Nobody before the 19th century promoted consistent laissez-faire on what we would recognize as either libertarian grounds or formulations.

Really? How’s that?

Everything is a bulwark for the state. People are naturally inclined towards this sort of stuff.

Well, I don’t know what range of things “this sort of stuff” is supposed to encompass. If you’re claiming that people are naturally inclined towards statism, if that were true, it would seem odd that people have been around for about 500,000 years, but have only had states, as far as anyone can discover, for about 13,000 years (and nation-states for only about 400 years). If that’s what people are naturally inclined towards, then the overwhelming majority of human existence has been dominated by the unnatural.

... Dan, Let's say that somebody shows you a Velasquez, and, looking at how carefully he painted his scenes -- the beads of water on jugs, or the glassy-eyed

... He published two full-length books within his lifetime -- the _Tractatus_ and a spelling dictionary, _Word-Book for Public Schools_, that he put together

... O.K., but isn't it belaboring the point at this point in the conversation? It's understood that you think that considering certain sorts of things about,

... 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