Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

I have a vague hunch one can sketch out a proof that extreme libertarian slash ancap economics is suboptimal without adding some additional centralised coordination to resolve the inevitable crises caused by speculative bubbles

[garmbreak1]

If it could be done, the market would’ve done it by now.

[argumate]

without speculation you hobble your economic growth, with speculation and absolute inviolable property rights I think you run the risk of [fill in blank]

[shlevy]

Ah, yes, [fill in blank], the primary objection libertarians have had to contend with since time immemorial.

[argumate]

I mean the obvious starting point is currency, which is either restricted to a fixed amount (ushering in the Great Depression?) or issued by a single authority (giving that authority too much power?) or issued by anyone who cares to, the most interesting case.

[shlevy]

Oh snap, we forgot about currency! No way to handle that one without government. Back to the drawing board.

[voxette-vk]

You know, that’s the one thing I never hear libertarians talking about: how to privatize currency.

[squareallworthy]

Libertarians are required to have a complete program for rebuilding society from the ground up, along with an exacting proof that the program would work. They are not allowed to simply say “the state will whither away” like the communists are. Much less are they allowed to get away with simply having a bagful of policies, like mainstream, democratically-elected parties. No.

No, libertarians can’t just say “hey, how about no minimum wage” or “how about no drug war,” because if you do, someone like @argumate​ will come along with a vague hunch about a sketch of an argument that an extreme form of libertarianism is less than perfect. And then you’d be so embarrassed.

So get on it. Argumate’s got a smidgen of doubt that libertarianism isn’t immediately and obviously perfect. Can’t let that stand.

[mitigatedchaos]

Actually, Communists aren’t allowed to say that “the state will whither away”, and as someone that does not and has never liked Libertarianism, I have called Communists on this on multiple occasions and demanded that they provide a full plan for rebuilding society from the ground up, since “let’s abolish private ownership of the means of production” basically requires that.

And Communists complain that they aren’t allowed to just say that, and talk about how you aren’t supposed to pre-define the revolution so it doesn’t get locked in.

(But I don’t need to worry, since nothing hurts Libertarianism quite like Libertarian immigration policies.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

This is really about your desire to justify an unjustifiable concept - infinite moral liability for finite beings - despite your guesses about me “being upset over a loss of control”.

---

Alright, I’ve had my tea, so I’m feeling a bit more charitable.

Your grounding is based on the idea that the root causality is encompassed in the self, and that therefore the self ‘owns’ the results.  But the causality passes from outside, through the subcomponents, and then back out again, with the self riding on top in a sense.  The subcomponents can radically alter the total outcome, while the self remains riding on top.  

You haven’t established why this ownership should not be subsurface.  After all, you said it was about causality.  You say “but the self is also a whole”, but causally, so is an aircraft, so that doesn’t really help.  There are of course many practical reasons, but for your purposes that doesn’t really help, either.

Since I’m weighting on experience, rather than control, I don’t need to establish a perfect sovereign will that re-roots causality locally from the universal level to the individual.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

You can’t subdivide out entities that way, though, even if we distinguish them due to the complex interactions involved. The lack of a unified, detached ‘will’ animating our meat puppets doesn’t change the fact that at the core, it remains a single entity, a single actor. You are attempting to granulate things that don’t have any business being so granulated.

Actually, the effects of Ritalin prove that it IS so granulated.  And I, myself, have taken it and am familiar with its effects.  So yeah, actually I can subdivide entities out that way.

That is a thing, even if it’s one you don’t like.  

You have created a false boundary that ignores causal distinctions and elevated it to full status, but reality is not so cleanly delineated, which is something I’ve tried to get at with you for a long time but which hasn’t gotten through to you.  

Some kind of nihilistic type might object that a boat is just a collection of atoms that we have arbitrarily labeled as a boat, and that reality doesn’t care.  (They’d likely also take your “but you just don’t like it” shtick, too.)

However, even though the natural categories are fuzzy (for instance, when is a skin cell a part of someone, and when isn’t it?), we can still define object boundaries - but we have to use causal bundling instead.

That is, the impact on the world.  A “boat” is defined as a cluster of possibilities based on its effects on the world compared to alternative configurations of matter at the same time and place.

There are natural boundaries around people, but it is necessary to also consider the natural boundaries within them, rather than arbitrarily declaring them off limits for moral consideration.  These are themselves real causal clusters with impacts on the state of the world.

I think you need to justify placing your causal cutoffs where you place them.  Why is placing them at the total mind level valid, but both the sub-agent and incoming-causes levels are invalid?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

We’ve already had that talk? The short form is that we recognize ourselves as thinking entities, IE: I think, therefor I am as you’ve repeatedly stated. What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them. From this flows such necessary moral precepts such as the illegitimacy of initiating force against another thinking actor and the necessary fact that because are responsible for the results of our actions, we also own them, and that includes actions that mix with other material goods.

What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them.

This requires a kind of internal unity of agents/minds that I’ve already established does not exist.  You want absolute moral liability, but people do not have absolute control over their minds and never did, which is why brain injuries, drugs, and mental illness can alter behavior.

For your position to make sense, the effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin should be impossible.  It shouldn’t be feasible to change someone’s level of alignment between their will and its execution through biochemical means if their will is absolute and unified.  

And if will isn’t absolute, if it’s subject to all the limitations and complex complications of life in physical bodies in a physical world, then the result of binding liability (if we even accept that) is far, far lower.

Because of this lack of perfect unity, if we took your proposition seriously, then it should be possible to charge someone’s executive functioning capability with a crime (or just moral liability) independently of the other subcomponents of their mind.  

Some sort of unification of limited moral binding based on limitations of execution, limitations of information, the default will, targeting of subcomponents of mind, does not, I think, move towards AnCap, but some new class of moral theory that has yet to be born, which is the first thing new/valuable I think I’ve actually gotten out of these discussions with you.

…though not entirely without precedent, but rather not formalized into a total system.  See typical handling of limitations in many common courtrooms, and many laws.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

No, you did not explain why it ‘does not make sense,’ you posited some objections that I answered. You have no ‘violated its understanding of unified agents,’ given I answered your supposed objections each time. You have NOT pointed out how it does not logically follow, you’ve merely said it doesn’t. The fact that minds ‘precede’ ownership isn’t even relevant, and so on.

Well, let’s see your derivation for self-ownership, then.  Explain how it logically follows. 

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level

argumate answered:

That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.

Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).

In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.

[mitigatedchaos]

The world is already ludicrously morally impure on property terms, so why not abandon the purity of property in favor of something that values peoples’ wellbeing instead?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

I’ve already explained why your axiom does not make sense, I have violated its understanding of unified agents in several ways, I have repeatedly pointed out that “self-ownership” does not logically follow from its premises, I have pointed out that minds themselves precede ownership because ownership isn’t even meaningful in one-agent systems while the borders of minds still are, it’s just - 

- ach, I was going to just leave the post and not read it because I know this discussion is pointless, but I wanted to see how you’d respond to the Delegate Organization Republic so I read it anyway.  Or enough of it.

I’m never going to be convinced by your premises, because aside from the general worldview, intuition, and so on, for me, a morality system is about good things happening and bad things not happening, and any moral system that isn’t about that is, to me, pointless.  As far as I am concerned, there is no other possible root, and it is bizarre that people say “no, these rules being followed is more important than outcomes” because why would you even bother having rules if not to seek outcomes.  (So, logically, the ultimate system is the one that seeks the ultimate outcome.)

And as for your part, you seek a different kind of control that you don’t have.  You want a system in which morality is far more fixed and far less dynamic, incapable of being redefined in its broad details according to who actually exists within the system, at a much more concrete/intermediate level than under a Consequentialist system, which the fixed core is at a higher level of abstraction.

You want a system in which a consent violation is always wrong, no matter what.  That’s what makes you feel like you’re valued.  Not having it makes you feel like you’re not in control.  If a consent violation happens to you, it’s important that it be deemed wrong, no matter if it reduces consent violations elsewhere or prevents someone from involuntarily ceasing to exist.

But that dooms you into a framework in which terrible things can happen without even being considered regrettable/immoral by the system because it has no language to mark them as bad.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

• Libertarian: let me try an economic argument
• Statist: Efficiency isn't everything!
• Libertarian: ok let me try a moral argument
• Statist: Yeah, but how would that work in the real world?
• Libertarian: ok let me try an ec
• ---
• Libertarian: Voluntary action will solve environmental problems.
• Statist: It's already failing to solve environmental problems in China.
• Libertarian: But the Chinese government is authoritarian and corrupt and is failing to solve environmental problems.
• Statist: But it doesn't prohibit solving environmental problems through voluntary action, they lie about the smog levels being low so they would hardly stop you actually clearing the smog, and other countries have environmental problems managed through government. If voluntary action is enough, why isn't it already there and working?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

AnCaps acting as if we forgot about workers locked into burning factories, rivers so polluted they became fire hazards, meat packing plants so vile they contributed to more deaths of soldiers than enemy action, women licking radium paint, dumping PFOA in the water supply, and every other abuse by business. They would have us believe voluntary consumer action is sufficient to address all these and other problems, when it already isn’t sufficient now. They say that “well that isn’t worse than what states have done”, but that’s mostly because these companies do not have freely-operating military arms and are instead militarily subordinate to states. Even abolishing LLCs does not actually solve it, since it’s possible to set up alternate webs to escape liability, and it’s far easier and cheaper to cause damage than to fix it. People cheated at Commie rules. No reason they wouldn’t cheat at AnCap rules, too.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

I think those two things are intimately linked, though. 

Look man, if you want a cynical explanation, might I suggest that clearly from my expectations I expect to suffer and maybe die under Anarcho-Capitalism, and that at some point I might need state assistance.  Not guaranteed, but it’s been mentioned in various places that I don’t have perfect executive functioning.