Nicely done, Marc, but I have to say that I’m rather puzzled by this: “… many northern Whigs—who prized stability over chaos and uncertainty— simply couldn’t abide the anarchy caused by John Brown and his fellow abolitionists.”

John Brown was virtually unknown to anybody other than his neighbors and a few abolitionists until his Kansas campaigns in 1856; Harper’s Ferry was in 1859. Given that the Whigs had more or less completely disintegrated already by 1856, I have trouble taking seriously the suggestion that John Brown or the guerilla tactics associated with him had very much bearing on anti-abolitionist Northern Whigs’ thought…

THorne: “This is a cultural force that causes them to be ultra competitive and results in violence against men by men.”

Culture is not an airborne virus or a gaseous medium. It’s us, that is, you and I and our neighbors. The things that you are talking about are not cultural forces; the process is neither impersonal nor anonymous. What you’re describing is men bullying other men to toe the party line.

That’s too bad — no one should be bullied, least of all into acts that are both immoral and dangerous. But it ought to be obvious what men get out of maintaining a culture of male violence. And I might be more sympathetic to my fellow men’s complaints of being victimized by expectations of masculinity that they would rather reject, if I saw any evidence that they were doing a damn thing to challenge or undermine that culture of male violence or those norms of masculinity, rather than just complaining about it as a strategic response to radical feminist arguments.

Kennedy: My only purpose here was to explain why I have a distaste for unions in general as they have evolved in historical practice, not to offer an exhaustive analysis of the history of unions.

That’s fine. My purpose was to try to explain why I think you ought to take a more nuanced view of people in the labor movement who happened to use the letters S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M to tag the views they held.

Kennedy: When did he sentence anyone or carry out their execution? When did he kill?

When he deliberately declined to order subordinates, over whom he had direct and unquestioned control, not to kill someone that he knew they planned to kill, when he claimed the authority and in fact had the power to stop them by a simple order, because he approved of the actions that he was permitting.

Are you claiming that to count as one of the people responsible for killing Tookie Williams, Schwarzenegger would have had to issue a direct order stating “Kill Tookie Williams,” or jabbed the needle in himself?

Kennedy: I’ll leave it to others to document the double standards, they were evident to me when Tookie’s supporters were calling Schwarzenegger a cold-blooded killer.

He is a cold-blooded killer. Last I checked, executing a death sentence meant killing somebody, and carrying out a deliberate, premeditated killing 24 years in the planning could hardly be described as a crime of passion. Making the words “cold-blooded” and “killer” longer and more Latinate (“the execution of the unquestionably guilty mass murderer and violent gang founder Tookie Williams — after a jury trial and multiple judicial appeals …”) doesn’t change the fact of the matter.

Maybe you were objecting to something else? E.g. the express condemnation of Schwarzenegger without a corresponding condemnation of Tookie? But most people who objected to Tookie’s sentence either thought (1) he wasn’t guilty, or (2) whether or not he was guilty killing him would be unjustified. Those who believe (1) may or may not have been dishonest about the facts of the case (I wouldn’t know; I don’t care whether Tookie was guilty or not and I haven’t studied the case). But what’s that got to do with their opinion of Schwarzenegger? (It’s not a matter of dispute as to whether or not Schwarzenegger authorized the killing.) Those who believe (2) are under no obligation to make sure they denounce any murders that they believe Tookie committed before they denounce Schwarzenegger’s having him killed—since they think that whether Tookie was evil or not is irrelevant to whether or not Schwarzenegger should have him killed. If you mean (3) the attempt by many to portray Tookie as a good person in spite of any crimes he may have committed, since he supposedly turned his life around, then I have no idea whether or not he became a good person or was just trying to save his skin (how would I know?), or whether the people who believe this are being dishonest, but I don’t see what any of this has to do with Schwarzenegger either.

You seem to think there’s some kind of comparative judgment involved here instead of a simple statement to the effect that Schwarzenegger killed somebody when he shouldn’t have. If there is such a comparison, explicit or implicit, where is it?

Schreiber: Libertarianism, which I generally support, isn’t justified by recourse to objective deontology (nothing is) and as a meta-ethical point, the functioning of all ethical systems are predicated on a hypothetical imperative. … But in the latter case, the first argument of Mackie’s Error Theory will apply and the position is untenable.

These are bold claims for which you have provided absolutely no support. I don’t know which argument of Mackie’s you’re referring to as the “first”; if you mean the Argument from Relativity (the first one he uses to attack the existence of objective values in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) then the argument is not even remotely decisive. (So people disagree on ethics and it’s hard to resolve the dispute by introducing bits of evidence that one of the parties has not got. So what? You could offer the same worries about meta-ethics or philosophy generally that Mackie offers about normative ethics. If it doesn’t entail that there’s no objective fact of the matter as to whether or not error theory is true, then it doesn’t entail that there’s no objective fact of the matter as to whether a given normative ethical claim is true, either. Broadly speaking, if your argument depends on this kind of crude verificationism, you should probably give the argument up.) For discussion of the second claim, see Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, in which she revisits (and rejects) her own earlier argument from “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” The first claim is also simply irrelevant, since the claim was merely that slavery is an evil in itself and not for its causal contribution to something else. That may be true under deontology but it’s also perfectly compatible with virtue ethics, some kinds of consequentialism, and many other theories about the nature of the Right and the Good. It’s not compatible with hedonism, but the fact that hedonism blocks you from viewing slavery as an evil in itself is one of the chief reasons that hedonism is false.

But to press my earlier point on real freedom: there is somethign that you know you will never do, the government suddenly bans it, is your freedom diminished?

Yes. Freedom is a term with modal weight; it has to support counterfactuals.

Kennedy: Yes. He’s quite right that many actively excuse rights violations in these other places and hold the U.S. to be a worse offender when it usually is not.

I certainly agree with you that there are people who do this, and that the examples that you give are good ones. But is this just a general beef on your part, or do you have specific examples in mind having to do with the killing of Tookie Williams, or even the death penalty in general? Because frankly, the only evidence that Greenwald seems to offer is that some people vocally objected to the killing of Williams but he personally hasn’t seen them objecting to executions in other countries where the death penalty is used more freely and against people who certainly didn’t do anything wrong. Which is frankly a ridiculous standard for concluding that someone is being dishonest or selective; there are lots of honest reasons that you might object to both A and B but only mention A at some particular time. (Maybe there are some Leftists in Europe, or some libertarians in America, whose outrage over Williams’ execution is dishonest; but the argument certainly hasn’t shown that.)

WhiskeyJuvenile: People post a lot of words about Kelo because:

a) we have a more realistic chance of dealing with it; b) we actually are arguing against an opposition, whereas nobody is defending the events in the Congo.

That’s fine. Maybe similar considerations to (a) and (b) explain some people’s decision to spend a lot of words on the killing of Tookie Williams without first having made sure that they denounced every murderous regime in the world that also deliberately kills prisoners?

Kennedy, that’s fine. Did anyone suggest that the premeditated murder of prisoners in the US is worse than the systematic human rights violations in the P.A., Iran, Syria, Cuba, China, etc. that Greenwald mentions? Or are they just focused on things that happen bear on them at the moment?

Schreiber, of course there seems to be nothing instrinsically wrong with slavery if you don’t think that people have any rights not to be enslaved. So what? The question is why you’d believe such a ridiculous thing.

As far as freedom goes, you seem to be either neglecting or intentionally obfuscating the distinction that libertarians make between freedom in the sense of uncoerced choice and freedom in the sense of the choice between available alternatives. There are lots of reasons alternatives might not be available to you, but that’s only an actionable problem, from the standpoint of libertarian theory, when what’s restricting your choices is coercion by another person. You might think that that distinction doesn’t bear logical scrutiny, but it’s silly to pretend as if it didn’t exist when trying to make a point in a mostly libertarian forum. And I am not at all clear on why having a different theory about the logical status of the categorical proposition in A, when the domain is empty, commits you to any particular claims about the proper functions of government at all. (I happen to think that they have false presuppositions, and like Strawson, I think that sentences with false presuppositions are neither true nor false, but rather failed attempts at asserting. So what now?)

Schreiber: This reasoning is fallacious because there can be no inherent moral rightness or wrongness in some purely instrumental function like government or capitalism (or even a particular government) independent of some goal exterior to it.

“This reasoning is fallacious because there can be no inherent moral rightness or wrongness in some purely instrumental function like slavery (or even a particular slave-pen) independent of some goal exterior to it.”

Please identify the relevant difference, if any, between your argument and mine, and any auxiliary premises that one must accept in order to recognize the difference. (If there isn’t any, do you accept the conclusion that there can be no inherent moral rightness or wrongness in slavery?)

Jonathan, there’s a terrible civil war raging in the Congo, in which as many as 3,000,000 innocent people have been slaughtered in the past 8 years by warring pretenders to State authority, backed by various ethnic factions and by neighboring states. Clearly, even to ardent eminent domain opponents, the stealing of houses by the New London, Connecticut city government, after a long administrative process authorized by state law and municipal ordinance, ranks very, very low on the list of the world’s human rights outrages and grave injustices compared to the Congolese civil war.

Yet I have seen endless posts about Kelo and eminent domain on this blog, and not one mumbling word about the Congolese civil war. Where’s the outrage? Clearly you are just pretending to be libertarians as rationalization for your pathological, manipulative hatred of the New London, Connecticut city government.

Right?

The following statements are counterhistorical outrages.

The Holocaust did not happen to the European Left. At best, they are neutral observers of it, … – Glenn

In fact the first victims of Hitler’s round-ups, summary executions, and concentration camps (beginning with Dachau in 1933) were German leftists, particularly Communists and Social Democrats. The European Left had extensive, first-person, decidedly non-neutral experience of Hitler’s terror and mass murder.

If you mean “the Holocaust” to refer to the specific campaign of terror, slavery, and extermination that he directed against European Jews, then it’s certainly true that non-Jewish European Leftists were not victims of that (by definition). But so what? I rather expect that the Jewish Leftists in Europe weren’t “neutral observers” of that, and the claim that non-Jewish Leftists were “at best, … neutral observers” at the time is demonstrably false.

The reason that Europeans are against the death penalty is that their governments use it to exterminate rival ethnic groups. The reason we Americans support the death penalty is that we have a different and superior history. – Tantor

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of the death penalty in the United States (whether formally approved by a court or executed, with more or less open police complicity, under lynch law), as it applies to Black people in the South and immigrants in the North and West, ought to find this claim laughable, if the facts being blanked out were not so terrible.

N.B.: the fact that whites in America have an ugly history of using the death penalty as a tool of racial terror does not make the use of the death penalty as a tool of ethnic terror in Europe O.K., or any less bad. If you are going to argue from history, however, you do have a responsibility to begin from actual history and not your mythistorical fantasies.

The following statements involve elementary errors of fact.

PS As far as I understand, governors are only supposed to give clemency if they have doubts about the case, i.e. not their opinion re. the death penalty. But why let minor details get in the way of a good antiUS story? – blubi101

This is not true. The Governor of California holds the authority to grant reprieve, pardon, or commutation of sentence, under Article 5 Section 8 of the California Constitution, as a discretionary power that he or she can exercise “on conditions the Governor deems proper.” There is no constitutional or statutory limitation on the reasons that he or she can give for clemency, and they certainly include doubts about the death penalty in general and doubts about the justice of inflicting it in a particular case.

The European left says nothing about the thousands of political prisoners executed in China. Zero, zip, nada. Until they generate at least the same amount of faux moral outrage over the true evil regimes in the world, their phony protests mean nothing to me. – Lou Minatti

Lou Minatti could have disabused himself of this error by doing elementary research on European left groups. For example: “Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison — for the crime of raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson wrote to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on May 28, published Benenson’s article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners [1] that asked readers to write letters showing support for the students. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, writing to defend victims of injustice wherever they might be. By mid-1962, Amnesty had groups working or forming in West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Ceylon, Greece, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaya, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burma, and India. Later in that year, a member of one of these groups, Diana Redhouse, designed Amnesty’s Candle and Barbed-Wire logo.” (Source: WikiPedia: Amnesty International.) By any reasonable standard, the British-founded, London-based Amnesty is an example of the European Left. Amnesty also says a lot about human rights abuses, including the torture and murder of political prisoners, in China. I conclude that Lou Minatti has not done the basic background research needed to make himself less than ignorant about the European left. That only leaves the question of why he insists on talking about it.

The following statements involve grave conceptual confusions.

Whatever else it may be, Williams’ execution is not murder. To call it so is to erase the distinction between killing the innocent and killing the guilty. – Anonymous

2. Legal execution is not murder, which is illegal by definition. Every death is not murder, look it up. – Jabba the Tutt

Legally authorized premeditated killing is often rightly considered murder. For example, the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were acting well within the limits of German law and under direct orders from their government when they rounded up and summarily slaughtered about 1,200,000 Jews in Soviet territory. But so what? That was an act of mass murder, and the law has nothing at all to do with that fact.

You might claim that there are relevant differences between wanton mass slaughter and the execution of convicted criminals after the appeals process has been exhausted and clemency denied, that make the former murder and the latter some other kind of premeditated deliberate killing. That’s fine, but you have to give some argument for that position. Pointing at statute-books and trying to avoid the discussion by way of conceptual gerrymanderings will not do.

If Europe has learned so much from the Holocaust, why did they create new death camps in the Balkans in the 1990s? – Anonymous

“Europe” created new death camps in the Balkans in the 1990s? All of them at once, or one at a time?

If “anti-American” means anything, I’d say it means an inclination to blame America for every world problem, and to vigilantly search for America’s guilt while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies. – Glenn

This is sheer obscurantism. If “anti-American” means anything, it means “against America;” if you want to coin some new term to discuss people who have “an inclination to blame America for every world problem, and to vigilantly search for America’s guilt while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies,” you’re free to do so, but I have no idea why you think that this psychologistic reading has anything to do with the way that the word “anti-American” (as in: anti-Americanism, anti-American sentiment, anti-American activism, anti-American protests, anti-American politics, etc.) has thus far been used in political discussion.

The following statements commit overt logical fallacies.

If the death penalty is so barbaric, why is a significant proportion of Europe’s population in favour of it? – blubi101

This is a fallacy of appeal to the people. The number of Europeans who favor the death penalty has no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not the death penalty is barbaric.

You self-righteous Europeans who have committed horrifying atrocities throughout history, … you self-righteous assh-les are absolutely in NO POSITION to lecture the United States about human rights and imperialism! – Anonymous

This is a textbook case of the argumentum ad hominem. The fact that Europeans have committed atrocities in the past has absolutely no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not charges of imperialism and human rights violations by the United States are or aren’t accurate.

While there is an argument to be made that things like the Holocaust (not to mention the two world wars spawned by European countries in Europe) should no longer be used to suggest that the Europeans have an inherent propensity towards violence and savagery, those historical events certainly cannot be used, as Europeans and their worshipers try to do, to prove the opposite — namely, that Europe is somehow now the central repository for moral wisdom and universal human rights such that they have some unique ability to decree what is and is not just. – Glenn

This is quite likely a strawman. I think the claim involved in these kind of appeals is that they’ve learned from (horrific) historical experience.

Maybe you think they haven’t, or haven’t learned the right lessons, but this rhetorical assault on the supposed claims of superior “moral wisdom” and “some unique ability to decree what is or is not just” doesn’t seem to make any contact at all with a reasonable reading of what real human beings are claiming.

Incidentally, one of the essays to be presented at APA Eastern Division later this month will be an essay on libertarianism and organized labor (specifically endorsing a “thick” libertarianism advocating an appreciation for, and an alliance with, anti-statist traditions in the labor movement). I don’t think that the questions of rights surrounding strikes are specifically addressed in the essay, but it’s no doubt potential fodder for Q&A.

In any case, it seems like there are at least a few background questions that need to be answered before there can be any fruitful effort towards an answer. E.g.,

1. Does a “right to strike” mean (a) the right to coordinate mass work stoppages without retaliation from the State, or (b) the “right” to coordinate mass work stoppages without losing your job? (That’s an important question, since there’s a very plausible libertarian case for (a) but no plausible libertarian case for (b); libertarian theory would indicate (a) by the RIGHT to strike, but a lot of labor relations law leans more towards the latter interpretation.)

Also,

1. Do INDIVIDUAL people have the right to walk off the job?

… which involves several sub-questions…

2a. If you walk off the job, is there a breach of contract involved?

The answer to 2a seems clearly to be false in many workplaces, where employment is explicitly or implicitly at-will, without any specific term on the labor contract. But in cases where there is some contract that has burlier provisions about how long you’re supposed to continue working, there are the further questions:

2b. If there is a breach of contract, can you rightfully be forced to complete the job as you contracted to complete it (i.e., can you be compelled to specific performance)?

2c. If there is a breach of contract, but the answer to (2b) is “No,” can you be forced to pay compensation to your former employer? If so, how much and for what specifically?

My understanding of the current state of contract law on this point is that generally you can’t compel specific performance (so 2b would be answered “No”), although there may be exceptions where failure to do your job may constitute culpable negligence (e.g. airplane pilots can’t walk off the job in the middle of the flight). Also that you can be forced to pay compensation only for any costs incurred in replacing your labor (and of course compelled to return any portion of your money that you received for work that you eventually failed to render).

That understanding may be flawed, or oversimplified; I’m certainly no lawyer. But I’m inclined to think that contract law is mostly in the right here. Compelling specific performance seems to be either slavery or something creepily close to it, and if you have a right to withhold specific performance (provided you return advance payment for withheld work and cover any liabilities incurred in replacing you) it’s no longer clear what sort of damages you would be paying for if you were forced to pay compensation.

I don’t know if that’s your inclination too, but I think that any good discussion of strikes will, anyway, need to sort out the normative questions involved under the heading of (2), i.e., the questions about INDIVIDUAL rights, before any questions about the status of COORDINATED work stoppage by many individuals cooperating with one another, i.e. strikes, can be sorted out. (This on the plausible auxiliary premises that if you have a right to do something individually then you and your allies have the right to do it cooperatively, and that if you don’t have the right to do something individually, you and your allies’ right to do it cooperatively is at best dubious and in need of some special justification.)