Comment by thegrimmest
2 years ago
> You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you
This is exactly it. Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you. If you can be killed without consequence then you're only as free as you are strong. This is a description of liberal anarchy, which is the natural state.
I guess I should have elaborated that the it is a liberal order which guarantees everyone an equal right do everything which injures no one else. It is the pursuit of order while maximising the freedom of the natural state that motivates the liberal. So the response isn't "killing like that is simply wrong", it's that violence without due process is disorderly.
> the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian
It's not actually, it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal. I'm arguing that the only legitimate use of (physical) authority is in the maintenance of a liberal ecosystem. It is not legitimate to use authority to intervene in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. You've not directly answered my question:
> What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections?
The answer, should you produce it, would presumably justify any authoritarian intervention in pursuit of a utilitarian objective.
> prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism
This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason. It will fail the same way every time power is concentrated in human hands. Liberalism-authoritarianism is a one-dimensional axis. Power is either diluted or concentrated. Neither outcome is utopian, but the failure modes differ. Giving relatively large amounts of power to the average individual produces all sorts of negative outcomes (eg. school shootings), but the consequences of concentrated authority are always catastrophic. The old adage about eggs and baskets applies. Distributed power is antifragile.
> Deciding to privilege non-intervention over any other course of action is itself a choice that can cause harm.
This is an opinion. I disagree. The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome. If you get sick it's the disease that causes harm, not the person who didn't care to help you. If you're pushed out a window, it's the person who pushed you that caused the harm, not the one who didn't catch you.
> It injures the children.
This is also an opinion. People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. Some would say failing to enforce attendance of religious school is injurious. You're sure you know best?
> Natural rights are a very flexible concept.
They're not really. It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening. So yes clean air and water, but no not the professional services of other people. Yes rights are only meaningful when they intersect with the rights of others. The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes. We can still pursue them, just on a voluntary, consensual basis.
> it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal.
You don't have much grounding in leftist thought, do you? Nobody who had even a passing familiarity with left-wing anarchism would say this. It's not worth getting into; suffice it to say that plenty of anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal. Politics are not a Manichean battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism.
> The answer, should you produce it
The answer is utilitarianism itself: a more robust system of axioms that justifies different things. I'm still unsatisfied with the system of ethical axioms you've lain out here; I find them overly vague.
> This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason.
The Soviet Union's problem was a failed vision for centralized planning. China has done quite well as an authoritarian state with more of a market approach. I think it's naive to assume that what is good must be productive and what is productive must be good. There's no inherent reason why an authoritarian state can't be successful. At a time when democracy is in decline both domestically and globally, it doesn't serve anyone's interests to blind ourselves to reality.
> Power is either diluted or concentrated.
Liberalism also concentrates power. It's the ideology of privileging the agency capital owners. "Freedom" in a liberal society means freedom from regulation; freedom for corporations to consolidate; freedom to own as much of anything you want, even when it comes to abstract concepts like land or ideas. It's an ideology in service of a particular status quo, like any other, and the status quo of liberalism is a hierarchy of ownership. It's naive to view "distributed" power as inherently better when that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests. That's just aristocracy by different means.
> The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome.
Who cares? If someone's drowning, and you could throw them a life preserver, and you choose not to, then I don't care if the water killed them. You could have prevented their death at no cost to yourself. They're dead and it's your fault. Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
> People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. You're sure you know best?
I'm not at all swayed by normative moral relativity. If you're a serial killer who thinks murder is good, and I disagree, neither of us is objectively right. But I'll still use as much force as it takes to stop your killing spree.
Yeah, I do think I know best. Or at least, I have no choice but to honour my own subjective morality. It's all I've got. The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
> It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening.
Natural rights are the rights endowed to you by nature, not the rights you would have in the state of nature. Locke thought those were one and the same, but he wasn't the only natural rights theorist. Kant had his own ideas about how you could tell which rights we are supposed to have.
I find the state of nature to be a rather silly idea. We don't live in the woods; why should some imagined conception of what life would be like in the woods have any bearing on the ethics of modern life? Besides, nature honours no notion whatsoever of property, nor does it unfailingly provide us with (e.g.) fresh water. If I steal your wolf pelts, the forest won't send me to jail for it. It is natural for the strong to take advantage of the weak. That's natural selection. Justice and ethics are artificial.
I think the core of natural rights philosophy is just presenting a notion to the audience and going, "see? Doesn't this feel intuitive? Doesn't it feel NATURAL for us to have property?" No, I don't think it does. Frankly I don't care much what is and isn't natural anyway. Rape is natural—animals do it all the time. Antibiotics are not natural.
> The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes.
The purpose of the liberal project is to justify a particular hierarchy of power and control using the language of freedom. "Authoritarian collective outcomes" here include things like squashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom because it violates the freedom to run a private health insurance company, despite the fact that it also frees people from illness. Harm and well-being are elided in favour of the much more flexible concept of freedom, and that concept is invoked in the service of preserving the power of the powerful.
> anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal
The words are overloaded, but liberal and authoritarian are on opposite ends of the same axis on the political compass. Classical liberalism stands on the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics. Today these ideas are also called "libertarian" but the core desire is expressed in the Latin root word. I want to be free - as in without a master, elected or otherwise, who governs my life.
> I find them overly vague
I'd be glad to elaborate. I'm positing that it's more important our interactions be consensual than value-maximizing. Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
> China has done quite well
China is doing well because it is able to benefit from innovations generated outside its borders. It's not able to generate important innovations on its own. This was also the main problem in the USSR. The Soviets just didn't have as ready of access to innovations born of a liberal society. Where China does use its centralized authority, the results are often catastrophic, eg. its one-child policy or COVID response.
> Liberalism also concentrates power
Some parts of this paragraph are more true than others. There is nothing in classical liberal thought about eg. patent or copyright law. Also you're broadening the definition of power that I put forward:
> Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you
Corporations cannot arrest you for noncompliance with their policy. They cannot fine you. They are fragile structures, existing at the whim of their consumers and competitors. It takes a revolution to overthrow a government. Corporations live one big mistake away from ruin.
The main issue with today's corporations is regulatory capture, which is actually an issue of our government. If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
> that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests
No, it actually matters. The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated.
> Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
Responsibility is all that matters in human affairs. All we do in court is ascertain it. All of our organizations are structured around it. A death is only your fault (responsibility) if you had a duty to intervene. A duty that cannot be imposed on a free person without their consent.
> The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. The worst human catastrophes happen when power is concentrated into hands that do not make this distinction.
> quashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom
This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance, and self-organize into pools with different risk tolerances. Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. If you don't take care of it, it fails. The overwhelming majority of healthcare expenses are consumed by a tiny minority of chronically ill people. Many of these people do not make choices that are compatible with good health outcomes. The 80/20 rule applies. Caring for people who cannot care for themselves is the purview of charity, not authority.
The concept of freedom is actually much easier to grasp than quantifying harm and well-being. It's pretty simple: Did both parties explicitly agree to the interaction? Can either party opt out without being assaulted or imprisoned? If yes then the interaction is consensual. This is not a hard concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ
Using force to impose non-consensual binding agreements is slavery. Slave holders in fact often used utilitarian justifications for their atrocities. You are not any more entitled to the services of a doctor than of a prostitute. The guiding principle of all human interaction must be consent.
> Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
Yes, in an instant.
I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people?
> [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own.
Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
> If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you.
> The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power.
I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots.
> Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree.
Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
> This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance
I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that.
> Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility.
Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction.
On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful.
So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.
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