Micha:

Constant, there is a double standard, but there is no reason to think that, in order to fix the inconsistency, we should oppose female adults having sex with male teens, rather than not opposing male adults having sex with female teens.

Of course there’s a reason to think that. The reason is that it’s sleazy to fuck 8th graders less than half your age.

It’s also worth noting that age is not the only fact that needs to be considered in this case, anyway. Whatever their ages, it’s also wildly unethical for teachers to have sex with their students—whether or not the students consent.

(N.B.: I’m taking no stand, for the moment at least, on whether either of these should be considered a crime, or merely a vice; I’m just saying that they are wrong. If these reasons are not intuitive enough, I can talk about it some more, but really “Hey, don’t fuck 13 year olds” seems on its face like a pretty reasonable rule for adults to follow.)

Scott:

What the hell are you talking about? Of course the double standard’s acceptable. Men and women are not the same. I read it in a biology book.

I hear that blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people have discernable genetic differences, too. The question is what specific differences you think there are that would justify a double standard on this count.

And Ghertner, when I have kids, you stay the hell away from my daughters.

But you’d be just fine with him fucking your 13 year old sons?

M. Simon:

America didn’t just kill Indians. For the most part we were in a continuous state of war with them. The fact that the Indians liked to kill civilians (which was reciprocated to some extent) ought to enter into the calculation. Treaty breaking and various stupidites were done by both sides.

This is absolute nonsense on several fronts.

“America” was not a “side” in any war; it is a pair of continents. Nor were “Indians” a “side” in any war; the word describes several different independent nations of people spread out across those two continents, who have and had a bewildering variety of cultures, religions, economic systems, languages, technological levels, political constitutions, etc. etc. etc. over the course of tens of thousands of years’ worth of history, including nations that fought with white people and nations that allied with white people and nations that never met white people at all and nations that fought with or allied with each other. Talking about relations between “America” and its relations with “Indians” is precisely as historically enlightening as talking about relations between “Eurasia” and “Europeans.” Which is to say, not at all. If you want to talk about something specific (like the ethnic cleansing-cum-genocide committed against the Cherokee in Georgia, or the wars fought against the Creek or Seminole, or the wars against the Plains Indians in the late 19th century), then we can do so. I think you’ll find that each of these are quite different cases, and that some of them involved atrocities on both sides and others were little more than unilateral slaughter.

But the problem is that not only is this absolute nonsense, but also that the more specific cases you seem to want to refer to are one and all irrelevant to the point. There certainly were some wars with Indian nations in which atrocities were committed against white people by members of those nations. So what? The fact that atrocities are committed by both sides doesn’t make atrocities by either side justifiable. This is part of the ethical point being made throughout this thread: wrong is wrong no matter who, or how many, are doing it.

M. Simon, again:

And yes. Hitler loved cowboys and Indians. He patterned his camps after the camps for Indians.

That’s part of the reason why it’s not an apples-and-oranges comparison.

M. Simon, again:

So perhaps the calculation in WW2 (right or wrong) was to avoid repeating that mistake. We got to dictate the Japanese Constitution and their type of government. Something not possible without complete defeat.

…

The question in 1945 was not was Japan a current threat. It was – will they be one in the future without complete defeat. Once you pay the price for a hot war it is good to finish the job. if you can.

So do you believe that it’s OK to incinerate half a million innocent civilians, in a country that no longer poses any military threat to you, if you can make improvements to their constitution by doing so?

Can’t you think of any way of averting future wars that doesn’t involve the use of terror-bombing to kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants?

Joe Miller to Micha: “Why think that you need to have your consequentialist card revoked? There are good consequentialist reasons for thinking that there ought to be limits to the sorts of actions that are permitted in war. It just requires a move to indirect utilitarianism.”

Joe explains the line of argument further below: “I would argue further that, because exceptions are so rare and because the opportunities for mistakes are so great, that it’s also utility-maximizing to disallow making exceptions. That will mean giving up on some opportunities to maximize utility by breaking rules, but that loss is outweighed by eliminating all of the incorrect rule-violations.”

Well, this is one possible consequentialist ground for placing some means completely off-limits. I’m not sure it’s the most convincing one, though: at best it seems to make a case for a rule of extreme caution, not a rule of absolute prohibition; if it really makes sense to say that utility could ever outweigh the disutility of nuclear massacres, and all actions should be judged by the balance of utility over disutility that they cause, then all these constraints seem to suggest is that you should demand that people very carefully demonstrate the alleged benefits of the nuclear massacre before you let the bombs drop. But that hardly captures the intuition that a lot of people want to capture — that incinerating innocent people is categorically wrong, not just a policy that bears a very high burden of proof. Even if this objection is decisive, though, it doesn’t actually mean the end of the game for consequentialism; it just means the end of the game for utilitarianism. But not all consequentialists are utilitarians; and if you think (as G. E. Moore, for example, did) that consequences like cruelty, enmity, ugliness, etc. are great positive evils in themselves, without any reference to their effects on anyone’s utility or disutility, then you may have pretty strong grounds for condemning certain kinds of atrocities as evils in themselves (because they essentially involve some of these great evils) no matter what further effects they may have on things like pleasure-pain balances.

As I mentioned in the original post, I’m more interested in the meta-ethical issue here than the political one — not because the political one isn’t important, but rather because you need to be clear on what you’re arguing over if the argument is going to make any sense. (So accusations that Jacob was indulging in “moral relativism” are misplaced, because what he was actually arguing was precisely the opposite. The actual disagreement was either (a) over the general ethical principles that he was employing, or (b) his understanding of the specific historical case to which he was applying those principles; pretending as if he were indulging in relativism, and giving up on objective ethical principles entirely, just clouds the issue in a particularly inane way.)

However, a couple of notes.

Faré: “(1) 9/11 was not a military target at all, it had no military purpose whatsoever.”

You may be forgetting that there were actually two different targets attacked on September 11th. One, the World Trade Center, was clearly not a military target. Another, the Pentagon, clearly was a military target. (Also, of course, the attacks killed a few hundred civilians on the hijacked airplanes.) Complaints against the deliberate killing of civilians in the course of striking “non-military” targets apply to the attacks on the World Trade Center, but they don’t apply to “9/11” in general. (Of course, there may be other reasons to condemn the attack on the Pentagon while not condemning the incineration of Hiroshima. But distinctions between “military” and “non-military” targets won’t cut that ice.)

Dave: “I guess what I really object to is the finger pointing school of history where various people glean the record for ‘facts’, usually taken out of context which they then use to mislead the innocent, ignorant and score points in a debate which has nothing to do with the historical subject in question. This usually takes the form of apple and oranges comparisons such as ‘Well, how can you Americans be so indignant about up about the Nazi’s taking over Poland, Ha!, the Americans took over the Indian’s land.’ You can play that game ad nauseaum. On that basis we had no moral right to oppose the Nazi’s.”

I’m not sure at all why comparing Hitler’s war of conquest, and willingness to engage in ethnic cleansing and genocide, to the American government’s repeated wars of conquest, and willingness to engage repeatedly in ethnic cleansing and genocide against several different Indian nations over a period of a century or so, is an “apples and oranges comparison”—particularly when Hitler explicitly cited the treatment of Indians in the American West as a model for his own campaign for Lebensraum. But whether the comparison is a just one or an unjust one, I must say that I’m mystified by the claim that such comparisons issue in the claim that “we had no moral right to oppose the Nazis”. According to whom? All that follows if the American government’s treatment of Cherokees, Creeks, Sioux, Apache, etc. was morally comparable to Hitler’s treatment of Jews, Poles, Czechs, Romani, etc., then you can’t excuse one and condemn the other — they have to either both be condemned or both be excused. It doesn’t follow that the American government (far less individual American citizens) didn’t have the right to condemn the Nazis, nor does it follow that they didn’t have the right to use force to oppose them. It just means that if they are going to condemn them and advocate resistence, then they ought also condemn the American government’s comparable actions, and to endorse the Indians’ right to resist then. Consistency is the key here.

Now you might object they’re not really comparable. Fine, but then you ought to give an argument for why they’re not really comparable. Knocking down a strawman position that allegedly undermines just condemnation of, or forcible resistence to, Nazism, or Islamist terrorism, or whatever it is you happen to be concerned with at the moment, is just a distraction from the real argument.

Tom: “Not all objectives are morally equal. Killing the infidel because he’s an infidel is different than — and inferior to — defeating Japan because it posed a military threat to the U.S.”

(1) Tokyo was firebombed in March, 1945 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in August of the same year. Do you seriously intend to claim that Japan posed a substantial military threat to the United States in March – August 1945? If so, what in the world do you think they were about to do? If not, why do you claim that the “objective” of the bombings was to defeat a military threat to the U.S.?

(2) Micha actually nowhere claimed that all objectives are morally equal. (Even if he did, that would not be moral relativism either; it would be moral nihilism. Relativists don’t claim that no objective is better than any other; what they claim is that the question of whether one objective is morally better than another always has to be answered relative to someone’s frame of reference, and that the correct judgments can differ for different people.) All he claimed is that Truman and bin Laden are in the same moral position as far as means are concerned: if noble ends could justify Truman’s means (whether or not Truman’s ends actually were noble), then noble ends could just as easily justify bin Laden’s means (whether or not bin Laden’s ends actually were noble). And if the ends couldn’t justify bin Laden’s means, then they couldn’t justify Truman’s either. The point of raising this point is that a lot of people think that no possible end, no matter how noble or ignoble, could justify bin Laden’s means. But if they want to say that, they had better be willing to say the same thing about Truman too — and accept the logical consequences that follow.

Brian Doss:

That’s true, there is a form of economic populism that intersects with libertarianism, though Jim is right in that this is not even remotely what Kos & Dean think of economic populism.

Worst yet, though, is that for even those on the left for whom these ideas have traction, the preferred solution (at least initially) in nearly every case is government action.

Point taken, but I’m not sure that you’re actually being entirely fair to the likes of Kos or Dean. It’s true that the understanding of “economic populism” that they have may often involve government action, but it’s not clear to me either that this is always a first resort or that interventionism is more essential to their position than populism is. So there’s a question of how to approach them: you can approach them as primarily interventionists (in which case a belligerent approach, on the grounds that what they’re doing has nothing to do with libertarianism, makes sense) or you can approach them as primarily populists who don’t understand the problems associated with interventionist means (in which case a charitable approach, based on pointing out how radical populism entails libertarianism, makes more sense). I tend toward the latter approach, since (among other things) that’s how I remember becoming convinced of libertarian arguments, and also because I think that philosophically left-liberals’ commitments to populism are usually much deeper than their commitments to government interventionism. (For similar reasons I think trying to approach the Right on similar terms is foolish—it’s a strategy not well justified by its success, and I think there are good reasons to suspect that most Rightist’s commitments to traditional orders of power run much, much deeper than any commitment to small government or free market principles.)

Kos: “The intersection of libertarianism, good government, and economic populism.”

Trent McBride: “I’m afraid the place where libertarianism and economic populism intersects could be termed an empty set.”

Well, if in your mathematical notation “an empty set” includes sets with several elements, I suppose it could be termed that. Otherwise, however, you seem to be overlooking all of the following: (1) opposition to corporate welfare, (2) opposition to the voracious crony capitalist appetites of the military-industrial complex, (3) opposition to agribusiness subsidies, (4) opposition to New London-style pillage for business gain, (5) (possibly, depending on the libertarian’s position) opposition to patent and copyright monopolies, (6) (possibly, depending on whether the libertarian has ever thought seriously about the issue or not) opposition to government-sponsored union-busting (Taft-Hartley, “right-to-work” laws, etc.), (7) (possibly, depending on whether the economic populist has ever thought seriously about the issue or not) opposition to government cartelization of industry through restrictive licensing, etc. etc. etc.

The idea that libertarianism is the economic thought of, by, and for Ebenezeer Scrooge has just got to die. It’s bad enough seeing it come from statists interested in defaming libertarianism; it’s worse when it comes from people purporting to defend it.

If you’re going to complain about something related to libertarian principle, it ought to be the alleged “intersection” of libertarianism and “good government,” since on principled libertarian theory the government which governs best, governs not at all.

Scott:

I don’t think you suggest a persuasive reason why one cannot make purely positive claims about property

Why not? If a statement P just is a normative claim, then doesn’t it follow that you can’t make “purely positive” (i.e., non-normative) claims about whether or not P is true? And isn’t it true the claim “S owns P” just is a claim about the rights that S has toward P (and thus what would constitute legitimate use, legitimate defense, thieving, etc. with regard to P)? And aren’t those normative claims? So doesn’t any theory which says anything about the truth-making conditions for claims of the form “S owns P” a claim that necessarily deals with normative considerations?

I said:

…treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights is not conducive to libertarian politics.

Scott replied:

That may be true, but “treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights” is conducive to acceptable legal argumentation. … The alternative is likely to get the judge to rule against you.

The second sentence only provides support for the first if the criterion of “acceptability” in legal argumentation is the argument’s ability to ensure that violence is not used against you, rather than the logical strength of the argument and the truth of the premises. But why should we accept that? How is that any different from a textbook example of the fallacious argumentum ad baculum?

Brandon:

I’m sympathetic to arguments about courts capriciously (or systematically) ignoring contracts, but this is a problem for everybody, not just for homosexuals.

Well, come on now; this isn’t “a problem for everybody” any more than, say, lynch law in the South was “a problem for everybody” rather than Blacks specifically (there are a few cases of white people being lynched in the 1920s and 1930s). It’s a problem for gay people specifically because partners in gay relationships are particularly vulnerable to having their express agreements arbitrarily disregarded by courts; they’re often treated in ways that straight couples would almost never be treated because they are gay. That there’s an “almost” in front of the “never” doesn’t really affect the point that this is a politicized class structure that needs serious attention.

Brandon:

And as a libertarian, I’m obviously not moved by claims that gay couples can’t force taxpayers, employers, or other private entities to give them various material benefits or “social respect.”

I certainly agree with you here, but oughtn’t we be more concerned about the fact that straight couples today are already forcing taxpayers, employers, and other private entities to give them various material benefits or “social respect”? I mean, why dick around about expansion to gay couples specifically when the issue is that nobody at all should have access to government marriage privileges?

Speaking of which, here’s Micha:

I think people here are focusing on abstract freedom to contract without giving enough attention to the transactions costs of contracts. Even if it were true that gays could get all the various contractual benefits a married couple currently enjoys by using a mishmash of contractual arrangements, it still would be a violation of their freedom to contract since they cannot enter into a boilerplate marriage contract that includes all of these benefits without prohibitive transaction costs.

Come on, Micha, this is frankly silly. If transaction costs were the only issue, it wouldn’t be hard for someone to draw up a fill-in-the-blanks bundle of lifetime-partner contracts and sell it or give it away to anyone who wanted it. But civil marriage is neither a contract nor a bundle of contracts; it’s a change in legal status and it confers a number of privileges and obligations that are not and could not be privately contracted. The issue here isn’t transaction costs; it’s that the State is using coercion to grant special privileges to straight couples through civil marriage. But of course the proper reply to that is not expanding, but rather dismantling, the coercive entitlement.

Micha, replying to Scott:

So you are making a positive and not a normative claim?

Scott:

Yes.

The problem here is that you can’t make purely positive claims about property; to say that A owns P is to make a statement that involves normative claims about A, P, and what A can do with P. (“Owning” a piece of property just means having certain rights with respect to how it is used.)

For example, to say that the State has the right to transfer property rights in all the means of production, by fiat, to the Politburo, is to say that the State can (at will) give itself the right to do whatever it likes with the factories, mills, mines, etc.; that it will be within its rights to “recover” its new property from those holding it, using proportional violence if necessary; that anyone who resists the legally authorized grab by either passive resistance or violence will be trespassing or aggressing against State officials (and can rightly be punished for it); and that any successful effort to keep capital in private hands in spite of State efforts to “recover” it will in fact be organized theft and (since it disrupts the Politburo’s exercise of their newly-minted “property rights”), violent interference with the free market. These are all weighty normative claims that Scott’s theory seems to entail; apparently by State fiat innocents can be transformed into thieves and politically-connected brigands into peaceful property owners. I wonder if “for legal purposes, at least” they can make up into down, too.

If you make claims about how property rights are determined you’re making a normative claim, not a positive one. And treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights is not conducive to libertarian politics.

My preferences come into the picture as the answer to your question: “If so, in what way are you actually opposed to state Communism?” I would prefer a different state of affairs. That would seem to clearly mark me as “opposed to state Communism.”

If you are only going to cite your preferences and not any further fact that gives the reasons for your preferences, then they mark you as “opposed to state Communism” in exactly the same sense in which my loathing for mustard on hot dogs marks me as “opposed to mustard on hot dogs” (and in which the tastes of those who like the foul stuff mark them as “supporting mustard on hot dogs”). But I wasn’t surveying your tastes; I was asking you what, if anything, is wrong with state Communism under the theory that you apparently use to justify intellectual property claims. So far I can’t find any answer.