Religious Liberty and Bills of Rights

I know in my last post I promised to continue elaborating on God and Being, but I've decided to put that off a little while.  My reason is basically that I have a number of ideas I want to write about while I've been pondering how to put that post together, so I have been postponing them.  However, I want to get some of them down fairly soon.  I will eventually get back to God and Being, but in the meanwhile, you can enjoy some of my other thoughts.

I've recently come to the realization that there is no surety of religious liberty in the United States (or most countries).  This is the case for two interrelated reasons: (1) there exist no churches with substantial authority over the state, and (2) there is no charter of religious liberties.  The two are interrelated in that a powerful church can force the state to issue a charter, and a charter allows churches to challenge the state.  However, each of these institutions is crucial for religious liberty, and for liberty in general.

Before going further, we have to know more about what religious liberty actually is.  It consists in the freedom of members of certain faiths to practice their religion without state interference.  It cannot possibly mean freedom to believe whatever one wishes about religious matters--anyone can believe whatever they wish about anything; the only the way liberty has place is in freedom of action.  Nor is religious liberty something which can apply to any religion.  For one, there might be a religion which demands holy war against infidels.  Insofar as the adherents of this religion obey this injunction, their "religious liberty" would necessary conflict with the liberty--religious being beside the point--of everyone else.  Thus, only certain kinds of religions can enjoy religious liberty.  Also, religious practice is part of a community, which includes specific religion(s) in its identity.  To say that any religion is acceptable implies either that there is no community or that the community doesn't care about religion, which practically speaking means that there can be no guarantees that everyone will be free to practice their religion.

With this in mind, it should be fairly obvious how a powerful church and a charter of religious liberties can be useful to ensuring religious liberty.  The charter lays out certain spheres in which the church will be free to act without state interference, and the church acts to defend its rights.  And it's not hard to imagine, or look into history and find, how religious liberty is imperiled without these two institutions.  Without them, the state may very well tax churches, restrict their practices, confiscate their lands, or force their members to act contrary to their faith.  A recent example is the federal government forcing Catholic employers to pay for their female employees' birth control.

But how do powerful churches and charters of religious liberties help protect liberty in general?  Well, if these institutions exist, then there exists an alternative power structure to the state which can challenge it.  For example, the Roman Emperor Theodosius was excommunicated by St. Ambrose after committing a bloody massacre, and King Henry II was forced to do penance after three of his knights killed Thomas of Beckett.  If the state is not the sole arbiter of its power and jurisdiction, it will tend to be more moderate.  And the presence of a single institution that can challenge the state opens the door for others.

Thus we come to bills of rights and their significance.  Charters of religious liberties are examples of bills of rights: they enumerate certain freedoms which will not be impeached by the state.  In a sense, a bill of rights is a list of "we shalt not"s published by the state.  Bills of rights cannot be comprehensive, simply by their nature, nor can they be absolute guarantees of liberty.  For example, the United States Bill of Rights has been thoroughly trashed by the state--only the Third Amendment remains intact.  However, bills of rights serve as shields against the state, and as such should not be cast aside lightly.

The chartered rights of a country or people consist of those enumerated in their bills of rights.  It was to these that Edmund Burke referred in his defense of the British Constitution.  Won over the course of centuries, he advised basing political rights-claims on these chartered rights rather than on abstract, universal rights.  Though the chartered rights are never complete in their enumeration, they were superior to abstract rights in that they were tied to the real world in which people lived yesterday, live today, and will live tomorrow.  If chartered rights are cast aside, this connection is lost, and with it all guarantees of liberty.  Without bills of rights, how do you hold the Jacobins or Napoleon at bay?

However, John Randolph of Roanoke pointed out that parchment is no true defense for liberty.  What is needed is some power to challenge the state and keep it from infringing the rights it has promised.  For this purpose, the states in the U.S., guilds, churches, and chambers of commerce are invaluable.  Of course, these other powers might abuse their rights or take over the state, but rivalry amongst them, as well as their own, and hopefully the state's, narrow purview will keep them in check.  This managed to work for several centuries.  Perhaps we should try reinstituting this system today.

God or What?

The idea of God has a long and noble history, graced by most of the great minds in history.  God is generally assigned several divine attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, transcendence, perfect benevolence, necessary being.  God is also some sort of person, though his attributes force us to strain our notion of person in order to fit him in that category.  He is responsible for the creation of the universe, especially of humanity, and for handing down morals.  In Christianity, God also raises the virtuous up to Heaven and casts the vicious into Hell after death.

There is, of course, the obvious question: does God exist?  The answer is Yes, sort of.  The idea of an old man in the sky creating the universe in six days strains credulity to the breaking point, especially under the light of modern physics, geology, and natural history.  However, if we take God in a much looser sense--a being with the aforementioned divine attributes--there is good reason to think that such a being does in fact exist.  And when we look at what we find very closely, we will see an interesting degree of congruence with several ideas about God from Christianity.

So, how do I know that there is a being that can be called God without much straining of the conventional notion?  I've never observed such a being with my senses, nor has anyone with any kind of instrumentation.  Is there some kind of rational argument to this effect?  Well, actually, there are several, and I'll touch on a well-known one in a moment.  The best reason I can think of is that I can fairly easily think of a being whose existence I don't think anyone would even bother denying and which possesses the properties attributed to God.  What is this being?  It is Being.  Everything which exists in any respect, taken as a unity.

So, does the unity of all that is really exist?  Well, things exist, so there is Being.  And in order for there to be two Beings, then in some sense the two Beings must be together in order to distinguish one from the other.  In other words, for there to be two Beings, there must be a unity between them.  Alright, so does Being have the attributes of God?  Let's go through them one by one.  Starting with necessary being, is it possible that Being not exist?  We can rephrase this so as to ask is it possible that nothing exist?  But then, as first observed by the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, Non-Being has the property of Being, which is contradictory.  Thus, there must be something, and so Being has necessary existence.

What about transcendence?  Well, Being is quite conspicuously not any particular thing in space and time, and space and time must be included in Being themselves.  Thus, Being is outside of space and time.  Omnipotence?  Everything which can happen exists as a potentiality and so is included in Being.  Omniscience, every truth has being as a truth, so Being includes all true knowledge.  What about perfect benevolence?  I'll get to this in more detail later, but for now consider this argument.  Existence is better than non-existence, so if Being is benevolent, then everything which is possible would exist.  But everything which is possible does exists, as a possibility.  We're not dealing with benevolence in the sense of volition (I'll get to that later), but we've got something close enough.  So there you have it, Being has all the attributes one would ask of God, and I would be very interested to hear anyone try to argue that Being does not exist.

So what about God as he is usually conceived in theology?  Let's look at a classic argument for the existence of God: the Ontological Argument.  The ontological argument, put simply, goes thus: (1) God is the greatest conceivable being; (2) We have in our minds an idea of such a being; (3) However, we can conceive of a greater being than the one in our minds, namely, one which exists outside our minds; (4) Therefore, God exists outside of our minds.  Being seems to satisfy this condition for being God, since it is impossible to conceive of anything greater than all that exists.  However, if God is supposed to be distinct from some other thing which exists, then Being fulfills the requirements of the proof even better because if there is God and non-God, then I can conceive of something greater than God, the unity of God and non-God which is Being.

In Christianity, God has several other attributes: issue of moral and physical laws, creation of the physical universe, creating man in his image, saving and damning souls, and a three-aspected nature.  Since this post is getting a little long and several of these require very in-depth analysis, I'll stick to the first two for now and develop the others in a later post.  For now, let us consider, if there exist moral and physical laws, then they are part of Being.  Similarly with the physical universe: not only is it part of Being, but either something that exists caused the matter in it to start moving or something brought it into actuality out of mere potentiality.

I'll stop here for now to pause and point out what we've learned up to this point.  We've discovered that something fitting the description of God exists, and not only that it exists, but it is something whose existence seems so obvious that to question it almost boggles the mind.  If nothing else, this exploration should reinforce the idea that when dealing with matters of philosophy, it is always advisable to ask "What exactly do you mean by that?" before accepting or dismissing any idea.  To end on a cliffhanger, in my next post I'll answer some more questions about God that lead to surprising answers.

Challenge to Statists

A state is a compulsory, territorial monopoly of judicial services and enforcement.  A statist is someone who believes that a state is a positive good or a necessary evil.  This post is a challenge to statists in two parts.

The first part of the challenge is this: why is a state necessary for the functioning of society?  The answer is that it isn't--there have been societies surviving and thriving for centuries without a state.  Medieval Europe is an outstanding example where landowners served as primary judge on their own lands, kings and royal magistrates served as courts of appeal, merchant courts met to apply the law merchant, admiralty courts to apply admiralty law, and church courts to apply canon law, and these courts could and did enforce their own decisions.  These courts even competed with each other for disputants: for example, two merchants could have their case heard in a noble or royal court or in a merchant court, or even in a church court if they swore an oath to God as part of the transaction under dispute.  Somehow, this anarchy survived for over a thousand years and produced a thriving society.  A statist must explain how a state is superior to this system of competing jurisdictions at producing justice, and given the performance of states in the past two-hundred or so years, this is a very tall order.

The second part of the challenge is moral.  A statist who believes that a state is a positive good must demonstrate how a compulsory territorial monopoly is morally superior to any other method of providing judicial services and enforcement.  To put the matter starkly, let us suppose that there is a territorial monopolist of these services, one whose jurisdiction extends beyond its own property.  An anarchist (at least one of the stripe I represent) raises no objection as long as certain conditions are met.  If the monopolist's extended jurisdiction is based on contracts with the particular people, these contracts must have been freely agreed to and must allow the people in question to cancel them without relocating.  If it is based on restricted titles to land, there must be a way for landowners to remove those restrictions.  The statist must explain why such requirements are villainies deserving repression.  Why must a territorial monopoly be compulsory?  Why must people be forced submit to an authority other than that of justice itself?  Is the state automatically the executor of justice?  In that case, the Holocaust was a just deed, and those who died deserved what they got.

A statist who claims that a state is a positive good must answer both of these challenges; one who considers it only a necessary evil must merely answer the first.  If he cannot give a answer to his required questions, then he must become a philosophical anarchist.  The weakest position permitted by logic and honesty is "I oppose the state, but don't see how to get rid of it anytime soon."  On this count, have no fear--the state is busy destroying itself all on its own.  Someday it will come crashing down.  I only wish it that would get on with it.

Rule of Law or Rule of Men

The rule of law is an idea with a long and noble history in Western civilization.  The notion is that there are laws of moral behavior and that these laws should have priority over the whims of people, particularly of people in positions of power.  Especially in the early United States, the idea that laws should rule as opposed to men was taken as the ideal.  However, this idea needs a bit of clarification in order to be more than a cover for tyranny and dehumanization.

The reason why this clarification is necessary is because, to put it simply, the law does not enforce itself.  Law also does not elaborate on itself without human intermediation.  This means that, however much we may desire the rule of law, we're stuck with the rule of men.  And furthermore, if the rule of law is theoretically in force, the men in power gain a cloak of legitimacy which they do not deserve.

Consider the naive idea of the rule of law as enforcement of the dictates of a legislative body.  Under this system, there exists a group of people who theoretically possess the moral authority to produce new laws.  Once they produce these new laws, they are to be obeyed and enforced.  The legislative authority may change its mind at a later date, but the content of the law is still subject to its sole discretion.  Now, being merely human, the legislative authority will at some point try to do something contrary to justice.  Suppose it does so, and someone is charged with violating the unjust edict.  Here we can see both the potential for tyranny and for dehumanization.  If the court and the enforcers carry out the unjust edict, they are guilty of abetting injustice themselves.

Even worse, if they buy into the idea of the rule of law over the rule of men, then they are guilty of abdicating their own moral responsibility.  They are the ones enforcing the unjust law; the rule of men is in effect.  But they duck responsibility for this outrage by pointing to the law and saying, "We are a country of laws, not of men.  If I were to try to judge the law itself, I would be substituting my own prejudices and inclinations for the law, and that cannot stand."  But in point of fact, regardless of how they decide, they are acting upon their "prejudices and inclination," their personal sense of right.  It just happens that their sense of right is to obey the dictates of the legislative authority.  They are moral actors, but they pretend to be mere machines enacting the will of some outside agency.  It is the duty of a moral actor to identify and act according to justice, but according to the naive rule of law, the enforcers and the court ought not do this, instead behaving like robots.

Properly conceived, the rule of law stands for an ideal, and one which probably never perfectly manifests in the world.  There exist objective moral rules which all people should obey, including judges, enforcers, and even legislators.  Those who rule should rule according to justice, and when they fail to do so their rulings are not binding.  The rule of law is a state of affairs we should strive for, not one we should assume is ever in effect.

This realization splits political science into two branches.  On the one hand, what are the criteria of right rule; and on the other hand, how should rulers be cultivated in order that the rule of law prevail?  The answer to the second question is complicated, but there are a few things we can pick out fairly easily.  For one, mere election by a mass of people who don't know the candidates as people is a bad way of choosing rulers.  Instead of selecting rulers for their virtue, the democratic process weeds good people out and installs demagogues and deceivers.  An impersonal bureaucracy, rule by appointed officials, isn't much of an improvement, though it does depend on who does the appointing.

The best way of choosing rulers is probably some for of selection from a pool based on heredity.  The children of aristocratic families would be educated from a young age according to a curriculum designed to prepare them for grave moral responsibility.  Once they came of age, they would be given the opportunity to demonstrate their virtue and skill, with those doing so successfully moving on to greater responsibility and those failing passing off into other careers.  New men could enter the aristocracy by marriage or by selection for outstanding accomplishment.  This was the basic system in Europe for over a thousand years, giving credit to its durability, though it only reached its greatest degree of refinement in the 18th and 19th centuries.  After World War I it passed away completely, but there is definitely something to be said for finding a way to restore it, if that is possible.

Against Voting

After careful and lengthy introspection, I have isolated an aspect of my social thought to such a degree of clarity that I can express it with ease: I hate voting.  Not in the sense that I don’t like the process of voting, although it can be a pain.  Also not in the sense that I think voting in a political context is immoral.  Rather I hate the idea of settling an issue—any issue, large or small—by plebiscite.

Consider a presidential election.  What is theoretically at issue is the question of who should be President of the United States, a position with no small amount of power and responsibility.  Generally speaking, there are two candidates between whom voters choose, a Republican and a Democrat, with one wining and the other losing.  One Tuesday in November, everyone interested and eligible goes to the polls and usually by the end of the day it’s obvious who won, waiving the complications of the Electoral College.

Now suppose that one year the Republican wins and the Democrat loses.  Further suppose that this was an overwhelming victory with the outcome completely incontestable by the loser; let’s say the vote was 80% Republican to 20% Democrat.  This should be a case where the will of the people is clear and our supposedly democratic institutions reflect as such.  Now suppose that the 20% who voted Democrat had stayed home instead of voting; would the outcome have been significantly different?  No, of course not, and that’s because they lost.  Would this fact be different had the victory been less dramatic?  Again, no, and for exactly the same reason.  After a plebiscite, the losers cease to matter.

Consider now a smaller-scale vote, say, whether a state should allow gay marriage.  The vote is set for a particular date, and when that day arrives, everyone interested and eligible will vote yea or nay.  By the time of the vote, everyone will be expected to have made up their mind on the issue.  After the vote, however, the matter is supposed to be settled more-or-less permanently.  This means that whoever lost or hadn’t made up their mind yet is out of luck at influencing the outcome.  In this case, we can see more clearly why the losers don’t matter.  The vote is supposed to be the final word on the issue, expressing the general consensus.  But in fact, it does no such thing.  The vote a person casts expresses their views only, and there is no wiggle-room on their ballot. Rather than expressing consensus, a plebiscite splits a society into factions contesting with each other for control.

This scenario also sheds light on another problem of voting.  The options presented at the time of the vote are never the only possible choices, and almost certainly not the best choices.  For a complex issue, the best, most acceptable outcome is to be discovered in a conversation amongst the people the issue affects.  Take, for instance, the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  The people at the convention did not settle contentious issues by simply polling the delegations, but through lengthy discussions in which all the attendees weighed various arguments and positions.  What came out was a series of compromises that were at least acceptable to everyone present.  The fact that they voted on the various proposals and the final product was ultimately less significant than their general resolution to accept them or reject them as they case may have been.

Now let’s take things down to an even smaller scale.  Suppose a group of friends are trying to figure out where they should go for dinner.  Suppose also that one of the friends is a vegetarian.  How should they decide where to go?  The main issue involved here is how much sway the lone vegetarian should have over the decision of the group, and this depends on a variety of factors.  What are the available options?  How willing is the vegetarian to go without eating for a while longer?  How much weight do the other friends give to the vegetarian’s desires?  There is no simple answer to these questions, but simply deciding the issue by voting sweeps all of these concerns under the rug.  The difficulty is in finding the right balance so that the most satisfactory outcome is reached.  This may not always occur, and even in those cases where it does, it may require a strong personality to step forward and forge a consensus where there wasn’t one before.  There may have hard decisions made and compromises on many fronts.  Decision by poll simply ignores all of these complicating factors which form the core of the issue to be decided.

The upshot of these considerations is that whenever voting is “needed” it is destructive to the body that is making the decision, and whenever it is not needed, well, then it is superfluous.  This strikes at the heart of the idea of plebiscitary democracy, revealing it as a wretched form of government fostering division rather than community.  And this is true regardless of the size of the government in question, whether of a small group of people, of a company’s workers, or of an entire nation.

Laplacean Machine

Out of the fecund mind of my friend Bryce Laliberte has sprung an idea that I find quite fascinating.  The idea is of machines capable of calculating everything that occurs within a universe at any given time, which he calls Laplacean machines, or L-machines.  I think this is a very fertile idea for speculation, so in this post I will focus on creating a typology for different kinds of L-machines and on exploring some results concerning possible L-machines and the universes they model.

Bryce works from the premise of an L-machine as an entity distinct from the universe that it models.  While this is certainly a possibility, I want to classify it as a special case.  We will call an L-machine that models a universe different from the one in which it resides an exterior L-machine and an L-machine that models the universe in which it resides as an interior L-machine.

We can also think of L-machines in terms of constant versus occasional calculation.  That is, we can have a machine which could calculate the state of a universe at any time, or we can have a machine that is constantly calculating.  To help make this distinction clearer, consider an L-machine which can calculate what happens in a universe at any time but requires a specified time at which to calculate the result and contrast this with a machine which actually does calculate what occurs at every time.  We will call the first type of machine, which requires a specified time, a specific L-machine and the second type which calculates for all times a general L-machine.

A distinction that applies uniquely to general L-machines concerns the relationship between when it finishes calculations to model a universe and when the state it “predicts” actually occurs.  The calculations can occur before, after, or simultaneously with the events in the universe.  We will call these prior, posterior, and simultaneous L-machines respectively.

If we wish, we might also oppose L-machines which have inputs and actually engage in calculation to those which have not received inputs and so are not calculating.  I don’t see much profit in exploring this distinction, so we will simply call L-machines awaiting instructions inert and not bother specifying L-machines that actually are calculating.

Finally, we can classify L-machines with respect to the number of calculations they perform at any given time.  We will call L-machines that perform finitely many calculations at any given time finite and L-machines that perform a countably infinite number of calculations infinite.  I have difficulty imagining how a machine could perform uncountably many calculations, so while I won’t exclude the possibility altogether, we will simply lump such machines under the blanket heading of uncountable L-machines.

I believe we now have a typology sufficient to allow discussion of some interesting results regarding possible L-machines and their respective universes.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a fully worked out system for this analysis, so these proofs will be a little sloppy.  I’m fairly sure they’re correct as far as they go.

Proposition 1: In discrete time, a deterministic universe is a prior L-machine.

Proof: In a deterministic universe, all events at time t are determined by events at times prior to t, so the events in a deterministic universe are the same as the calculations of an L-machine.  In a universe with discrete time, the supremum of possible times prior to t is t-1.  Thus, the calculations modeling a state of the universe are finished at a definite time before that state comes about, making that universe a prior L-machine.

Proposition 2: In continuous time, a deterministic universe is a prior or simultaneous L-machine.

Proof: As proof for Proposition 1, except that the supremum for possible times prior to t is t itself, allowing for the possibility of simultaneous L-machines.

I suspect a fair bit of work can be done in trying to determine under what conditions a deterministic universe can be a simultaneous L-machine.  For example,

Theorem 1: Let U be a deterministic universe with continuous time consisting of point-objects in an algebraic vector space with pointwise-continuous position functions with respect to time that are not constant on any small time interval.  U is a simultaneous L-machine.

Proof: By Proposition 2, U is either prior or simultaneous.  For an object with position function s(t) and a specified time t_o, the limit as t goes to t_o is s(t_o).  If s(t) is constant on a neighborhood of t_o, then s(t_o) could be determined at some time prior to t_o.  Since s(t) is constant on no neighborhood of t_o, the supremum of the time by which calculations are completed to determine s(t_o) is t_o.  Thus, U is simultaneous.

Another way in which this discussion gets interesting is when we try to determine characteristics of universes by studying L-machines corresponding to them.

Axiom of Irreducible Simplicity: The simplest, complete representation of a system is itself.

This should seem fairly intuitive.  If we have a system we are trying to model, we need some way to produce all the data of the system in addition to the data itself.  Thus, the model must have more going on in it than the system itself does.  This is equivalent to the statement “Any single event requires at least one calculation to completely model it.”  If you have a problem with accepting one of these principles as an axiom, then take the other and prove it as a theorem.

Proposition 3: For any deterministic universe, there are infinitely many possible L-machines that model it.

Proof: Let U be a deterministic universe.  U is an L-machine by Propositions 1 and 2.  Let O₁ be an object not in U with two possible behaviors which alternate according to a fixed pattern.  Then the universe     U U O₁ is deterministic and so an L-machine modeling U.  This procedure can be repeated for U U O₁, producing a new L-machine which also models U, and so on indefinitely.

We can also try to think of the smallest possible L-machine of a given type for a given universe.  This leads to an interesting result.  (Note: Hereafter, “universe” denotes “deterministic universe.”)

Lemma 1: Let U be a finite universe.  The smallest L-machine of any type for U is finite.

Proof: Obvious from Axiom of Irreducible Simplicity.

Definition: A proper L-machine for a universe is an interior L-machine that is different from the universe itself.

Lemma 2: Let U be a finite universe with a lower bound on time.  There is no proper, general, prior L-machine for U at all times.

Proof: If time in a universe has a lower bound, then no proper, general, prior L-machine for that universe could calculate what it would do on a neighborhood of time zero.

Lemma 3: Let U be a finite universe with an upper bound on time.  There is no proper, general, posterior L-machine for U at all times.

Proof: As for Lemma 2, mutatis mutandis.

Lemma 4: Let U be a finite universe with a lower bound on time.  There is no proper, general, simultaneous L-machine for U.

Proof: If time is discrete for U, then obvious.  If time is continuous and L is a general, simultaneous L-machine for U, then at time 0 L must perform as many calculations as there are events in U, which means that all of the events in U are calculations of L.  Thus for any subsequent time, all calculations of L must be performed at that time and so be all the events in U at that time.

Lemma 5: Let U be a finite universe with an upper bound on time.  There is no proper, specific L-machine for U at all times.

Proof: Any proper, specific L-machine in U has a minimum number of calculations it must perform to calculate the events at any given time.  Let n be that minimum time for calculation for a specified time and t be the supremum of time in U.  For times greater than t-n, such a machine will not be able to calculate the events at the time in question.

Theorem 2: A finite universe with bounded time is its smallest L-machine for all times.

Proof: Follows from Lemmas 1-5.

I’m sure plenty more results could be proved, and I may be proving some more in the future.  For now, however, I want to close with a few general comments.  There are several fields of inquiry that I see opening up from L-machines based on what I’ve already worked out:  (1) when a universe is a simultaneous L-machine; (2) what we can learn about universes by studying their L-machines; and (3) properties of proper L-machines.  Other areas that I haven’t dealt with include infinite universes and L-machines, differences between general and specific L-machines, and probabilistic universes.  With a probabilistic universe, the universe’s L-machine merely calculates the probability of events occurring instead of whether they actually occur or not.  A small point I can see even now is that if a probabilistic universe has a proper, general L-machine, then it must be infinite.  All of these lines of inquiry could be very fertile, and I eagerly await any new developments deriving from them.

What is the State?

When libertarians use the word "state," we tend to have a very specific meaning in mind.  We generally mean "a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation/judicial services."  This definition has much to recommend it, especially that most, if not all, governments currently in existence today are states of this kind.  This definition also has, or at least had, some currency outside of libertarian circles--Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and even Robert Nisbet, all major conservative thinkers, used the word state in this sense.  However, not everyone follows the libertarian standard.  For example, Edmund Burke used the word more to indicate the constellation of forces in a society, and many thinkers didn't even use the word "state" simply because they wrote in a language other than English.  What I want to do here is tease out some of the varied meanings of state and elaborate on some consequences of these meanings.

As in my last post, I'm going to use a distinction between Leftist and Rightist notions of the state without going into detail on why I'm using those adjectives.  There are reasons for my usage, some of which should be discernible to readers with some familiarity with 18th and 19th century intellectual history, but, as before, my choice of these descriptors does not necessarily correspond with any particular people or groups today that share them.

Let's look at what I'll call the Leftist idea of the state.  The buzzword associated with this idea is "consent."  Supposedly, the state is an agency created by the governed population to pursue certain collective ends.  The legitimacy of the state is dependent on the continued consent of the population to the rule of the state.  This condition goes two ways: on the one hand, an agency need only have the consent of the population, and on the other, if a state ever loses the consent of the population, then it immediately loses legitimacy.  And since the consent of the people is critical to the legitimacy of a state, it is the will of the populace that is sovereign.  Whatever the particular organizational structure of the state--whether monarchical, oligarchic, or democratic--democracy in the sense of popular rule is the ideal.

There are a couple aspects of the Leftist state that are rather fuzzy, and this fuzziness causes serious problems.  For one, what constitutes consent?  One might say that, in some sense, a woman who stops fighting back against a rapist has "consented" to being raped, but this disgusting extreme does violence to our usual notion of consent as well as the victim.  Implicit consent--meaning consent that is genuine according to our usual notion, but not expressed in any explicit manner--is a popular standard, but it really doesn't make much of an improvement.  The problem with implicit consent is that it is impossible to tell if it actually has been granted.  The evidence of consent would be a functioning government, but just as with the rape victim who stopped resisting, this may be indistinguishable from a situation without genuine consent.  Thus, the people who perform the functions of the state cannot know who is really under their legitimate jurisdiction so they necessarily either do nothing or commit gross injustices.  Explicit expression of consent might seem to solve this problem, but it really doesn't since there is the issue of verifying whether the consent is genuine.  Whether someone pays taxes, votes, or otherwise participates in acts and offices of the state, these might simply indicate a desire to secure oneself from its depredations rather than a genuine consent to its authority.  I defer here to Lysander Spooner, whose No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority deals with this matter in great detail.  However, something to point out in modern states, which are ostensibly of the Leftist type, with the exception of (legal) immigrants, no one is lining up to make an objective and explicit declaration of their consent to the state, mostly because there isn't one, but also because it wouldn't make any difference--whether you consent or not, the state still rules you.

The other region of fuzziness concerns what the state may legitimately do, and this hinges on what sort of agencies actually count as states.  Neither Microsoft nor Planned Parenthood is a state, but the US government is.  What makes the difference?  All of them are in principle dependent on the consent of their people, but one has a decidedly broader scope.  That the US government may legitimately use violence, is actually less important, according to the Leftist idea, than its charter to provide for the common defense and the general welfare (and we will, for now, leave aside the issue of Constitutional interpretation).  The US government, on the assumption that it is legitimate, is thus justified in doing whatever is required to secure those ends, perhaps with some restrictions.  There is the Constitution which prescribes and proscribes certain actions, but it can be amended, and not always explicitly.  While the US government is a particular state, the abstract notion of the Leftist state does include a charter of some kind which must be followed in the pursuit of its ends.  However, in actual practice, and especially since the state is always the arbiter in such cases of dispute on this matter, the constitutional restrictions on state action, insofar as they exist at all, will progressively be loosened and ignored.  This raises another issue regarding consent--does "consent" mean consent to every action of the state or merely to the state as such?  The standard answer, which is really the only reasonable one, is the second.  This does, however, lead to the absurd situation that if a state claims that authority to murder people and this does not prompt an overthrow, and then the state murders someone, that the person who was murdered consented to being killed.  There are a lot more gems like this that can be considered, but the important thing is that the Leftist obsession with "consent" is practically speaking a great joke.

Now let us consider what I'll call the Rightist notion of the state.  Whereas the Leftist idea centers around the notion of consent, the key idea behind the Rightist state is rather "deference."  Due to the natural inequalities between men, some people are superior in certain respects than others.  The most obvious example of this is economic division of labor--some people are better at hunting, others at farming, others at pottery, others at solving partial differential equations.  Respecting these differences is a major feature of a Rightist state.  In terms of social direction, those people at the head of a Rightist state would be those people best suited to leading and organizing people.  However, there is something more to a Rightist state that makes it different from pure meritocracy, a moral component.  In the Leftist state, the distinction between states is binary: a state is either legitimate or illegitimate.  Beyond the criterion of legitimacy, there is very little room for principle-significant differences.  A Leftist state can to a large extent do whatever it wishes as long as it retains legitimacy without any praise or condemnation.  Some states might be more palatable to a given philosopher than others, but that is not a matter of principle.  For the Rightist state, on the other hand, the goals of the state are subject to criticism.  A famous example of such a critique is in Plato's Republic with his system of Five Regimes.  Plato discusses the nature of states in which virtue and truth, honor and glory, wealth, public opinion, and violence are the factors which determine to whom deference is granted.  In each of Plato's regimes the division of labor, or something analogous to it, persists since not everyone is as virtuous as everyone else, nor as capable in war or in commerce or in demagoguery or in criminal violence.  Under Plato's schema, in fact, a Leftist state has a place as a democracy, which Plato ranked very low.

There are a couple things to note about the Rightist state as well.  For one, there is no issue of legitimacy or illegitimacy: the state simply is.  No one consents to the state as such, but rather participates in it by their own living and choosing.  It also does not depend on any explicit charter or formal organization; it merely consists of a group of people who are committed to living together in peace and cooperation.  The powers of such a state are likely less formally defined than in a Leftist state, but the control that the populace has over the state is also somewhat tighter, since deference is a more concrete phenomenon than "consent."  Also, a Rightist state does not depend on the use of violence, just like a Leftist state.  However, the notion of a monopoly of legitimate violence makes little sense under a Rightist state as opposed to a Leftist one.  If a Leftist state utilizes violence, it makes sense that it have no competition with other agencies since, provided it is legitimate, competition makes it harder for the state to pursue its goals of common defense and general welfare.  A Rightist state, on the other hand, is not necessarily a single organization, but is more likely a constellation of multiple cooperating agencies.  Thus, the segmented character of the state makes the notion of a monopoly of violence simply inapplicable.

The second noteworthy characteristic of a Rightist state is that the quality of a state is not a binary factor as it is according to the Leftist idea.  Just as rape is an act and an evil one, a tyranny is a state and an evil one.  However, evil comes in degrees, and states can be more or less evil and destructive.  Typically, the standard for a good state is one which maintains peace and cultivates virtue--this is, for example, a major part of Plato's system.  There can be some talk of trying to improve a state by bringing the people closer to virtue, but for the state that is not wholly given over to evil, enforced proclamations do little good.  Fundamentally, it is the character of the people rather than the explicit rules they obey which determines the quality of a state.

Now, I would not go so far as to say that the dichotomy of Leftist and Rightist states covers all ideas about the word, but there is a great deal of variation within these two categories, so we can analyze currently existing "states" under both schema.  If we look at the US government today as a Leftist state, we see that the question of whether it has the consent of the governed is wide open, even leaving aside the logical issue of how consent could be ascertained at all.  Thus, what we have is likely an illegitimate state, but there may be some hope for it.  Under the Rightist lens, however, the US government appears incredibly grotesque.  As a class, politicians and bureaucrats are universally despised, yet they are the ones who hold much of the power.  Captains of industry earn their money by catering to the whims of the American mob in the democracy of consumerism.  And there are countless examples of criminal violence by the state's agents across the country every day.  At best, the US government is a swiftly declining democracy; at worst, a vicious tyranny.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm much more a fan of the Rightist notion of the state than of the Leftist type, even though both have the possibility of evil variations.  However, as a closing remark, I want to comment on how the Rightist notion of the state highlights the importance and brilliance of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's grand strategy of secession.  What Hoppe's proposal essentially amounts to is taking local states, constellations of authority, and separating them from the corrupt state that currently holds sway.  This procedure would allow suppressed natural states to regain predominance and provide a vastly superior ordering for social life.

Fairness and Taxes

The notion that "the rich ought to pay their fair share" in taxes is one that has been with us a long time and has recently gained a great deal more currency.  This is usually, though not always, thundered by socialists, fellow-travelers, and poor people who don't pay much in taxes themselves.  However, the notion simply does not hold water, regardless of the level of taxation under either of two views of taxes.

We can think of taxes in two different ways, which I will call the Leftist and the Rightist views for reasons I will not explain here--simply note that the reasons are complex and so should not necessarily be associated with people bearing the labels Leftist or Rightist in other contexts.  The Leftist view is that taxes are involuntary contributions exacted under threat of force and of a degree determined by the state.  The Rightist view is that taxes are essentially voluntary contributions granted to the extent that the interests and abilities of the payers permit.  The Leftist view describes what actually prevails today in the United States, but the Rightist view might be associated better with other times and places.  One simple way to differentiate between the two types would be thus: under the Rightist type, the state is under the effective control of the major taxpayers and there is no thought of externalizing those costs; under the Leftist type, either the state is controlled by non-taxpayers or the costs of the state are externalized to people not in control of the state.

If we consider taxes under the Leftist view, we find that taxes are a burden inflicted upon people by the state.  In this case, "fairness" is not an issue--the most "fair" level of taxation would be no tax at all, or if one must have some taxes, a capitation tax.  But let us suppose a more complex scenario that one might say changes things.  Consider the case that a Rightist state is in a fiscal crisis and the ruling group tries to externalize the costs.  Would it not be fair to say that the classes who control the state are not paying their fair share because they should not be externalizing the costs?  What this claim actual demands is that the Rightist type of taxation be maintained rather than a Leftist one instituted.  And the complaint is properly not that the ruling classes are not paying their fair share, but that people whose "fair share" is zero are being taxed at all.

Under the Rightist system, class fairness does not enter either.  Particular individuals may pay more or less than they can afford, but since the ruling class is also the taxpaying class, there is no issue of whether it as a whole pays its fair share.  If there is a mismatch between the abilities of particular individuals and the needs of the state, those are to be addressed on an individual basis, not on a class basis, and there is certainly no reason for a major public discussion on the subject of whether the Smiths and the Joneses are paying their "fair share" in taxes.

A libertarian will notice that I've used the term state in a loose sense that is different from the one we customarily use.  I do so for the sake of generality, since many other thinkers have used the term in a different sense than we do, and I will hopefully explain this in a later post.

Conceivability and Possibility, A Critique

My friend Bryce Laliberte has written an interesting and engaging paper on the relationship between conceivability and possibility.  The central thesis of the paper is that a proposition is possible if and only if it is conceivable.  While I am sympathetic to this notion, I'm afraid that I ultimately cannot accept Bryce's elaboration--there are too many serious problems, which I will try to explain here.  Right now I don't have any good idea about how to fully rectify the theory, but perhaps I will come up with something by the time I finish writing this post.

Definitions are critical in this discussion, specifically definitions for possibility and conceivability.  In the paper, possibility is plain-old metaphysical possibility.  The definition of conceivability is the main focus of Bryce's work.  The definition he gives is Wittgensteinian:

The act of conceiving must entail at least the ability to list out the conditions of the state of affairsʼ fulfillment. If these conditions cannot be expressed, then we cannot be sure that what we take to be conceived of is actually conceived of, for understanding what would be the case just goes along with knowing what it is that is the state of affairs in this case.

For a more concrete example, he considers the proposition that a specific polar bear is blue rather than white.  The way we would know whether this is the case is by looking at the polar bear and seeing what color it is.  This leaves open the obvious objection that a blind person cannot see the polar bear and thus cannot conceive of the proposition in question.  To this Bryce replies that he does not mean conceivable by anyone, but only by those with sufficient knowledge to conceive of it.  While the blind person cannot conceive of color, someone who can see can so conceive, and that is enough.

It is here at the beginning that we run into the first major problems with Bryce's thesis.  Suppose we are going to conceive of proposition P.  In order to do this, we must know the conditions of P, Q and R, both propositions.  And how do we conceive of Q and R?  Obviously, by knowing the conditions for them, Q1, Q2, R1, and R2.  But the problem remains and has even multiplied.  Thus, in order to conceive of a single proposition, we must be able to conceive of many more with no obvious stopping point.  Where does conception end?  If all propositions are self-conceived (whose condition is the proposition itself) or analytic from self-conceived propositions, then we have no problem.  (We need analyticity because we can't have any notions or relationships that we can't conceive of already, so synthetic propositions are out.)  This gives us what we want, since it means that all true propositions are necessary, and necessity implies possibility, but this isn't what Bryce is arguing.

The notion of self-conceived propositions raises an issue all by itself.  To use Bryce's example, what are the conditions for the proposition that a polar bear is blue?  The answer he gives is our seeing the polar bear and its color, but that's not actually correct.  Our vision tells us what color the polar bear is, but it does not determine the polar bear's color.  Rather, the condition for the polar bear being blue is the fact itself, not our knowledge of this fact.  Thus, to conceive of a proposition is to understand its meaning, and Bryce's claim transforms into a proposition is possible if and only if it is meaningful, which isn't quite the same thing.

Alternatively, we might suppose that the conditions for empirical propositions, like the polar bear's color, are all the prior events which caused the polar bear to be blue.  But this means we have to be able to list every event and causal connection in a given chain going back to the first cause, if there even was such a thing.  This leads to the absurdity that in order to conceive of my writing this essay now, I have to know everything in the causal chain that led up to it, which neither I nor anyone else does or can.  Thus, it is impossible that I am writing anything.

Bryce makes  brief digression into the difference between conception and imagination.  This is probably the weakest part of the paper, since at the end we still don't have a very good notion of imagination.  Near as I can discern, the main difference between imagination and conception is that imagination doesn't require grounding in logic.  In a sense, imagination is precisely what it says: forming an image of something.  The problem is that all of Bryce's criticisms of conceiving something impossible apply also to imagination.  This seems to be a relatively un-worked-out part of Bryce's system, so I won't dwell on it, but imagination is definitely something to elaborate further.

The long section entitled "Conceivability Implies Possibility" is quite fascinating.  I'm quite impressed with Bryce's work here, and my only difference would be to question the need establish the identity of different "nothings".  I am perfectly happy saying that the set of square circles is the same as the set of triangular circles, both empty, and don't see the need to descend to first-order logic.  I suppose a metaphysician like Bryce might have some reason to do so, but logic and mathematics are my bailiwick, so I will leave this matter of esoterica to the specialists.

My focus on mathematics does allow me to spot several serious problems that emerge when we try to apply Bryce's system to mathematical propositions.  Up to this point, we've only dwelt on problems that require significant revisions to the overall thesis.  Now, however, we encounter problems that actually prove that Bryce's system simply does not work.

The standard for conception of mathematical propositions that Bryce provides is rather high:

To conceive of a logico-mathematical proposition is to know that it is true; the demonstration of its conceivability is the same as the demonstration of its actuality.

That is, we can only conceive of a theorem if we can prove it.  This is obviously problematic in that it means we can't conceive of a theorem that we haven't simply proved yet, making it impossible.  In other words, Fermat's Last Theorem was impossible twenty years ago, but Andrew Wiles somehow made it true in the intervening years.  The way Bryce tries to escape this problem is by proposing agnosticism on the conceivability of unproven theorems--we simply don't know everything that we can conceive.  However, this doesn't really solve the problem since in actual fact we either can or cannot conceive of a theorem.  If it is the case that we can conceive of a theorem, then we can prove it.  If we are charitable, then we might say that we can prove theorems that we merely haven't proved yet.  The task of mathematicians is to work out the true extent of our powers of conception.

This "solution" rests on a rather naive idea of mathematics as an essentially unchanging body of knowledge--all mathematicians ever do is work out further implications of various axioms.  We can forgive Bryce for this mistake since mathematics isn't his specialty, but the implications are still quite serious for his theory.  There three different ways this proves to be a difficulty.

For one, mathematics today is very different from mathematics even two hundred years ago, let alone two thousand.  In Socrates's day, no one could prove Fubini's theorem or derive the Cauchy-Riemann equations, however hard they thought--they simply didn't have the necessary precursor notions.  Completely axiomatized mathematics is actually a very modern invention--we've only had axioms for arithmetic for a little over a hundred years now.  This is a problem for Bryce's system in that we today can prove theorems which were unprovable two thousand years ago and not because we've worked out the consequences of our axioms better--it's instead because we have axioms where people long ago did not.  We can avoid this difficulty if we posit strong formalism; that is, Theaetetus could have proved all the theorems of group theory had he our axioms, but since those axioms don't actually describe anything, he wouldn't have any better understanding of anything.  However, strong formalism is absurd on its own terms, and Bryce's, as we'll see in a moment.

Even if we restrict our concept of mathematics to axiomatic systems, we still have to deal with the issue of picking axioms, even to describe the same subject.  If we are going to do set theory, we have a veritable smorgasbord of options.  We can have sets alone, proper classes if we'd like, and this is leaving aside constructive set theory (which isn't really axiomatic) and category theory, among others.  Which do we pick?  Once more formalism saves us, but it really is no help.  We saw earlier how we could derive from Bryce's general thesis that a proposition is possible if and only if it is meaningful, and even if we don't take this tack, I doubt Bryce would contend that we can conceive of meaningless propositions, even if they are not logical impossibilities per se.  But strong formalism contends that all of mathematics is meaningless, and thus inconceivable and impossible.  I'm afraid I can't see any interpretation of this other than that mathematics is utter nonsense, and I invite anyone who thinks this to start counting the words on this page and then explain what it is they are doing.

There is a third problem that formalism cannot allow us to escape: unprovable theorems.  One example of an unprovable theorem is the Continuum Hypothesis--that the cardinality of the continuum is the smallest uncountable infinity.  We know that this cannot be proved or disproved using the present axioms of set theory, so does that mean we cannot conceive of it as true or false, making both impossible?  That is the answer Bryce's system seems to require.  Another example would be in arithmetic.  We know that for any countable set of axioms and proof methods, there will be theorems which are true under those axioms but that cannot be proved from those axioms.  Does this mean that these theorems are inconceivable and impossible?  That's what the theory says, but Goedel proved that they do exist.  Thus, Bryce's theory is wrong.

As I had hoped, I've come up with a few ways that Bryce might take to save his theory: (1) replace conceivable with meaningful; (2) replace conceivable [by humans] with conceivable by an infinite mind; and (3) devise a new, non-Wittgensteinian notion of conceivability.  Any one of these changes would sufficient to deal with the flaws I've pointed out, though they would still need elaboration.  However Bryce continues from this point, whether in a direction I've suggested or not, I wish him luck.

Abortion, A Moderate Perspective

For my part, I am undecided about abortion.  The issue seems to me to hinge significantly on whether a developing fetus is to be accorded all the rights of a human being.  At the very least, it seems absurd to me that a non-human thing can become human by simply exiting a woman's uterus, but there are plenty of complications that I am either unqualified or just unable to answer at the present time.  However, the other day, a friend of mine expressed an idea about abortion that I think is worth considering.

My friend's point is simply that abortion is, ultimately, the violent and premature ending of a human life.  Without this act, a fetus will naturally grow and develop into a human being.  The mother thus has a responsibility to make decisions about the future of this human being whether she wants it or not.  While my friend did not say what he thinks the mother should ultimately decide, he strongly objected to referring to an abortion as "terminating a pregnancy," or "aborting a fetus."  It is killing a person, plain and simple.

There is a libertarian argument in favor of abortion, presented by Murray Rothbard and Walter Block.  The argument goes thus: the mother's body is her property, so if she decides that she does not want to carry the child any more, then she is within her rights to expel it.  If the only way to expel the child from her womb is to kill it, then she is justified in doing so.  This certainly seems rather harsh, but it is simply an extension of the idea that you can kick trespassers off your land and shoot them if they don't comply.  While I have to accept this by the rule of logic, I have some qualifications that make me wonder about the conclusion.

In the first place, I'm not quite sure the trespasser analogy holds.  For one thing, a fetus is an innocent in the broadest conceivable sense of the term--it has done absolutely nothing that amounts to any criminal act.  To illustrate how this is significant, suppose the following situation.  A man is kidnapped by a person with a helicopter and is then dumped out by that person's henchman, landing unceremoniously on your property and breaking enough bones that he can barely move.  Has he committed any aggression against you?  No, the people who dumped him out of a helicopter did.  Still, what may you do with respect to the man on your land?  Well for one thing, you may not simply kill him as a trespasser--he didn't trespass.  You also may not demand that he leave your property and kill him if he does not comply--he can't move and ought implies can.  You certainly may help him in various ways, and you may simply leave him be--libertarianism itself does not demand charity--but you may not take any aggressive action against him.  May you pick him up and move him off your property?  Not without his consent.  You're really just stuck with him.  This seems to vitiate the "evictionist" thesis that a mother may simply expel a fetus since the fetus is in exactly the same position as the man on your property.

Things become even more complicated when you consider the fact that pregnancy isn't something that just happens all on its own, but is the result of conscious action on the part of at least one person.  To analyze this factor, let's split they ways pregnancy can arise into three categories--rape, consensual without intent to conceive, and consensual with intent to conceive. (I'm sure one could devise more categories than these, but I'm keeping things simple and sane.)

In the case of rape, a man has forced a woman to carry a child without her consent, even for the act that brought her pregnancy about.  My earlier thought experiment still holds, but I want to start afresh with a new one to help accentuate some features of this analysis.  So, instead of a man being dropped onto your property, imagine a baby or other suitably helpless person simply popping into existence in your living room.  After overcoming the shock of this even happening, and having the circumstances somehow transmitted to you from an authoritative source, you have to figure out what to do with this child.  The situation is exactly the same as before, so you still may not expel or kill the child.  However, we can ask, "does it matter how the child appeared?"  Maybe it was created by a supervillain (who James Bond will be thwarting in an upcoming movie), who is inflicting this child upon you.  On the other hand, what if there were no such villain and the child simply appeared through a sequence of incredibly unlikely quantum processes?  Is there any difference?  Yes--in the first case, you may exact justly compensation from the supervillain.  Otherwise, the situation is exactly the same as the earlier experiment, as is the result.  You're stuck with the child, at least for now.

Moving on the the second option, consensual without intent to conceive, a man and a woman have had sex and the woman is now pregnant as a result, but they didn't intend that to happen.  To go back to our imaginary scenario, suppose you have a button somewhere in your house that will cause babies to magically appear in your living room and you accidentally push it one day (what were you thinking?!).  Are you off the hook?  No more than you would be if the child appeared without you pushing the button.  And since sex involves a bit more conscious effort than accidentally pushing a button does and the expecting parents knew that this could result before they had sex, they are if anything more responsible in this case (though their range of responsibilities doesn't increase).

The final case really addresses a common claim among pro-choice people--that the decision is the mother's alone and the father has nothing to contribute.  That claim would be reasonable in the first two situations, but in the third it fails.  The case is consensual with intent to conceive--a man and woman have sex intending to produce a child and raise it.  In our experiment, you and a friend jointly agree to push to button and deal with the consequences.  Now suppose you (the mother), wants to get rid of the child.  The problem is that you (her) have entered an implicit contract with your friend (the father), and so even if you (she) could get out of deal, you (she) need his permission to do so.  On the other hand, he can't weasel out without your (the mother's) consent either--you're both bound to your earlier decision.  Given the stipulation, this also means the parents have to raise the child to adulthood as well.  That has the potential for opening up a whole other can of worms, though, that I do not wish to explore right now.

There are, of course, other aspects of the public debate about abortion--specific types, required procedures, etc.  I'll deal with a couple more.  One, there is the idea of requiring parental permission for children to get abortions.  This seems to me like a simple extension of the parent's natural authority over their child and the "my house, my rules" principle.  I don't know if they still do this, but I remember that schools had to get parental permission for students to go on field trips.  An abortion seems like a much more important decision, and even more within the scope of parental authority than a school field trip, so parental permission should be required for a child to get an abortion.  This is, naturally, assuming that abortion is permitted, which I've argued above it shouldn't be...hmm.  Two, what about abortions to protect the health of the mother?  This is very much like the situation in which a person hands you a gun and tells that if you will not kill someone you will be killed.  The correct choice in that case is to refuse and die.  In the case of a doctor potentially performing an abortion, he is no more justified in killing the child than the mother is.  The moral choice is not always the happiest one.

Well, when I wrote above that I'm uncertain about abortion, I meant it.  In writing this post, I've walked myself through the arguments as much as I've tried simply to express them, so I now seem to be driven by the inescapable laws of logic to the strong pro-life position--no abortion, no exceptions.  All of this still depends, however, on the notion that a fetus has the rights of a human being, which to me is still uncertain.  In theory, I guess I'll leave it an open question, but in practice, I have to go with the pro-life position.  In my fondness for Plato, I'll use one of his arguments to illustrate this point.  In the Laws, Plato argues that drinking parties can be useful in allowing a person to relax their unconscious inhibitions and so teach them better conscious self-control.  However, he says that he has never seen any party held in this manner, and so if such conditions cannot be assured, he argues that prohibition of alcohol is the second-best option.  I'm taking a similar approach--technically, it's still an open question as to whether a fetus has the same rights as a human being, but if they do have those rights, supporting abortion would be tantamount to countenancing mass murder, something I do not support.  Furthermore, there is my friend's sagely point that abortion does involve the premature and forcible ending of a human life, which strikes an indecisive blow on the theoretical side against abortion.  If you ought to treat a fetus as a human life, then you ought not to take it without just cause, which I have painstakingly explained is never so.  This is a strong argument, even if it doesn't prove the case.

Even after all this, I still think that my chose title of "Abortion, A Moderate Perspective" is applicable.  I've given my reasons here, and they're very careful, non-emotional, and even non-theological reasons.  I'm also open to critiques, if you think I've gone wrong somewhere in my analysis.  However, if your problem is with Rothbardian libertarianism, which informs all my arguments, I suggest you find another occasion to comment.

Anti-Statism and Nothing Else

It's been a while since my last post, but I've had an idea that has dramatically expanded my understanding of political philosophy.  It is as though I can now see the totality of political philosophy: where every idea comes from, how it makes sense, and where it goes wrong.  It's really quite amazing.  This article is an attempt to articulate part of that enlightenment to my libertarian friends.

Basically, the origin of my idea is in a fairly simple question: what if we win?  Suppose we could somehow tear down the current statist system and reinstitute a natural order (to use Hoppe's phrase)--how do libertarians fit in to this new system?  For one thing, we would go from being radical revolutionaries to being defenders of the status quo, and the status quo involves something interesting.

Since today we live under the rule of states, libertarians can bring to bear all of our arguments about aggression being illegitimate to combat just about everything the state does.  However, we do not object if a business sets up office rules, if a homeowners association builds and maintains streets, if a fraternal organization collects dues, if a fairgrounds charges vendors for selling there, if a church forbids is members to smoke marijuana, or if a parent grounds their child, at least not qua libertarians.  Notice, that these things are exactly what we object to the state doing--regulation, building projects, taxation, trade barriers, issuing moral injunctions, or denying freedom of speech/association/etc.--but have a crucial difference.  The difference is that these organizations and agents have a voluntary and property-based justification.  And it is these organizations and agencies that we want to provide all of these services.  Libertarianism today is fundamentally little more than anti-statism.

But if the state were abolished, what would we have to say?  Of course, we would object to things like slavery contracts, fractional-reserve banking, and other particular issues, but we would by and large be out of a job.  Nonetheless, we can see a place where libertarians might fit in.  All of the organizations would have a contractual basis, each would have its own constitution, and we libertarians would be strict constitutionalists, raging against every violation of the contract and demanding that any changes be incorporated into the contract according to the predefined procedures.  We would also insist on the parties to these contracts upholding their end of the agreement, obeying the strictures passed according to the constitutional procedures.  We would be law-and-order conservatives par excellence.

However, as Plato observed long ago, the law is rigid and cruel, not taking into consideration all important factors in human life.  We would join with Plato in saying that having no laws would be ideal, but since we don't live in an ideal world, the rule of law is second-best.  Furthermore, we should not read the Laws with trembling and loathing, but rather with respect for the wisdom contained therein.

The rigidity of the law can become problematic, causing situations that are not what the parties subject to the law intend or desire.  For example, a starving child who steals food to survive at the very least deserves our pity, and punishing them as a vicious thief may be downright cruel.  Thus, exceptions to the law must be permitted.  The libertarian response to this fact is twofold: (1) since what the law forbids is probably something we don't want, the law itself should not be changed except without careful and lengthy deliberation, and (2) exceptions to the law should never become the norm--if children are starving, then people should help feed them, not just let them off whenever they steal food.

If the libertarian program were to be reformulated for a stateless society, it would look very similar to what is generally thought of (among thinking people, anyway) as conservatism.  Libertarian organizations should maintain order, enforce contracts, protect property, and not be changed willy-nilly.  We would be in favor of restricted "immigration," legislating morality, and regulating business practices.  We would even support things that would look eerily like socialism, but that have a voluntary basis, if they were genuinely advantageous--for example, a homeowner's association or group of such associations owning and operating roads.  The important fact is that all such associations must be voluntary and based on private property.

For now, however, we are still mere anti-statists.  I think there is room for more in a libertarian worldview--for example, the definition of a household has to be prior to and independent of any state--and I may go into some of these in later posts if I can find the time.