual on the Libertarian Left, and you want to discuss and debate theory, history, and smashing the state-capitalist system, then the Forums of the Libertarian Left is the place for you. It has grown beyond all of my expectations, with 72 members (currently) and about 10-20 posts a day (on average). It has become the forum for Left-Libertarianism online. Sign up and join the Revolution today!

One More Time on "Axiomatic Libertarianism"

Thanks to Wirkman for pointing this out:

Whatever liberty is or is not, its ethical defense is something in
addition to it. Thus, there may be more than one ethical principle
defending liberty. Autonomy (self government) and eudaimonia (happiness
through flourishing, or however you define it) likely have something to
do with the best defenses of liberty. But the ethically principled
defense of liberty is not the same thing as liberty, and it is
worthwhile to separate — keep distinct — the is question (contingent upon human action, mind you) from the ought question (which itself can be looked at from several perspectives.

What I meant was the right to liberty, liberty in the normative sense, not liberty as an existing condition.  Its my fault for not making the proper distinction here.  From now on, revising, I promise :-).

Some Clarifications on "Axiomatic Libertarianism"

A little clarification is needed for my previous post (I really need to finish my posts before I post them :-) )

First, I was unclear on what I meant by "axiomatic".  In saying this, I meant that liberty or self-ownership (more on this later) was independent from wider ethical concerns.  There is another meaning of axiomatic, a self-evident principle that cannot be logically denied, that I conflated with the definition that I was going for.  Some of the conceptions of libertarianism are axiomatic in both senses, but my criticism was directed towards the first.  Also, it may be argued that Rothbard's method is half-way between an axiomatic view and a view based in Aristotelian meta-ethics, as Douglas Rasmussen does here.

Second, I was a little off base on what the axiom actually was.  Most of the thinkers I named (Rothbard, Hoppe, Block, Molyneux, and Kinsella) posit that self-ownership, rather than liberty per se, is axiomatic.  Liberty is then a corollary of self-ownership.  This is a small clarification, as it doesn't really effect my criticism, but I thought that I should make it anyway, before someone corrects me :-).

Third, I was asked by someone by email what I meant by "independent from wider ethical concerns."  I mean this: in an axiomatic conception of libertarianism, the only principle that is referred to is self-ownership (liberty and arguably Lockean homesteading rules are corollaries of self-ownership).  Nothing is said about autonomy in a wider sense, or any other moral principle.  For example, Walter Block has said that you have the right to pry someone's fingers from the ledge of your skyscraper window, if you don't want them to be there.  The problem with that is that it would result in their death, a rather more important issue in this case than your property right.  A libertarian political theory properly grounded in a broader ethical theory would tell you that there are limits to the harms that you can inflict on others, regardless of property.

I hope that this has been of some use in clarifying my argument.

The Problem with Axiomatic Libertarianism

Many libertarians, following in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, propose that liberty is an axiom; that is, liberty is a self-evident fact.  They include such thinkers as Hans-Hermann Hoppe with his libertarian version of argumentation ethics, Stephan Kinsella with his conception of estoppel, and Stefan Molyneux with his "universably preferable behavior".  Non-aggression is thus singled out and seperated from the rest of ethics, which leads to a seperation of what is "right" and what is "good"; this is evident, for example, in many of the writings of Walter Block.

The problem with this is that it isn't the case; liberty is not an axiom, it is an ethical princple based on deeper ethical concerns (autonomy and eudaimonia).  This may seem to be a small difference, but it leads to several deviations from what I would consider to be truly libertarian.

First of all, it leads people to only consider principles, divorced from any wider ethical context.  This means that ethical concepts with real meaning, such as need or harm, are completely ignored.  Thus, the Rothbardian view of proportional punishment as being a valid answer to a crime, regardless of the consequences to anyone, and ignoring what Long called each individual's "spheres of authority".  Also, Block's view that one can legitamately pry someone's fingers off of the ledge of a skyscraper if you own it falls under this category.

Second, it leads many thinkers to propose a "plumb-line", "thin" libertarian view; that is, the view that libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, and nothing else.  The problems with that are best explained here.

Third, it leads some thinkers to bundle libertarianism with values that a non-axiomatic thick libertarian would reject.  This includes some of Hoppe's ultra-conservative views; he explicity rejects pluralism, a necessary part of a free society, and he advocates a sort of "voluntary" authoratarianism.

Instead of divorcing liberty from the rest of ethics, libertarians should base the non-aggression princple in a wider ethical theory, to avoid these problems.

Aristotle Quote #1

Because I don't have the motivation to write a full post:

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We
do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather
have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” (from the Nichomachean Ethics)

Action as a Basic Axiom?

While I was contemplating about a hybrid Aristotelian/Randian/Austrian ontology, I started wondering: is human action a basic axiom, like existence, identity, and consciousness, or is a non-basic axiom like entity or a corollary of an axiom like causality or non-contradiction?

First off, I wondered about Rand's distinction between basic and non-basic axioms. Existence, identity, and consciousness are said to be basic, while the only non-basic axiom that I could find (in OPAR) is entity. The distinction seems a bit weak: strictly speaking, the only basic axiom appears to be existence, while the others are implicit in it. A closer inspection will reveal, though, that the distinction holds. Existence and identity are 2 different aspects of the same irreducible fact (something is and something is, respectively), while consciousness is another irreducible fact (the law of identity also serves the useful purpose of being the basis of the laws of logic). Entity, for example, is a sub-divsion of existence, and while it is an irreducible fact, it still depends on existence in a way that identity and consciousness do not.

With that established, we can investigate the nature of action. Action, according to Mises in Human Action, is "purposeful behavior". He further defines it as "will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the condition of its enviroment, is a person's concious adjustment to the state of the universe that detirmines his life." Already, we can see that action depends on at least one of the basic axioms, consciousness. But is action irreducible?

To answer this question, it appears we must ask another: can the be consciousness without action? Can a self-aware being not have purposeful behavior? One example that comes to mind is an "unlimited" consciousness, which would have no reason to act. However, such an idea is rendered impossible by the primacy of existence; every existent, including a conscious being, has an identity, and is thus limited. Any unlimited attribute is an impossible contradiction (see OPAR and George H. Smith's Atheism for a further arguing of this point).

Here is another example: imagine an artificial intelligence, running on an isolated computer, with input but no output. Can this consciousness act? It would seem not. Thought isn't purposeful behavior; it is only a pre-requisite to purposeful behavior. Thus, I think we have come to an answer: action is not completely contained within the concet of consciousness, but is a basic axiom in its own right.

Comments from those more knowledgable than I are appreciated :-)