Brainpolice : Ethics

Insurrection vs. Pacifism: A False Dillema

Brainpolice — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:34:00 GMT

There is a general traditional strategic split among anarchists between insurrectionary anarchism and pacifist anarchism. Insurrection is generally associated with either individual or public violent revolution, although if one wants to be specific it is etymologically linked closely with the concept of an "insurgent", and an "insurgency" could be seen as a spontaneous defensive response to an initial invasion by a political and/or military power (like the "insurgency" in Iraq, for example). On the other hand, pacifist anarchists completely reject any degree or kind of violence, likely viewing it as inconsistent and hypocritical, and this is more than just a strategic question for absolutist pacifists because they reject self-defense as a matter of principle.

However, it would be decieving to assume that these are the only two possible options. Reasonable arguments could be given against both of them and they could be constrasted from an explicitly "libertarian anarchism" that makes a clear distinction between defense and arbitrary violence. On one hand, pacifism can be criticized on the grounds that it doesn't make any room for defense and it consequentially leaves one in a submissive position relative to power; rulers aren't likely to just voluntarily give up their power, especially when there isn't even a moderate threat of resistance. On the other hand, the traditional violent revolution can be critisized on the grounds that it threatens to undermine the end that it is a means towards and often just leads to a vangaurd state; arbitrary violence contradicts the principles that one is "fighting for" to begin with and is not likely to lead to the goal of a free society.

For a hasty insurrectionist, violence is the first resort, while for a libertarian anarchist, violence is more of a last resort of defense in comparison (there is a difference between defending yourself in the face of a police state and simply taking people out arbitrarily), and the kind of measures supported by some insurrectionists definitely crosses well over the line of defense and into the realm of assassination and rioting. From a libertarian perspective, it is hard to see how simply storming city hall and shooting the place up like it's Duke Nukem is reasonable or consistent. Aside from the possible horrors that may be endorsed by an insurrectionist as a means, the main problem that an insurrectionist faces is the question of how to avoid the phenomenon of the revoltionists becoming the new power center. Instead of "the new society in the shell of the old", there are valid concerns about "the new power center in the shell of the old". While insurrectionary anarchism is contrasted from marxist vangaurd statism on a certain level, there still may be a context in which such a distinction essentially breaks down.

The conundrum of the pacifist is sort of the opposite one: namely, that when it does come down to a question of defending oneself in the face of aggression, pacifism constrains the individual to the point of powerlessness. There are certain situations in which peaceful resistance will simply be crushed with violence, and in this sense pacifism is simply suicidal as a strategy. While the argument that anarchism could only work if everyone in the world agreed or if everyone was perfectly peaceful is not valid, it may be valid as an argument against pacifism in the sense that pacifism offers no real means to counter violence when it comes down to the nitty gritty of situations in which people use violence; that is, it could be viewed as giving carte blanch power to those who do use violence precisely because organized resistance to it is prohibited to everyone else (by their own code even).

With that being said, this should not be construed to imply that violence is necessarily the only way to counter power - I think that is too pessemistic and Hobbesian of a view. There are numerous non-violent ways to counter power that can potentially have an effect, particularly if one is focusing on the long-term. At a meta level, the most basic of these ways to combat power is a matter of philosophy and ideas, by not allowing the ideological constructs of power to hold weight for you and to spread the demystification of such ideological constructs. On another level, another way to combat power is through a myriad of forms of civil disobedience, which can potentially be effective if the proper precautions are taken. There *is* a certain extent that there's a sense in which power is dependant on compliance or asequiesance, and power can be sterilized sometimes through sheer lack of consensus and compliance. And to put the matter in positive terms, one can combat power through association to foster competition with power and more of a degree of self-reliance that lessens one's unchosen dependancies on power.

However, one shouldn't take too idealistic of a view of the matter either. Power does not dissapear overnight and in some sense anarchism is inherently a long-term project. The traditional notion of revolution can be critisized for precisely this reason, I.E. that it naively expects a singular violent uprising to dissolve power. It doesn't really work that way. On the other hand, the notion of a purely peaceful process seems naive when one considers the likelyhood (or lack thereof) of those in power to cooperating with those who wish to dismantle their power. When it actually does come down to one being explicitly threatened with violence, it seems like violent resistance is essentially the only way to counter it, and a pacifist is simply a sitting duck in such situations for the obvious reasons already mentioned. This is why a "3rd way" makes more sense than either pacifism or insurrectionism.

The matter could be thought of in terms of an anarchist contextualization of Neitzsche's dichotomy between "master morality" and "slave morality". One could say that the masses tend to embrace and follow a "slave morality" that restrains them from engaging in self-assertion while those in power tend to embrace and follow a "master morality" that gives them free reign of self-assertion (although there is a sense in which this does not absolutely hold - there are people in power who genuinely believe in a "slave morality" but are working within an institution of "master morality", and not all of "the masses" believe in a strict "slave morality"), and the combined effect of this is that "slave morality" actually has the function of enabling the master class in that it tends to render the masses powerless by virtue of their own moral dogma.

But I would say then that the purpose should not be to expand "master morality" to everyone but to overcome and transcend both "slave morality" and "master morality". By analogy, pacifism is "slave morality" and insurrectionism is "slave morality" manifested as "master morality". In the context of the state, something like state-socialism could be seen as "slave morality manifested as master morality". The problem isn't restricted to "slave morality" but to the dualistic paradigm itself. "Master morality" as it is actually generally manifested in politics is an outwardly-oriented form of self-assertion in the sense of dominating the lives of others, which is not the same thing as a more inward form of self-assertion in the sense of genuine self-improvement or concern with one's long-range interest. So I would say that both "slave morality" and "master morality" suffer from the same fundamental problem; they are both, in some sense, not "properly egoistic".

Struggling With Max Stirner

Brainpolice — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:07:00 GMT

I have a great amount of respect for the near-forgotten figure Max Stirner. His ill-famed "The Ego and His Own" is probably the most radical, thought provoking and challenging writting that I have ever read. Not only did Stirner explicitly take an egoist position, question the very foundation of morality and critisize modern liberal secularism as not going far enough numerous decades before Neitzsche (and arguably manage to be even more radical than Neitzsche), but he did this as what many think is meant to be the logical completion of Hegel's project and during the same period as and loosely being associated through academia to Karl Marx and Engels.

The "young Hegelians" or "left-hegelians" such as Ludwig Feurbach and Karl Marx all had interacted with Stirner on a personal level in Academia prior to the release of "The Ego and His Own", and from their own perspectives they were trying to surpass Hegel. These young Hegelians came to take an explicitly atheist position, hence aschewing all of the overtly religious elements from the Hegelian project and shifting the emphasis more towards man or humanity. The end result tended towards some kind of secular humanism, and eventually communism as proposed by Marx and Engels (although the communism of Engels was arguably less collectivistic than that of Marx).

Stirner was a student of Hegel himself and passively participated in some of the interactions that took place among the left-hegelians. When he formally released "The Ego and His Own" it greatly shocked many of his collegues, since it took the Hegelian project in an entirely different direction and quite explicitly critisized the left-hegelians as only replacing the old godhead with a new one. Stirner did not critisize the left-hegelians on the grounds of their atheism, but on the grounds that they still cling to concepts that function in the same way as religion. From Stirner's perspective, they had not followed the logical progression far enough. The modern secular liberal had destroyed the basis for an incorporeal god but then proceeded to divinize earthly things and "humanity" in the abstract. In short, the cloak of power had only been secularized, not eliminated. The higher cause of the god had been functionally replaced with the higher cause of the state, the nation, humanity and all sorts of abstract concepts.

This realization of Stirner's and the period during which he realized it is not a trivial matter. Stirner's criticism applies about just as much to contemporary secularism now as it did when he wrote about it. Furthermore, the implications of what Stirner realized is more far reaching than a criticism of secular humanism, it has immense epistemological implications. Stirner effectively denied transcendentalism and rationalism long before anyone classified as a post-modernist did and he reached the conclusion of what by the very least is a strong nominalism using an egoist framework. Stirner had technically surpassed the entire enlightenment project by proclaiming that we should not be ruled by concepts. The enlightenment and secular humanist emphasis on the mind, from his perspective, was just as filled with "spooks" as religion. This is really just an extension on the phenomenology of mind.

While Stirner has been influential in one way or another on many anarchists (ranging from Benjamin Tucker to Emma Goldman) due to his rejection of the state and some of the aspects or implications of his egoism, he also rejected "morality", at least "morality with a big M", and critisized anarchists such as Proudhon for still clinging to morality. To be sure, Stirner seems to put the anarchist on a somewhat higher level because the anarchist doesn't accept the arbitrary authority of the law while the typical secular humanity or liberal still does, but he nonetheless critisized anarchism on the grounds that it still ultimately clung to a human-based morality. This is the point at which I personally start to struggle with Stirner, for while my own views on secular humanism and modern liberalism mirror his in many ways and I'm intrigued by the directions he took the phenomenology of mind, I am an ethical anarchist. That being said, the extent to which Stirner may really be an ethical nihilist is debatable.

Stirner also rejected the traditional notion of revolution, although this was actually picked up and adopted by many individualist anarchists. Certainly not all anarchists believe in violent revolution, revolution for its own sake or at least revolution in the same of a mere change of the seat of power (state-democratic revolution, if you will). So it's questionable wether this criticism should be interpreted to apply to all anarchists per se or wether the criticism is limited to anarchists. There are plenty of people who advocate violent and state-democratic revolutions who are not anarchists and most certainly only wish to change the seat of power, and there are plenty of anarchists who take either a pacifist stance or are generally not comfortable with the traditional method of revolution. If anything, Stirner's criticism could be applied as an anarchist criticism of political libertarianism.

If Proudhon is considered the first formal anarchist, Stirner is definitely the first formal egoist. To be sure, due to the implications of Stirner's phenomenology, Stirner was not an ethical egoist along the lines of Ayn Rand. There are different types of egoism, ranging from nihilist egoism to psychological egoism to ethical egoism. Nonetheless, it seems undoubtable that Stirner has been indispensibly influential on egoism in general, and he must have at least indirectly influenced Neitszche and Ayn Rand in one way or another. Whether or not Neitszche ever read Stirner (and even if he plagiarized him) is a controversy that hasn't been given a rest and has often been pushed under a rug, but I think it's rather undeniable given the historical period and academic connections that Neitszche must have read Stirner's "The Ego and His Own" at once point or another, and some studies have collected some fairly compelling evidence that he must have.

Stirner is not an easy person to classify. While he appears to very strongly oppose communism, democracy and humanism, there is no evidence to indicate that he was necessarily any more supportive of capitalism, conservatism and traditionalism. A knee-jerk response to Stirner from your average secular liberal may be to misunderstand him in such a way, but this is mostly due to cultural cliches and misunderstandings about egoism and individualism. But if anything, Stirner has surpassed all of these things from an egoist framework and as a consequence of his phenomeology. It is also possible for Stirner to be misunderstood as presenting a religious argument against atheism, but this kind of misunderstanding is only an affirmation of Stirner's criticisms of secular humanism.

The reason why Stirner has been pushed under the rug as a philosopher and figure in general, beyond the mere radicalness of his ideas by itself, largely has to do with Marx's own attempts to counter Stirner and all Marxist and post-marxist scholars more or less accepting Marx's line on Stirner. Marx obviously saw Stirner as a threat to his own project, and effectively denounced Stirner as a "petty burgouesie individualist". Very little criticism was directly aimed at Stirner's ideas, it was more of an emotional or knee-jerk reaction. The philosophical community in large part was either silent or dismissive of "The Ego and His Own". It was clearly far too radical for its time and even our time. But it's a shame that the reaction to Stirner has been to marginalize and ignore him, relegating him to a tiny little footnote in history. I highly suggest that anyone, anarchist or otherwise, read "The Ego and His Own" to challenge themselves and perhaps seek inspiration. Stirner most definitely is not irrelevant, and perhaps will become increasingly more relevant over time.

On Amoralist Anarchism

Brainpolice — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:18:00 GMT

I've been a part of numerous online social networks or general social groups online that contains some amoralist anarchists, who either are former libertarian anarchists who have come to reject libertarianism or they are anarchists who rejected libertarianism from the get-go and reached the conclusion of anarchism from a completely different conceptual framework.

On the most personal level, the youtuber D4Shawn and the persona formerly known as Stodles (who now runs this website) are the two amoralist anarchists that I've interacted with most. D4Shawn used to be a libertarian anarchist, and made a separate channel one day trying to approach anarchism from a more utilitarian or relativistic perspective, which has recently devolved into an ethical nihilism. Stodles never was a libertarian, he jumped straight from white nationalism to anarchism, which created some confusion about his position along the way.

Both Stodles and D4Shawn philosophically reject libertarianism while still prefering anarchism. D4Shawn effectively claims that ethics is completely useless metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and thinks that we should be speaking in purely preferential terms. Stodles even appears to go so far as to imply that any conception of ethics inherently leads to rulership. On the other hand, both of them practically take positions that may very well tend towards libertarian anarchism, but it is functionally a mere statement of preferance from their perspective. This starts to hint at the complications that leads me to see this approach as silly.

While these amoralists may philosophicaly reject libertarianism, they essentially practically support it and they cannot completely avoid value-laden terminology. So while they may loudly proclaim their opposition to ethical principles and rights-concepts until they are blue in the face, they ultimately would like to live their lives in a way consistant with certain ethical principles and rights-concepts. While, unlike Stefan Molyneux, I am not argueing that this by itself proves those ethical principles and rights-concepts, it certainly gives reason for pause when comparing one's behavior to one's philosophy and may hint at a need to reanalyze the moral-practical dichotomy.

Anarchism is indistinguishable from anomie if there is an ethical vacuum. There is no such thing as a society in an ethical vacuum. Even if one concedes to the existance of some kind of subjectivity, I don't think it logically follows that ethics is completely useless and irrelevant. An anarchist society either cannot conceptually be an anarchist society to begin with or will not last as an anarchist society for long if its philosophical and cultural norms deliberately undermine it. So it doesn't make sense to act like anarchism is compatible with any set of values or to act as if all values are equal.

Various ethical principles can undermine anarchism, help foster it and widen its scope. Furthermore, merely having an ethical principle, wether it's sensible or not, doesn't necessarily lead to the use of violence to enforce it. Questions of the use of violence inherently are ethical questions themselves, and the behavior of an individual doesn't always align with their philosophy. There really is no such thing as a person who has no ethical considerations, and this includes self-proclaimed ethical nihilists and various post-modernists. Noone can really divorce themselves from goals, reasons for goals and means towards goals.

Such things almost always have a reason. It makes no sense to proclaim that you favor a society in which rulership is normatively shunned, and then say you have no real reason for it other than preferance. To borrow Molyneuxian terminology, that reduces it to the level of "I like ice cream". Surely, a cause such as anarchism is not at the level of "I like ice cream". If one is putting foreward anarchism as a goal, surely one must explain why it is your goal beyond a mere appeal to the fact that your do favor the goal. It makes no sense to have a goal, and then proclaim neutrality as soon as the question of its foundation and application comes up.

So, by the very least, this ethical nihilism is highly impractical. If taken to its extremes, one is simply advocating anomie. If one is more practical about it, one is nonetheless sort of advocating both anarchy and anomie at once. On one hand, I think there's a sense in which this ethical nihilism is harmless, since the ethical nihilist may practically take a libertarian type of position anyways and most people aren't going to practically take ethical nihilism seriously. On the other hand, it poses a threat to libertarian anarchism to the extent that it encourages people to either think that anarchism is a pandora's box compatible with any set of values or to ultimately reject libertarian values in the name of putting on a facade of neutrality.

Putting The NAP In Its Proper Context

Brainpolice — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:55:00 GMT

I contend that the non-aggression principle is not a contextless axoim and it requires a specific definition of the difference between genuine self-defense and the initiation of violence. There is a grave problem that thin libertarianism and plumb-line libertarianism runs into, which is that the non-aggression principle has to be properly specified and taken into its proper context relative to other more specific principles or values. Otherwise, one's conception of libertarianism may start to undermine itself by either assuming values that contradict the NAP or through vagueness in the definition of what constitutes the initiation of violence.

For example, I would contend that the value of revenge and the traditional concept of punishment inherently undermines and violates the NAP. I consider them to constitute justifications for ex-post-facto violence, which is a particular form of the initiation of violence. I would also contend that an absolutist view in favor of violence in defense of property rights undermines and violates the NAP because it justifies pre-emptive violence on the mere grounds that someone is on your property. So I think that genuine self-defense has to be clearly distinguished from pre-emptive and ex-post-facto violence, and the context for genuine self-defense is an actual threat to one's life.

The absolutist view, in contrast, is completely arbitrary because anyone at any time can just go "hey, you're on my property" and cap someone. But merely being on someone's property is an arbitrary reason to justify the initiation of force. You need more of a specific context than just "there is someone on my property". The "punishment" of being shot to death isn't even remotely proportional to the crime of trespassing or loitering. Compared to life vs. death, tresspassing and loitering is a fairly minor matter. It certainly does not merit arbitrarily shooting people unless the people truly do present an overt threat of force.

Furthermore, I reject the idea that being on someone else's property means you forfeit your right to life and liberty. It might mean that you have an incentive to generally cooperate, compromise and abstain from infringement, but not that you lose all of your rights all of a sudden. A theory of property rights that overtly undermines the right to life and liberty needs to be fixed, otherwise it is going to be hopelessly inconsistant, even sinking to the level of justifying what are clear cases of assault and murder. Clearly, a consistant theory of rights has to uphold all of the rights, not misdefine rights to the point where one's alleged defense of one right inherently violates another right in the overall network of rights-concepts.

While Objectivists may tend to have a more integrated social philosophy than thin libertarians, Objectivists also fail to put the NAP in it's proper context, since at least the Piekoff-influenced Objectivists openly justify pre-emptive violence on the largest scale possible in the form of the invasive military apparatus, and there is a degree to which Rand was wishy washy on questions of American imperialism and she definitely seemed to throw a bit of a bone to the political right on questions of foreign policy. The problem with this interpretation of the NAP is that it totally turns a blind eye to the mass-death of innocent bystanders in the crossfire of conflict between nation-states. Scruples over private military proposals aside, thin libertarians actually tend to be pretty good on these sort of questions.

Where thin libertarians tend to fail most, however, is in the realm of pre-emptive violence on a smaller scale, in the context of individual private property owners. It's at this point that thin libertarianism may carve a possible path towards vulgar libertarianism, with the baggage of advocacy of the alleged right of property owners to arbitrarily shoot alleged tresspassers and justifications for feudal or quasi-feudal landlordism. These kind of libertarians tend to treat property rights as axoimatic, and effectively they trump life and liberty in their framework. The tendency is to act as if property rights grants completely arbitrary or absolute decision-making power over other people who are on or make use of your property.

This is problematic because it creates tension with the more fundamental principles involved in individual sovereignty. The fact that I'm on someone's property or the fact that I may technically be capable of leaving someone's property does not mean that literally whatever they decide to do to me is inherently justified. The decision-making power that property rights grants a person should not be completely arbitrary, since it always must be put into the context of consistantly respecting other people's rights. Being on someone else's property should not imply that you are their defacto slave or no longer deserve to live, only that one probably has to compromise with the owner in order to make use of the property. Owning property should not logically grant someone completely absolute and unilaterial decision-making power over other people.

So if views on the NAP or the use of violence in general could be put on a spectrum or organized, I'd categorize it like this: (1) Pacifism - All violence is unjustified, including self-defense (2) Thick Libertarianism - The initiation of violence is unjustified, self-defense is justified when there is an actual threat to life (3) Thin Libertarianism - The initiation of violence is unjustified, except in defense of property rights, which is to be categorized as self-defense (4) Objectivism - The initiation of violence is unjustified, except when it is rational "retaliation" (I.E. ex-post-facto or pre-emptive violence is justified), which is to be categorized as self-defense. The problem with both elements of Objectivism and thin libertarianism is that they smuggle in initiations of force by miscategorizing them as self-defense. The thick libertarian option seems the most rational.

Children and The Family

Brainpolice — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:18:00 GMT

The question of children's rights and familial authority is often regaurded as a grey area for libertarians, as it remains an issue of contention. I generally take a fairly anti-authoritarian view on the matter. While I think that Murray Rothbard's views on children's rights that he expressed in "The Ethics of Liberty" is an improvement over a more traditional conservative view, I ultimately do not find it to be entirely sufficient. In this regaurd, I genuinely think that Stefan Molyneux has provided a more rational libertarian view on children's rights and familial authority than Rothbard and this is his most significant contribution to libertarianism, although my own view is not identical to his.

On a normative ethical level I contend that the non-aggression principle applies to children just as much as it applies to adults and on a psychological level I contend that the imposition of any kind of physical violence is not necessary to raise a healthy child. I do not think that the consistant application of the non-aggression principle to children should be controversial, but apparently it is controversial, especially among many of the more culturally conservative libertarians. I see no reason why child abuse should be considered any more legitimate than adult abuse. That being said, I wouldn't necessarily want to blur the lines between a few light spankings and something more overt and egregious. But I still nonetheless would contend that spankings are not necessary to raise a healthy child.

Furthermore, for some of the exact same reasons behind why I oppose the state, I do not think that the mere fact that a child lives in their parent's household or the mere fact that they have a biological connection to their parents that this grants the parents the right to initiate violence and have completely arbitrary authority over every single aspect of their lives, nor does it mean that the child has an unchosen positive obligation to their parents. Even the capability of the child to run away is not a sufficient justification for whatever their parents do to them, and it is at this point that Rothbard's expressed views on children's rights starts to fail, since the love it or leave it argument is no more legitimate for parental authority than it is for a state.

In Rothbard's view, the child gains their rights as soon as they express the capability to run away. In my view, the child already has rights, it's just that their circumstances limit their ability to express them, particularly because of their dependance on their parents. This dependance is more understandable the earlier in childhood it is, but in either case it does not mean that the child has no rights. I do not think that children are the defacto slaves of their parents until they move out or get a job. In my view, parents are not owners of their children so much as caretakers. In a normative ethical sense, the child cannot be owned by anyone. Noone can be.

I think that families should be voluntary. The fact of the matter is that not all families are voluntary, which is part of why a conservative view on the family doesn't make sense, since it broadly assumes the benevolence of "the family" as such. But I think that it is just as ridiculous to be "pro-family" as an absolute as it would to be "anti-family" as an absolute. The context that is missing from both absolutes is the actual behavior of the family members and the consequential way in which the family is structured. A family can be generally healthy or abusive and parental authority could be nurturing or arbitrary.

I see no more reason to treat parents or family members as having intrinsic authority than to treat nations, states or corporations as having intrinsic authority. I don't believe in intrinsic authority or intrinsic value of any kind. I think that a transcendental concept of the family is just as irrational as a transcendental concept of society. Parents and family members should be judged as individuals and associate freely. An individual should always have the choice to disassociate with parents or family, as there is no intrinsic obligation. Otherwise, the family can be structured as a form of slavery, which sets up the basis for the authorian tribe when blown up on a somewhat larger scale and devolved.

The family, when it is voluntary, is the simplest anarchistic form of government, and it definitely deserves praise in such a context. However, when the family functions as an authoritarian institution, it is precisely what plants the seeds for the more large-scale forms of authoritarianism such as the state that libertarians commonly critisize. The initial breach of liberty always starts small-scale, at the level of the family and the immediately surrounding community. The logical and historical outgrowth of an authoritarian family structure is the authoritarian tribal system and monarchy. It is not a mere coincidence that monarchies are based on familial lines, and a tribe is essentially just a large extended family.

Another interesting point to consider is that in a sense authoritarian political ideology could be thought of as viewing political institutions as a surrogate family, so there is an important psychological element to all of this. While this tendency may not always be completely overt, it is nonetheless a fairly obvious connection. People may tend to want the state to play a paternal or maternal role because they feel that either they themselves or others in society are missing or in need of such a role or out of a feeling of obligation that can be traced back to a familial root. Likewise, the powermongering of various individuals can often be traced back to a familial root. As long as one doesn't dive head first into fruedian absurdity, I think such an analysis can make a lot of sense and be very useful.

Revising Self-ownership

Brainpolice — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:16:00 GMT

In various articles in the past I have made a monist objection to a dualistic concept of self-ownership due to the problems that an absolute mind/body dichotomy leads to. To summarize the problem: who exactly is it that is doing the owning? If I own it, then it is not me. If I am owned, than I am not the owner. One cannot be both the owned and the owner at the same time. Using the analogy that the mind owns the body doesn't really work because the mind is also part of the body. There is a coherant whole in reality, the mind and body are not metaphysically detached to the point where we can treat them as completely independant entities.

Hence, the way in which libertarians commonly put foreward the concept of self-ownership is flawed and must be revised to what is really meant by the concept, I.E. individual sovereignty, which is an ethical concept rather than a descriptive one. The problem is that when libertarians argue for self-ownership, they tend to treat it as if it was descriptive. So they will put foreward an argument along the lines of what Hans Hoppe's argumentation ethics and Stefan Molyneux's UPB would put foreward: that by virtue of you argueing and generally purposefully acting, you implicitly aknowledge self-ownership. But this is to totally confuse an is with an ought, or descriptive ethics and normative ethics.

It goes so far as to completely conflate categories of philosophy and definitions, as this reduces to an attempt to make a metaphysical argument for self-ownership. "Individual sovereignty" is really what is usually meant by the term self-ownership, but it is also often used as a sort of mix of different concepts like conciousness, free will and individual sovereignty. This is the sense in which I think the self-contradiction argument starts to fall apart, because conciousness or free will by themselves, while they are a necessary condition for personal sovereignty, are not the same thing as the ethical right of personal sovereignty. So the argument may apply to those who deny conciousness and free will, but it is ultimately erroneous to characterize arguements against self-ownership and property rights as necessarily being in denial of conciousness or free will. In this way, I think that self-ownership has a danger of being used as a package deal concept.

What's in dispute is not necessarily conciousness or free will, I.E. the capacity to have individual sovereignty as opposed to the substance of having individual sovereignty itself, what's in dispute is a specific ethical theory or principle. Therefore it does not make any sense to put foreward purely descriptive arguments as if they justify a particular ethical premise by themselves. Proving that someone has conciosness and free will is simply not a sufficient proof by itself for the ethical right of individual sovereignty, and neither is the mere fact that individual sovereignty is internally consistant as a concept (although half the problem here is that libertarians themselves aren't always internally consistant in their definition or use of the concept).

Thoughts On Punishment

Brainpolice — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:56:00 GMT

I think I reject the traditional concept of punishment (this is not to say that I'm opposed to measures that compensate victims though, because that isn't really punishment in the way I'm thinking of it, since the emphasis is on the victim's rights rather than simply harming the aggressor). I have trouble seeing how punishment is anything other than revenge, and I don't think that revenge and justice are the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.

The traditional view, however, is essentially that punishment is a moral remedy for a breach of morality. But I don't see how this can be the case when by definition punishment takes place after a crime has already been commited, I.E. it is ex-post-facto revenge. It has no productive value whatsoever, it merely increases destruction to appease people's desire for revenge. It does not actually correct the wrong at all; if anything, it's "two wrongs make a right".

For example, putting someone to death in and of itself does nothing to remedy any crime that person may have commited. To be sure, it may ensure that the person doesn't commit any more crimes, since they aren't alive anymore to do so, but this does absolutely nothing to address the issue of why people commit crimes in the first place (and here I'm using the word crime in the narrowest libertarian sense of the term, I.E. a negative rights violation such as theft or assault or murder). All that's really gone on is that another person has been killed.

While there may be an extent to which the fear of punishment makes some people less likely to commit a crime, the fear of punishment in and of itself is obviously hardly enough to stop someone who's determined to commit such an act to begin with, since criminals by definition are people who engage in such acts anyways regaurdless of the law or any possible punishments they may face. If anything, the ability of people to defend themselves, combined with social pressure or custom, deters crime far more than the mere fear of punishment could possibly do.

It also may sometimes be the case that punishment has the oppose effect of detering crime. In particular, the current prison system essentially puts all of the criminals together (although of course a good deal of the people in there are there for victimless crimes) in a place where they can train as criminals and form criminal alliances. The vast majority of people who go to prison and make it out end up repeating the same behaviors or going on to engage in worse activities than before. Indeed, people who were otherwise peaceful citezens before can be made into criminals by their prison experience. There is a vicious cycle at play.

It is of course true that the fact that someone is in prison ensures that they can't commit crimes with regaurd to people in society, since they are isolated from society. Of course, the reductio ad absurdum this thinking leads to is locking everyone up in cells for their entire lives on the grounds that they might commit crimes in the future. In either case, the amount of actually serious criminals who are in lockdown for life in prison as compared to the amount of actually serious criminals who are running free is quite small, and it would be practically impossible to keep track of all of them. The fact that a handful of murderers are in prison hardly even begins to crack the problem.

The amount of people in society who are serious criminals (such as murderers) is likely fairly small to begin with. Outside of the criminally insane, there are very few people who would ever actually engage in an act as extreme as murder. It hardly seems to be the case that in the absence of draconian punative laws everyone would go around murdering eachother; a ridiculous argument from doomsday if I've ever heard one. The person who says that in the absence of such laws or the punishments that go along with breaking them they would have no problem engaging in theft and murder either has a very low moral barometer or they are simply deluding themselves.

Is self-ownership a misnomer?

Brainpolice — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:47:00 GMT

If something is owned, then by definition there is something external to it that is doing the owning. Likewise, something that is owned is by definition something external to the agent that owns it. Taking this very basic point into account, does it really make that much sense to think in terms of "self-ownership"? For if the self is something that is owned, then it is being owned by something or someone else. So then what is this entity that owns us and yet is us at the same time? Surely if it owns us then it is not us, or if we own the thing in question then it is not us?

In short, we run into the problem of creating a metaphysical duality in which the self is split into an essential and unessential self or a dominant and passive self in which the body is merely something that is inhabited by a "soul" or "spirit". One way of trying to get out of this problem would be to sever this duality into two separate entities, although the problem of explaining the existance and nature of this immaterial "soul" or "spirit" would remain. Another way of getting out of this problem would be to disregaurd the "soul" or "spirit" as a floating abstraction and to consequentially recognize the actual self as a coherant whole, devoid of any dominating metaphysical entity.

The idea of an external metaphysical entity that owns oneself renders the individual into nothing more than the slave of an abstraction, for their actual material being is placed into a submissive position in relation to this metaphysical entity or this particular manifestation of it. Individual autonomy and self-realization can actually be said to come under threat as a result of such a concept. In reality, this abstract metaphysical self functions as a false identity and implies some sort of internal struggle. Such an internal struggle can only be avoided by casting out or denying such a metaphysical duality to begin with, at which point the actual self can be meaningfully recognized and rights can be meaningfully derived.

None of this is being said to belittle the importance of individual sovereignty, but rather it is being said to save it from internal disintegration, while avoiding the problem of solipsism at the same time. This is a rather simple matter of recognizing the distinction between one's actual self and that which is either external to oneself or non-existant to begin with. If such a distinction is not made, then there will forevermore be a confusing haze with respect to discussions about rights and their derivation.

Objects Are Morally Neutral

Brainpolice — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:45:00 GMT

I've always been a stickler for the notion that objects are morally neutral. This notion usually comes to play in debates about gun prohibition, to counter people essentially claiming that guns are causal determinant for violence in and of themselves, but of course they truly aren't causal determinants, only instrumental means. A gun can be used to murder someone or to defend someone from an attempted murderer. In either case, the moral neutrality of objects has implications more far reaching than the issue of gun control. For example, there is the idea among some people that money is the root of all evil, but money is only a means and object that one can use for a plethora of purposes, both good and bad.

In the case of both the gun prohibitionist and the "anti-monetarist", an object is claimed to be intrinsically and absolutely evil merely because sometimes certain people may use them towards negative ends, and the abolition of the object is proposed as a solution. The problem is that no such intrinsic value exists in such objects, and morality judges actions, not tools. There is nothing about such tools in and of themselves that can be rationally assigned with moral properties. What matters from the perspective of morality are the actions that people engage in while using such objects. While the nature of an object may certainly be to facilitate a particular end, it is only the end in question and the way in which the object is used that can be morally judged, not the object itself.

Some may nitpick and try to find acceptions to the rule by pointing to something such as nuclear weaponry, which can function for nothing but mass destruction. But once again it would not be the mere existance of the object itself that can constitute immorality, it would be the decision of an individual to make offensive use of them. Isolated from any decision on the part of people and interaction between people and the object, the object has no moral significance whatsoever. Personally, in an ideal world I'd like all nuclear weapons to be jettison into the sun. Of course, I don't except that to happen. But all the same my own weariness about nuclear weapons does not stem from a moral condemnation of the object itself, but an awareness of the general danger of the object itself when used by human beings.

The moral condemnation of objects would seem to naturally lead towards primitivism the more consistantly that one applies it. What is contemporary industrial civilization but the extensive use of objects for the purposes of mass-production to appease human needs and wants? Instead of opposing power or institutional frameworks or bad ideas, the neo-luddite puts all of their energy into opposing objects, tools, instruments. They misplace blame entirely, effectively ignoring the role of individual action. They only emphasize the negative possibilities for how objects can be used while acting as if they have no positive use.

It should be fairly obvious why objects cannot be assigned with moral properties. Objects are not moral agents, they do not have conciousness or willpower, they do not think or act. A rock cannot be blamed for anything, it makes no sense to assign responsibilities to it. A rock can only be an instrumental tool for something that one can blame a human being for. It is possible for a rock to be thrown at someone to harm them, and it just as possible that a rock can be turned into a statue or carving or used to build a building. Indeed, treating objects as moral agents leads to absurdity, as such objects would have to be regaurded as if they were human beings. Surely one doesn't want to end up at the reductio ad absurdum of arresting objects for disturbing the peace.

Judeo-Christian Morality vs. The Free Society

Brainpolice — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:21:00 GMT

I'd like to explain why I think that traditional judeo-christian morality does not synch up very well with the principles of liberty and does not provide a beneficial cultural framework for a free society. In many ways, I'm not going to be saying anything particularly new here, as this criticism has essentially already been made by both Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand in their own respectively unique ways, although of course I'm going to be putting this into my own words and expressing it from my own perspective which is both similar to that of Neitzche and Rand and altogether my own. Unfortunately, most people and most libertarians for that matter are not particularly familiar with the substance of this kind of criticism of judeo-christian morality or at least do not entirely grasp what the meat of the issue is.

The Devaluation of the Earthly

To start off, let's consider the implications of the general concept of an afterlife in judeo-christian tradition. According to this view, this life is only a test or a transitional stage. What ultimately matters is that which allegedly lies beyond. As a consequence, the life and time that we have on this earth in the now is devalued. The concept of the afterlife basically posits that the only real purpose of life in the here and now is to prepare for the afterlife. In the grand scheme of things, earthly matters are more or less characterized as meaningless or insignificant. The earthly may even be construed as immoral. Salvation is construed as lieing outside of material existance and consequentially material existance starts to lose its meaning and significance.

The picture gets even more gloomy when we introduce the concept of original sin, which is basically a sweeping declaration of ancestral guilt for all of mankind. Apparently everyone is guilty from birth and "the flesh" is somehow inherently bad. And the most fundamental feature that makes us human, I.E. free will, is characterized as the source of evil in the world. Yet while a free willing agent most certainly is capable of evil, free will is neutral to morality and could also lead to good. Furthermore, morality as such couldn't exist without free will, as without agency there is no responsibility for one's actions. Interestingly, the fatalistic implications of the notion of god as the first cause and watchmaker contradicts the concept of free will. The notion that god has a "divine plan" that will inevitably pan out throughout the course of history cannot be reconciled with the notion that human beings have some kind of free will.

Leaving the meaning and implications of free will aside (I'm leaning towards some kind of compatibalism on the general free will question at the moment), the implications of the concept of original sin and the afterlife are fairly silly. What's implied is that since we are all inherently sinners, we must spend our entire lives paying off this debt we have allegedly incurred. Hence, we have a whole slew of unchosen positive obligations. We are supposed to feel guilty for being "of the flesh" and for having biological drives and psychological motivations. Allegedly it is an imperative that we strive to deny or suppress much of the fundamental characteristics of what makes us human in this life as a path to a gauranteed ticket to the afterlife.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Consider the 7 deadly sins: pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. Before I go into an analysis of these individually, consider this: has there ever been a point in your life when you did not feel any of these emotions at all? No, these are all traits that pretty much describe some fundamental aspects of what it means to be a human. And that leads us to another realization: most of these are emotions or feelings, ones which all of us experience at some point or another, although of course they can be manifested in terms of agency. In either case, quite clearly the implication of this is that it is essentially impossible for us to exist as humans qua humans without "sinning". Furthermore, all of these "sins" have one thing in common: avoiding them constitutes self-denial or self-sacrifice. It's all meant to imply that that which has to do with the self is somehow evil.

Why is pride considered a sin? If anything, is self-esteem not a good thing? What is wrong with being proud of one's accomplishments? Putting forth pride as a sin is a rather sweeping declaration that ignores the positive side of pride, I.E. individual self-esteem based on one's actual merits. Pride as such is not necessarily the same thing as narcissism. The narcissist is not proud of their actual self or their actual merits and accomplishments. Rather, they have created a fantasy world in which they have merits and accomplishments that aren't really theirs. The narcissist does not hold themselves up, they push everyone else down. But should we therefore abandon pride altogether out of the fear of narcissism and essentially propose that all self-esteem and pride-driven self-improvement is evil?

What about avarice, which may be substituted with the term "greed"? We must first note once again that by itself it's just a motivation or emotion, I.E. the desire to have more of something or to keep the plentiful amount that one already has. As realized in agency, it would mean the pursuit of more or the pursuit of holding on to what one already has. It is easy to see how the more socialistic interpretations of christianity may draw from this. But once again it is far too sweeping to consider this inherently immoral. Why is wanting to keep what you have immoral? Why is pursueing more immoral? Does the actual means by which one does this irrelevant, or should distinctions be made between various ways of obtaining plenty or hoarding what one has? Is there no distinction between claiming that which is others and merely pursueing more for yourself in a voluntary or mutual way? And by what standard does one determine how much is too much? Once again, this sin reduces to the notion that the self and its gratification is somehow evil.

What about lust, which is usually meant to imply sexual desire? Why is it immoral to have sexual desire, and how can one possibly be a human being without experiencing this in some form or another, especially when one is young? Is sexual desire not a fundamental biological drive within us? It certainly seems far to sweeping to consider all sexual desire immoral. While rape may be immoral, voluntary sexual interactions between adults isn't. While promiscuous sexual interactions may be unhealthy for the individual in the long-term, it hardly makes any sense to proclaim it to be inherently evil. In either case, if everyone lived their lives as total prudes then the human race would slowly start to die off. There is, afterall, a connection between sex and the propogation of the species. On an interesting note, this sin contradicts the dictim "be fruitful and multiply", so obviously victorian prudism isn't the only possible interpretation.

Why is anger considered a sin? Perhaps anger can be misdirected or lead to immoral behaviors, but it need not be so. Anger is an emotion that everyone experiences in one form or another at some point in their life. And how can one possibly not be angry at injustice or immorality? There are times when anger can be a rather good thing, a way for one to release pent up energy or frustration without necessarily hurting anyone else. It would be absurd to expect people, especially people that are in rather dire situations, to go through life smiling and being slap-happy all the time. And sometimes anger goes along with honesty. Sometimes the alternative to expressing anger or frustration is to lie to people just to keep a facade going. I'd rather be both angry and brutally honest to someone then to perpetuate a false sense of comfort which merely enables what is actually a bad situation.

Why is gluttony considered a sin? I find this to be perhaps the most silly of the 7 deadly sins, since at face value it has to do with nothing but food, although of course it can be construed to imply that one shouldn't take recreational drugs (although I've always thought that food is a drug in a sense). As a motivation or desire, gluttony simply means to want another cookie from the cookie jar. While eating or drinking too much can obviously lead to obesity and some major health problems, it hardly makes any sense to make minimalism in eating and drinking habits a moral imperative. Are we really going to call fat people immoral? I'd rather live in a free and prosperous society full of fat slobs who munch on junk food all day than an unfree and unprosprous society where everyone is surprisingly physically fit.

The case of envy is a bit more complicated then the others. Envy may be characterized as the desire to have something that someone else has. It is often used interchangably with jealousy, but there is a bit of a distinction. Once again, taken simply as an emotion or desire to have something that someone else has, I don't necessarily see anything wrong with envy. I want an extremely talented group of musicians to play with and lots of studio equipment and I don't have it but Steve Vai does, therefore I suppose I envy the guitarist Steve Vai. That doesn't mean that I'm going to try to steal his band or his studio equipment. It's simply that he has something that I want and that I probably will never have. Should that stop me from pursueing my dreams and trying to obtain those things for myself? I think not.

What about sloth? Sloth may be another word for laziness or leisure. Of course I can easily see how this can be a bad thing in that a lazy person may be dependant on others and do little or nothing for themselves, hence showing a lack of responsibility and ability, but I would hardly consider it immoral. For one thing, some people are this way due to their nature, sometimes because of a very real mental or physical handicap. And even when a perfectly capable person chooses to be lazy, that is their perogative. I'm not going to consider someone immoral for wanting to take a long break from working and spend their time in leisure instead. Surely it would be absurd to consider it a moral imperative that people be working and productive at all times. We're human beings, not robots. I can envision a slave-master cracking a whip at a slave and calling them slothful for taking a break from the hard physical labor that they are forced to do.

All of these alleged sins can be and have been propogated in negative ways. Pride as a sin can be used to crush people's self-esteem. Avarice or greed as a sin can be used to keep people poor or to discourage economic mobility. Lust as a sin can be used to keep the women for oneself or as a method of population control. Anger as a sin can be used to perpetuate dishonesty and to enable bad relationships. Gluttony as a sin can be used to keep people hungry, to essentially starve people. Envy as a sin can be used to discourage people from pursueing their dreams. Sloth as a sin can be used to foster compulsory labor. When they are taken to their logical conclusion and consistantly applied, they amount to the total denial of self-interest, desire and personal well-being. Taken as absolutes, they would require people to be mindless automatons with no trace of humanity.

Altruism As Slave Morality

Let's take a look at the concept of altruism. Altruism is posited in one form or another by most organized religions. It essentially proposes that the individual has an unchosen positive obligation to serve others and that their fundamental purpose in life is to serve others. On the flip side, self-interest is essentially demonized as immoral. This is a very warped view when broken down rationally. Unfortunately, criticism of altruism is often misunderstood because in most people's minds altruism is the same thing as benevolence and empathy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Altruism as an ethic implies unchosen positive obligations. If an individual does not live up to this positive obligation they are viewed as immoral rights violators and they are supposed to be compulsed to live up to the obligation. Afterall, an ethical theory without imperatives wouldn't be functional. In either case, actually choosing to be kind or giving to other people is not fundamentally altruistic because it still involves agency and a genuine desire on the part of the person to benefit another. In true acts of kindness and giving, the emphasis is not on denying oneself but to benefiting another, and the benefit may even be mutual.

Altruism actually leads to nihilism, and the problem of nihilism is something that both Nietzsche and Rand were trying to avoid in their own unique ways (and while Nietzsche was in some ways an immoralist while Rand was quite clearly a moralist, Nietzsche nonetheless essentially proposes a form of egoism as his personal morality). The logical end of altruism is the total devaluation of the self to the point of absolute selflessness. Your life, your values and your property are deprived of value and meaning and you're expect to act as if they don't exist or don't matter. Of course, from my perspective selflessness is impossible both ontologically and psychologically. The self follows from one's very existance as an individual human being and a human beong's fundamental psychological motivations are inward and personal. However, the attempted implementation of altruism as an ethic does have very real effects.

The notion of unchosen positive obligations, whether it be to a deity, a family or an entire society, is inherently incompatible with negative rights and individual sovereignty. Every positive obligation, to the extent that it is not chosen or not a genuine debt, implies a negative rights violation as soon as it is enforced. The result is that people are coerced to associate with other people and to provide goods and services for other people. The individual is forced to sacrifice their own values, their life and their property, regaurdless of their circumstances and regaurdless of their consent. Altruism is at the heart of both communitarianism and dictatorship. In communitarianism, the individual's life and values and property is sacrificed to "the community" or "the majority". In dictatorship, the individual's life and values and property is sacrificed to the dictator and more people can potentially be effected. In either case, in all cases altruism is the morality obligatory upon what amounts to slaves, sometimes subtley and sometimes quite blatantly.

It's important to note that all of this self-sacrificing, self-denying morality has historically been encouraged by people in political and religious power to get the masses to be complacent or obedient. The masses are discouraged from pursueing their own values and bettering their own lives. What largely goes unnoticed is that this is used to benefit the values and lives of various groups of elites. The masses are encouraged to follow a morality of servitude, and when there are servants there are masters. This is what Nietzsche meant when he drew a distinction between "slave morality" and "master morality". Slave morality functions as an ideology that masters or rulers can propagate on to get the masses to accept their enslavement to them as a moral imperative. The masters or rulers, of course, don't actually follow slave morality. They are its beneficiaries. It is just a convenient mentality to propogate to the masses, an apologetic device meant to make it so that servitude seems like a moral imperative. In practise, the masses engage in self-denial to the benefit of a small group of rulers and associated elites. Hence, it's a parasitic relationship.

If the principle of altruism were universally applied to all human beings, and of course it never is and it would be impossible to do consistantly enforce it in the real world, the implication is that everyone is eachother's slave. Since this cannot be realized in practise, since it defies fundamental facts about human existance, motivation and behavior, what one ends up with is at least two distinct classes of people: the masters and the slaves. Quite likely, the attempt to implement altruism will lead to more of a plural latticework of master-slave relationships while still not reaching the consistant extreme of enslaving everyone to eachother. But usually the slaves outnumber the masters by far or a select elite of people function as masters to a much greater degree than anyone else does, and therefore altruism most often leads to some kind of oligarchy, even if it is a mildly democratic oligarchy. Altruism has historically been an apologetic and enabler of both religious and political tyranny.

Master morality, as I interpret it, amounts to hedonism and "might makes right". Master morality should not be construed as the proper alternative to slave morality, nor is it necessarily the polar opposite of slave morality in a certain context. While master morality is not altruistic, master morality is most certainly not any kind of rational egoism. It is anomie or lawlessness, since the masters are not subject to their own rules. Master morality entails an outwardly oriented sense of self that justifies imposing oneself onto others, sometimes using altruism as a ruse or a mask to hide behind. Rational egoism involves an inwardly oriented sense of self that merely justifies being free from the imposition of others, being at liberty to voluntarily pursue one's self-interest and values without restraint. The rational egoist proclaims that noone else may rule over them, but simultaneously they do not claim to rule over anyone else. Rulers don't believe this or function in this way. They claim the right to rule over others while superficially and hypocritically trying to demand that noone else rule over them.

Judeo-Christian morality essentially proposes slave morality as a solution to master morality. In its zeal to oppose hedonism and anomie, it provides a false alternative that only enables the hedonism and anomie of certain people while devalueing everyone else. A society that is dominantly filled with people who accept slave morality will not have the necessary mindset or attitude to resist the yoke of tyranny. It provides the perfect atmosphere for rulers to arise and dominate the naive masses. The cultural framework of a free society must contain the personal sense of value and purpose necessary for people to actively free themselves, otherwise their lack of confidence and their lack of any genuine sense of self-worth and personal value will enable tyranny. It's time to reject both slave morality and master morality to persue some meaningful alternatives.

Morality, Rationality, Survival and the Law

Brainpolice — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:27:00 GMT

I was having a bit of a debate with an Objectivist and we got into some questions about morality and rationality. It related to the question of suicide, and I maintained that suicide is irrational but not immoral and that the individual has the liberty to commit such an irrational act. The Objectivist asserted that irrationality is immorality. This doesn't make any sense to me. I'd say that what is moral is inherently rational, but not that what is rational is inherently moral. Likewise, I'd say that what is immoral is inherently irrational, but not that what is irrational is inherently immoral. This is not a paradox when one makes a proper distinction between a vice and a crime or between that which is unethical and that which is merely incorrect or counterproductive. A meaningful distinction between ethics and aesthetics also helps clear up any confusion in this regaurd.

Consider the implications of combining the two premises that (1) that which is irrational is inherently immoral and (2) the law should reflect morality. I can think of endless things that are irrational and harmless to others in and of themselves that should consequentially be viewed as "immoral" and be outlawed under this logic: suicide, not taking a shower, not brushing your teeth, discrimating based solely or primarily on the basis of race, to continue to associate with people who hurt or manipulate you, to smoke cigarettes and do hard drugs, to pray, to go to church, to stay up for 3 days, to starve yourself, to bite your nails, to have promiscous sex with strangers, to have a high time preference, to not take care of one's own property, to not defend oneself and to be boistrous and loud.

All of these things are irrational and many of them are unconductive to either the quality of one's life or its continued existance, but I consider none of them to be immoral and think that all of them should be permissible and legal. It's not conductive to certain ends for me to buy certain products or patronize certain service providers over other ones. It's not conductive to my long-term economic security to borrow and spend lots of money and not save. It's not conductive to my long-term health to eat a certain way. But am I "immoral" for making a mistake in judgement or for merely being stupid or for having aesthetic tastes? That's absurd. It's not "immoral" for me to make bad financial decisions or have bad eating habits. The expression of aesthetic tastes in general could be viewed as irrational. There is no rational way to justify the notion that someone has an obligation to make a certain aesthetic choice because it happens to be the most efficient towards survival or happiness or prosperity, and in the case of happiness there is no way to determine what will make someone else happy. The logical end of this kind of thinking would seem to lead to the legislation of economic preferances in the name of utility.

One might object to this reductio as absurdum by trying to make a distinction between the law and morality, by positing that the law doesn't have to reflect or be in accordance with morality, but one can only do so by opening up a pandora's box of inconsistancy and accepting the evils of legal positivism. This view holds the law to be above morality and consequentially functions as a way to make moral inconsistancies and acceptions. The inevitable consequence of taking this view is that the law is quite blatantly turned into a instrument of immorality. Using such an approach to politics, things that are immoral can be legitimized by merely appealing to its legality. Natural law, in contrast, holds the currently existing and positive law up to an independant standard of justice, derived from reason. Notice that rationality does play a role, but the natural law follows from morality. It's not the case that everything that is rational is moral and everything that is irrational is immoral. Rationality in this context is only an instrumental tool that is used to figure out what is moral and immoral. But it does not follow that everything that is a product of rationality is moral or that all irrational actions are immoral actions.

Rationality can point one to the most efficient means at achieving a desired end and it can point one to the most moral means to a desired end (and the two aren't necessarily always the same thing), but not all questions of persueing desired ends are moral questions. That's the problem. Rationality can suggest that engaging in cooperative industrial production is more efficient to my survival and general well-being to being a hunter-gatherer, but it does not follow that I have a moral obligation to choose the more efficient means. I would assert that one has the liberty to go live as a hunter-gatherer, even if it is self-destructive or nowhere near as beneficial as the alternatives, and hence there is no real moral obligation to choose to engage in industrial production. The question of whether to live as a hunter-gatherer or as an industrial worker or producer is morally irrelevant in and of itself. From my perspective, regaurdless of the utility towards life and prosperity of the choices in question, the individual essentially has free reign to choose whichever alternative they want so long as they aren't violating any ethical or metaethical principles in the process, so long as they don't force anyone else to pursue or not pursue a particular option. These become questions of personal preferance, regaurdless of any objective concerns about their utility.

It seems to me that Objectivists rely too much on the concept of survival in their ethics, which makes it take a sort of utilitarian turn. They use survival, or more broadly the achievement of desires necessary to fullfil the necessities of life, as the primarily justification for actions. That is, Objectivists essentially conclude that because liberty is necessary for survival and the achievement of certain virtues or benefits (such as happiness, prosperity and healthiness), liberty is justified because it leads to those things. However, there are some problems with this view. While liberty is a necessary condition for survival and flourishing, it does not gaurantee it. Someone could theoretically be perfectly free and not violate anyone else's rights yet be unhappy, unhealthy, uneducated and have trouble surviving. So it seems far too demanding on people to proclaim that people have an obligation to do that which is necessary to survive and benefit themselves. People have the liberty to persue their survival and happiness, and it is in their rational self-interest to do so, but they have no such obligation to do so or to choose the most efficient means to doing so.

Yes, it is irrational to not persue the continuance of one's life and improvements upon its quality. But to consider people "immoral" for not doing so or not adequately doing so seems ridiculous. It also seems to me that Objectivists extend ethics way beyond interpersonal relations and into the realm of purely personal decisions. But for me, ethics is interpersonal and thus purely personal decisions are aesthetic at best. Such purely personal decisions can be objectively evaluated as being "good for you" or "bad for you", but there is no way to genuinely make them obligatory or enforcable and an unobligatory and unenforcable ethics seems like no ethics at all. It makes no sense to proclaim that one has a moral obligation to pursue and fulfill their rational self-interest while simultaneously say that they are free to not fulfil the moral obligation. Since I think that people are free to harm themselves or to make bad personal decisions, I have no choice but to consider such actions morally neutral at best. Otherwise, the implication would be that people should be legally required to eat healthy, raise their children in a right way, read the right books and conform to an endless sea of requirements in their personal preferances.

One might object that if what I'm implying is the case, then ethics wouldn't apply to a lone man stranded on an island. My answer is: yes, ethics indeed doesn't apply to a lone man stranded on an island, because ethics has no meaning in such a scenario. There's no one else to steal from, murder, lie to, cheat, and so on. There's noone else to violate the rights of. One could do all sorts of things to further one's own survival and happiness, but morality wouldn't really come into the picture until you start introducing interpersonal relations. The choice of a man stranded on an island "to hunt or not to hunt" or "what materials should I make my home with?" has no moral significance. Such decisions are not moral decisions but purely practical ones. Morality would only come into place with such questions in terms of how it affects the rational self-interest of other people, in terms of whether or not the means one pursues in the persuit of such things violate the life, liberty and property of others.

Another problem with this erroneous conflation of rationality and morality is that it essentially implies that holding irrational thoughts is immoral in and of itself. Thought crimes! It is of course true and important to realize that ideas determine the course of history. But nonetheless it is ultimately the realization of those ideas, or at least the attempt to do so, and the means by which those ideas are implemented that is immoral. Merely believing in false or irrational ideas does not make someone immoral, and neither would they be immoral for pursueing, spreading and enacting those ideas so long as it is on a voluntary basis. Stupidity and ignorance is not immorality. Being misinformed or just flat out wrong is not immoral in and of itself. Believing in communism or the flying spagetti monster is a vice, not an immorality. Forcing communism or the church of the flying spagetti monster onto people is what would be an immorality.

It seems to me that the moral of the story is that the fetishizing of the mind and survival leads to some absurd implications and conclusions if consistantly followed through.

Politics Is The Opiate Of The Masses

Brainpolice — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:38:00 GMT

Theism is not the only kind of mysticism. Collectivist and political ideologies are also forms of mysticism. The nature of politics involves blind faith in a "highest essence". The abstractions of these "highest essences" function as arbitrary authorities to appeal to. The most common of these arbitrary and rhetorical authorities are "society", "nation", "state", "humanity", "race", "class" and "gender". In political ideology, these concepts function precisely in the same way as a deity. As a consequence of faith in these abstractions, individual human beings and/or certain collections of human beings are given the status of a deity. These concepts also all have one thing in common: they obscure the individual and turn the individual into a sacrificial peon to collective abstractions. In all cases, belief in something that doesn't exist (at least in the way concieved) functions as a mechanism to provide a plastic sense of meaning or identity.

While theism assigns a non-existant entity with rights not possessed by human beings, statism assigns certain human beings with rights not possessed by everyone else. While religious ideologies conflict over who rules the universe and how they do it, political ideologies conflict over who rules over other human beings and how they do it. In electoral politics, certain human beings are deified and people conflict over which deifed human being should rule over everyone else. For many people, the election rallies and political holidays are just as much of a "spiritual experience" as any religious ceremony at a fundamentalist christian church. People literally have faith in politicians, bureaucrats, nations, and states and they use that which is attributed to them as a way to legitimize their personal biases and their actions. The health of political power relies in large part on the exploitation of the religious impulse in the broadest sense through the use of rituals, symbolism, illusions, grandios promises, bread and circuses.

Many political assumptions are essentially forcibly inherented from parents and cultural norms, just like in theism. While religions tend to promise a utopia after death, political ideologies tend to promise a utopia during life. Both make use of fear and guilt and exploit the pessemism within people to elicit obedience. The morality of politics is based on arbitrary authority rather than reason. "The law" has the same functionality as a deity's alleged words or religious texts. The individual must submit in spite of their rational evaluation. Furthermore, politics provides a mechanism by which people can enforce their personal preferances and their incorrect conceptions of morality onto innocent bystanders. Politics is more dangerous than religion is by itself, since it is only through the mechanisms of politics that religion can be tyrannical on a large scale. Politics is the opiate of the masses.

The Paradox of "State's Rights"

Brainpolice — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:26:00 GMT

One of the most well known American legal traditions is state's rights. State's rights is essentially the idea that each individual state should retain its sovereignty or independance from the federal government. The idea is that each state may have its own varying laws and precedents that the federal government may not supercede. It's as if each state is thought of as being its own nation in and of itself, and before the formation of the federal government this quite literally was the case. Afterall, each American state is roughly the size of an entire European nation, sometimes or even often larger. The idea of state's rights would not have been formed if it weren't for the establishment of a larger apparatus, a federal government that each state is supposed to be a part of.

The idea of state's rights can be used in two basic ways: to stop the federal government from forcing a law on a state, or to stop the federal government from removing or defying a state's law. In other words, state's rights can be used to oppose federal laws and to support state laws. The former function of state's rights can be used to delegitimize and defy the federal government. But the latter function of state's rights presents a problem if one is trying to abide by an objective standard of justice, for theoretically state's rights can be used to uphold and preserve a state's unjust law. To be clear, this does not mean that the federal government is any more justified, but it does show that state's rights is an inconsistant standard for justice since it can be used to legitimize state governments.

From a libertarian anarchist perspective, none of the governmental entities in question are legitimate. The federal government doesn't have "rights" and neither do the states. Only people have rights. The doctrine of state's rights is problematic in that it may leave free reign for state governments to do just about anything. It may function to limit the powers of the federal government, but it does nothing to limit the powers of the state governments. In other words, it sets up a double standard of justice between the levels of government, and for this reason it may lead to some ugly results. It seems inconsistant for one to proclaim that the federal government may not do X but the state of Ohio may. Either X is right or wrong, hence the precise entity or people engaging in X is entirely irrelevant. It matters not if it is 100000 people, one person, France, America, Ohio or Kentucky that is enforcing X.

For example, it seems absurd for one to proclaim that "it is illegitimate for the federal government to impose drug prohibition laws, but the states may impose drug prohibition laws". This would shift debate on the issue from a matter of the justice of drug prohibition itself to a matter of which entity or level of government may prohibit drugs. But for the libertarian anarchist and the proponent of ethical consistancy, that is entirely irrelevant. Drug prohibition is illegitimate altogether as a matter of principle, and therefore it would be no more legitimate for the state of Ohio to enact and enforce such laws then it would be for the federal government to do so. State's rights is problematic to the extent that it is used as a mechanism to legitimize the laws and policies of state governments in defiance of rational principles of justice. It could theoretically be used to legitimize anything a state does that is not explicitly prohibited by the constitution, and the question of what the constitution prohibits the states from doing is rather open ended to begin with.

The issue of integration and segregation is often debated about in the context of state's rights. The fact of the matter is that while the federal government most certainly engaged in an injustice by establishing forced intregration, state's rights was used to legitimize and sustain forced segregation. It's a lose-lose situation no matter which perspective one approaches it from. If the federal government is allowed to impose a ban on discrimination that encompassed all of the states, then property rights are violated. On the other hand, if the states are allowed to make discrimination legally binding or obligatory within their territories, then property rights are violated. Both forced segregation and forced integration are illegitimate, and both the federal and state governments are illegitimate. To the extent that state's rights was used to preserve the power of the states to have a policy of forced segregation, it was an incredible injustice.

State's rights is only useful to the extent that it may stop the federal government from enforcing an unjust law on all of the states, so that there is at least some possibility that certain states will not have that law. This helps avoid a "one-size-fits-all" approach being shoved down the throats of the entire country. It certainly is potentially more beneficial to have more variance between the states so that there is at least some possibility for one to persue alternatives. However, internal to each state, the exact same problem presents itself. An individual state may still enact and enforce an unjust law. And with respect to smaller entities within the state, it is likewise a "one-size-fits-all" approach. The counties and cities have no choice but to be herded into a uniform model by the state. So why not continue the principle and have "county's rights" and "city's rights"? If it is followed through consistantly, one eventually stops at individual rights, the only real kind.

The advantage of state's rights that is commonly pointed out is that one has the ability to "vote with your feet" between each state in order to persue alternatives. This makes a certain level of sense. However, is this not merely the exact same thing as the "love it or leave it" sentiment that is usually applied to entire nations? When people object to their own nation's way of doing things, sometimes they are told that they can just move. But this retort avoids addressing the problem and only begs the question. In short, it assumes the legitimacy of the nation-state to begin with. But from the viewpoint of the libertarian anarchist who rejects the legitimacy of states, the burden of proof is on the state or those defending it to justify it. If the individual is truly sovereign and legitimately owns their property, then they should not have to move. Rather, the state should stop coercing them and trying to claim partial control over their property. This is true of smaller state entities as much as it is of large nation-states. If states do not legitimately control their territories, then state's rights is a very inconsistant creed.

None of this is meant to imply that the federal government should be given more powers. On the contrary, it is meant to imply that the powers of all levels of government are illegitimate as a matter of principle and that libertarians should be more skeptical towards the creed of state's rights than many of them tend to be. State's rights is a very inconsistant and moderate form of decentralization, a vain attempt to simulate free association and competition through large and arbitrary political units or territories. In comparison to the level of decentralization that anarchism entails, a regime of state's rights is still fairly authoritarian and centralized. Perhaps the traditional model for America is not nearly as decentralized as some libertarians would like to think.

The Case For Free Immigration, The Case Against Borders

Brainpolice — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:47:00 GMT

Immigration is a hot topic these days, particularly for those in the southern and south-western states of America. There has been a rising anti-immigration sentiment, directed specifically at immigrating Mexicans. The public cries out, "Secure the borders!" and "They're taking our jobs!". There is nothing new about this phenomenon. It has occured time and time again throughout American and European history. The same sentiment was directed towards the Irish, Catholics and Chinese in the 19th century and the Jews and Italians in the early 20th century. The three main contributing factors to anti-immigration sentiment are undoubtably (1) economic protectionism (2) nationalism and (3) racism.

There are many different types of arguements that are made against both "illegal immigration" and immigration in general. Some confine their claims to economics, and base their anti-immigration sentiment on the notion that immigrants are effectively stealing jobs, lowering wages and being leeches on public services. Others have a more nationalistic and cultural approach in which their complaint about immigration has more to do with keeping a "unified culture" and "tradition". Others are downright racist, basing their complaints about immigration on attacks on the hispanic race itself. Even some libertarians have gotten caught up in the sentiment. All of it relies on a mixture of fallacy and disinformation.

I intend to cover as much ground as possible and address the bulk of the arguements put foreward by proponents of border enforcement and immigration restriction. Particular emphasis will be placed on the debate over immigration internal to libertarian movement. Hold onto your horses, because this is going to be a long ride.

"I'm not anti-immigration, I only oppose illegal immigration"

This is a common claim made by many anti-immigrationists, including libertarian ones. But the legal/illegal distinction is entirely disingeuous. It's no different then making a distinction between legal and illegal drug use, and saying "I'm not against the right of people to use drugs, I'm against people illegally doing drugs". From what I can tell, an illegal immigrant is engaging in an act of civil disobedience no different then someone who wishes to smoke pot despite it being against the law.

To my knowledge, libertarians are not supposed to support the law just because it so happens to be the law. Opposing illegal immigration is to concede, by default, that you favor illegalizing immigration to some extent. It is to support the notion that you need special permission from the government, under the guise of regulations, in order to be allowed to live within the territory. There is no way around this. If you favor enforcing laws that restrict or illegalize immigration, you are anti-immigration to some degree. And in order to enforce such restrictions, you must support a government bereaucracy.

The Leeches and The Legal/Illegal Double Standard

To some immigration restrictionists, surely these people are all disease-ridden, jobless, job-stealing (gotta love opposing claims), welfare-sucking criminal hoodlums who believe in communism.

It is undeniable that the public welfare system, which is meant to mean public services in general, is akin to a massive network of parasitism, where resources are redistributed to leech-like recipients. Many right-wing anti-immigrationists argue that the "illegal" immigrants are recipients, and this justifies "kicking the bums out". But this claim is dubious. Actually, many of the "illegals" pay taxes in some form or another. Furthermore, this claim could equally apply to domestic recipients of government funding, which implies kicking domestic citezens out of the country as well. That's the problem with "public property" and all that comes with it: everyone is a potential parasite. Noone is able to escape using the government's services to some degree or another, such as driving on the public roads.

Furthermore, public schooling has been compulsory for a long time, so following this twisted logic we should kick all of the public school students out of the country as well. Afterall, "they're not paying for it". It would be absurd to argue that the solution is to kick people off of their own property and deport them. A real solution would be to privatize them. Have a problem with masses of people using public services? Privatize the public services then. Don't propose new interventions that require more funding and therefore in actual fact an increase in government funding to public services.

I don't really buy into the common notion that the Mexican immigrants come here with the express purpose of sucking off of the breasts of the welfare state and to vote for socialism. On the contrary, in large part I see them as fleeing socialism and quite rationally persueing better economic conditions and oppurtunities, where they will be paid more than 50 cents an hour. It is not immigrants that are responsible for the welfare state that we already have, the gullable domestic populace already intellectually supports it in large part and they are the majority of the recipients of its bread and circuses.

Either way, all such charges that are thrown at immigrants apply equally if not more so to domestic citezens, who vote for socialism and beg for welfare all the time. Are we therefore justified in kicking domestic citezens out of the country for driving on the public roads and sending their children to public schools? Or should we strike at the root, the welfare state itself, rather than using the welfare state as a rationale for violating people's rights and implementing new or expanded government interventions?

The Post-Ponement Arguement and Interventionism

Some proponents of immigration restriction, including libertarian ones, have advanced an argument that roughly goes as follows: "since we still have a welfare state, until it is done away with, we should support government intervention in the name of stopping the migration of people into the country". In short, since intervention X exists, intervention Y is okay as a solution to the problems created by intervention X. This is interventionism, plain and simple. The only libertarian solution would be to get rid of intervention X, in this case, the welfare state. Anything else just leads to a cycle of interventionism and a distraction from the root cause of problems. In practise, you will end up with a welfare state + more police powers and a larger immigration bereaucracy. That's just how these things work.

This particular closed border position is interventionism, since the arguement is essentially that in order to solve the problems created by intervention X (the welfare state) we must support intervention Y (a police state, quite frankly). And in order to possibly enforce these "borders" and immigration "laws", more taxes and spending are inherently required, more planning at the federal level is required and quite a bit of force will be required in order to go through with deportations and whatnot. At the end of the day, I do not consider immigration quotas to be any better than affirmative action, nor do I consider immigration controls in general to not be a form of central planning.

Immigration Restriction As Pre-Emptive Force

On the topic of war, I recall Walter Block argueing that is not sensible to argue for war that on the grounds of what people might do in the future. His point was that it is not libertarian to advocate initiating aggression against another country on the grounds that the country might initiate force in the future. I see the anti-immigration position as being no different. Initiation of force is being "justified" on the grounds of what immigrants might do (that they might accept welfare or they might vote for social democrats). It's pre-emptive force. Using the forceful power of the state to stop other people from using the forceful power of the state is self-defeating in principle. Increasing the power of the state in the name of preventing future increases in the power of the state will only *drum roll* increase the power of the state.

Furthermore, the position that accepting welfare or voting constitutes an initiation of force against the tax-payer doesn't make much sense. These are rather passive activities. It is the state that is initially stealing from the tax-payers. The state then redistributes the stolen loot to various interest groups, like a robber handing out the booty to gangs or to the peasantry. It is a misplacement of blame to go after the peasantry, the arguably passive recievers of the loot while neglecting the actual robbers. Where is the gun in the room? Most certainly not in the hands of the immigrants. The gun in the room is the state. To blame immigrants is to essentially blame the victim. It misplaces the burden of proof entirely.

The State As Private Property Or A Voluntary Commons?

Some proponents of immigration restriction tend to argue that the state is like a home. Others treat it more as a commons. But treating the nation-state as if it were the legitimate private property of the government, or the people's common property (tragedy of the commons, anyone?), opens up a huge can of worms that could imply some highly questionable things if we consistantly applied it. The private property of the government notion can be used to justify practically anything that the government does, and makes everything (and everyone) within the territory subject to be controlled (in other words, it merely reinforces and falsely justifies the territorial monopoly). The common property notion has communalist implications. The state, in either case, clearly is not private property. The state cannot emulate a free market by its very nature, so it makes no sense to me to use the state's intervention in a particular way on the assumption that this is how private property owners would choose to employ their property. This is an imposition of a personal preferance.

If the state is treated as the private property of the government's members, then it is legitimized. The members of the state itself may henceforth be treated as legitimately controlling the entire territory. All of us who reside in the territory, and all of the individual plots of land and things that we possess, may be treated as the property of the government. You do not own yourself, the state owns you. You do not own your home, the state owns your home. You may not decide how to employ your property; you are not its owner, you are only being allowed to use it by its true owners, the state. It is not your property. The members of the state may freely decide to exclude anyone from the territory as they please, since it is theirs. You may not decide how to employ the individual portion that you are "allowed" to use; the state decides this for you. All hail the total state.

If the state is treated as the common property of the tax-payers, then it is legitimized. We should all henceforth buy into the phrase "we are the government". Of course, a gigantic practical problem arises: the tax-payers cannot act as a single entity with a preference scale of its own. The tax-payers are conflicting over how they wish to use this common property. The tax-payers cannot exercise their quotal ownership in reality. You cannot sell your 1/500000th (or what have you) portion of government land. It is impossible for the "community" as a whole to enforce all of their individual preferences for how to employ such property.

Even granting that it may constitute stolen property, it has been redistributed so many times over and time has passed for so long that it would be impossible to allocate it back to the original just owners. Thus, in practise, we are left enforcing either the members of the state's preferences for how to use it or the preferences of a particular group of people within "the commity" for how to use it in the name of "the community". You may not decide how to employ the individual portion that you think you own; "the community" (I.E. in practise, the state or a special interest group acting through the state) decides this for you. All hail the total state.

The Incentives of Inclusion and Exclusion

While private property owners would indeed be free to exclude Mexicans in a free society, I believe that the incentives in a free market would make racial or cultural separatism suicidal in the long-run for reasons having to do with the economics of discrimination (and what I consider to be the large-scale implications of comparative advantage). At least on the margin, there will be an incentive towards integration; and there will always be willing sellers to some degree. The consequences of free association are a mixed bag and therefore pluralist. This is why I think that free association ultimately pans out in favor of so-called "multiculturalism", moreso as time passes. Separatists would effectively exile and impoverish themselves.

There will always be willing buyers and sellers. Consequentially, in a society in which all property is private, there is nothing that can be done to stop people from immigrating through voluntary exchanges for home and land property and voluntary patronization of transporation services, as well as good and services in general. In short, it is virtually impossible to keep a community completely ethnically "pure" when there are individuals within that community willing to buy and sell things with immigrating people from other ethnicities. In a truly free society, the incentive towards voluntary association would be so strong as to render absolute cultural "isolationism" impossible.

Free Trade and the Law of Association

Ludwig von Mises: "The productivity of social cooperation surpasses in every respect the sum total of the production of isolated individuals." - Epistemological Problems of Economics

For the same reason that blocking trade between people in New Mexico and Arizona would have a hampering effect on production, so too will blocking trade between people in, say, China and America. Economics provides us with the insight that voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial to both parties and has a ripple effect of sorts (I.E. its benefits may extend beyond the two people exchanging down the line). Any kind of protectionism is going to block this mutually beneficial exchange. It always is at the expense of consumer choice and bestows a privilege to one narrow interest at the expense of everyone else, and eventually at the expense of the original "beneficiaries" themselves. And since it stifles competition, it has the obvious effect of artificially keeping prices higher than what the true market level would be.

In essence, it is beneficial even for someone who is productively "superior" to others in multiple areas to exchange with others who are "superior" in none of those areas. Even if country X is superior to country Y in both areas, it is still in its advantage to exchange with country Y. If we accept the principle of the division of labor within a country, we must accept the division of labor within the world.

How does this apply to immigration? Well, there is a labor market for immigrants. It represents competition to non-immigrant labor. The economic law that Mises speaks of applies here as well. The anti-immigration movement wishes to use protectionism against the immigrant labor market. Economically and socially, such separatism is counterproductive even for the people who wish to remain isolated. While people are perfectly within their rights to choose not to associate with people, they undermine their own well-being the more liberally that they isolate themselves.

For example, if a buisiness refuses to sell products to group X, they lose buisiness, indeed, they are restricting their consumer base. It becomes vitally in the best interest of people to associate and engage in social cooperation, otherwise they harm themselves in the long-term by withdrawing from the benefits of society. This applies to immigration as well. To forcably block off immigration is also to aschew the benefits of social cooperation. While there is indeed a right of voluntary disassociation, the person who chooses to freely disassociate often does so at their own risk.

Property Rights and Free Association

Immigration itself is merely the act of moving from place A to place B. This is typically coupled with the act of purchasing a home, and the act itself may involve some form of transportation service. It should be obvious that this is a free trade activity just as much as any other. Yet many anti-immigration advocates, in effect, wish to illegalize selling goods and services to such people, hiring such people or allowing them onto one's own property; charity even. Such measures inevitably violate the property rights of both the immigrant and the citezens that they are associating with. If the government stops me from selling a home to an immigrant, hiring one or associating with them in any way, then my property rights are being violated along with that of the immigrant.

The problem with immigration controls and border enforcement is that it inherently requires dictating what citezens do with their own property: it disallows me from inviting someone onto my property, selling someone my property or hiring a willing worker. A lot of the closed borders advocates accuse open borders of violating free association and allowing people to engage in "tresspass" and "invasion" (and this arguement can only be superficially maintained if we treat political borders or unused land as private property or the common property of the tax-payers, which simply is not the case; there is no discernable just owner of the entire country or borders), but they apparently fail to see how their own position egregiously violates free association (forced disassociation is no better than forced association). It's not just the "illegals" that are effected, it's domestic citezens who wish to associate with them as well.

Libertarians are bound by the non-aggression axoim. This axoim leads one to support free association (and disassociation) between individuals on the basis that no aggression is used to force people to either associate or disassociate. This means that one must oppose both forced integration and forced segregation (forced association and force disassociation). If force is used to stop people from voluntarily associating, then a rights violation has occured. As such, using the law to stop immigrants from associating with citezens (and all that comes with it) is a rights violation on the part of both people in question. But the cultural isolationist essentially is argueing in favor of using the law to enforce forced segregation.

Prohibition Theory

When you prohibit something, in the short-term you might get less of it. But in time it is inevitable that a black market arises despite this limit on supply (example: we have drug and prostitution illegalization, yet we have a black market in these areas). Prohibition theory also applies to employment itself, to jobs. Thus, to overtly prohibit immigration will do nothing to stop people from simply immigrating anyways, just like prohibiting drugs does nothing to stop people from buying, selling and using drugs. If you illegalize the hiring of "illegals", you will simply create a black market for those jobs, and thus those jobs will continue to exist. Simply put, there will always be willing sellers and buyers. The answer to the question, "why do we have an immigration black market?" is "because immigration isn't free enough", "preciously because of the governmental limits on it that already exist".

Therefore, it is absolutely illogical to think that immigration quotas, more cops on the streets, the federalization of the borders, national I.D. cards, or any other such scheme, is going to actually eliminate illegal immigration. It is impossible to eliminate illegal immigration for the same reason that central economic planning fails, is unable to calculate, due to the complexity of information and economic decisions on the market. The fact that we have so many illegal immigrants right now as it is only shows that they can get through despite whatever previous limits existed. Indeed, immigrants are given an incentive to illegally come over by the mere inadequacy of the immigration process, with its red tape and bereaucracy. "Illegal immigration" exists precisely because of the degree to which immigration is prohibited.

Nations and Borders

What is a nation? A nation is nothing but a concept meant to describe a geographic territory. "Nations" do not actually exist other than as a linguistic term. Unfortunately, many people concieve of the nation in an anthropromorphic way, in which it is given a definite character as if it were a single individual, with uniform traits. But obviously, those within the territory that we call a nation all differ widely in their physical and mental traits, in their opinions and in their actions. The concept of nations is inherently collectivist. It presumes uniformity on the part of its atomic parts. And, most dangerously of all, the nation and state are implied as being one and the same. But this is an obfuscation, because the state is made up a minority, an oligarchy, of individuals, while "society" as a whole is an entirely different thing.

What are national or state borders? They are nothing but a line on a map, and do not exist independantly of that line on that map. They do not exist when one actually zooms in on the earth from outerspace. The concept of national borders is a concept of collective property; it presumes that the entire territory of the "nation" is "ours". But this is obviously absurd when one considers the objective criteria for ownership of property. In reality, it is property that the government is claiming ownership of, without necessarily actually using it, homesteading it or exchanging for it. In short, national borders effectively represents a claim of ownership by the government over the entire territory, and as a consequence, everything within it.

The entire concept of national borders depends on government ownership of property, specifically land. If one supports that government do something with respect to that land, including determining who should be allowed in or out of it, then they are accepting the notion that the land is justly the state's. It should be clear from a property rights standpoint that ownership of land requires that the homestead principle be fulfilled, or that a voluntary exchange has taken place for previously owned land. Government does not justly own the land that it claims, because it achieved that land by (1) putting up barriers to entry to unused land for homesteaders (2) confisicating it from its original just owner or (3) buying it with funds that were likewise confiscated from the original just owner.

The homesteading principle implies that it is not legitimate to claim ownership of un-used land, it requires first-use. When government is held up to the homesteading principle, or the principle of voluntary exchange, it becomes apparent that it is impossible to justify government ownership of any property at all, let alone land. Indeed, it becomes apparent that the history of the establishment of governments is the history of invasions and occupations followed by confiscation of land. In short, property precedes government and governments require the confiscation of property, including land property, to form in the first place. But in a purely libertarian world, all land is privatized, and therefore the only "borders" are private property borders. Immigration would be free insofar it would be at the consent of private property owners, and under such a context some kind of voluntary integration would become inevitable, moreso as time passes.

Walls and Fences

Among the more absurd propositions of anti-immigrationists is the idea of building a huge wall on the southern border. These people don't realize that they are playing out the exact same problem that existed in Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. They are supporting the pretext for a police state and for locking the people into their own country. Afterall, what can keep people out can also keep people in. Furthermore, has any such scheme historically worked in the long-run? Did the great wall of China hold out? No. Did the Berlin Wall? No. Some claim that immigration itself is balkanizing the country. On the contrary, fences, walls, increased police powers, and anti-immigration sentiment in general is balkanizing it. The state, and therefore national borders, breeds social conflict.

Artificial barriers do not ease hostility, they create hostility and intensify already existing hostility. In the same way that trade sanctions are a boon to international war, anti-immigration sanctions, artificial walls and the enforcement of imaginary divisions, leads to cultural war. But as Randolf Bourne once stated, "war is the health of the state". It is not just foreign wars that the state thrives on. It thrives on all kinds of domestic wars between interest groups, and wars on inimate objects and ideas such as the war on drugs, war on poverty, war on terrorism, the so-called war on christmas, and now the war on immigration. Anti-immigration sentiment provides a perfect atmosphere for politicians to exploit as to increase their power. And that's what it's leading to: increases in economic and police intervention.

"Isolationism" vs. Non-interventionism Revisited

There are some very compeling reasons for distinguishing between a non-interventionist and isolationist foreign policy. The key differances are over international trade and immigration. In sofar as isolationism applies to economics and the association of individuals, it is a bad thing and constitutes a form of interventionism, not non-interventionism. Economic protectionism is a key tenet of traditional isolationist foreign policy, as is what could be considered cultural protectionism. While the paleo-conservative movement can be considered better than the neo-conservative movement in various ways, unfortunately many paleoconservatives have a tendency to support protectionism.

What does the isolationist foreign policy imply? Painfully high tariffs, import quotas, export bans, immigration quotas, martial law at the borders, walls at the borders, prohibition of lower-end jobs, prohibition of various goods and services. Taken to it's furthest extremes, it implies a ban on all trade and immigration between America and other nations. In either case, it implies a plethora of potential government interventions. This sentiment represents a sub-culture of "buy American products only" and "the immigrants are taking our jobs" people. It has culminated in a "anti-globalization" movement, constituted by people ranging from the far left to the paleo right. This sentiment is riddled with economic fallacy.

The non-interventionist foreign (and domestic) policy, in contrast, would inevitably have to be opposed to such measures. They are, afterall, government interventions in the market. The non-interventionist foreign policy with respect to economic exchange can only lead to one possible conclusion: the unhampered division of labor, voluntary exchange, is the correct policy for both inner-national trade and inter-national trade. This inevitably means that protectionist devices such as tariffs, quotas (which includes immigration quotas, which is nothing but a peculiar form of affirmative action) and prohibitions have to be eliminated. Anti-immigration legislation is nothing but protectionism with respect to the migration, employment arrangements and housing arrangements of people, driven by nationalist emotionalism. Protectionism, nationalism and neo-mercantalism are the bane of a free society.

Conclusion

Immigration in itself is a free market activity and within the realm of free association. The problems associated with immigration are really problems created by the state, wether it be the welfare state or the nature of national borders in general. The solution to the issue does not lie in the state, it does not lie in federal troops at the state's borders, it does not lie in illegalizing jobs, it does not lie in public-funded walls, it does not lie in immigration quotas. It lies in private property. It lies in the privatization of land. State borders don't need to be protected or enforced, they need to be torn down. Governmental borders do not represent legitimate property titles, and possess all of the problems associated with "public property". Immigration should be left to the free market, which resolves such muddled collective/state property disputes by establishing a clear definition of property rights and a clear method of determining who the just owner is of a given property title.

What Is Democracy? Part One: Democracy Is Slavery

Brainpolice — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 05:57:00 GMT

This is part one in a three part series: democracy is slavery, democracy is impossible and democracy is liberty.

Democracy Is Slavery

By the phrase "democracy is slavery", I refer to the tyranny that inevitably arises from the principles of majoritarianism and communalism. One standard definition of democracy is rule by the majority. Rule by the majority is fundamentally in opposition to the liberty of the minority, and the individual is of course the greatest minority of them all. The logical implication of the principle of majoritarianism, viewed as an ethic, is that superiority in numbers justifies decision-making over others. The group with the largest amount of people in it may control and subjugate all other groups, all other individuals not within it. To use a common phrase that accurately describes majoritarian democracy, it reduces to "might makes right". Majoritarian democracy creates a master-slave relationship in which the masters outnumber the slaves. The range necessary for a group to become a majoritarian ruling class could be anywhere between 51% and 99% of a given population.

Numerical majoritarianism, a subcategory or altered version of majoritarian democracy, is somewhat different in that no true majority is actually required. One does not have to exceed 50% in numerical superiority in order to rule over others. The numerical majority could theoretically be constituted by anywhere between 1% and 49% of a given population. In practise, it actually reduces to a minority ruling over a majority in terms of the overall population of those involved. Numerical majoritarianism creates a master-slave relationship in which the slaves outnumber the masters. The more groups that are involved, the smaller the numerical majorities may potentially get, and conversely the larger the dominated or subjected group may potentially get. Most examples of democracy in action are cases of numerical majoritarianism, although democracies could be said to vary between exercises of both pure and numerical majoritarianism interchangably depending in the particular situation in question.

Democracy is slavery because the minority, most importantly the individual, is forced into an association with and subjected to the decision-making power of the majority that they did not explicitly consent to. I define slavery quite simply as involuntary servitude and forced association, a state of affairs in which one or more individuals imposes decision-making from above upon one or more individuals against their explicit consent. Under democracy, whatever positive obligations that the majority wishes to impose on the minority must be lived up to regaurdless of the consent of the minority. The majority exercises decision-making power over social and economic life of others. Certainly a man is no less a slave if they have a multitude of masters rather then one master. While in monarchy the individual has one ruler or is the subject of a tiny familial or noble aristocracy, in democracy the individual has more of a plurality of rulers. The majority exercises shared or quotal rulership over the subjected individual. Democracy increases the amount of rulers. It could conversely be said that it reduces the amount of subjects as compared to monarchy, but this does not solve anything and the subjects are only reduced by the creation of more rulers.

It is important for one to realize that, as a principle seeking to justify authority and decision-making, majoritarian democracy, wether it be constituted by true majorities or numerical ones, is blind or neutral to the logical or ethical nature of the preferences of the majority in question. It justifies whatever decision is made by the majority, regaurdless of wether or not is right or wrong based on any independant ethical criterion and regaurdless of wether or not it makes any sense at all. In an exercise of majoritarian democracy, anything from murder to theft to rape to kidnapping could theoretically be given sanction, so long as the group approving of or engaging in such actions constitutes a majority. To reduce majoritarianism to the absurd, using the principle of majoritarianism on a small scale, if there are two men and a woman and the men want to have sexual intercourse with the woman and she does not, the two men are allegedly justified in raping her. Or, to use a large-scale example of the absurdities resulting from the principle, 51% of a population may allegedly legitimately murder the other 49%.

Majoritarian democracy fails the criterion of universality in ethics because the respective majorities and minorities are not held to the same basic standard of ethics. It functions as a defacto justification for the majority or group being able to get away with doing that which the individual or minority may not do. In short, the majority is exempted from being subject to the same ethical criterion and responsibility as everyone else. This is logically inconsistant if ethical principles and rights are supposed to apply to all individual human beings, if the individual is our standard of sovereignty. Using the law of universality as our criterion, even if it is one individual against everyone else in the world, it still is not just for even everyone else in the world to enslave, plunder or murder the individual. "The community", "the majority", and the deceptive phrases such as "the will of the people" and "the public good" cannot legitimately be invoked to justify tyranny. These terms function as obfuscations and illegitimate apologetics for the subjugation of people.

Utilitarianism could be seen as being linked to democracy in terms of the old and common maxim "the greatest good for the greatest number". Using this as a criteria for ethics could be used to justify majoritarianism because the precise definition of the term "good" is left up in the air so that whatever the majority happens to consider to be "good" is sanctioned. Afterall, the majority is "the greatest number". The majority may certainly benefit and gain utility, wether it be in a purely psychological and emotional sense or in terms of material and physical well-being, prosperity and survival. But the criterion for justifying it is arbitrary and inconsistant, especially when terms such as "happiness" are employed. The means toward obtaining the utility are not taken into proper consideration. The end of utility or happiness for the majority is used to justify the means. What is not addressed is that there is a burden of proof on the majority to justify their means. The burden of proof always lies with those who assert authority, and a mere numbers game does not constitute a sufficient justification for authority. If explicit consent is used as a criterion for the burden of proof, then democracy and utilitarianism cannot ethically legitimize anything at all. It functions as little more then majoritarian hedonism. In the absence of explicit consent, democracy as a general principle is nothing but an arbitrary apologetic for slavery.

The idea that one has a right to participate in and have decision-making power over other people's private relationships against their explicit consent is fundamentally contradictary to the concept of individual sovereignty and free association. A sovereign individual is one who is free from the imposition of 3rd parties of people, including majorities. Noone else has an abstract entitlement to decision-making over the individual and the private relationships that they enter into. Only the individual has legitimate authority in decision-making over their own person. The only alternative to individual sovereignty or self-ownership, as Murray Rothbard once pointed out, is either for another individual to exercise decision-making over their person, which would create a master-slave relationship in which one person rules over another, or for the collective or everyone to exercise quotal ownership or decision-making over eachother's person, which would create an absurd scenario in which everyone attempts to own a quotal share of everyone else. Since this is practically impossible to realistically enforce, the communalist alternative, in practise, reduces to the first alternative of individual rulership, only in the name of the community or collective. Democracy is somewhere in between the two extremes of individual rulership and the mutual and universal slavery of everyone to eachother. Democracy is as close to the communalist ideal that a society can get, reducing to some combination of pure and numerical majoritarianism in which there is a mixed and somewhat dynamic network of master-slave relationships.