Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

David Eller opines: “To non-Christians (including Atheists), the Bible is not authority at all, just as to Christians the Qu’ran or the Hindu Vedas are no authority. Nonbelievers don’t care what somebody else’s text says. … I don’t care what the Bible says — it is not my authority — and so its claims are not worthy of my serious consideration, any more than any other texts or myths in the world.” (Natural Atheism, 39) Can I reason likewise about our author’s own book? Why should I accept anything he writes? Isn’t it a “text” in the world? What is not a “text”? Ah, Eller will say, but his book contains arguments. He is not asking me to believe on authority. The Bible, on the contrary, contains only unsupported claims about the articles of faith. OK, let’s start with the basics: did Jesus exist, and did He say and do the things recorded in the Bible? That’s a legitimate historical question. Eller cannot escape it: the answer is either yes or no, and it depends on a sober analysis of the Bible in its aspect as an historical document. If the answer is yes, then we might proceed from that, for example, to the question of Jesus’s self-understanding and to the C.S. Lewis’s trilemma. The Bible can ultimately be dismissed by an unbeliever in terms of its necessity or sufficiency or both for the distinctively Christian set of faith and morals. But it has to be dealt with. It’s a fact, a stubborn presence, and it won’t go away by being called “biased testimony.” (38) To make that happen Eller would have to claim that every important event mentioned in the Bible beyond, perhaps, early Genesis is fake or suspect or embellished by deceivers or deceived beyond recognition. And not even the most fanatical atheist would dare do that.

From Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution blog.

The shifting of the “burden of proof” of God’s existence entirely onto the theist is an unwise move on the part of the atheist. For the theist will welcome this development, because in so doing the atheist essentially refuses to use some of the most powerful arguments against the existence of God, such as the problem of evil, the problem of unbelief, and the problem of divine hiddenness. It is also disingenuous, because few atheists, I imagine, are atheists solely because they find the arguments in favor of God’s existence and concern for His creatures unpersuasive and take the default action of cutting off the seemingly unnecessary entities with Occam’s razor. They are atheists presumably because they are overwhelmed by the positive arguments in favor of atheism, such as the ones mentioned above.

Now it is certainly possible that I am wrong at least in the case of David Eller who calls himself a “natural atheist,” apparently implying that nothing in nature points towards God, and that’s why theism is a silly hypothesis. But even so, I suspect that he is exception to the rule.

Update. I think even the problem of evil, etc. can be used by a “negative” atheist, as well, in the sense of a spotted contradiction within the theist’s concept of God. An atheist need not prove anything; he can sit serenely and argue that the Christian God does not exist, e.g., because omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible, or because omnipotence is incoherent (can God make a stone… ?), or because the problem of evil contradicts our idea of God. In my view the coherence of theism can be successfully defended against all attacks, but it is true that the theist has to do the lion’s share of the work.

There are some people, Christians mostly, who call atheism a “religion.” David Eller takes them to task for this: “If Theists think religion is good, then that is high praise; in fact, we should then qualify for federal funds and tax exemptions, too. If we are a religion in any sense, we are entitled to toleration, First Amendment protections, and all the prestige that Theists think religions deserve. I’m sure they do not mean that. Probably they mean that Atheism is dogmatic, self-assured, intolerant, authoritarian, and other bad things. But if they think that those things are descriptive of religion, how can they be proud of their own religion? Are they really saying, ‘Oh, you are just as dogmatic, self-assured, intolerant, and authoritarian like us?” In other words, when they call Atheism a religion, do they mean it as a compliment or an insult?” (Natural Atheism, 15) Now I would object to this characterization as follows: theists indeed intend this appellation as an insult but in a peculiar sense. There are dogmatic, etc. elements in Christianity, but those things are good, because (theists think) Christianity is true. Since it is true, then the deposit of faith and morals (i.e., dogma) must be taught and preserved with authority. Further, one is entitled to self-assurance if faith is an infused virtue which turns one’s opinions about matters of religion into undoubted beliefs, and even to intoleration of what are perceived as errors in other religions. On the other hand, if atheism is false, then its corresponding dogmatism, etc. are clearly bad.

But none of the foregoing defines religion. A religion is “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.” (m-w.com) Atheism is rejection of any such service and worship. So, atheism is not a religion. (An atheist may be animated by a powerful vision of how the world ought to be which is a substitute of the true perfection for him. This fight for the good for an atheist has all the overtones of religious devotion. Case in point: Walter Block.) What it is, however, is a worldview, a weltanschauung. I’ll give you two dentitions of this term. m-w.com says that it is “a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint.” Mises classifies worldview as follows: “If we look at all the theorems and theories guiding the conduct of certain individuals and groups as a coherent complex and try to arrange them as far as is feasible into a system, i.e., a comprehensive body of knowledge, we may speak of it as a world view. A world view is, as a theory, an interpretation of all things, and as a precept for action, an opinion concerning the best means for removing uneasiness as much as possible. A world view is thus, on the one hand, an explanation of all phenomena and, on the other hand, a technology, both these terms being taken in their broadest sense. Religion, metaphysics, and philosophy aim at providing a world view. They interpret the universe and they advise men how to act.” (Human Action, 178) A worldview, Mises says, “explains the cosmos and seeks to say something about the meaning and purpose of human existence.” (Liberalism, 192) In this sense, I think, atheism qualifies as a worldview.

In 2001 Lew Rockwell penned an article, in which he mentioned the cost per student in public vs. private schools. At that time, according to his research, it was $6,000 vs. $3,100 with many public schools being in awful conditions, so it makes sense to speculate that the higher prices did not buy better quality. (Quality in a socialized industry? Say what?) The numbers need to be updated: in 2004-05 the government schools cost $10,892 per student per year. The government does not publicize the relevant recent data on private schools for obvious reasons (e.g., their Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results from the 2005-2006 Private School Universe Survey has no finance information); but I was able to obtaine a private schools tuition datasheet by request, and my calculations show that the average per student cost in 2003-04 was $5,410. So, still government schooling costs at least twice as much as private education. I am not saying that this is the only reason to privatize all government-run schools, but it is surely a potent one.

Jude Wanniski, may he rest in peace, when he was alive, spent his time sending “memos” to politicians and federal bureaucrats advising them on a variety of policies. His most famous supplication was that the policy-makers use the Laffer curve to determine the “optimal” tax rates, optimal meaning that which would bring in the most revenue. It just so happened, in Wanniski’s opinion, that marginal tax rates were too high even from the point of view of the rulers themselves, and lowering them would increase tax revenue. This was supposed to happen because with lower federal taxes the economy would grow faster due to the greater incentives to work and invest and generate more taxable income. This caused us libertarians to look at him with some favor. Now Rothbard had some unkind words to say about this scheme (Ten Great Economic Myths, Myth #9; A Walk on The Supply Side), but I want to apply Hoppe’s insights to this matter.

Hoppe first sets up the right endpoint of our curve: “Where nothing has been produced, nothing can be expropriated, and where everything has been expropriated, all future production will come to a shrieking halt.” Then he considers the incentives to the state if it is monarchical: “Hence a private owner of government (a king) would avoid taxing his subjects so heavily as to reduce his future earning potential to the extent that the present value of his estate (his kingdom) would actually fall, for instance. Instead, to preserve or even enhance the value of his personal property, he would systematically restrain himself in his taxing policies, for the lower the degree of taxation, the more productive the subject population will be, and the more productive the population, the higher the value of the ruler’s parasitic expropriation monopoly will be.” (Democracy: The God That Failed, 19) It is apparent that Wanniski’s memos might have succeeded, had he been tutoring a prince. In a democracy, however, things are very different. “A democratic ruler can use the government apparatus to his advantage, but he does not own it. … He owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value. In distinct contrast to a king, a president will want to maximize not total government wealth (capital values and current income) but current income (regardless and at the expense of capital values). … Accordingly, it must be regarded as unavoidable that public-government ownership results in continual capital consumption. Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a king would do, a president (the government’s temporary caretaker and trustee) will use as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume. In particular, a president (as distinct from a king) has no interest in not ruining his country. … For a president… moderation offers only disadvantages” (24)

As I argued below, private property anarchists need to demonstrate that private solutions will work for each branch of government to be privatized. The interesting thing is that each branch presents its own unique challenges. Let’s start with law-making. I have defended the view that morality is intersubjective; it works only when there is agreement on what is right or wrong. But at the same time no more is required. Agreement need not presuppose identical moral theories. Nor does it cause relativism; some moral systems and sets of rules are better than others. But if morality, then so is law. First, private — an in, subjective — law is an oxymoron. If you think that doing drugs is permitted, and I think it should not be permitted, then no judge can adjudicate our differences: there will be a war to the death as I try to knock the crack pipe from of your hand, and you (perfectly righteously, from your point of view) defend yourself. We must agree on what is right and what is wrong. But, again, we may come from very different directions. A may think using drugs should be permitted, because the natural law says so. B thinks the same, because he is a pragmatic and is skeptical of the success of any drug war, though if he could prevent people from doing drugs at 0 cost, he’d do it. C may be a utilitarian and believe that government paternalism is, as a rule, absurd. The government is not, C thinks, the guardian of the ignorant and stupid populace. And so on. Now the question is, how to establish agreement on a wide range of issues among the citizens of a town or country? Only two ways suggest themselves: either through voluntary negotiation or arbitrary legislation. If culture so permits and the administrative unit is small enough, rules are best established through custom, common law trial-and-error, natural law a la Rothbard, or economic analysis of law. But it can be that no agreement can be reached in this manner. Then the state can be useful in imposing law according to, say, majority rule. Even if some disagree, they have to persuade the majority and go through the motions of amending the legal code. At the very least, the law will be uniform over some population, something absolutely crucial to a functioning society. A combination of private and state solutions may be in the stars.

But once the law is however determined, I see no obstacles to competing private judges and arbitration agencies. Reputation will be key. In contracts a particular jurisdiction and judge could be specified. In torts, both parties can agree on a decent judge. It’s no accident that ancient Israel, once it was given the “law,” did not require the king but had judges only. An elaborate system of private lower and higher courts, appeals courts, specialized courts dealing with everything from disputes between financial companies to farmers’ quarrels, rules of recognition, Consumers Digest reviews, advice from industry experts, etc. will likely arise and will be able to supplant the present regime completely. The state judicial system we have now will disappear.

The final stage of any legal process, viz., enforcement, however, is, in my view, impossible to privatize. Once the question of what law is has been settled, and a judicial verdict, rendered, the offender must be overpowered, crushed (not in terms of the severity of punishment, of course, but in the sense of carrying out the sentence reliably). Only society as a whole, organized and represented by the executive branch of the state, can do so without fail. The community as a whole inflicts the punishment. Here the mayors/governors/etc. are merely tools of society ensuring that the (private) judges’ efforts are not wasted. For the offender broke the law governing the behavior of an entire people, and as far as judges are trusted — and why wouldn’t they be, unless there is (infrequent) corruption — everyone must be united in executing the sentence imposed on the criminal or tortfeasor.

This analysis suggests that in many disputes anarcho-capitalists and minarchists talk past each other, because they fail to disentangle the different problems posed by each of the three branches of government.

Update. In short, in a city, for example, I envision a government consisting of a part-time city council and a full-time major in command of a few tough deputies.

The IEP sets out the objection:

Proponents of this objection point out that, according to Molinism, the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom must be prior to God’s creating activity because they inform His creative decision. However, under the standard possible worlds analysis, which counterfactuals are true is dependent upon which world is actual (counterfactuals are true if they are true in the closest possible-but-not-actual world to the actual world). Thus, which world is actual (and presumably, how close all possible worlds are to it) must be prior to God’s knowledge of the true counterfactuals. But this means that God’s creative decision must be prior to God’s creative decision! Thus, middle knowledge is circular.

Let it be that if P were in C, then he’d do A. In the possible world W which interests us, P is in C and hence does A. W is fully specified and self-sufficient; we do not need to connect it to any actual world in which P is not in C. In fact, the real counterfactual is this: if God were to actualize W, A would occur. The actual world relative to which this counterfactual is evaluated is the world prior to God’s decision to create — an empty world containing only God. But our counterfactual is self-evidently true, because in the possible meta-world, in which God actualizes W, A indeed happens. So, there is no circularity.

Middle knowledge has been variously defined. Norman Geisler says in a critique that God’s natural knowledge is His knowledge of all possible worlds; free knowledge is the knowledge of the actual world; and “[b]etween the merely possible and the necessary there is the contingent.” (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, “Molinism”) Wikipedia divides knowledge differently: “necessary” means truths that are independent of God’s will and have no possibility to be false; “middle,” contingently true but independent of God’s will; and “free,” contingent truths that are dependent upon God’s will. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy proposes something similar:

Natural knowledge is that part of God’s knowledge which He knows by His very nature or essence, and since His essence is necessary, so is that which is known through it. That is, the content of natural knowledge includes all metaphysically necessary truths. …the content of God’s natural knowledge is independent of His will; God has no control over the truth of the propositions He knows by natural knowledge. Consider, for example, the mathematical truth, 1 + 1 = 2. No matter what God wills, it will always be true that the concepts represented by the symbols 1, 2, +, and =, when arranged in a formulaic expression, one plus one equals two.

Free knowledge is that part of God’s knowledge which He knows by His knowledge of His own will, both His desires and what He will, in fact, do. The content of this knowledge is made up of truths which refer to what actually exists (or has existed, or will exist). … First, the content of that knowledge is contingent; it could have been different from what it, in fact, is. That is, free knowledge includes only… truths that could have been prevented by God if He chose to create different situations, different creatures, or to not create at all. Second, free knowledge is postvolitional; it is dependent upon God’s [decretory, causal] will.

[M]iddle knowledge is like natural knowledge in that it is prevolitional, or prior to God’s choice to create. This, of course, also means that the content of middle knowledge is true independent of God’s will and therefore, He has no control over it. Yet, it is not the same as natural knowledge because, like free knowledge, its content is contingent.

The problem with these definitions is that {necessary, contingent, actual} does not cover all the relevant possibilities. {necessary, contingent/possible, impossible} indeed exhausts all the modal categories, but it is not what we need at all. Both necessary and contingent knowledge are still understood in terms of possible worlds. Thus, if God “knows all the possible worlds,” then He has both the natural and middle knowledge already. It’s true that 1 + 1 = 2 is necessarily true, but the possible worlds in which this statement is true are contingent. The contingency we care about is the contingency of each possible world not the contingency or necessity of propositions or states of affairs in these worlds. That a proposition is true in all possible worlds is a happenstance; good for the proposition, I suppose, but what is it to us? (NB: I’m not saying that PNx & P~Nx which is always false.) Given any world, a proposition in it will either be true or false, whether it is necessary or contingent, and God knows that. It’s the truth value that’s important not the modality. Let me suggest therefore that 1 + 1 = 2 is not part of the natural knowledge of God but of the middle knowledge, defined indeed as the knowledge of all possible worlds. An objection immediately arises: if knowledge of possible worlds is middle, what remains for natural knowledge? The answer is, we cannot know. That knowledge is reserved for the blessed only. We can’t even give an example of a single anything that is true for God naturally. But one thing we can state for certain: God is not reducible to the set of all necessary truths, if such a thing is even coherent. We meet God half-way in possible worlds, but beyond that we cannot progress unless beatified and in the state of glory.

Aquinas would no doubt object. Possible worlds, he would say, are finite reflections of the infinite God. Hence God knows them through Himself. By knowing Himself, God knows how He can be imitated in every possible way. Similarly, the actual world is one of the possible worlds, and since God knows everything to which His power extends, He knows which possible world is the actual one. No need therefore for any kind of knowledge but God’s innate knowledge of His own essence. But here St. Thomas has made a crucial error by failing to countenance the levels within God: necessity, self-interest, and charity or creativity. For example, we humans can easily (perhaps with the help of grace) discuss possible worlds without thinking of them as crude copies of God. Why must God think of them as such? Possible worlds represent what God Himself could be. But He is what He is. He is supremely actual. He has chosen that possible world to live in in which He is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving. Of all the possibilities of existence God’s way is the best one. He has rejected every possible evil, every possible deficiency. In a way, God is the best possible world Himself, the best way of them all to be.

It may be true that “God, from a most profound and inscrutable comprehension of every free will in His essence, has intuited what each, according to its innate liberty, would do if placed in this or that condition.” (Geisler, Ibid.) But that intuition is indistinguishable from the knowledge of necessary truths in the possible world in which some free will FW is in condition C; it’s just that 1 + 1 = 2 will also be true there (and everywhere else, but so what?). Again, we are interested in describing each possible world not in the modality of particular propositions.

I’d like to suggest that free-will libertarianism considers the agent, the self making the choices to be an irreducible ultimate given. On the other hand, it seems compatible with libertarianism to hold that the choice is still determined in the sense that if agent P were put in circumstances C, where C is a set of fully specified circumstances including the whole history of the world up until the time of P’s free action, again and again, he would choose the same thing. As I write, “if I were put into the same situation with the same ‘me’ as I was at the moment of the choice a million times, then every time I would, assuming that there is no random element influencing our choices, reliably pick” the same course of action. In real life we can’t reproduce this experiment, because neither the circumstances now nor the person as he is now nor the random events (if any) that are now taking place will ever be repeated. We would need a set of a million possible worlds to play with, surely God’s own personal prerogative. So, can we say that libertarians are, too, determinists who, however, do not deconstruct the individual agent into, say, “nature and nurture” but consider him to be an elementary simple “particle” or cause?

The city, Hoppe says, is a creation of merchants. It is a trading center, a marketplace. As such, it entails a mixing of people of different races, ethnicities, tribes, etc. who would otherwise have stayed with their own kind. In big cities “the most elaborate and highly developed system of physical and functional integration and segregation will arise. It will also be in the big cities where, as the subjective reflection of this complex system of spatio-functional allocation, citizens will develop the most highly refined forms of personal and professional conduct, etiquette, and style.” Because of this Hoppe denies that it is best that a single government rule a community even of the size of a city. “To maintain law and order within a big city, with its intricate pattern of physical and functional integration and separation, a great variety of jurisdictions, judges, arbitrators and enforcement agencies in addition to self-defense and private protection will come into existence. There will be what one might call governance in the city, but there will not be government (state).” (Democracy: The God that Failed, 176ff)

The merchant elite is the most likely group of people to tolerate and even encourage mixed marriages, though even such marriages will be among the perceived equals. This causes genetic “luxuriation,” as the inborn talents of different racial, ethnic, etc. elites are combined.

With the introduction of the state the form of which, Hoppe predicts, will most likely be a democratic republic, the one-size-fits-all coercive apparatus will cause forced integration between the city and countryside and within the city. This will cause only unnecessary strife (e.g., as a result of “monopolization of ‘public’ streets — whereon everyone may proceed wherever he wants”), and “all forms of ethnic, tribal, or racial tensions and animosities will be stimulated.” (180) This process of the creation of a monopoly of force within a city begins with the prospective monopolist’s playing the “race card” in order to “raise the racial, tribal, or clanish consciousness among citizens of his own race, tribe, clan, etc. and promise, in return for their support, to be more than an impartial judge in matters relating to one’s own race, tribe, or clan…” (178) It is not clear exactly, however, how this is supposed to lead to the establishment of a unified city government.

At the same time, Hoppe says, the decivilization set about by the government will cause mixed marriages among lower classes, leading to “genetic pauperization, a tendency furthered by the fact that government welfare support will naturally lead to an increase in the birthrate of welfare recipients relative to the birthrate of other members, in particular of members of the upper class of their tribe or race.” (180) (I don’t understand, however, why Hoppe thinks that mixed marriages are OK for the elites but not for the masses.) Conflict among classes will be encouraged by the now popular government. The elites, finding themselves outgunned, will head for the suburbs. As a result, “one of the last remaining civilizing forces will be weakened, and what is left behind in the cities will represent an increasingly negative selection of the population: of government bureaucrats who work but no longer live there, and of the lowlifes and the social outcasts of all tribes and races who live there yet who increasingly do not work but survive on welfare.” (182) As arbitrary state legislation is substituted for natural law, marital and intergenerational ties within families will be weakened. “After the race and the class card have been played and done their devastating work, the government turns to the sex and gender card, and ‘racial justice’ and ’social justice’ are complemented by ‘gender justice’.” Vices such as moral relativism, high time preference, dissolution of the family, hatred of the other run rampant. “Rather than centers of civilization, cities have become centers of social disintegration and cesspools of physical and moral decay, corruption, brutishness, and crime.” (184)

Conclusion. Hoppe’s point is that big cities are inherently, by their very nature, ungovernable by a single monopoly state. As always, our author’s solution is decentralization and market anarchy even within cities.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, agrees with the view that “economics (real economics, not the nonsense you get on talk shows and business hours) is very, very difficult and involves a great deal of complex math.” That’s emphatically not true. Economic theory is a logical a priori science. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone, certainly to any intelligent layman. As Mises argues,

Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s human existence. …

There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon “experts” and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination. As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake.

Very few are capable of contributing any consequential idea to the body of economic thought. But all reasonable men are called upon to familiarize themselves with the teachings of economics. This is, in our age, the primary civic duty. (Human Action, 878ff)

“Well, let’s just hope we’re lucky.”

But it’s interesting that Friedman writes that “One of the first things I realized when visiting Iraq after the U.S. invasion was that the very fact that Iraqis did not liberate themselves, but had to be liberated by Americans, was a source of humiliation to them.” Ah, indeed. The difference between Ron Paul and the rest of them is that Paul thinks that America should be a final cause of the liberty around the world, and McCain and others propagandize (and only propagandize, because they couldn’t care less about freedom, either at home or abroad) that America should be an efficient cause of liberty.

This philosopher’s talk translates as follows: according to libertarians, we should make ourselves as beautiful and free as possible and by means of that serve as an example for others to imitate. According to warmongers and killers of every stripe, on the contrary, we should violently interfere into random countries’ politics in order to bring about the results desired by the state. The former is a recipe for prosperity and peace and indeed, liberty. The latter, for endless war and misery.

Of course, the America’s impact on Iraq can hardly be characterized as “liberation.” But regardless, Friedman’s quote nicely illustrates the point that paternalism cannot be a permanent strategy either with individuals (because it fails to soul-make) or with countries (because ideology which ultimately controls the political system cannot be imposed by force but only adopted via voluntary learning).

William Kristol objects to the now famous MoveOn.org ad featuring a mother and her 1-year old son:

Now he argues that “Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.” Thanks to him we are indeed not. But anyway, the young men and women can rest easy. I am part of the “nation,” but I don’t want them to risk their lives for me. If anyone wants to risk his life, go climb a mountain or learn some extreme sport. Me, you can leave alone, unguarded and unrisked for. I can defend myself, thank you very much. If necessary, I’ll even call the city cops to help me. (Yes, I know: “defense” is a public good; non-excludability and all that. Readers of my blog will know that I care little for the federal and state protection.)

Doesn’t Kristol understand that the point of the ad is not to denigrate soldiering as such but to protest against particular offensive imperial conquests such as indeed the war in Iraq; against deceiving young men into serving not the “people” but the state and its connected pressure groups; and against foreign statism and interventionism as such? It is true that “Someone has to stand between our society and danger.” But no country in the Middle East was a danger to us, certainly not Iraq. What McCain can’t have is Alex as his tool, his useful idiot in perpetuating government destructionism of the despot-in-chief.

Only the government can gobble up productive land and make it useless. Florida will “buy the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar” to “restore” the Everglades. … “Environmental groups hailed the undertaking. ‘This is putting it back the way it was in 1890,’ said David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. ‘When you come back in 20 years, it will look indistinguishable from the way it looked before the white man.’” Why stop there? Let’s make the whole US look like before the “white man.” (Those rapists of nature, white men are.) Just kill everybody. We wonder why anyone would do something so destructive as create a computer virus. Mark my words, one of these days we’ll see a greenie engineer a real virus, against which we humans have no defense, and release it into general population.

I tell you, the notion of evenly rotating ecosystems has been beyond pernicious.

What’s the point? Consider the Alaskan refuge. I’ll never visit it. At best I’ll see a nature show where the wildlife is shown to cavort and caper in the tundra. I don’t benefit at all from it. Who does? The “future generations,” for whose sake we are supposed to sacrifice, will likewise not benefit, as they, either, won’t be allowed in there.

I define mental illness as taking your intellectual errors to their logical conclusions; i.e., actually living your life according to some reductio ad absurdum. Environmentalism is a mental illness, insofar as it considers human civilization building to be a bane not a glory. From the innocent at first glance love of “biodiversity” (I admit that there may exist plants and animals for which we have not yet found use; but that’s the only good reason for preserving them for the future) via a religious impulse to serve something greater than oneself, the greenies eventually end up with a reductio that humans don’t belong on earth. Yuck.

Update. Joseph Rago agrees with me in his review of The Happening.

Natural rights are those human rights respecting which promotes social cooperation, general welfare, and human flourishing and happiness; and results in the fastest improvement in the standard of living of the immense majority of the population. In other words, natural rights emerge from the body of natural law as elucidated by natural and social sciences, especially as it pertains to human happiness.

Obeying natural law makes human actions as successful as they possibly can be relative to the society’s level of economic and technological development. Natural rights are the rights which, if respected, are most conducive to such success. In this sense natural rights can be likened, perhaps surprisingly, to rule utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism will then be the form or spirit of the human laws, while the matter of letter of the law can be filled in in the way Rothbard does it in The Ethics of Liberty. Although Rothbard seemingly berates utilitarianism for its subjectivity, for taking values as given and considers ethics to be a science of “true” happiness, there is no reason why we can’t use the term “rule utilitarianism” in this narrower sense to mean the requirement to create laws following which normally maximizes that true happiness over some group of people (such as, indeed, everyone). In other words, utilitarianism demands (1) that laws promote or be means to human “true” well-being and (2) that it be specified the well-being of which humans we are concerned with. Surely, this is uncontroversial. (Rothbard also chastises utilitarianism for taking all present property titles to be legitimate, but that criticism, if at all valid, applies to act utilitarianism only not rule utilitarianism.)

For example, just because every man naturally owns himself does not mean that he ought to own himself, unless you argue that slavery of whatever sort is evil, because it retards flourishing and happiness.

Two objections can be made here, now that I am remembering Rothbard. First, the ethics which allows some people to own the bodies or fruits of the labor of other people fails to be universalizable. “Thus, if someone claims that the Hohenzollern or Bourbon families have the ‘natural right’ to rule everyone else, this kind of doctrine is easily refutable by simply pointing to the fact that there is here no uniform ethic for every person: one’s rank in the ethical order being dependent on the accident of being, or not being, a Hohenzollern.” (43) The subjects, says Rothbard, are veritable subhumans as compared to their rulers, and this “violates the initial assumption that we are carving out an ethic for human beings as such.” (46) On other hand, “Universal and Equal Other-ownership” fails because it leads to mankind’s disappearing from the face of the earth. “Can we picture a world in which no man is free to take any action whatsoever without prior approval by everyone else in society? Clearly no man would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly perish. But if a world of zero or near-zero self-ownership spells death for the human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the law of what is best for man and his life on earth.” (46)

Second, we can argue that the soul commands the body as a crane operator commands his machine, infallibly; while a human master commands his human slave through mere incentives of fear and reward. The reason to acknowledge self-ownership then is the far greater intimacy of the connection between the owner and the owned in the case of self, the far easier and more direct control by the soul of the body than by a master of his slave. In addition, a man can know himself by direct introspection which is a greatly superior way of learning than any way a master can learn of his slave. So, any person is suited to own himself in a more robust manner than he is suited to be owned by another. This is because ownership of oneself is of a different nature than ownership of another: the union of the soul and body is far closer and deeper than the union of the master and the slave. It’s much more “efficient” for each person to own himself.

In my review of one of the previous papers in this book I blithely equated moderation with temperance. Byron will have none of that: these are different habits, and the “virtue” of moderation is even aptly placed in scare quotes. Here is what our author says: “…moderate folks are contented satisficers. … Considered as a habit of feeling and desiring pleasure, temperateness is a mean because the temperate person has neither too little nor too much. But considered as a virtue and an element of a good human life, it is the best. And so the temperate person, by striving to be temperate, aims at the best and thus optimizes. … temperateness does not involve choosing what is merely satisfactory…, and so temperate action is not in itself the result of satisficing choices.” (Satisficing and Maximizing, 195ff)

Byron examines the idea that “satisficing is rational because it expresses the virtue of moderation.” (196) Even if, for example, I am just expressing my love for someone, that expression is aimed at satisfying some desire or accomplishing some goal. So, of course, he says, every action is done for an end. Hence moderation must have a purpose. Unfortunately, Byron argues, no one has shown what that purpose is. As I show below, moderation detached from temperance can be a vice contrary (by deficiency) to magnanimity.

Finally, a view that satisficing expresses the virtue of antiperfectionism is discussed. Choosing an action which is less than the best or which reflects insufficient virtue is defended on the grounds that one does not want to be too hard on himself for not being perfect. But then taking it easy and being content with one’s own character flaws is the subjectively best course of action — that is, the topmost entry on one’s value scale. You still maximize, even if you are deceived about what’s “really” best for you. Again, choosing on the basis of incorrect information retains all the qualities of normal choosing. Weakness of will is reducible to high time preference or perhaps to high coefficient of impulsivity. The alleged satisficing therefore is nothing of the sort.

In one episode Peter is filming a plastic bag being moved to and fro by the wind and saying that there’s so much beauty in the world, obviously in a reference to the movie American Beauty. Then there is a shot of God on a cloud yelling at him: “It’s just a piece of trash blowing in the wind! Do you have any idea how complex your circulatory system is?!”

In the previous post we compared the satisficing/maximizing pair to duty/supererogation. Our present author likens it rather to rightness/thresholds. His first claim is that consequentialism and satisficing are totally incompatible. This is because a consequentialist can always ask the satisficer why he has not opted for a more pleasant choice, all things considered. “If the advocate of mere satisficing refuses to explain why it makes sense to choose the lesser option, then the critics can offer considerations of their own and employ them to show that the option chosen is really best, or they can refuse to agree that the choice makes sense.” (Satisficing and Maximizing, 159) What van Roojen proposes is a deontological theory where the right is prior to the good. Then almost by definition a person who acts as morality commands need not maximize the good. And since acting morally cannot be irrational, not maximizing is not irrational either.

Now as John Rawls points out, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” (A Theory of Justice, 26) Deontology is saved from this perversion by admitting thresholds, in which case it becomes “moderate” rather than “strict.” Suppose that 5 people desperately need organ transplants or they will shortly die. There is a guy named Chuck in the hospital. Can the doctors kidnap him, chop him up, implant his organs into the 5 sick people and save their lives? Reason would say no, despite the (crudely speaking) greater utility of saving 5 and killing 1, as compared with the opposite.

But let’s make the situation more extreme. Suppose that a terrorist has hidden a powerful nuclear bomb inside a warehouse in downtown Tokyo. If it goes off, millions will die and billions of dollars will be lost in property damage. Unfortunately, the warehouse has only one entrance which is watched over by a security guard who is armed and instructed not to let anyone in. The guard is just a regular guy trying to make a living, hired by the warehouse owner, neither of whom has any inkling of the destructive contents of the property. Now I am rushing in to save the city, but I am confronted by the guard and, to make matters worse, he won’t believe me (or I can’t communicate with him, because I do not know Japanese). He has pulled out his gun and is clearly ready to use it if I trespass. Do I have the right to kill him in order to get in? To make the problem even more difficult, suppose that I am a cop, whose duty it is to protect the citizens. Can I now kill the guard? I think I’d have to, and God have mercy on my soul.

In other words, if by doing what is right the situation deteriorates so much as to go below or beyond some threshold, I am permitted to violate my duty (such as “you shall not kill”) and maximize the good. So, the formula ends up being: (it is rational to) satisfice until the threshold is reached, then maximize. Although Van Roojen is fully aware that he provides no defense of nonconsequentialism, it’s enough to note that satisficing seems to be compatible with it.

NB: deontology with thresholds is not equivalent to rule consequentialism: in the former the good is posterior to and serves the right; in the latter the right is posterior to and serves the good.

To be continued…

If we think of the relationship of maximizing to satisficing as of supererogation to duty, then is there a difference between ethical and rational satisficing? Dreier says there is. Ethical satisficing can be understood as declining to do the supererogatory act. This our author justifies by saying that while moral reasons may require one always to go beyond the call of duty, there can be nonmoral reasons urging you not to do so. And those nonmoral reasons can be so compelling as to outweigh the case in favor of performing a supererogatory act. For example, saving a woman’s hat which flew out of the bus window is definitely a heroic act, so heroic in fact that it may be considered silly, especially if you lose something important by doing it, e.g., arrive late to your son’s baseball game. But with respect to rationality there is only one kind of reason. “The perspective of rationality just is the perspective of all things considered.” (Satisficing and Maximizing, 152) Hence that perspective always counsels maximizing.

To be continued…