Comments Elsewhere

I actually use my blogging software to generate a separate “blog” consisting of my comments on other sites. The main upshot for me is that I can easily pull down a list of the places I’ve commented recently in order to check back in, but I’ve had a few people tell me that they like following it as a sort-of-blog of its own.

I don’t really know what my actual commenting style is. The commenting style I’d like to have would be short remarks that either help to clarify something conceptually, or else point to some relevant piece of information not mentioned. But I don’t feel like I’m very good at doing that right now, and I tend to post long responses that would often be better suited to a post on my own blog. That, or long responses that I spend an hour on and then abandon halfway through without posting, because I realize that I don’t really know where I want to go with all that.

Richard,

Sorry it’s taken me a while to come back to this.

As a side note, the book that the anonymous poster is quoting from is by Leonard Peikoff, not by Ayn Rand. (It’s an attempt at a comprehensive, exegetical presentation of Rand’s philosophical thought.) As far as I know it doesn’t particularly misrepresent Rand’s own view on this point, but the stuff quoted from OPAR should be attributed to Peikoff, not directly to Rand.

Anyway.

I know that you’ve addressed the Nozickian line of argument before. But I don’t think you’ve understood Nozick’s point well enough to mount a successful critique of it. As I tried (probably unclearly) to stress in my comments above, the issue here isn’t that utilitarian calculators think they are pro-individual and Nozickian individualists just ignore it. The issue is that Nozickian individualists have a substantive disagreement with utilitarians over what constitutes respecting an individual person. The disagreement has to do with whether respecting individual people has mainly to do with maximizing pleasure (or happiness or whatever) for her, or whether it has mainly to do with respecting her wishes.

If you’re working on the latter notion, then it makes perfect sense to suggest that there’s a pretty strong link between individualism and a non-instrumentalist account of rights. Violating the rights of one individual person—even if it, in some sense or another, serves some other individual person’s “interests,” will be seen as treating the victim as less than an individual person with a life of her own, as a mere tool or plaything for others’ use. If you think that respecting individuals is mainly about respecting their wishes rather than promoting their interests, then the standard sacrifice cases are pretty easily understood as failures to be appropriately individualistic in your moral deliberations.

Now, whether it’s appropriate to label this particular failure-to-be-appropriately-individualistic as “collectivism” is a separate question. Maybe it’s not; in that case the question is not individualism as against collectivism but rather respect for individual people as against willingness to sacrifice one individual people for one or more other individual people. (I’m tempted to draw the distinction in terms of “individualism” as against “altruism,” but on balance I think that would be an unhappy way of putting it, Ayn Rand’s bluster notwithstanding.)

But I don’t think the book is shut on calling it “collectivism,” either—because I think that the sort of “respect” for individual people that utilitarianism claims to offer is, in an important sense, dehumanizing and anonymizing. Whether I’m right about that would take us pretty far afield from the discussion; but again, I think that at least the position is more sophisticated than you’re giving it credit for.

As for my remarks under (ii), I agree that there is a debate to be had about whether or not a given moral agent ought to incorporate considerations about her own definite individuality as a moral agent into her moral deliberation. But I think you’ve mischaracterized the terrain of the debate, as I remarked above; it’s not that the position I sketched requires you to think only about your own definite individuality when making moral decisions, but rather that utilitarianism systematically rules out thinking about such things at all. And yeah, that does have something to do with individualism as against collectivism. And I think your suggestion that utilitarian calculation subordinates considerations about the moral agent’s definite individuality to generic concerns for “the individual” unintentionally makes my point for me.

Why in God’s named would trained ATF agents fire first? Unless the eblieved they were about to be attacked or shot, it makes no Goddamned sense.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Did you really just suggest that there would be anything unusual about “trained” government officers precipitously opening fire on people who weren’t attacking them? Pull the other one. No, really. Seriously. I mean it….

Please try to be serious.

It’s a good video; and it’s now today’s feature at Dulce Et Decorum Est.

It reminds me of all the members of the know-nothing blowhard brigade who were so outraged by Michael Moore’s use of stock footage — including children flying kites, quiet city scenes, happy people riding a ferris wheel, etc. — in depicting pre-war Baghdad in Fahrenheit 9/11. As far as I know nobody claimed that the footage wasn’t actual footage of Baghdad; apparently the problem with this was that it’s somehow irresponsible to so much as suggest that, even under a truly ghastly tyranny such as Saddam Hussein’s, there might still sometimes be children who are happy, people with ordinary lives to live, and many things of value that could be destroyed by aerial bombardment and urban combat. (Of course it is true that if your awareness of the world only goes back to last Tuesday and got all your information about pre-war Iraq from the film footage in Fahrenheit 9/11, then you’d come away with an awfully distorted picture of what Iraq was like during the reign of Saddam Hussein. But I don’t think that newborns and Kaspar Hauser were Moore’s intended audience….)

“That goes beyond eccentric and I’m aware of no defensive uses to which one can put car bombs.”

That’s easy.

Suppose the aggressor against whom you intend to defend yourself is a large, well-organized gang and tends to segregate itself into distinct residential compounds. Then driving a car bomb into one of their compounds and blowing it up would be an effective way of killing aggressors and destroying their material means of attacking you. That would in fact be a considerably more precise form of defense with less risk of killing innocents than the conventional way of throwing high explosives around, i.e. dropping them on urban centers from airplanes at high altitudes.

Of course, I know nothing in particular about this cult or its intentions, so take this as a purely hypothetical point.

A little bird tells me that Roderick’s discussion with Bidinotto will not be in this book because an expanded version of it is forthcoming in an anthology on the anarchy-minarchy debate from Ashgate Press.

“Saying that one is an anarchist is so alienating to the vast majority of people …”

Oh, but I like the fact that calling yourself an “anarchist” alienates the vast majority of people.

I don’t have anything in particular against the general run of humanity. And I don’t think being off-putting is desirable in itself. But I do have a goal — undermining the material, intellectual, and cultural power of the State — which demands some big changes in the way people look at the world and at their fellow people. I think those goals are better promoting by challenging people’s preconceptions than by pandering to them.

If you’re worried about popular associations, then it seems like you’re being selective in singling out “anarchy” for its “association with mayhem” and “association with various socialist movements”. You (and Bob LeFevre) made up your own meaning for the word “Autarchy,” but it has another established historical usage, which is synonymous with “autocracy,” i.e. direct personal rule in an absolutist tyranny. In economics there is also the doctrine of “autarky,” i.e. radical protectionism. If you’re going to worry about problematic associations, then you can hardly overlook the associations that “autarchy” carries when you make the comparison.

Great. What better way to honor the life and accomplishments of a libertarian intellectual than by picking an arbitrary date for tax-raising, universal-insurance-mandating government windbags to sing his praises and talk about his influence?

Richard,

I don’t think that consequentialists have “a broader conception of their moral mission” than people who urge the objection I suggested in (ii). There’s nothing in such a position that would rule out trying to maximize the net global quantity of some good (pleasure, happiness, virtue, human flourishing, whatever). If you believe that philanthropy is a virtue (as I do) then that’s one of the things that is included in the “personal demands of ethics” that I mentioned. What it does do is subject your philanthropic projects to certain boundary conditions: whatever good you try to effect in the world has to be consistent with, yes, keeping your hands clean, as it were. So the point isn’t that you shouldn’t try to promote everybody’s well-being (however specified); it’s that you have to concern yourself with some other things, too, and so can’t set about doing it by any means necessary.

There’s a bunch of other stuff to say, but I have to run off to work shortly. Hopefully I’ll be able to come back to it later.

Richard,

Different libertarians have different views about utilitarian calculation. Many libertarians, especially those who focus a great deal of attention of economics, are in fact philosophical utilitarians, and make utilitarian arguments for libertarianism. I happen to think that they are wrong about that but they are certainly out there.

Libertarians who are opposed to utilitarian calculation, and who criticize it as “collectivist,” may be criticizing any of several related but distinct things, since “collectivism” is a cluster concept that has several related but distinct applications. Classical utilitarianism is individualist in some senses and collectivist in others.

Speaking for myself, I think there are at least two ways in which classical utilitarianism can be described as objectionably “collectivist.”

(i) The first is indeed related to the standard sacrifice cases that you discuss here. But I think your statement of the case in terms of balancing “interests” obscures the real issue. Libertarians who object to utilitarian calculation aren’t entering the debate over whether or not Bob’s “interests” can ever be jointly outweighed by Alice’s, Ted’s, Norah’s, etc. in moral deliberations. It has to do with whether certain kinds of “interests” can ever outweigh certain other kinds of “interests.” In particular, whether the benefit that Alice, Ted, Norah, etc. can get by forcibly seizing some natural good that rightfully belongs to Bob, can outweigh the violation of Bob’s individual liberty of person and property. (Or, more tendentiously, the violation of Bob’s right to control his own labor and enjoy the fruits of it.) Principled individualist libertarians (1) deny that the one kind of benefit outweighs the other[*], and (2) argue that the the reason has to do with qualitative distinction between the kinds of benefit and harm, not just a quantitative difference in the amount or the reliability or whatever of utility.

[*] I’ve left it open as to whether the first condition is supposed to be a universal statement or a statement of typical conditions, because different libertarians differ on this point, depending on how absolutist they are and on their views on emergency situations.

That’s very far from being a crazy position to take, even for a committed utilitarian. Lots of utilitarians have wanted to make qualitative and not merely quantitative distinctions between different kinds of benefit and harm. As well they should. (Here’s a case: suppose you were deliberating whether to rape a child on live television, and that the broadcast would only be played for convicted pedophiles. Presumably the victim would endure suffering from the rape and the audience would get some small pornographic thrill from watching. If all you can do here is run a simple quantitative comparison of total suffering to total enjoyment, then whether or not you should rape the child becomes a matter of whether or not the audience is large enough that the sum of all the small thrills adds up to more than the total suffering inflicted on the victim. And for any non-zero level of thrill that audience members might get, there must be some hypothetical audience which would be large enough to justify raping the child.) I take it that this sort of worry is why many utilitarians have been inclined towards making at least some qualitative distinctions between different kinds of benefits and harms. Also why many of the attempts that have been made (e.g. weighting the calculation so as to take the distribution and not just the net global total of utility into account) have tended to try to bake in some limitations on how badly any individual person can get treated for the profit of other individual people.

Of course, you might agree with the principle of having some limitations on how individuals can be treated in order to maximize total net utility, but reject the claim that the right limitations to have line up with the limitations suggested by libertarian rights theory. Libertarians will argue that other baselines for treatment of individuals don’t guarantee enough respect for their individuality, or the integrity of each person’s one and only life. That’s a substantive argument to be had elsewhere, but I think that the libertarian position here is certainly intelligible.

(ii) The second doesn’t actually have anything directly to do with sacrifice cases, although I think it explains why many people think that certain sorts of sacrifice cases are morally acceptable, when in fact they are not. To wit, utilitarianism methodologically begins with the idea that the object of ethical deliberation is maximization of global good. I think this is mistaken: the object of ethical deliberation is something much more personal, viz. the best way to live. So my worry here is not whether or not utilitarianism is “collectivist” in its treatment of moral patients, but rather whether or not it is individualist in its treatment of moral agents.

Thus, for example, utilitarians (including both non-libertarians and some utilitarian libertarians) claim that there are cases where you can justifiably coerce Bob in order to stop a greater or a worse degree of coercion against Alice, Ted, Norah, etc. I think this is a fundamental mistake: the first task you should set yourself to is not keeping down the total amount of injustice going around, but rather not being unjust. Swallowing the personal demands of ethics up into some global mission to maximize net good ends up doing violence to the individuality of the moral agent. (As you may have noticed, it’s won’t take a very long segue to get from here to Bernard Williams’s objections against utilitarianism. So how you feel about those may determine how you feel about the concern here. But whether it’s right or it’s wrong, again, I hardly think it’s a stupid or unintelligible position.)