Comments Elsewhere

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?