So, Randall, do you think that white people who want to take BiDil ought to be stopped or discouraged from doing so by the federal government?

I mean, that’s what “race-specific drug approval” means, y’know.

Rainbough: More dangerous than a speeding tornado… [etc., etc.]

Well, not to come across as the humorless scold, but really what’s happening in Zimbabwe is beginning to sound more and more like an echo of forced de-urbanization. Like. In. Cambodia. I fear that it’s rapidly passing the point at which even the most sardonic humor is appropriate.

Marc: Instead, I say the US needs to become an active exporter of revolution. Bring people from oppressed dictatorships around the world to the US, and train them rigorously in BOTH military skills AND constitutional law, and return them to their homelands – with some free M-16’s as a going away present.

“Exporting” United States Constitutional law in its present form strikes me as about as useful to a freedom-loving insurrection in the Third World as the free M-16s.(1) Especially when the understanding of the law is being doled out by the United States government.

(1) N.B.: mass-produced AK-47s are far better suited to the kind of work that guerrillas have to do and the kind of conditions they have to do it in than finicky, expensive M-16s.

That said, there is nothing that I know of that prevents you, now, from doing this — except, perhaps, the M-16s, which might come under federal arms control laws. You could gather the money, rent some land out in the country, make some contacts with Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean ex-pats over the Internet, and hold a Zimbabwean Freedom Summer Camp every summer. Heck, since you don’t have to count on the good graces of U.S. government functionaries anymore, you could even do something more useful — like giving them a crash course in the works of Lysander Spooner and supplementing militia training with a solid grounding in, say, the history and tactics of nonviolent passive resistance. And then help them gain the organizational skills and resources necessary to create similar camps in safe areas in sub-Saharan Africa (say) to do the same thing.

If you really want to “Help the world by helping people help themselves,” why not start by helping yourself instead of depending on the government to do it for you?

Brad: “I mean really, who writes 40-page monologues into a novel?”

Well, Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to pick a couple of examples off the top of my head.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Rand’s writing but the mere existence of Galt’s Speech is not really one of them.

Congratulations! (That’s also about the third most adorable stock photo I’ve ever seen, by the way.)

As it happens, I’m a third-generation libertarian along my paternal line. That might seem like good anecdotal evidence for the inheritance theory. On the other hand, in the countervailing evidence column, my great-great-grandfather was a slaver. That might fly with the folks at the Von Mises Institute, but it won’t fly with me.

Brandon Berg:

Note in particular that Jim Crow laws were passed because white voters were unhappy that many merchants refused to discriminate against blacks.

Well, no, not quite. Jim Crow laws were passed because white supremacist terrorists systematically stopped Black people from going to the polls to stop them from being passed (or to stop candidates who would pass them from being elected). It’s not an accident that massive disenfranchisement of the Black population was one of the central planks of Jim Crow; there were many communities in the South, prior to the mass migrations of the 1920s, in which Blacks were the numerical majority, and they exercised substantial power in state politics when they had the chance (as they did in the 1860s-1870s, and as they did again in the 1960s-1970s) to vote.

Eric:

I have tried to say that Populism/Democracy leads to less freedom, not more, and you have presented irrelevancies that distract from that core concept rather than address it. The increased freedoms you constantly discuss did not result from Democracy.

Maybe you could explain more clearly what you mean when you distinguish the Republican parts of the American constitution from the Democratic/Populist ones. What makes a particular aspect of the government Republican as opposed to Democratic/Populist?

I ask this because a lot of libertarian discussions that I’ve seen on this topic end up simply defining Republicanism and Democracy in such a way that one’s guaranteed to have better outcomes than the other by linguistic fiat—e.g., by stipulating that part of what it means to be a “Republican” form of government is to have a constitution that effectively limits government power, while giving a definition of “Democracy” in some sort of purely structural terms (e.g.: election of legislators or 50%+1 referenda). Of course if you define one of them by reference to achieving the goal you want to achieve, and define the other only in terms of the means of decision-making, one of them’s going to look like a much stronger candidate for achieving that goal than the other. But it’s unclear what intellectual gains you make with that sort of apples-and-oranges comparison.

Joe Miller:

If you were told that you could have anything that you wanted without working for it, would you really insist that, no, you’d prefer to work for it?

Well, I don’t know; that depends on what the object of desire in question is, doesn’t it? If I could have cookies without working for it, sure, I’d like the free cookies. But it’s not clear that everything worth having in life is worth having without the correlate work. There are lots of places that will offer me a college degree without any work at all; but it’s precisely because they don’t require any work at all that I don’t think a college degree from those places is worth having. More broadly speaking, honors and fame are not worth having if you have not done the work to earn them. You might think they make your life easier, but so what? Who says ease is the only thing to go after in life?

I don’t want to live on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. I’d really insist that I don’t. And I’ll bet you wouldn’t either.

Micha:

I agree that there are no purely rational reasons to not be a prudent predator and lie, steal and cheat when you can get away with it. I don’t believe in cosmic karma.

You seem to be supposing that the only motivations which can count as “purely rational” are those that involve gaining natural goods or avoiding natural evils. I agree that it’s often possible to be a Friedmanian PP without losing any natural goods or gaining any natural evils—hell, just go into politics and you’ll be set for life. But why does it follow from that that there aren’t rational reasons to avoid it? Is not wanting to treat other people like crap irrational?

We are more complicated creaturs than some of the popular accounts of human actions and attitudes seem to take for granted. The fact that an explanation of somebody’s behavior is ennobling is not necessarily a good reason to think that it’s false.

Gary:

You made a definitive statement on the matter. I think you are wrong.

That’s fine. I made a statement which was over-broad or underqualified. Point taken. But I think that you do the same if you mean what you seem to mean when you say:

As I wrote, its a rather subjective judgment as to which is worse.

If you just mean that there are some cases of torture for which it is a matter of subjective judgment whether or not death would be preferable to them, I agree; but if you mean to apply “it’s a rather subjective judgment” to the statement “Being killed is worse than being torture,” that seems to suggest something stronger. If, for example, you mean that it’s a subjective judgment as to death is worse than any given instance of torture, I think that’s got to be false. There are clear cases where death is worse than torture. That’s not to say that torture is OK or even bearable; it is to say that there are at least some cases—indeed, a lot of them—in the face of which people would—indeed, did—do what they could to survive, and they would be quite right to do so.

If you mean something like: it’s a rather subjective judgment whether killing is a worse sort of thing to do to a person than torturing—well, maybe, but what reasons would you give for saying that? If it’s something like, “it’s subjective because there are cases in extremis where it’s not clear that death is worse”, then I’d just say that cases in extremis often don’t prove any point about the comparison of sorts. (I don’t think the badness of killing as a sort of thing to do to a person is determined by the worst conceivable sorts of deaths, either.) I think there are pretty good reasons to hold fast to the intuition that killing is the worst kind of thing you can do to a person—as a claim about the character of sorts, not a universal claim about their instances—even if there are individual instances in which killing Jones may not be as bad as something else you could do to her.

There’s an underlying point to all of this quibbling that applies to the article and the forgoing argument. It’s this: there is a class of punishments—even if it’s debatable just how deep into Hell that class extends—that most people recognize as plainly barbaric, but which they do not consider worse than having your throat cut. These include flogging, rubbing wounds with brine, severe beating, branding with hot irons, chopping off fingers or hands, raping, stabbing with the intent to maim or just to make you hurt like hell, at least some forms of systematic torture, and so on. You might say that there are other forms of systematic torture that are worse than death. Fine; but as long as there’s a number of instances greater than zero that are not as bad as death, that means that doing anything in that class to a prisoner, in the name of achieving a particular purpose, is fair game as long as killing the prisoner in the name of that purpose is also permissible.

Most people aren’t willing to say that those kind of punishments are fair game. So they shouldn’t be willing to say that killing the prisoner for punishment is fair game, either.

Brian:

Whereas Mark Kleiman laid out a pretty good argument why societies & governments ought not condone torture and the intentional infliction of pain and suffering on prisoners.

Are there any reasons Kleiman gives against condoning torture or corporal punishment that are specific to torture or corporal punishment? Any that cut against only those and not also against condoning slaughter?

Gary:

I can think of instances where death would be perferable to torture; where torture would be much worse than merely dying. Of course which is worse is based on some rather subjective decision-making.

Brian:

I can see several instances where being killed is preferable to torture. If my options are: [extreme mutilating torture that leaves you in unbearable pain, or a relatively painless immediate death] … and those are my 2, metaphysically certain options, I choose B. Granted some people may love existence so much that they’d choose A still, but I’d find living after A to be intolerable.

Granted: there may be cases in which one might rationally choose death over extreme ongoing pain. But most forms of torture and almost all forms of isolated mutilation, flogging, beating, etc. are not like this; as horrifying as they would be to go through, most people would nevertheless undergo them rather than being killed in even the most painless fashion. (It’s also interesting that even in the strongest cases, both of you seem inclined to think that it’s a matter open to debate and individual variation whether or not death is preferable to the torture.)

So let’s skip over the borderline cases and talk policy. Here’s one: for some particularly heinous crime X, which is currently a capital offense, everyone convicted of X is (for the sole purpose of punishing her or him) to be flogged and rubbed down the back with brine, then branded with hot irons, then forced to eat his or her own excrement, and then incarcerated in an ordinary prison for the rest of her or his life. Do you think that this policy is morally any less permissible than killing the condemned for X? Why or why not?

Actually, let’s not skip over the borderline cases. Here’s another policy: for some particularly heinous crime X, which is currently a capital offense, everyone convicted of X is (for the sole purpose of punishing her or him with intense bodily pain) to be sentenced to daily torture of the most bizarre and Satanic kinds. However, the condemned is allowed the option of a painless assisted suicid at any point if he or she wants it. Do you think that this policy is morally any less permissible than killing the condemned for X? Why or why not?

Brian:

Additionally, there are plenty of times when it is socially necessary, in terms of cost-benefit, signalling effects, yada yada, where it is useful and beneficial to kill a prisoner

What “signals” are sent by killing a prisoner that could not also be sent by mutilating or torturing him or her? What costs are saved by killing her or him that are not saved by mutilating or torturing her or him? What benefits accrue from killing her or him that do not accrue from mutilating or torturing her or him?

Brian:

If you look at it another way, a death is a one time suffering event; be it long and drawn out or quick and dirty, at the end, the suffering ends (absent a position that there is a soul which continues to suffer from death after removal from a physical body).

With torture, the mental and physical pain of the event stays with the victim for the rest of their life.

So from a utilitarian POV (ala our friend Joe’s position), you could say that you get more negatives from the torture than from death.

Well, appeals to oblivion either don’t cut much ice or else prove far too much. If the only thing you’re willing to count as disutility is present or future sensate pain, then the fact that the prisoner is oblivious would make death come out higher in the calculation than being tortured for the same amount of time. But it would also make death come out higher in the calculation than being bored and mildly uncomfortable for the same amount of time, or any other situation with a net negative utility at all. But that doesn’t show anything about death; all it shows is that you shouldn’t be so radical a hedonist about utility and disutility.

If, on the other hand, you’re willing to count more than just present or future sensate pain as a form of disutility then it’s not clear what a bare appeal to the fact that the dead are (may be?) oblivious doesn’t prove anything in particular. You’ve shown that death doesn’t involve one kind of disutility—present or future sensate pain—but you haven’t shown that it doesn’t involve any kind of evil for the dead. You’ll either have to demonstrate that, or else demonstrate that whatever evils are involved are not cumulatively as bad as the evils involved in being in a particular kind of pain for the same amount of time.

(Note also that if this is the way you’re going to set about doing the calculation, it makes the policy decision of whether or not prisoners should be executed dependent on holding a particular, currently unpopular, eschatological theory. I think the theory you’d have to hold is probably the right one; but that does seem like an awkward position to be stuck in when trying to justify a particular criminal justice policy.)

Brian Doss:

Its an argument against capital punishment iff you assume capital punishment is on the same moral plane as torture & inflicting intentional suffering on prisoners.

Well, but why wouldn’t you say that execution of prisoners is on the same moral pain as torture or other gratuitous hurting of prisoners?

Being killed is worse than being tortured, and it’s far worse than an isolated caning or painful restraint. So what sort of reasons could you give for the permissibility of slaughtering prisoners that wouldn’t provide just as good reasons for the permissibility of mutilating, torturing, or gratuitously hurting them?

Fully addressing the question of thick and thin morality would take a lot more space and time than I’ve got at the moment, of course, so instead I’ll focus on one specific issue and beg off the rest until later: the question of “rationally defensible” and “rationally indefensible” lifestyles:

It is asking far too much of people to demand that their preferences must be ‘rationally justifiable’ in order to count as moral, indeed I don’t think that such a standard can even be coherent. We accept readily enough that when choosing sleeping partners we can be as ‘irrational’ or as ‘bigoted’ as we like in choosing whom to let enter our bodies or whose bodies we choose to enter. By extention I think the same applies to our non-corporeal property. So if someone wishes to open a nightclub for gay men only or a country club for WASP’s only or establish a town only for Welsh speaking Hindus nothing unlibertarian nor, I contend, even immoral is committed thereby.

Well, but there are a lot of things that need to be unpacked here.

Firstly, are we asking whether you’re morally obligated to have a rational justification for forming friendships (or sexual liasons, or …), or whether you’re morally obligated to have a rational justification for treating Smith and Jones differently with respect to X given that Smith is your friend (or lover, or…) and Jones is not? I think the second question is actually the only one I broached, not the first; but I think most of the suspicion towards the notion of “rational justification” in these spheres gets whatever plausibility it has from the first. All I urged above is that “Smith is my friend and Jones isn’t” is a rational justification for treating Smith better than you treat Jones with regard to some things (although not, importantly, with regard to coercive violence), but that “Smith happens to have been born in the same country as I was but Jones wasn’t” is not, and that it’s wrong to treat Jones worse than you treat Smith without any good reason to do so. That leaves open the question of what to say about the grounds you might or might not have for having become Jones’s friend but not Smith’s in the first place. You might say, “look, you said that treating Jones worse than Smith without a rational justification is immoral, so doesn’t that mean you also need to come up with some rational justification for becoming Smith’s friend rather than Jones’s if you want to maintain your position?” Well, only if becoming Smith’s friend but not becoming Jones’s is treating Jones worse than you treat Smith. I don’t think it is, unless you can articulate some way in which becoming Smith’s friend but not Jones’s is in some way (e.g.) unfair to Smith. (Which it might be—if, for example I become Smith’s friend because he flatters me but despise Jones because he honestly criticizes me. But I think that forming friendships like that is pretty clearly ethically objectionable.) The fact that there’s a certain amount of arbitrariness involved in the formation of many of our ties doesn’t entail that by forming those ties we are treating anyone any better or worse than anyone else.

Secondly, what do the notions of “rational justification” and “rationally indefensible” come out to? To be sure, I left that open in giving my own definition—which makes for a pretty thin definition of bigotry, I guess! But it’s important to note that when I described bigotry as “rationally unjustifiable” group-preferences, I was using the terms in such a way as to qualify bigotry as a vice term. (I think it’s part and parcel of how we use the word “bigot” that bigotry is eo ipso a bad thing to practice.) If that’s how it’s being used, then it’s important that you can draw a distinction between conduct that’s merely arbitrary and conduct that’s irrational. Doing A instead of B even though you haven’t got any reason to pick A over B isn’t the same as doing A instead of B when you’ve got a reason not to pick A over B. Merely arbitrary decisions can often be perfectly ethical—it may be that the choice is just not one in which ethics makes a ruling. But actively irrational decisions can’t be; as such they entail overruling ethical constraints. My claim is that bigotry (by definition) involves group preferences that are actively irrational, not just arbitrary. Someone’s merely arbitrary group-preferences may be signs of partisanship, or boosterism; they may even (in some cases) be signs of a silly disposition. But they’re not of themselves signs of bigotry. Bigotry as I defined the term is bad not because it’s arbitrary, but because it hurts people; not because it’s independent of reason but because it’s contrary to it. (This attaches to the question about forming, say, Welsh/Hindu-only towns. The question is, first, whether that exclusiveness is reasoned or arbitrary; and then, second, if it’s arbitrary, whether it’s merely arbitrary, or whether it exists in a social context where it’s actively harmful. In this respect there’s a pretty distinct moral difference between, say, Welsh/Hindu-only towns, on the one hand, and white seperatist institutions on the other: there may be reasons to think that a Welsh/Hindu-only town is silly, but there are also good reasons to think that it’s harmless to non-Welsh/Hindus. But that’s not at all clearly the case with whites-only towns (or, say, whites-only boycott campaigns) in a society with a history of violent, pervasive, and intensely damaging white supremacism.

This is also connected to the question of forming friendships and sexual liasons, incidentally: part of the issue here is the need to distinguish whether “Your decision to X is/is not rationally justifiable” means “Your decision to X has/has not got an articulate rational justification,” or “Your decision to X is rationally corrigible but is/is not undefeated by any other considerations.” Note that I left this entirely open in the definition; the only proviso is that a decision that flunks at least the second test (i.e., a decision that’s rationally corrigible and in fact should be constrained for other reasons) is immoral. Whether the stronger claim that a decision on this or that particular topic that flunks the first test is also therefore vicious.

(You might ask: “Well, what about decisions that the first test flunks, and that the second test can’t be applied to, because they aren’t made on rationally corrigible grounds?” The answer is that nothing that could qualify as a decision is rationally incorrigible. Those would not be decisions at all, but tics or fits.)