Comments Elsewhere

Jeremy: Alli, I would simply ask what it is about the State that makes its guarantee so convincing.

I’d answer: sheer mysticism. As Randolph Bourne put it:

“Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. … Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.”

(This may be a more belligerent answer than fits the tone you’re trying to set, but I think it has the recommendation of being true. The question is how best to disabuse people of the lingering mysticism of the State. I think part of the answer has to do with the right sorts of arguments to make and the right sorts of conversations to have, as you’ve discussed here. But I also think that a lot of the answer is as much a matter of aesthetics, imagination, etiquette, and a bunch of other stuff that needs to be addressed through means other than dialectical reasoning.)

LB: Well, I think we are all “trained” by threat of force. That’s how parents raise their children, to a certain degree. Watch how children act when there are no limits and consequences applied in the home. Its nuts.

Besides endorinsg what Jeremy said, I’d also like to add that I’m not at all convinced, at least not by the evidence that I’ve been given so far, that (1) beating children is necessary as a means to establish “limits and consequences,” or (2) that the sorts of “misbehavior” that children often engage in when they aren’t beaten are actually anything worth worrying about in the first place. (A lot of the so-called “problems” only look like problems if you take for granted what you’re trying to prove — e.g. that children need to act deferentially to their parents, need to obey every demand promptly, shouldn’t be assertive about what they want, etc. Generally speaking, people who want to prove a point by referring to the rearing of children need to do a much better job in making explicit just what sort of “problems” they have in mind when they say that rearing children too laxly causes problems.)

Richard: Kripke proposes that we simply stipulate that we’re talking about the possibility in which this very man wins the election, or whatever.

This is a common way of putting Kripke’s view in a nutshell. But I think that his point is actually directed at a more fundamental target than you suggest.

When Kripke talks about stipulating identity across worlds he’s explicitly criticizing the whole Lewisian view on which we are given a set of possible worlds ahead of time, and then strike out to find where a particular object of interest happens to be in them. The idea is not that you have these possible worlds and just stipulate that that man over there is Nixon; it’s that you don’t even have a cognitive grasp on the possible world except by way of starting with considerations about (for example) Nixon and how he might have been. Thus:

“A possible world isn’t a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away. Even if we travel faster than light, we won’t get to it. A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it. What do we mean when we say ‘In some other possible world I would not have given this lecture today?’ We just imagine the situation where I didn’t decide to give this lecture or decided to give it on some other day. Of course, we don’t imagine everything that is true or false, but only those things relevant to my giving the lecture; but, in theory, everything needs to be decided to make a total description of the world. We can’t really imaigne that except in part; that, then, is a ‘possible world’. …. ‘Possible worlds’ are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes.” (44)

“Most important, even when we can replace questions about an object by questions about its parts, we need not do so. We can refer to the object and ask what might have happened to it. So, we do not begin with worlds (which are supposed somehow to be real, and whose qualities, but not whose objects, are perceptible to us), and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects.” (53)

Of course, it’s a separate question whether Kripke is right or wrong about this; but I do think it’s important to keep in mind that he’s just not starting from the same problem that you are. In fact he’s trying to undermine the idea that there is such a problem at all. If you begin with things (Nixon, the die in front of you, etc.), or with stuff (water, gold, etc.), and then spin out possible worlds around them, then a lot of the problems that exercise accounts of transworld identification simply dissolve. (That doesn’t rule out the anti-essentialist view. You might hold that the range of possible worlds you can successfully spin out around the thing you have in mind is context-relative. But the view becomes much less compelling once you’re no longer worried about haecceities or counterpart relations r the like.

You wrote: Furthermore, ‘the morning star’ and ‘der Morgenstern’ are distinct as signs—one is English, the other German—and each will be related to a different Begriff [concept] in the mind of each speaker who uses these terms.

I think that you have confused concepts with ideas here.

What Frege says in Ãœber Sinn und Bedeutung is: “The Bedeutung and sense of a sign are to be distinguished from the associated idea. … The idea is subjective: one man’s idea is not that of another. … This constitutes an essential distinction between the idea and the sign’s sense, which may be the common property of many people, and so is not a part or a mode of the individual mind.” The German word used for “idea” here is not Begriff, but Vorstellung.

Frege makes clear, from the Introduction of the Foundations onward, that ideas must be distinguished sharply from concepts. Not to distinguish them violates the fundamental principle always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Thus: “In compliance with the first principle, I have used the word ‘idea’ [Vorstellung] always in the psychological sense, and have distinguished ideas from concepts [Begriffe] and objects [Gegenständen].” Concepts are logical and objective. The same concept-word in two different people’s mouths will designate the same concept, but will necessarily be associated with numerically different ideas.

In the case of “the morning star” and “der Morgenstern,” there is the further difficulty that “the morning star” and “der Morgenstern” are both (by Frege’s lights) proper names, not concept-words. They have ideas directly associated with them, but not concepts. (They name objects; concepts are the Bedeutungen of concept-words such as “( ) is a horse” or “( ) ist ein Pferd.”)

There may be concepts involved somewhere in the process: for example, concepts might be constitutive parts of their sense. (E.g., “the morning star” may have the sense, “the extension of the concept ‘( ) is a star that appears in the morning in such-and-such a way.’”) But if that’s the story, then “der Morgenstern” and “the morning star” must have identical concepts associated with them in order to have the same sense. (If the sense of each was given in terms of a different concept, then they would have different senses, although they could still have the same Bedeutung.)

Broadly speaking, since for Frege concepts are logical and objective, there is no reason to think that different people couldn’t express the same concept with two different signs. Indeed, I’d wager that he’d think the preservation of the concept is the best way to determine, for example, whether “( ) is a horse” is or is not an adequate translation (for logical purposes) of “( ) ist ein Pferd.”

This may seem nitpicky, but given the extreme importance that Frege puts on his notion of the Begriff, and given how emphatic he is about the distinction between that notion and ideas, and the objective and logical nature of Begriffe in particular, it’s a nit that I think he would rather want picked. (Among other things, the distinction is central to the confusion that he attributes to Benno Kerry in “On Concept and Object.”)

. . . Or are there aspects of a genuinely free market which Carson, Konkin, Rothbard, and other market anarchists would reject as unacceptable – though uncoerced?

Speaking only for myself, provided that “reject as unacceptable” means nothing more than “consider subject to moral criticism and deserving of nonviolent protest,” I’d say sure, of course there may be aspects of a genuinely free market which turn out to be something that libertarians ought to reject as unacceptable. Systematically uncoerced exchange guarantees only that transactions will be free from injustice. But while justice is a virtue, it’s not the only virtue, and if the people in a given culture tend to have despicable values they are willing to pay for (say, white supremacism, or misogyny, or irrationalism) then there will tend to emerge despicable markets that freely serve that demand (say, a market in minstrel-show iconography, or — I think — the modern pornography market, or markets in various sorts of flim-flams such as astrology or spiritualism).

That these transactions would be uncoerced does very little to defend them. It does establish that the nature of the problem has to be identified in terms other than the terms of injustice, and it also establishes that the means of trying to change the situation must not involve the use of force (e.g. boycotts, strikes, moral agitation, etc.). It may be that these sorts of protest are called for simply on their own merits — because besides being a libertarian, you also happen to be an anti-racist or feminist or whatever. But I think that in these specific cases (and in many others) there are also deeper connections between libertarianism and specific cultural and philosophical positions. It’s not that libertarianism entails them (both misogyny and feminism can exist within the boundaries of the non-aggression principle), but rather that there are various sorts of logical and causal connections between the values entailed by the positions, and the grounds for the positions (as I discussed in New York last year).

Does this clarify, or muddify?

FreedomsAdvocate: Right this instant, we have an opportunity to grab a good portion of the small-government portion of the republican party.

Pull the other one. The Libertarian Party’s primary outreach for more than a decade has been directed at “small government conservative” types, particularly through targeting AM talk-radio audiences, readers of right-wing publications, and supporters of right-wing “free market” think tanks. This strategy was especially promoted by Harry Browne and his coterie from the mid-1990s until 2001 (cf. Operation Drumbeat, Project Archimedes, etc.), and continues to influence the LP’s outreach efforts in a lot of ways. Given how gleefully this constituency has alwaysdefected to march in formation with the G.O.P. in every election cycle, I can’t say that this strikes me as a strategy well-justified by its success.

FreedomsAdvocate: I am about a noninterventionist as you can get. But I also realize that sometimes the best defense it a good offense. Sometimes war is necessary to avoid worse possibilities. In WW2 we intervened. Was that wrong?

Yes, it was.

I say this not because I think the world would have been more free or less free as a result of U.S. neutrality (how would I know?) but rather because the U.S. government’s involvement in the war committed it to doing things that were absolutely immoral, including a gargantuan increase in the size and invasiveness of the State domestically, the summary imprisonment of political dissidents, the confinement of innocent Japanese-Americans to internment camps, the creation of a slave army through massive conscription, a policy of total warfare throughout Continental Europe and the Pacific, and terror-bombing using incendiary weapons and, for the first time in history, nuclear weapons.

Look, if you want to argue that war is sometimes necessary or justified, then you should feel free to make that argument. But you can’t sensibly call yourself “about [as] noninterventionist as you can get” while also endorsing the U.S.’s involvement in the biggest and most destructive military intervention in the history of the world. To be “as noninterventionist as you can get” means being an absolute pacifist. I am not an absolute pacifist, but I (and a number of other libertarians) are substantially closer to the position than you are; thus you are substantially more interventionist than we are. You can make whatever arguments you want on behalf of your interventionist position, but it serves no-one to pretend that your position is something other than what it is.

I didn’t mean to sound as if I were coming out in favor of lizard marriage.

The point isn’t that I think the government should recognize lizard marriages (whatever that would mean). It’s that I think it’s a mistake to concede the government any authority over marriage in the first place. If George Bush signed a Presidential decree stating that Citizen Kane is trash and nobody should see it, I would not be outraged by that, either, even though it’s a patently ridiculous claim; I never considered G.W. an authority on film in the first place, and I simply don’t care enough about his opinion to get worked up over it. At the most, it would be an occasion for expressing some contempt about his taste in film.

The people whose opinions about marriage matter are the families (for secular marriage) and the churches (for religious marriage). In either case, the best thing for the government to do is not try to fix up its policy in one direction or the other, but rather simply to butt out and stop acting as if it had any business offering its opinions on what is or isn’t a valid marriage.

War collectivism happens on both ends of the sword.

It’s certainly true that collectivism is often used to make excuses for commandeering people’s lives and property in the name of the war effort. But it’s also certainly true that collectivism is often used to make excuses for burning villages and dropping bombs on innocent people’s heads. Sometimes this is done explicitly as terrorism or collective punishment; sometimes it is done on the idea that the national military or diplomatic aims justify continuing the war by any means necessary, no matter the cost to innocent third parties.

Kennedy’s right that anti-war libertarians don’t put nearly enough stress on the first sort of collectivism. But why in the world shouldn’t one challenge the second sort of collectivism, too?

I’d be outraged if the courts said that two lizards could become married.

I wouldn’t.

What does it matter who (or what) the government says can get married? What makes them an authority whose opinion is worth caring about? Good marriages don’t depend on the government’s consent and bad marriages aren’t made better through the government’s busybodying.

The problem is that marriage is properly (1) a civil ritual and (2) a religious sacrament, and I don’t see why any respect at all — even the minimal respect involved in treating something as a serious matter for outrage — is due to the government’s arbitrary meddling with either.

Brandon:

I don’t have a problem with this. The simple fact that something is publicly owned doesn’t mean it must or should be a free-for-all. Government shouldn’t own parks, but as long as it does it should try regulate their use in ways that maximize public enjoyment.

I suspect that the new law will reduce enjoyment of the parks by the part of the public that happens to be homeless, or involved in charity for the homeless. Or do they not count?

hein:

I think Brandon is right. This is a property rights issue.

No it’s not. The city is not the rightful owner of the land and therefore has no legitimate authority over its use.

Constant:

And public parks are the property of the city.

No they aren’t. Public parks are built and maintained with stolen money, and very often located on stolen land. The parks are no more the property of the city government than a cache of buried treasure is the property of the pirate who stole it.

And sometime in the next week, everyone who is serious about imposing web filtering will add http://libertyfilter.com/* to their list of filters.