Comments Elsewhere

nobody.really:

But then RadGeek rebuts this argument by conceding that anarchies are not natural. To the contrary, RadGeek states that anarchies require “material and cultural preconditions” — even more elaborate preconditions than are required for existing forms of government.

Neither anarchy nor statism is natural. There is no natural political order, if “natural” means something like what we tend towards apart from or independently of culture; politics is a cultural artefact, and like all artefacts it has material and cultural preconditions. I didn’t say, and don’t think, that the material and cultural preconditions of flourishing anarchy are “even more elaborate” than the material and cultural preconditions of various forms of statism. They’re just different, and not all of them are currently present.

To the contrary, they create institutions specifically dedicated to the proposition that some people both within and beyond their borders will hold values OTHER than liberal democratic values; they call these institutions the “military” and the “police.”

Why do you think that anarchists don’t advocate participating in institutions for co-operative self-defense? They do (even pacifists; they just advocate different means). The only requirement is that those institutions not involve coercive methods and that they not make claims to sovereign authority. Actually existing stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland, Catalunia during the Spanish Civil War, etc.) had armed forces for defense; they just didn’t have standing government armies or police forces.

The problem that anarchists have with the military and the police are their aggressive and repressive functions, not their defensive function.

nobody.really:

I like wealth (among other things). In making my life decisions I considered various alternatives in terms of their likelihood of producing wealth, and I opted to pursue a professional degree.

I understand the concept of trade-offs. What I deny is that virtue is a good of the same sort that wealth or pleasure is (specifically, it’s what some ethicists have called a “side constraint” on the pursuit of goals, not just one goal among many to be pursued). The issue isn’t “going for broke” (which is just one more strategy, often a foolish one, for maximizing a good); it’s that you, personally, have a categorically binding obligation to do the right thing, not just to “maximize” the quantity of doing-the-right-thing going around in society as a whole. It’s about what kind of person you’re going to be, not what “quantities” of virtue you or your neighbors are going to accumulate. The nature of the thing is such that talk about trade-offs (and thus also talk about “going for broke”) does not make sense. Trading off a little bit of ethics now to get a greater quantity of righteousness later (how?), or worse yet more of other goods, is not prudent planning; it’s just moral treason.