... I don't think it's very surprising to find it slap dash -- Wittgenstein never wrote a book on color, after all; he just got interested in Goethe near the

... No doubt. Did someone in this conversation deny that artworks can be judged on non-aesthetic as well as aesthetic grounds, or that it's important to

... Jeff, Well, far be it from me to shy away from endorsing a radical view. But I think that this is a radical view which has some roots in commonsense

... That's a common enough view; it's just one that I reject. ... I think that is definitely not it. A study of human psychology may tell you something about

JOR:

I’m not sure what you mean. If moral realism is false, then all moral beliefs are false

Well, that depends on the meta-ethical claim about the meaning of moral “beliefs” that happens to accompany the anti-realism. A few anti-realists — error theorists, like J.L. Mackie — believe that moral beliefs express claims about a non-existent property, and hence all moral beliefs are false. Most anti-realists, however, have some other theory of how moral expressions are supposed to work which hold that they don’t make any assertions at all, either truly or falsely — among them emotivists, expressionists, prescriptivists, etc. For these folks, “Murder is wrong” doesn’t state a truth, but it doesn’t state a falsehood, either; it’s not a statement, but rather another kind of speech-act, and your propensity to engage in that kind of speech-act is, strictly speaking, something other than a belief with propositional content.

(but not harmful or objectionable, since absent some standard of good, there is no harm or benefit).

That needn’t follow. You could be an antirealist about moral goodness without being an antirealist about all forms of goodness. (Say, prudential goodness I take it that this may be one way to gloss, e.g., Mandeville’s position.) In any case, if one is an antirealist about all forms of goodness, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she is going to withdraw claims about what’s good and what’s not good; it’s just that she has a different theory about what it comes to, logically, when she makes a claim like “The belief in the curse of destruction is harmful.” On a realist theory, “harm” refers to some form of evil (moral, prudential, or otherwise) being inflicted; so the statement simply ascribes the property of producing those evils to the belief. On the kind of theories that typically accompany antirealism, the claim is still going to be made; it’s just going to be held to boil down to something like “Boo! belief in the curse of destruction!”

... Well, "authentic" in what sense? "Authentic" in the sense of historical authenticity? It's true to what one strand of Anarchists (Tucker among them, but

Anonymous: I don't consider them to be an alliance -- or even an *attempted* alliance --

An alliance with whom? It's true that ALL is not an attempted alliance with anarcho-communists; the intent was not to create yet another group aimed at pan-Anarchist alliance. There are already a lot of those. ALL is an alliance of left-wing market anarchists (mutualists, individualists, agorists, et al.) That's not because we hate allying with anarcho-communists; it's because there are other forums and organizations (of which some of us are also members) better suited to that particular purpose.

Anonymous: due to their refusal to embrace anarcho-communists with open arms

I'm not sure what this means. A lot of us are very friendly with and have good working relationships with anarcho-communists (at least, I do). Those working relationships are not generally conducted under the banner of ALL. But so? Do you see a lot of ALLies sitting around complaining that we're not embraced with open arms on NEFAC's website? I figure people have lots of groups and networks they're part of, each of them with different focuses.

Lorraine: Their central premises are the same as those of the libertarian rightists; NAP etc.

I personally happen to believe in a very robust version of the Non-Aggression Principle (roughly, because I think that aggression is a form of hierarchy, and as an Anarchist I reject it absolutely).

But not everyone involved with ALL agrees with that. (William Gillis, for example, is very critical of the NAP, because he's very critical of natural-rights based approaches to ethics in general.) Nor, for that matter, do all libertarian rightists. (The right-wing Rothbardians and the Randians believe in it; a lot of other factions don't believe in it, and prefer other -- e.g. Hayekian, or utilitarian, or... -- approaches.)

TokyoTom,

I didn’t miss it. I’m familiar with that line of argument for condemning the corporate form per se. I agree with you that government-granted limited liability is a form of illegitimate privilege. I don’t know whether or not that’s enough to indict the corporate form per se as a creature of state privilege — that probably depends, in part, on which features of a business you take to be essential to making up “the corporate form.”

But my point above was simply that one sort of argument against the corporate form will not do — that the existence of “government-supported monopoly corporations or government-created captive markets for large corporations” does not, just by itself, demonstrate that the corporate form itself is illegitimate or that it would be unsustainable in a freed society. (The reason I pointed out that this sort of argument will not do is in order to illustrate, by means of analogy, what’s wrong with a parallel argument sometimes made against the legitimacy of workers’ unions.) Anyway, maybe the corporate form is illegitimate per se, or maybe it will be per se unsustainable in a freed society, but if so I think you need to give another kind of argument (like the argument you’ve alluded to, against government-imposed limited liability) in order to demonstrate that.

... I agree with you that Tucker's later rejection of natural rights was a mistake. In this I follow Spooner and the other natural lawyers in the Liberty

... Maybe not, but my position is certainly not that every possible normative aspect of the work is relevant to aesthetic evaluation. A book may be useful as a