Holmes:

I think that your central argument — that consent to sex entails accepting responsibility for bearing any child that results — is dead wrong, but I’d rather give my explanation why a post to itself. For now, a couple questions about the view expressed later in your post:

1. If you believe this, then why did you bother to argue in the first place that consenting to sex entails accepting responsibility for bearing any children that result? Since you go on to argue that abortion is still illegitimate even for pregnancies that resulted from rape, you apparently think that consent is irrelevant, and that women bear responsibility for bearing children whether they accepted that responsibility or not. If the lack of consent to sex is irrelevant to a woman’s duties toward a fetus resulting from rape, then I don’t see how the presence of consent to sex becomes relevant to a woman’s duties towards a fetus resulting from consensual sex.

2. Since you apparently do think that consent to sex is irrelevant, and that the needs for a fetus’s life outweigh the unwilling mother’s claims to her own bodily organs, in what sense is Thomson’s Famous Violist case a bad analogy for you? Doesn’t the position you defend in the second part of your post commit you to saying that the cases are analogous, and simply drawing the opposite conclusion from Thomson?

After all, you can’t point to the fact that you didn’t volunteer your bodily organs for the use of the Famous Violinist as a point of disanalogy. You’ve explicitly denied that a fetus’s claim on its mother’s internal organs depends on her having consented. So it looks like the conclusion you ought to draw is that the cases are analogous in all the morally relevant respects, the Famous Violinist has a right to keep on using your body against your will, and if you disconnect her, that’s a form of criminal homicide.

If you’re willing to draw that conclusion, then your position is at least internally consistent. God only knows how you intend to reconcile it with anything recognizable as a libertarian theory of rights to person and property, though.

Stuart,

This story is actually about a year old. For reasons that I’m not clear on, editorandpublisher.com reprinted a verbatim copy of the story on Judge Hellerstein’s ruling back on September 29, 2005. The government’s appeal stalled the eventual release of the new material but some of the newly released photos and videos were included in this Australian news report from February 2006.

The Libertarian Guy,

Why do you think it is important for people talking about this man-eating monstrosity to do so calmly? The circumstances do not call for calmness. Activists are “unhinged” about it because it’s really fucking awful, and it’s getting worse every day.

(Before you waste your time repeating it, yeah, I know that all wars everywhere are like this, or worse. That’s an argument for being stridently opposed to all wars, not an argument for moderating your tone about this one.)

Me: “So in the meantime, you suggest dissembling my views in the name of political expediency?”

Nick: “No, I’m suggesting that you realize turning roads into toll roads and legalizing heroin are not accomplishable political goals at this moment in time. I support some pretty radical ideas too, including one of the two you mentioned, but you won’t hear me start to talk about them until we actually have the average voter’s attention and trust. Let’s first show them that legalizing marijuana won’t cause the social structure of America to collapse.”

But Nick, how is what you’re suggesting here different from the way I characterized it? You’re recommending that libertarian candidates conceal their real views from voters in order to curry political favor. Isn’t that dissembling?

Nick,

Here’s a hypothetical. Suppose I believe that all drug laws should be completely repealed (so I believe in legalizing heroin), but I want to run a Sensible Moderate campaign so I’ve focused on legalizing marijuana and I haven’t said one mumbling word about repealing all drug laws or legalizing “hard drugs” in particular.

It’s not crazy to think that my opponent, or perhaps some other concerned citizen, won’t be too dense to put two and two together. One thing that often happens in controversial campaigns is that the advocate gets asked to clarify just how far she’d go. So suppose that at the debate my opponent asks me point-blank whether I’m for legalize heroin, too.

Now I see only three options for my answer. I could:

1. Admit that I do support legalizing heroin, thus committing “political suicide” and abandoning my Sensible Moderate approach;
2. Lie about my views to avoid 1; or
3. Evade the question or obfuscate the issue to avoid both 1 and 2.

What do you suggest I do?

Nick Wilson: Good for you, but it’s impossible to ignore that advocating it as official party policy in the realities of the current environment is political suicide. When you can get a plurality of people to at least consider the idea, then go for it.

So in the meantime, you suggest dissembling my views in the name of political expediency?

Right now, lets focus on the fights we even have a somewhat remote chance of winning on: ….

I don’t think that single-minded focus on “winnable” goals is always the wisest strategy for social change, but anyway you’re changing the subject here. It may be perfectly sensible to pick carefully the battles that I invest time and resources in. But I object to concealing or misrepresenting my views on the “unwinnable” issues I’m not pushing on right now, to pander to the majority’s prejudices. That’s different, and dishonest.

“I think Nick is saying that media and opponents can no longer play the “libertarians want to legalize heroin and turn all roads into toll roads” card, ’cause a lot of that stuff has been removed from the national platform.”

But I DO want to legalize heroin and turn all roads into toll roads….

http://dulceetdecorumest.org/

“The purpose of this weblog is to abolish war, immediately, completely, and forever.

“That’s a tall order for a website, particularly a small website run by somebody with little money and no influence in the halls of government. But my aim is not to make a change in the halls of government by exercising political influence or force; it is to make a change in the culture by undermining the moral legitimacy that the self-appointed heroes of the War Party claim for themselves. My aims are not constructive, but rather destructive: I hope to do my part towards knocking out the cultural supports that prop up the War Party with the whole force and ideological backing of the State. My end is schism and discord: that is, to agitate against, and encourage people to turn against, any civil, religious, or political institution that tolerate, sustain, or practice wholesale slaughter. The War Party is sustained largely because of a vast array of parades, pageants, celebrations, memorials, re-enactments, pop histories, and holidays, all devoted to inculcating the myth that warfare is something glorious, that the warlords are great leaders of heroic efforts, and that the engines of war are worth exulting over and regarding with awe, rather than horror. Many people accept that myth, and many more are bullied into playing along with it, because they are insulated from the reality of war, and because serious and thoroughgoing anti-war sentiment doesn’t have enough of a cultural presence to overcome the official ideology of the Warfare State. I hope to undermine that; I want people to look on the carrion fields with loathing, and to turn that loathing against everything that produced them. …

“… The means my ends will be anti-war cultural artefacts, both historical and contemporary. I don’t just mean agitprop by anti-war activists; I also mean artefacts that record the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians in times of war. This is not the place to go for commentary, analysis, or debate on current events; more or less none of the content will even be original to this website. It will be a place for facts, and for things, and for people. My intent is simply to remember our history (including the history we are making right now), and in so doing to strip the mask from off the War Party, revealing not glory, not honor, not heroism, but rather a grinning Death’s Head underneath.”

Anyonmous2: For this to work, the landlocker’s efforts to defend his concrete barrier/hotel chain/whatever must exceed in severity my violation of his barrier/hotel/whatever. Yet if he were to enter my home by tearing down one of my walls I could order him off at gunpoint, and you wouldn’t consider this to be a “disproportionate” response, correct? If my response defending my house is acceptable, then logically his response defending his hotel/barrier should be acceptable too.

I’m not sure that proportionality is actually the best general solution to right-of-way / landlocking problems (since it seems to me that that leaves the enforcement of right-of-way as an injustice against the landlocker—just an injustice that she cannot justifiably retaliate against). But I don’t think your argument here actually cuts any ice against Roderick’s position. The way that Roderick spells out the principle of proportionality has to do with the “moral seriousness” of the force being used, which is not merely a function of the intensity or “severity” of the physical force being employed on each side. (That’s a very important factor, but it’s only one factor among many.)

So there may be cases where Jones’s use of force is disproportionate but Smith’s use of force, even though the same degree and kind of physical force is being employed on both sides of the conflict. This can happen whenever there is some contextual factor that makes Jones’s use of force more “morally serious” than Smith’s.

Like the difference between (1) shooting someone who is only trying to gain right of way off her landlocked property in order to buy groceries, as vs. (2) shooting someone who is holding your property in a state of siege and has now started tearing down your walls for no apparent purpose other than invading your home. Just to take an example.

Albert: The difference, I think, is that rights don’t incorporate the subjetive ends of someone in particular but permit the peacefully realization of all of them.

But clearly it does not permit the peaceful realization of any and every end. Some ends include aggression as a consitutive part — e.g. the ends adopted by fascists (who view war as part of a healthy national life) or by the “positive good” faction of slavery apologists in the Southern United States (who viewed the enslavement of “inferior” races by “superior” races as a good in itself). These ends cannot consistently be combined with the nonaggression principle because the end itself is aggressive.

So to be accurate, you’d have to say something more like this: “Rights don’t incorporate the non-aggressive subjective ends of someone in particular, but permit the peaceful realization of all of those that are non-aggressive.” But since “non-aggressive” is just a synonym here for “non-rights-violating,” that is equivalent to saying “Rights … permit the peaceful realization of all the ends that don’t violate rights.” That’s certainly true (analytically true, even), but I don’t see how it proves anything at all about the status of respecting rights vis-a-vis other moral commitments. You could just as easily say that “egoism permits the selfish realization of all the ends that don’t conflict with my own self-interest,” or “Feminism permits the antisexist realization of all the ends that don’t oppress women.” Any given moral commitment is going to rule on the issues that it takes an interest in, and leave the rest of the field open for other commitments to decide.

Albert: I think it’s the other way around. By caring too much for the non-agressive values of people qua libertarian you are endangering your own libertarian positions. People with these non-agressive values (but nonetheless oppressive) will feel threatened not by your particular values / personal views but by your very own political philosophy. They will think that a libertarian order will be a menace to their non-agressive conducts, and actually it’s not. You are saying to them “libertarians, qua libertarians, will fight against your personal non-agressive values, but you are welcomed in a libertarian order”. It doesn’t make much sense to me.

But I don’t want slimy male supremacist types (or racist creeps, or blowhard know-it-all bosses, or whatever) to feel welcomed in a libertarian order. I think they are at best obnoxious deadweight and at worst an active menace to the prospects for liberty. And I think that they should feel threatened by consistent libertarianism: there is good reason to think that a free society would dramatically undermine their ability to go on oppressing and exploiting their victims.

I’m an anarchist, so I do not advocate using force against anyone — even real creeps — who conscientiously abstains from initiating force against others. But there’s no reason why I should have to co-operate with, or evangelize to, or cater to the sensitivies of, or moderate my tone towards, people whose values I find not only morally repugnant, but also specifically a menace to the real-world application or implementation of libertarian principles. I don’t want to be part of a movement that they are part of and I don’t want to live in a community where they feel welcome. (Besides which I think that any movement in which they are happily accepted is unlikely to make any concrete, long-term progress towards freedom.)

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you here, but you seem to be suggesting that it is pragmatically important for libertarians to portray libertarianism as a very big tent, and that failing to welcome anyone who meets the minimal criteria for counting as a libertarian is in some sense a strategic mistake. But I don’t see how this is true. Numbers don’t always determine political victories; political strategy is not just a matter of getting as many people to rally to your standard as you possibly can. If I’m misunderstanding your point, I hope you’ll correct me. If I’m understanding you rightly, it might help if you could explain more specifically you think that alienating (say) nonviolent white supremacists or peaceful patriarchs is harmful to libertarian prospects.

Albert: I think it’s better to fight against these oppresive values simply as moral agents and decent human beigns, not as libertarians. Furthermore, if you as a libertarian promote not only the NAP but also other kind of values, other libertarians with different values will be tempted to promote, qua libertarians, his own values, and the distintion between rights and value will be blurred.

But “I will not tolerate white supremacy, even where nonviolently imposed, and I will actively organize and agitate against it” is a very different claim from “I am going to start shooting people involved in imposing white supremacy, even if they do so nonviolently” are two obviously different claims, which can be clearly distinguished. And if I make the distinction clearly (which, as a libertarian, I take pains to do), then I don’t see how it would my fault if other people then blurred the distinction that I made. Of course any position can be confused or misrepresented, either by people who think that they agree with it or by people who think that they suppose it. But as long as the position can be and has been made clear by the people advocating it, the responsibility for misunderstanding it lies on those who have misunderstood.

Tim: So being unsatisfied with the roundabout nature of the free market argument for competitive antidiscrimination, my aggrieved friends will probably start agitating for direct action, ie for state intervention or personal or group intimidation (if arguably only counter-intimidation), which brings us back full circle to Rothbards argument too.

Just so we’re clear, “direct action” tactics may be either coercive or noncoercive, but they never involve state intervention. Direct action is defined partly by contrast with efforts to make political changes through electioneering or lobbying government officials. The idea here is that the people who want to make the change take actions that directly contribute to bringing it about, instead of trying to influence and enlist the government or other third parties to do it for them.

N.B.: The people who talk a lot about “direct action” today very often endorse coercive forms of direct action (e.g. doing damage to corporations they don’t like by trashing their storefronts). But that’s not because direct action is inherently coercive; it’s because adopting direct action requires you to get out from under certain myths that the mystique of the State promotes (having to do with Law and Order, the necessity of Working Within the System, etc.), and most people who have managed to divorce themselves from those myths aren’t principled libertarians, and have fallen into the opposite error of romanticizing rebellion as such. There are lots of forms of direct action — involving social ostracism, boycotts, pickets, strikes, building counter-institutions, etc. — that have nothing to do with destroying property or assaulting people, and I for one think that libertarians would benefit from spending less time on vain efforts to lobby and evangelize to the established power elite, and more time examining the history of direct action tactics and promoting their future use as a means to liberty.

You wouldn’t need to replace the entire operating budget for the school in order to convert it to a private University; you’d just need to replace the portion of revnue that comes from the government. According to the figures on p. 9, that’s $110,000,000/year, including both the money directly appropriated by Congress and money from government grants and contracts. There’s no reason why the hypothetical new private donors would have to replace the money that already comes in from student tuition, existing donations, investment income, book sales, etc. etc. etc. Still a lot of money, of course, but you can nudge the per-capita figures downward accordingly.

Ron,

I think the “Jesse Jackson of dinosaurs” thing was a hamhanded attempt at making a little funny about the shifts in acceptable language for describing American black people (“colored,” “Negro,” “Afro-American,” “African-American,” etc.). For some reason this seems to be an endless fount of humor for certain white folks. And Steve Sailer was born with a rare genetic disorder that makes it impossible for him to discuss anything having to do with anti-discrimination activism without throwing out Jesse Jackson’s name, higgeldy-piggeldy, regardless of whether or not Jesse Jackson had much of anything personally to do with the issue he’s talking about, or whether he had even been born when some of the events took place.