Susan Hogarth wrote: SH) I also don't consider you to have provided anything I would recognize as 'empirical analysis' (SH
Here it is for the third time: "every single episode in which there wasn't a monopoly on force-initiation over a region becomes a test case for [anarcholibertarianism]. Despite the literally hundreds of such test cases, the only purported successes advanced for the theory involve a few thousand pre-industrial farmers sprinkled sparsely across medieval Iceland and the frontier of colonial Pennsylvania. In contrast to how even bastard forms of minarchism have been so spectacularly successful compared to all other significant social experiments, the track record of anarcholibertarianism is simply embarrassing." This also was an empirical claim: "It would be untenable to deny that history provides many examples of situations in which there was no functioning monopoly on force-initiation over a significant region for a significant period of time, for any non-embarrassing standard of significance." And this: "I've never heard of a single case in the entire history of organized crime across hundreds of cities in scores of nations over multiple decades in which the unregulated market for protection behaved as predicted by anarcholibertarian theory. This track record becomes even more dismal if you include all the cases in history in which there have been regions lacking effective sovereignty by a central authority. This amounts to an empirical falsification of the anarcholibertarian theory of protection markets that by the standards of social science is spectacularly conclusive." And earlier I twice offered you this as-yet-unanswered empirical argument: "You're asking for a complete overturning of how this polity provides for its common defense and secures its members' right to life, liberty, and property. According to the three leading <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_indices_of_freedom> indices of freedom, only 13 nations (out of almost 200) are currently more free than America. America's constitutional republican framework has been by far the most successful in human history. It has been increasing personal and civil liberties almost monotonically for two centuries, and we are among the most economically free nations in the world, with a per-capita GDP exceeded only by Norway and Luxembourg. Our 300 million people live and work in a continent-wide nation with a $13 trillion economy built on a twenty-first century technological infrastructure. By contrast, anarcho-capitalists can merely wave toward a couple of medieval island nations with populations and population densities four orders of magnitude less than those of modern industrialized states. As great as America is, we have detailed, redundant, and current empirical evidence backing up the mainstream findings of modern economic science about how market-oriented reforms within the statist framework can make America far more free and far more prosperous. You have nothing of the kind to support your moralizing a priori claim that America would be a better place if we completely dismantled our system of rights protection in favor of a promise by liberty-lovers to set a good example of aggression abstinence." SH) Besides our substantive ethical differences, we also seem to have serious communication issues. (SH Indeed. It's just not tenable to claim that what I wrote above isn't an empirical argument. SH) I do not seem to be able to ask a question and get an answer from you I find useful. (SH Are you seriously claiming that I don't answer your questions more completely and directly than you answer mine? Do you really want me to compile a list of my many direct questions to you that you've never even tried to answer? SH) I don't know what values drive your sense of right and wrong. (SH In a thread with you entitled "Defining Libertarianism", I wrote: BH) I would define libertarianism is the belief that the role and incidence of aggression in society are to be minimized -- i.e. that the role and incidence of liberty in society are to be maximized. [...] A good way to measure how libertarian you are is by the net incidence of aggression that would likely occur if your policies were adopted. An even better metric would be to differentiate the aforementioned measure over the time variable: the change in the net incidence of aggression that would occur because of the policy changes you advocate. [...] Nobody can promise us that for the tool-using speech-capable pair-bonded omnivorous bipedal primates on this planet, it just so happens that 100% absolute aggression abstinence is always the optimal strategy for minimizing the net incidence of aggression in the societies such primates form. I can take very seriously the detailed consequentialist arguments of a David Friedman or Fred Foldvary for advocating such abstinence, but I see very little merit in simplistic Rothbardian deontological arguments for it. (BH BH) people should not be allowed to free-ride on the contributions of others toward such goods [viz. guaranteed access to a system for protecting life, liberty, and property], but rather must help finance them through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic. (BH If that isn't a thorough enough summary of my political principles, see also http://marketliberal.org/PlatComWiki/Statement_of_Principles_Proposals#Propo sal_by_Brian_Holtz. And if you want an excruciatingly comprehensive statement of my views on ethics, political philosophy, and virtue philosophy, then see this chapter of my magnum opus: http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Axiology. My views on a couple of details have changed a bit since then, and I still need to incorporate some of the ideas I've since encountered in Fred Foldvary's universal ethic <http://www.foldvary.net/works/ue.html> and geolibertarianism <http://www.econjournalwatch.org/pdf/FoldvaryIntellectualTyrannyApril2005.pd f> , but I still stand by nearly everything in my book. SH) But I do know you consider killing innocents as moral behavior under the right circumstances and that places a huge gulf between us that I am not sure any discussion can bridge. (SH Are you stating categorically that you would never kill an innocent to save a thousand innocents? Does your "sense of right and wrong" let you give a straight answer to this straightforward question, or do you still dismiss it as "stupid"? I below excerpt my last email to you on the Trolley Problem, which alone includes around ten unanswered questions or challenges. _____ SH) I've thought more about this since then. It's not -speculative- so much as -stupid-. The only way it could happen as you say is for some Evil Genius (TM) to set it up thusly (SH No kidding. So is it evil that you're thinking won't exist in anarchotopia, or genius? Or if you think they could never intersect in anarchotopia, then please share with us your list of all the other kinds of misbehaviors that anarchotopians need not worry about. Ditto for your list of topics in the philosophy of ethics literature that, upon further reflection, you think are "stupid". The goal of the Trolley Problem is to present very simply and cleanly a clear moral choice, and it's not uncommon for philosophical thought experiments to sacrifice certain aspects of plausibility to achieve such a goal. If such mental abstractions are not your strong suit, there are other similar thought experiments that don't require any Evil Genius. For example, consider a manned mission to plant a nuke on an Earth-crossing asteroid to prevent an impact that will surely kill millions. Suppose the ship has some technical problem that prevents it from separating from the asteroid before the window of opportunity for diverting it with a nuclear explosion. Suppose further that the crew refuses to detonate the nuke before separation, but NASA has the ability to detonate it remotely. Are you going to call this scenario "stupid", too? Is any scenario "stupid" if it challenges the generality of your ethical principles? SH) Would you kill your mother to save ten strangers? (SH If her death were the only thing that could save them, then I probably would -- and she'd probably insist that I do so. Would your mother let ten strangers die just to save herself? BH) You're innocent, but the only person who can so testify is an innocent third party witness who refuses to answer any questions about the case. (BH SH) What a jerk. (SH If there were no jerks in the world, we wouldn't need courts. It doesn't inspire much confidence in how well you've thought through your political worldview when "what a jerk" is your first reaction to a scenario that is so common and important that it was engraved into the Bill of Rights two centuries ago. SH> what gives me the right to force him to do what I want him to? <SH What gives him the right to refuse to testify when his fellow citizen is on trial for her life? Why can't the right to a fair trial be as fundamental as any other right? BH> In addition to all the Japanese troops and civilians whose lives were saved by not having to invade the imperial homeland, <BH SH> They were saved by being slaughtered? THIS is what you suggest is a straightforward application of your inane Trolley Problem? <SH The atomic bombings killed about 200K Japanese. The projected fatalities for invading Japan included hundreds of thousands of Americans, and over a million Japanese. While there would indeed be some inevitable overlap between the Japanese killed in the bombings and those killed in the alternative invasion, what's "inane" is to suggest I'm claiming that the virtue of the atomic bombings lies in the overlap, rather than in the net savings of lives. SH> leaving Japan was the better alternative all around <SH Better for people in North Carolina, maybe -- at least those whose primary concern is their clean hands. Not so good, however, for the hundreds of thousands of slave laborers controlled by the Japanese, or the tens of thousands of "comfort women" abducted from Korea and China for use in Japanese army brothels. Not so good, especially, for the roughly 100K Asian non-combatants who were dying each month under Japanese military occupation, joining the six to ten million Asians that had already been slaughtered by Japanese aggression. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes if you can stomach further details. _____ I don't claim that you not answering my arguments proves I'm right, or that your beliefs are unwarranted if you don't answer them. I just want you to internalize the brute fact that, for the duration of this Platform cycle, your drive-by aphorisms in support of anarchism are going to be systematically rebutted any time I see them on a forum where I'm not censored. So it would save us both much time, and improve the quality of the debate in the Platform community, if instead of drive-by aphorisms and one-liners you focused more on identifying and promoting what you think are the best available texts arguing for your position, so we can explore (and perhaps even advance) the polemical frontier instead of just making the rubble bounce. Or do you not believe that the extant literature favors your position?
