David McDonagh
I do not admire Keith Preston or his friend Kevin Carson. They seem to think in utterly unrealistic Romantic terms, such as class. Maybe the main one that I will criticism below is what seemed to be the most used term in the 80 minute talk that Keith Preston gave, a term I have long since loathed viz. pluralism.
Before giving my objections to the Politically Correct [PC] term of pluralism, I will make a few other criticisms.
My guess is that in the future society that is free of the state there will still be big business. I have nothing against big business, though I do oppose state aid for it; as indeed for anything else. I oppose taxation completely as illiberal proactive coercion that floats liberty for all.
I see no false debate on par with one between Islam and Christianity, to adopt the analogy that Keith Preston uses in his talk, that an atheist could disagree with both sides as equally religious, that, similarly, an anarchist might dismiss as equally statist.
Keith Preston goes on about what will sell today, as if any radical propagandist could care less in the short run. The propagandist thinks more terms of whether there is any truth in the solution to the problems rather than how current common sense is, or what might easily be adopted today. If we have the solution to, say 1) war and 2) mass unemployment with the pristine liberal idea of free trade, then we might think that is good enough to muster the masses to agree with in the long run, no matter how remote it is to their outlook today. Indeed, we might agree with the sociologist, Steven Goldberg, who said: “reality is always willing to give the theorist a lift, as long as he is going her way”.
There is no need for any organisation to defend the economic interests of ordinary people as backward Romantic Tories, like Keith Preston, hold. Nor any need for alternative economic arrangements, or any new organisations to replace the welfare state. A cleared market needs no safety net. Nor is there ever likely to be anything like revolution in the future, just like there is nothing even one whit like it in the past, especially in the France of 1789, which is better called a riot.
Class struggle is imagined by backward Romantic Tories but it is alien to reality. I found little realistic in the 80 minute talk by Keith Preston, no more than there is anything real in daft Leo Tolstoy’s idea to find what was good in all the religions of his day. As the backward diverse religions had no merit in Tolstoy’s day so backward diverse politics today also have no merit. To think of what we need to put in place of the welfare state is on par with worrying what to put in the place of the cancer a sufferer will be suffering from,
Now to the rather stupid idea of pluralism; it first of all suggests to me a pluralism of morals. But basic morals look to be one and common to one and all rather than truly diverse. A diversity of what we say no more indicates diverse morals than it does a diverse chemistry or any other aspect of reality. Many different opinions do not mean diverse facts or that what is right is thereby diverse. Every ten year old knows the basic moral rules even if they feel they know better, so today also reject them. It is a basic set of rules 1) no murder, 2) no stealing, 3) no lying and the like. Kant’s idea seems to be the liberal one; that we treat all persons as an end thus we need to respect their liberty. This is a single moral value of liberty; and it is enough. It is the social mutual liberty of the pristine liberal idea, of course. It is what the Libertarian Alliance wants to add to the basic atomistic liberty that we have in every society but that might lack this ideal of social liberty that respects a similar liberty for all. This is one value, not many. It is singular not plural. i
Keith Preston mentions in his talk the vexed issue of abortion. This is not so much a disagreement on murder but on whether the foetus is a full human person, or not. He suggests that such a difference might lead to break away societies, so that the different people might live in peace without the other side. This may, or may not, come to pass over abortion in the future. But is does not look like a difference as to the basic moral principle of murder being immoral but rather as to what it is to be a person.
I think there are, and there will be, things said to be moral that, in reality, may be moral or not, like whether equality has any moral worth, for example. I think it has exactly none. Thus the whole PC outlook looks more immoral than moral to me. I guess only a minority truly push totalitarian PC today whilst most people feel it went mad as soon as it appeared. Thus gay marriage, that Keith Preston mentions in his talk, will not be of much worth in many years to come but just happens to be part of the current PC fad of the colleges, and their ex-students in the mass media, today.
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If you’re talking about arguing from principles then the abortion debate is a crucial one. You already disagree with a whole bunch of eminent Libertarians though. Some commentators, so far as I can see, work on the principle that human life begins at conception but that a woman has the property right of her own body and can evict unwanted residents since her ownership of her body takes precedence over the squatting rights of the embryo/foetus/baby. I’m more inclined to that view since it removes the thorny question of when does human life / begin end, helps cement the principle of ownership of self and results of one’s efforts.
Fact is you are not going to come up with a definition of when human life begins, or ends, that isn’t fundamentally arbitrary. I can’t see how principles primarily grounded on arbitrary judgement are going to be of any generalised use.
Also, unless you focus on differences on principle (as to the moral legitimacy of use of force and in what circumstances) big business will de facto be equivalent to government in a society that is notionally without government. The challenge, to my mind, is form a social polity based on empowerment of the individual and disempowerment of the collective so that gangs of people can be disposed by the individual.
Sigh… if only I had an autonomous gunship, or two, in high orbit…
To clarify my point re big business being de facto government: I’m coming from the in vogue definition of government as being the entity that has the exclusive moral right to initiate violence within a given territory, compared to the entity that has the acknowledged power in spite of whatever consideration of right or wrong. Many modern governments actually fall into second category I think, which I’m sure further proves my point.
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Thanks for your reply, Johnny.
Well, I usually like to dodge the abortion debate but as Keith Preston brought it up and I cited it then it looks as if I am in such a debate now.
Basic morals, that I hold are simple, but not always actively adopted by people, seem to be right to hold that murder is wrong.
There are two issues here. Do property rights over-rule liberty or do they merely serve the pristine liberal idea of liberty for the most part, as does the free market? The aim of liberalism is liberty not private property or the market. Those two institutions serve liberty but politics and the state flouts liberty. Thus the consistent liberal needs to oppose the state. Whether the state can be abolished is a moot issue amongst liberals so the Libertarian Alliance is an alliance between classical liberals who think a small state will have to be tolerated and anarcho-liberals who think we can get rid of the state entirely.
Back in 1973, Rothbard published For A New liberty in which he put his abortion views. My friend, Stephen Berry suggested to me, when I mentioned Rothbard’s ideas on abortion to him, that they did not seem adequate. He clearly had a point.
The analogy with kicking squatters out fails on two major things.
First, a foetus that the mother, and some male she entertained [or was abused by], put the foetus inside her rather than it being a squatter. The foetus has not violated the mother’s private property rights in any way but rather she is, [most likely], responsible for it being there, as is also the man she went with.
Second, the foetus depends for its life on the mother seeing it though nine months to when she can have it adopted.
Clearly, the status of the foetus makes all the difference to this. If we grant it full personhood then we might be nearer to saying that it has been imposed upon rather than it is imposing on the mother. It is the mother’s activity that has [most likely] put the foetus there, not the foetus that has imposed on the liberty of the mother.
In any case, Keith Preston fails to make out a case for pluralism in morals; or in anything else. But it is in morals where pluralism is most silly as an idea.
Firms, be they small or big, are not one whit like government or like crass politics, are they Johnny? No firm can scotch my liberty but any state can, and it will, if ever I deal with it in any way. So any firm allows liberty but no state can do that. So your idea that big business is just like a state is clearly false, Johnny.
Liberty needs to get rid of power, not ever to empower anyone. Power is anti-social being intrinsically illiberal and immoral. Power scotches social liberty.
Thanks for your clarification. As you will see, I hold there never can be a moral state. I also hold that no firm is usually like a state, though I can think of one in the eighteenth century that, very oddly, was rather like a state.
It is not clear to me what point you feel that you have proved.
My point is that a collective imposing things on me can be pretty anything in fact or by definition but there’s little I can do about about it without raw power.
Yes, the East India Company is an interesting example of where it’s hard to see where government ends and company begins.
I agree in principle with Stefan Molyneux that it is necessary to develop a system of “Universally Preferable Behaviour” but I find that, in detail, I disagree with a significant portion of what he says.
I don’t think big business and the state are necessary for each other but I’m not sure what, as a matter of practical fact, would be the difference living under them.
“You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store”
The abortion debate is sufficiently problematic to require separate treatment. Other readers may wish to point the obvious flaws in the argument you make here.
David McDonagh stated “But basic morals look to be one and common to one and all rather than truly diverse.” and “Basic morals, that I hold are simple, but not always actively adopted by people, seem to be right to hold that murder is wrong.”
Do you believe that one and all hold the same basic morals? That is every single human being on the planet? If so how can some act against them and and the same time be said to one and common to one and all? Surely this means that so deemed basic morals are not one and common to one and all. So are you not contradicting yourself when you state that basic morals are held by one and all – as to not actively adopt these basic morals means that such people do not hold them.
Cheers
Thanks for your reply, Johnny.
The East India Company acquired the authority to tax. [That was the firm I had in mind the other day]. Not many rivals have been able to do that. If they could then the market would be no more liberal than is the state.
Usually firms cannot impose on the general public very much, if practically at all. If one does not like a store then one just boycotts it.
Raw power is simply a dysfunctional menace in society but the authority of the state has with the general public needs to go before it can be evaporated.
I do not agree to some sort of totalitarian universal preferable behaviour, or any other Politically Correct idea.
Stefan Molyneux is weak on what metaphysics is as well as what philosophy has contributed to science, [ judging by an Internet talk I looked at by him], in the past as well as the vast number of purely philosophical ideas that he, along with almost everyone else, includes in science, even in physics, today. I heard him cite about ten of them in a row. He is too keen to dump old ideas. The reality is that ideas do not get weaker with age, as a rule. Stefan, like the rest of us, just takes those old ideas for granted but he is keen to try to throw them out. I think his aim there is quite futile.
We cannot live under mere firms, as they are too passive to ever rule over us. The firms are geared to serve us rather than rule us.
It is not wise to get into debt. But the main consequence both today, as well as in any future time, seems to be a loss of credit worthiness. The banks seem to lend only to those who do not really need to borrow.
If there are the obvious flaws that you imagine in my augment against Rothbard on abortion then maybe another will point them out for me, Johnny. As I do not see the faults for myself, I am sceptical that you truly see them. But as Pope said “to err is human..”
Thanks for your reply, Jan.
I think that basic morals are external, like mathematics is, thus ethics are known about as well as we all know how to count to ten, more or less, but not always adopted in our value system as being right, especially when we are very young, say, in our first decade.
There are as many different values as there are different beliefs but morals is no more to do with values than any fact is to do with our belief. Beliefs and values are of the mind but facts and the ethical real are quite external to any mind.
So the fact that we do not always have similar beliefs or values would involve no contradiction for what is common to all is not that we are all of one mind, as Plato actually held, but rather that we see a common external world that has facts as many aspects of it, as well as a ethical domain that, in common with the mathematical domain, we can see with our mind eye, so to write. We each think for ourselves, but in a common world. Because the world is common we often find that we usually agree on most things.
Hi David “So the fact that we do not always have similar beliefs or values would involve no contradiction for what is common to all is not that we are all of one mind”. If we are said to have a common value then all must hold it? Is that what you are saying? Sorry for being a bit obtuse here.
Hello Jan.
Thanks for your criticism.
We have no common values or beliefs but merely similar ones. Thus if we both have potatoes for dinner we never have he same ones. If we both agree the sky is blue, you are on about what you think whilst I am on about what I think. It is the world that is common not our beliefs about it. Our minds are always distinct. But all our minds are in one world, all six to seven milliard of them. The world remains common to one and all.
I see nothing even remotely like a contradiction here. . Can you put what looks to you like one in the explicit formal terms of P and not-P?