Libertarianism, liberalism and conservatism

[bas...@gmail.com]

Suella Braverman gave a polished speech to the National Conservativism conference in the US in which she blamed the recent conservative party loss on the liberals within the party. 

She lists traditional conservative values as the conservatism of Roger Scruton emphasizing Community, Family, Place, attachment, love, preservation of a national culture. The [liberal] Cult of self of self-esteem, of self-realization, of self-absorption is causing our societies to fracture. We [conservatives] must be unashamedly the champions of family,  of Duty,  of love of country,  service to our people.

She says liberalism is self-righteous and intolerant. Liberalism, both economic and social, has led us to a point of societal disintegration. Simple liberal economics where the objective of personal material wealth was elevated Above All Else.  It forgets what Prosperity is really for. The  slavish elevation of wealth as the purpose of life is fruitless and has allowed conservatives to be caricatured as venal selfish and infamously

nasty.

What are libertarians/individualists to make of her opinions? She makes no mention of individual rights, to be left alone by an overweening state, to be free of harm without consent. Her conservatism is all about obligations, duties, service. Do you believe these are all important?

Trevor

[John Pretorius]

I recently read an excellent article by Peter Hitchens entitled "So. Farewell then conservatism The last train of the old life has finally departed":

 https://unherd.com/2024/07/and-so-farewell-conservatism/?=newsroomindexfrmemail

"The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal."

I am not Conservative, but It did have a certain resonance to me, even though I am an ageing hippy libertarian, atheist, detribalised-Afrikaner Anglophile. I think it comes from having grown up in one of the last outposts of the British Empire in a long-forgotten colony called The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. 

John Pretorius

13 Olive Lane, Morningside, Sandton 2196, South Africa

+27 83 231 5025
+27 11 784 5546 

jrp...@gmail.com

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[Sid Nothard]

The philosophy of altruism. Sacrifice yourself for others

 

From: indivi...@googlegroups.com [mailto:indivi...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of bas...@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2024 4:43 PM
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Subject: IM: Libertarianism, liberalism and conservatism

 

Suella Braverman gave a polished speech to the National Conservativism conference in the US in which she blamed the recent conservative party loss on the liberals within the party. 

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[Trevor Watkins]

Although I prefer his late brother Christopher, this is still a great quote from Peter Hitchens. It is probably an accurate definition of Conservatism.  I disagree with most of the ideas of conservatism thus defined. I do not love any god, nor any country. I do love my family, individual freedom, and the rule of law. I am not arrogant enough to think my definition of beauty, or music, or the seasons, or the gleam of polished iron is universal. 

If asked to define what I believe, I would reply with the HarmConsentRule (HCR) - no harm without consent, property rights, trial by jury. 

Trevor Watkins
bas...@gmail.com - 083 44 11 721 - www.individualist.one

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[John Pretorius]

Relevant to this thread, here's a 2019 UnHerd article by Republican VP nominee J.D.Vance entitled An elegy for the American Dream It's time conservatives rejected libertarianism and stood up for what matters:

My book Hillbilly Elegy is really an exploration of the American Dream as it was experienced by me and my family and the broader community in which I lived.

It chronicled a real decline in the American Dream, not because people weren’t consuming as much as they have in the past – if you look at the trend lines, we’re certainly able to buy more stuff today than we ever have been able to. It’s a story about family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector, and all these senses of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it.

When I was growing up, what the American Dream meant to me was that I had a decent enough job to support my family, and I could be a good husband and a good father. That’s what I most wanted out of my life. It wasn’t the American Dream of ‘the striver’. It wasn’t the American Dream, frankly, that I think animates much of Washington DC. I didn’t care if I went to Ivy League law school, I didn’t care if I got a best-selling book, I didn’t care if I had a lot of money. What I wanted was to be able to give my family and my children the things I hadn’t had as a kid.

That was the sense in which the American Dream mattered most to me. Now, that American Dream is undoubtedly in decline, what should a conservative politics do in response? I think a first and preliminary step is that we have to distinguish between conservative politics and libertarian politics.

I don’t mean to criticise libertarianism. I first learned about conservatism as an idea from Friedrich Hayek – The Road to Serfdom is one of the best books that I’ve ever read about conservative thought. But I believe that conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians, and because that’s such a loaded word, and because labels mean different things to different people, I want to define it as precisely as I can.

“The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve?”

What I’m going after is this view that so long as public outcomes and social goods are produced by free individual choices, we shouldn’t be too concerned about what those goods ultimately produce. An example: in Silicon Valley, it is common for neuroscientists to make much more at technology companies like Apple or Facebook, where I think they quite literally are making money addicting our children to devices and applications that warp their brains, than folks who are neuroscientists trying to cure Alzheimer’s. I know a lot of Libertarians who will say ‘Well, that is the consequence of free choices. That is the consequence of people buying and selling labour on an open market, and so long as there isn’t any government coercion in that relationship, we shouldn’t be so concerned about it.’

What I’m arguing is that conservatives should be concerned about it. We should be concerned that our economy is geared more towards the development of applications than curing terrible diseases, and we should care about a whole host of public goods, in addition to that, and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish some of those public goods.

I want to tell a story, one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard since my book came out. A woman I met in southeastern Ohio — which is really ground zero for the opioid problem and so many other social problems that all of us care about in this country — was telling me about a young patient she had who had become addicted to opioids. He was eight years old and he was already addicted to Percocets. The way that this kid became addicted to opioids is that he would do drug runs for his family. Because they didn’t have a lot of money, if he made a successful drug run, they would actually give him a Percocet as a reward. That was how this kid, at the tender age of eight, became addicted to opioids.

I think there’s a tendency in our politics on the right to look at this kid and say ‘You know, it’s a tragedy what’s happened to him, but it’s fundamentally a tragedy that political power can’t touch. Parents need to make better decisions. This child, God willing, needs to make better decision when he grows up.’

I think that ignores the way in which human beings actually live their lives – the cultural, economic, and environmental contexts in which this kid grows up. It ignores the fact that this kid lives in a community that has too few spare dollars to spend and too many spare opioids. That is a political problem. That is something that we decided to do using political power. We allowed commercial actors to sell these drugs in our communities. We allowed our regulatory state to approve these drugs and to do nothing when it was very clear that these substances were starting to affect our communities. That was a political choice and political power can actually fix it.

That kid lives in a community where even if he makes good choices later on in life, he lives in a place where there are virtually no good jobs for a kid of his educational status and his social class. If he wants to earn a decent wage, if he wants to work at a good job, those jobs in his community have largely gone overseas thanks to forces of globalisation that we unleashed because of political choices. We made the choice that we wanted that kid to be able to buy cheaper consumer goods at Walmart instead of having access to a good job. And maybe that was a defensible choice – I don’t think it was– but it was a choice and we have to stop pretending that it wasn’t.

I’ve been blown away by some of the research that I’ve seen in the past year about the way in which pornography warps young adults’ minds, and how they interact with their environment, and how they interact with their own sexuality. We know that young adults are marrying less — they’re having less children. They’re engaging in healthier and productive relationships less and less, and we know that at least one of the causes of this is that we have allowed — under the guise of libertarianism — pornography to seep even into our youngest minds through the channels of the Internet.

Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage and family and happiness. We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice, and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.

And even if this kid marches through an opioid epidemic in an environment and a community where there are very few good jobs, and even if he finds himself in a healthy relationship and wants to do the thing that I most defined as core to my American Dream – start a family and have happy, healthy children – he will confront a society and a culture and a market economy that is more hostile to people having children than maybe at any period in American history.

There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the way that I measure a healthy society, or I think the most important way to measure healthy society, is whether a nation – whether the American nation – is having enough children to replace itself.

Do people look to the future and see a place that’s worth having children? Do they have good enough jobs so that they can make the necessary sacrifices so that one of the parents can be home with that kid most of the time? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a roof over their kid’s head, put food on the table and provide that child with a good education?

By every statistic that we have, what we see is that people are answering ‘No’ to all of those questions. For the first extended period in the history of the American nation, our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us. Now I know some libertarians will say “Well, that choice comes from free individuals. If people are choosing not to have children, if they’re choosing to spend their money on vacations or nicer cars or nicer apartments, then we should be okay with that.”

I think there is a good libertarian sympathetic response to that. We can point out, for example, that areas of the world and areas of the country with fewer children are less dynamic. We can point out that we have a social safety net that’s entirely built on the idea that you will have more workers and more people coming into the system than retire, and to do that, you need to have children being born. But I think to make this about economics is to concede too much of a premise that we don’t want to concede.

When I think about my own life, the thing that has made my life best is the fact that I am the father of a two year-old son. When I think about the demons of my own childhood, and a way that those demons have melted away in the love and laughter of my eldest son; when I see friends of mine who’ve grown up in tough circumstances and who’ve become fathers and have become more connected to their communities, to their families, to their faith, because of the role of their own children, I say we want babies not just because they’re economically useful. We want more babies because children are good.

Libertarians aren’t heartless, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are. I think they also recognise many of the same problems that we recognise. But they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it to solve or even to try to help address some of these problems.

If people are spending too much time addicted to devices that are designed to addict them, we can’t just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something to stop it. If people are killing themselves because they’re being bullied in online chatrooms, we can’t just say parents need to exercise more responsibility. You have to accept that parents live and swim in the same cultural pond as the rest of us.

It is one thing to be a good parent who monitors your kids screen time. It is another thing to tell a kid whose entire environment, whose school friends, whose school bullies, whose teachers, whose work friends all use these technologies and use them in a way that is increasingly causing social problems and say, “we can’t do anything about that other than let our parents be better about screen time.” We live in an environment and in a culture that is shaped by our laws and public policy, and we can’t hide from that fact anymore.

The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish these things?

I serve my child, and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and it will be used to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbours without any consequence, because those people chose to take those drugs.

It is time, as Ronald Reagan once said, for choosing, and I choose my son. I choose the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life for him, and I choose a healthy American nation so necessary to defend and support that civic constitution.

 

This is an edited version of a speech entitled ‘Beyond Libertarianism’, delivered by JD Vance at the National Conservatism: Founding Conference in Washington DC on 16 July

John Pretorius

13 Olive Lane, Morningside, Sandton 2196, South Africa

+27 83 231 5025
+27 11 784 5546 

jrp...@gmail.com

[Gabri Rigotti]

The problem with American libertarianism is that it is a hodge podge mess ... and J D Vance is referencing this mess as being representative of "libertarianism".

There is no disciplined "calculus" upon which arguments can be derived from, everyone there utters NAP (Non Aggression Principle) and if challenged as to when a physical action is self defence or violence they might eventually resort to Ayn Rand's "Nature of Man", the NoM, which is skewed to the projection of the instance of herself as the NoM, to the extent that any manifestation of altruism, according to her, is a "sin".

The NoM should be replaced by a more comprehensive statistically sampled set of ranked (weighed) attributes ... egoism and altruism will manifest as values along a bell shaped random distribution curve with outliers beyond the standard deviation from the mean.

As a hypothesis, the attribute that will probably end up as the tallest bell shape with the 95% of us squeezed in tight around the mean is our desire for individual freedom.

This far more comprehensive set of attributes of human beings should be called the "Nature of Humans", the NoH, to distinguish it from the limited NoM, and also to be gender neutral.

Even the much acclaimed philosopher Robert Nozick failed to arrive at such a calculus in his "State, Anarchy & Utopia".

Whereas a proper calculus underpinning libertarianism would address Vance's concerns about "externalities" or what economists consider to be "market failures".

For example, the NoH will show that for most of us there is a threshold of tolerance of asbestos fibres, probably determined by whatever presence they have had through the period of natural selection that has shaped us.

Unless you are a customer who has signed acceptance of the terms of service for asbestos products, and here Trevor Watkins' HCR (Harm Consent Rule) kicks in, namely the effective yin-yang construct if I may call it that of no harm without consent (NHWC) which is the mirror image of harm with consent (HWC), the asbestos manufacturer that has spewed asbestos fibres into your lungs to a level that crashes through the natural tolerance we have (as we live in a real world the mean and the standard deviation can be the objective values for the tolerance threshold) the manufacturer has not abided by the HCR, and has contravened the NAP.

Thus:

        NAP = HCR + NoH     (previously summed up by Trevor Watkins).

Any "externality" that contravenes this fundamental equation, this calculus, is an infringement of the NAP and the victim needs to be compensated.

With this calculus backdrop, there is no "market failure", only the failure to legally enforce justice for the plight of the victims.

We can propose, thus, that the free market never fails, and an "externality" is merely the failure of the political system within which the free market is operating to enforce the appropriate justice.

American libertarians are no way even remotely close to this thinking, neither are most acclaimed free market economists.

Hence there is a basis for arguing that there is an emerging "South African School" of libertarianism that is breaking fresh ground.

With such a calculus, J D Vance's fears are addressed ...

 

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" It is not the water in the fields that brings true development, rather, it is water in the eyes, or compassion for fellow beings, that brings about real development. "

—Anna Hazare

[bas...@gmail.com]

Libertarianism, liberalism and conservatism

A reply to JD Vance and Suella Braverman 

Trevor Watkins 18/7/2024

Suella Braverman, a UK Conservative politician, recently blamed the recent Tory election catastrophe on the Liberals. In a 2019 UnHerd article JD Vance, the US vice presidential candidate, blames libertarians for the troubles that beset America. Notably, neither apportion any blame to their brand of conservatism.  

JD Vance: “The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve?”

This question goes to the heart of the difference between libertarians and conservatives. “Whom do we serve?” is the plaintive cry of serfs, of slaves, of the defeated. Libertarians ask “What do I choose, to what do I consent, what are my limits?”.  We do not serve, unless we choose to, 

Conservatives value nation, state, community, duty, service, place, culture. 

Libertarians value the individual, consent, free markets, freedom of choice, of speech, of movement. 

Both conservatives and libertarians respect family, the rule of law, love,  motherhood and apple pie.

Our values define us, and our conflicts. If you must serve your community, you may not serve yourself. If duty defines your choice, then you have no choice. If others define your limits, then you are always limited by those others. 

Communists sacrifice everyone to the state. Conservatives sacrifice every one else to the service of the community. Libertarians see no need for sacrifice. 

Conservatives believe that individuals must be constrained by government laws to produce the public goods that they believe are necessary, and to prevent behaviours they dislike. They are willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those public goods, particularly if their tribe happens to wield that power.  They believe in the greater good, that the ends justify the means, that some must die so that others may live.

Vance gives the example of a kid who is addicted to opiods who lives in a poor neighbourhood with a dysfunctional family. He accuses libertarians of not being concerned about the public outcomes so long as social goods are produced by free individual choices. He says we can’t just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something to stop it, by which he means the state, politicians and the bureaucracy. He discounts private initiative and charity (despite private charity exceeding state interventions in the US). He discounts the proven success of free markets in almost every human endeavour in resolving problems. He discounts the mountains of evidence that state interventions are almost always costly and ineffective. He’s a politician, so he must be right.

Conservatives and liberals do not trust individuals to freely choose the best outcomes for themselves. They must be guided by their elders and betters, who just happen to be politicians. 

Will mistakes be made? Sure. Will people die? Probably. Will some people profit disproportionately relative to others? Almost certainly, But as every free market example demonstrates, the result is always better for individuals than any other.

[Trevor Watkins]

I am pleased to report that my article, originally prompted by your post (John Pretorius), was accepted for publication by the Mail&Guardian and can be viewed here - https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2024-07-23-libertarianism-liberalism-and-conservatism-a-response-to-jk-vance-and-suella-braverman/

Trevor Watkins
bas...@gmail.com - 083 44 11 721 - www.individualist.one

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[Gabri Rigotti]

Wow, congratulations Trevor ... 💪😊👍👌

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[ter...@mweb.co.za]

Well done Trevor

 

 

Regards

 

Terry Markman

Consultant

082 411 0911

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[Leon Louw]

Thanks for the summary, Trevor.

 

You conclude with this question:

 

" What are libertarians/individualists to make of her opinions? She makes no mention of individual rights, to be left alone by an overweening state, to be free of harm without consent. Her conservatism is all about obligations, duties, service. Do you believe these are all important?"

 

I didn't have time to listen carefully, but thought that she had mentioned freedom/liberty as conservative values. Not that "conservatives" believe it, such as privatising your mouth -- they want to control what goes into it (eg drugs) and what comes out (eg blasphemy, defamation). 

 

That aside, "obligations, duties, service" (in her sense and I assume yours) are values extraneous to libertarianism. Those values might be dear to you, regardless of whether you're for liberty.

 

Libertarians are for honouring "obligations", "duties", and "service" to the extent an individual presumes them worthy, and for the use of force for compliance where contracted.

 

Does libertarianism allow for animal mutilation/torture/cruelty, demanding a Shylock 'pound of flesh', or the pro-choice killing of a half-born baby? And countless similar tough questions which libertarians tend to evade?

 

Libertarianism does not include how it should be applied, enforced and interpreted. Such questions are jurisprudence, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, criminology etc. That you are for trial-by-jury is, for instance, a personal preference alongside your libertarian consent preference, just as your preference for tonal music isn't inherently libertarian -- albeit that obligatory for Objectivists.

Your opposition to capital punishment (death penalty), which I share (subject to FIFO) is also not inherently libertarian, just as opposition to arrest, fines or imprisonment aren’t.

 

 It would be libertarian were the argument to be (with which I agree) that libertarianism doesn't allow for "crime" of any sort, "victimless" or otherwise. Whether private law could accommodate arrest, forced trial (whether or not by jury), imprisonment or execution, is a jurisprudential (not libertarian) question.

 

I take this opportunity to add a thought about you adding "harm" to the consent axiom.

Why?

 

Is your view that you may do as you wish to Petrus and his property provided he's not harmed? Are you for furtum usus, trespass, or involuntary pro-life surgery, for instance? Are you for courts (in your case juries) deciding whether you are "harmed" by Petrus taking a stone from a remote corner of your farm, fixing your broken window, or parking his car in your driveway whilst you're at LibSem?

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[Trevor Watkins]

In red below

Trevor Watkins
bas...@gmail.com - 083 44 11 721 - www.individualist.one

On Fri, 26 Jul 2024 at 14:48, Leon Louw <leonl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the summary, Trevor.

 

You conclude with this question:

 

" What are libertarians/individualists to make of her opinions? She makes no mention of individual rights, to be left alone by an overweening state, to be free of harm without consent. Her conservatism is all about obligations, duties, service. Do you believe these are all important?"

 

I didn't have time to listen carefully, but thought that she had mentioned freedom/liberty as conservative values. Not that "conservatives" believe it, such as privatising your mouth -- they want to control what goes into it (eg drugs) and what comes out (eg blasphemy, defamation). 

 

That aside, "obligations, duties, service" (in her sense and I assume yours) are values extraneous to libertarianism. Those values might be dear to you, regardless of whether you're for liberty.

 

Libertarians are for honouring "obligations", "duties", and "service" to the extent an individual presumes them worthy, and for the use of force for compliance where contracted.

As an individual I do not feel bound to honour any obligations to which I have not consented (no matter how worthy), even implicit ones like fathering a child or being born in a country. If I do consent, I want to know the precise terms of the obligation, who is imposing it, and who benefits from it. If I do not consent I may be subject to contempt and condemnation, which I would accept as some of the consequences of my decision.

 

Does libertarianism allow for animal mutilation/torture/cruelty, demanding a Shylock 'pound of flesh', or the pro-choice killing of a half-born baby? And countless similar tough questions which libertarians tend to evade? 

I don't evade these questions, but my opinions are not popular. 

I regard animals as property, or unowned. I will start respecting their rights when I get a signed contract from one of them. 

If you are foolish enough to sign a contract specifying a pound of flesh, then I believe you must live with the consequences. If the contract does not include blood you may yet survive. My only exception, universally you may not kill someone who is not an immediate threat to you. 

My position on abortion is that the mother may decide the disposition of the baby while it is attached to her via the umbilical cord. As soon as this is severed, the baby assumes all the rights of an individual. If there is not an easily provable and justiciable point in time when sovereignty occurs, then everything is just opinions.

My position  

Libertarianism does not include how it should be applied, enforced and interpreted. Such questions are jurisprudence, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, criminology etc. That you are for trial-by-jury is, for instance, a personal preference alongside your libertarian consent preference, just as your preference for tonal music isn't inherently libertarian -- albeit that obligatory for Objectivists.

I am replacing libertarianism with individualism as my guiding philosophy, where the principles are a bit more specific (see www.individualist.one). As I have done for years now, I am searching for a very brief set of words (or preferences) with which most freedom loving individuals can agree (and hopefully apply). The HarmConsentRule is my latest iteration, following the libertarian charter, the consent axiom, and the NAP.

Your opposition to capital punishment (death penalty), which I share (subject to FIFO) is also not inherently libertarian, just as opposition to arrest, fines or imprisonment aren’t.

 

 

 It would be libertarian were the argument to be (with which I agree) that libertarianism doesn't allow for "crime" of any sort, "victimless" or otherwise. Whether private law could accommodate arrest, forced trial (whether or not by jury), imprisonment or execution, is a jurisprudential (not libertarian) question.

 

I take this opportunity to add a thought about you adding "harm" to the consent axiom.

Why?

The original consent axiom stated "No action without consent". This was virtually meaningless as there are many actions which do not require consent from anyone. The NAP forbids the use of force. Many acceptable activities allow the use of force, such as contact sports, surgery, masochism, so long as they are consented to. The HCR now states "Render no harm without consent, except in self-defence". 

Gabri Rigotti has suggested a useful corollary to the HCR, namely, Harm with consent.

 

Is your view that you may do as you wish to Petrus and his property provided he's not harmed? Short answer - YES. Are you for furtum usus, trespass, or involuntary pro-life surgery, for instance? Are you for courts (in your case juries) deciding whether you are "harmed" by Petrus taking a stone from a remote corner of your farm, fixing your broken window, or parking his car in your driveway whilst you're at LibSem?

I can think bad thoughts about him, compete with him in business, subvert his opinions, without harming him. If he disagrees, then that goes to a jury. BTW, the Cullinan diamond was a stone removed from a remote corner of a farm.

On Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 4:42 PM bas...@gmail.com <bas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Suella Braverman gave a polished speech to the National Conservativism conference in the US in which she blamed the recent conservative party loss on the liberals within the party. 

She lists traditional conservative values as the conservatism of Roger Scruton emphasizing Community, Family, Place, attachment, love, preservation of a national culture. The [liberal] Cult of self of self-esteem, of self-realization, of self-absorption is causing our societies to fracture. We [conservatives] must be unashamedly the champions of family,  of Duty,  of love of country,  service to our people.

She says liberalism is self-righteous and intolerant. Liberalism, both economic and social, has led us to a point of societal disintegration. Simple liberal economics where the objective of personal material wealth was elevated Above All Else.  It forgets what Prosperity is really for. The  slavish elevation of wealth as the purpose of life is fruitless and has allowed conservatives to be caricatured as venal selfish and infamously

nasty.

What are libertarians/individualists to make of her opinions? She makes no mention of individual rights, to be left alone by an overweening state, to be free of harm without consent. Her conservatism is all about obligations, duties, service. Do you believe these are all important?

Trevor

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[Gary Moore]

Very good, Trevor.

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[Stephen vJ]

Good point Leon. I don't want people to do great and wonderful things to me without my consent either. I would, in many cases, much rather have them do harm to me with my consent than good without my consent. I find it abhorrent for example that I am not allowed to pay for my medical services in Canada and that others insist on paying for it for me. I did not consent to have my healthcare be worthless (or free, as they say - I don't see the difference).

Stephen.

On Jul 26, 2024, at 06:48, Leon Louw <leonl...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Leon Louw]

Original               black

Response           red

Rejoinder           blue

 

Thanks for the summary, Trevor.

 

You conclude with this question:

 

" What are libertarians/individualists to make of her opinions? She makes no mention of individual rights, to be left alone by an overweening state, to be free of harm without consent. Her conservatism is all about obligations, duties, service. Do you believe these are all important?"

 

I didn't have time to listen carefully, but thought that she had mentioned freedom/liberty as conservative values. Not that "conservatives" believe it, such as privatising your mouth -- they want to control what goes into it (eg drugs) and what comes out (eg blasphemy, defamation). 

 

That aside, "obligations, duties, service" (in her sense and I assume yours) are values extraneous to libertarianism. Those values might be dear to you, regardless of whether you're for liberty.

 

Libertarians are for honouring "obligations", "duties", and "service" to the extent an individual presumes them worthy, and for the use of force for compliance where contracted.

 

As an individual I do not feel bound to honour any obligations to which I have not consented (no matter how worthy), even implicit ones like fathering a child or being born in a country. If I do consent, I want to know the precise terms of the obligation, who is imposing it, and who benefits from it. If I do not consent I may be subject to contempt and condemnation, which I would accept as some of the consequences of my decision.

 

Yes, of course.

 

I agree with your elaboration, and mindful of Popperian ambiguity resist the temptation to add more. The essence of libertarianism is that people should not be forced to “honour” feelings, beliefs, values etc – especially not those of others.

 

Does libertarianism allow for animal mutilation/torture/cruelty, demanding a Shylock 'pound of flesh', or the pro-choice killing of a half-born baby? And countless similar tough questions which libertarians tend to evade? 

 

I don't evade these questions, but my opinions are not popular. 

 

Good.

 

One of the reasons libertarians tend to evade such questions is because the conclusions are unpopular. Other reasons include personal discomfort, drawing a line, indecision, fear of retribution, religion, culture, peer pressure, instinct etc.

 

I regard animals as property, or unowned. I will start respecting their rights when I get a signed contract from one of them. 

 

If you are foolish enough to sign a contract specifying a pound of flesh, then I believe you must live with the consequences. If the contract does not include blood you may yet survive. My only exception, universally you may not kill someone who is not an immediate threat to you. 

My position on abortion is that the mother may decide the disposition of the baby while it is attached to her via the umbilical cord. As soon as this is severed, the baby assumes all the rights of an individual. If there is not an easily provable and justiciable point in time when sovereignty occurs, then everything is just opinions.

 

Your positions are, of course, consistent with libertarianism, albeit not libertarianism per se, eg whether all (or some) rights should originate with umbilical severance.

 

Libertarianism does not include how it should be applied, enforced and interpreted. Such questions are jurisprudence, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, criminology etc. That you are for trial-by-jury is, for instance, a personal preference alongside your libertarian consent preference, just as your preference for tonal music isn't inherently libertarian -- albeit that obligatory for Objectivists.

 

I am replacing libertarianism with individualism as my guiding philosophy, where the principles are a bit more specific (see www.individualist.one). As I have done for years now, I am searching for a very brief set of words (or preferences) with which most freedom loving individuals can agree (and hopefully apply). The HarmConsentRule is my latest iteration, following the libertarian charter, the consent axiom, and the NAP.

 

Whilst the libertarian idea could not be more concise (consent), individualism is more complex. We called SA’s first libertarian publication “The Individualist” because we were both libertarians and individualists. We were clear about similarities and distinctions. Our explicit analysis included that collectivists in voluntary communes, farmers in co-ops, or workers in unions might be libertarians without being individualists.

 

There’s a long tradition of libertarian communalism, also called (confusingly) “left-wing libertarianism”. There are Marxist libertarians, eg (per Wiki) “Libertarian Marxism emphasises the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, such as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxism-Leninism.”   

 

There are Christian libertarians who’ve produced pro-liberty Biblical scholarship.

 

That said, like you, I’m an individualist libertarian.

 

Adding the requirement of harm is, of course, a personal value not required by libertarianism. Libertarianism doesn’t subject rights to third party opinions on whether complainants are “harmed”. I’m a libertarian purist on this.

 

Your opposition to capital punishment (death penalty), which I share (subject to FIFO) is also not inherently libertarian, just as opposition to arrest, fines or imprisonment aren’t.

 

It would be libertarian were the argument to be (with which I agree) that libertarianism doesn't allow for "crime" of any sort, "victimless" or otherwise. Whether private law could accommodate arrest, forced trial (whether or not by jury), imprisonment or execution, is a jurisprudential (not libertarian) question.

 

I take this opportunity to add a thought about you adding "harm" to the consent axiom.

 

Why?

 

The original consent axiom stated, "No action without consent".

 

I’m unaware of that formulation of the original axiom. There have been various formulations, the most accurate one being a single word, consent. All formulations could be elaborated at length, starting with my favourite: “Nothing may be done to a person or their property without their consent”.

 

This was virtually meaningless as there are many actions which do not require consent from anyone. The NAP forbids the use of force. Many acceptable activities allow the use of force, such as contact sports, surgery, masochism, so long as they are consented to. The HCR now states "Render no harm without consent, except in self-defence". 

Gabri Rigotti has suggested a useful corollary to the HCR, namely, Harm with consent.

 

One of my examples was furtum usus. Our common law forbids furtum usus regardless of harm which is the libertarian position. Have you argued somewhere why libertarian rights should be diluted by a harm criterion? If so, I haven’t seen it, hence I asked why. Please explain. 

 

Is your view that you may do as you wish to Petrus and his property provided he's not harmed? Short answer - YES. Are you for furtum usus, trespass, or involuntary pro-life surgery, for instance? Are you for courts (in your case juries) deciding whether you are "harmed" by Petrus taking a stone from a remote corner of your farm, fixing your broken window, or parking his car in your driveway whilst you're at LibSem?

 

I can think bad thoughts about him, compete with him in business, subvert his opinions, without harming him. If he disagrees, then that goes to a jury.

 

Liberty permits all of those and much more. Are you for a jury deciding that you may not do any of them if they harm Petrus? Surely not for that would render you against free markets, free thought and free speech.

 

The libertarian (and hence free market) idea is that Woolworths is more than free to harm Checkers, it’s encouraged to do so – as private airlines harmed SAA, MK harmed the ANC, social media harms MSM, and AI harms experts.

 

BTW, the Cullinan diamond was a stone removed from a remote corner of a farm.

 

Not quite, but are you for A’s right to remove it from B’s farm if a jury’s opinion is that B wouldn’t have found it and was therefore not harmed? Or, if the jury arbitrarily felt differently, that it had to be returned? Libertarianism says it’s B’s, regardless of jury sentiment.

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[Leon Louw]

Good thoughts, Stephen.

You raise the specter of do-gooders unleashed to do to you without your consent what Big Brother becrees to be "for your own good", such as mandatory vaxxing.

And the prohibition of your right to be harmed by consent.

. 

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[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

Exactly, and for that reason I see no reason to add harm or anything else to the original consent axiom. Consent seems to stand just fine all by itself, without further elaboration. If we were going to expand on the concept, then I'd like it to be in the area where consent is difficult, questionable or impossible i.e. animals, very young children, mentally limited individuals, people in comas, plants, aliens, octopii, etc... consent is simple enough of a principle, assuming all parties involved are sane, moderately smart, relatively well informed and culturally approximately homogeneous human beings... the trick comes when one or more parties are not that. I think a clear and concise definition of what constitutes a consenting party is the only thing the consent axiom might lack.

S.

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[Leon Louw]

Wow Stephen, the full implications of the harm axiom hadn't occurred to me.

Unless carefully formulated as I'm sure Trevor and Gabri would do, it could negate liberty completely -- to the point where anything may be done to you and your property that others presume beneficial or harmless. 

That's basically what every country has, intricate dirigisme presumed good for all. It's the rationale for drug laws, building codes, curriculum control, drug prohibition, Sunday observance, liquor laws, government monopolies, licensing, forex control, etc etc.

On Sun, Jul 28, 2024 at 1:17 AM Leon Louw <leonl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Good thoughts, Stephen.

You raise the specter of do-gooders unleashed to do to you without your consent what Big Brother becrees to be "for your own good", such as mandatory vaxxing.

And the prohibition of your right to be harmed by consent.

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[Trevor Watkins]

It seems that referring readers to a website  is an almost pointless exercise, so I will bring parts of the website here.

How does the Individualist Manifesto deal with the major issues?

• • Right to life: Respecting my right to life is implicit in respecting me and my independence, and in requesting my consent.

  • Freedom of speech: Words do not physically affect others and so the consent of others is not required before speaking, except in the case of fraud.

  • Harm: For an action resulting in harm against another to require the consent of the other, then that action  must be immediate in time and space, must  have significant consequences for the other, and must have physical reality.

  • Consent: The request for consent and the subsequent action must be within a reasonable time and distance of each other.
    Consent given now does not imply ongoing consent into the future. Consent given in one place does not imply consent in all places. Consent for an action is not required from people far removed from the consequences of that action, in space or time.

  • Fraud: If your fraudulent words or actions may physically affect me then you must request my consent.

  • Freedom of action: You may do anything you choose so long as you cause no physical harm to others without their consent.

  • Use of force: You may only use force against others with their consent, except when they have already used force without consent, like for like.

  • Age of consent: Some individuals, such as very young children or the insane or unconscious, are incapable of informed consent. In that case they are considered as the wards and property of a consenting individual, or unowned.  If ownership is challenged (by anyone), the decision on ownership must be taken by a duly appointed jury. If an individual is considered unowned, by themselves or by anyone else, then they may have to rely on the charity and intervention of their peers.

  • Democracy: Voting is a useful mechanism for determining the opinion of a majority.  However it gives no authority to any group to harm an individual without their consent.

  • The Greater Good: Some actions are considered so overwhelmingly good for  society that their performance overrides any individual objections (for example, vaccination, environmental preservation (eg global warming), terrorist apprehension). This argument is inevitably the top of a slippery slope, on which all manner of further consent violations are justified. This argument should be rejected.

  • Grey areas: Any discussion of human interactions is bound to involve many grey areas. This manifesto suggests that such grey areas will be resolved by a jury of one’s peers.

Trevor Watkins
bas...@gmail.com - 083 44 11 721 - www.individualist.one

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[Stephen vJ]

I previously objected to a jury and it was pointed out to me how a judge is not much better and possibly worse... that does not mean I have been convinced of the jury solution, just that I now also don't like the judge solution. I also previously objected to the property solution, but that was long ago on another thread, so I'll raise it again here.

Imagine a whale in the open ocean. Clearly a sentient being and clearly cannot be owned. Can things be done to him without his consent ? I say no. Can his consent be gotten ? I say maybe... or maybe there is another solution. In any event, good luck getting one of his peers into a courtroom.

Now imagine a bunch of aliens landing on earth. They are slightly more intelligent than us by about as much as we are smarter than pigs. They colonize the Southern part of Africa and declare all creatures in their territory their property. Luckily we taste like Old Spice and Lux, so they just want to keep us as pets... but they also claim ownership of smaller creatures so now every jug of yoghurt and ever loaf of bread is a property dispute. Solve for X.

Stephen.

On Jul 28, 2024, at 03:45, Trevor Watkins <bas...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Leon Louw]

Disclaimer:

 

Before proceeding, it’s too readily presumed that the purpose of these discussions is adversarial, to prove who’s right, rather than what’s right. Or to be the best debater, the best-informed, or the one who has definitive conclusions.

 

I cannot stress sufficiently, Trevor, that I do not raise issues adversarially. Nor do I have answers; I seek them.

 

Having spent 50 years interrogating these issues with some of the world's greatest thinkers directly (Hayek, Buchanan, Rothbard, Sowell, Tullock, Freidman, Williams, Boas, Hospers etc), and having read many volumes, I’ve concluded that simple (more commonly simplistic) final answers are rare, and that rigorous open-minded enquiry is a journey without end. Every road branches into three more. (I forget the famous book in which the author suggested that every answer raises many more questions infinitely; maybe Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

 

I'm in this discourse for a simple selfish reason, to think and learn. The more I learn in such matters, the more I realise who much more there is to learn. The oft-stated paradox is that the more one knows the less one knows. One of the greatest blocks to enlightenment is that people don’t know what they don't know.

 

I would love a workshop of informed, enquiring and dispassionate libertarians, the sole purpose of which is to interrogate every issue, if not every word, mercilessly. How about hosting it, Trevor?

 

Now to your latest email:

 

The most important sentence philosophically might be the last:

 

"Any discussion of human interactions is bound to involve many grey areas."

 

As I read through for a refresher (having done it long ago) "grey areas" arose throughout. This is to be expected since, as Popper noted, language is inherently Imprecise.

Your point is self-referentially true of itself, and especially true of what follows:

"This manifesto suggests that such grey areas will be resolved by a jury of one’s peers."

 

The jury idea is extraordinarily complex and varied in detail application, conceptually and in principle, as are the (de)merits of judges, magistrates, lay magistrates (like juries), arbitrators, mediators, negotiators, councils of elders, and the like.

How many jurors, who appoints, their powers, whose peers, disqualification, sequestering, jury duty, and so on through a missiad of questions.

 

Have you done an in-depth analysis of grey areas regarding juries? And any of the other options? If so, please share.

 

Reading through your Manifesto, adjudicators will be endowed with immense power since so much is subjective, ideological and arbitrary. That might be neither libertarian nor individuaslistic. Do libertarians want others to have so much power over them or, for instance, Stephan, or an accused Nazi paedophile, or alleged debtor, or happenstance trespasser?

 

For there to be liberty, or to get closer to it, there would need to be more certainty, more unambiguously defined rights.

 

Are you sure, for instance, about the only limit on free speech being fraud? If so, by implication, you condemn the FMF’s case against Malema, the EFF and others? Do you subscribe to the Roman Dutch common law definition of fraud, or one of many others, or your own?

 

Jim Harris argued compellingly that fraud should be allowed. Did you consider and simiss his thesis? I argued that it had not been coherently defined in libertarian discourse (with little-known exceptions). Eustace argued compellingly that incitement should be banned (hence the case to muzzle Melema). I take it that you don't agree with libertarians who want such forms of expression as plagiarism, contempt of court, sedition, and defamation banned. Is plotting things, anything, permitted free speech?

 

How about hypnotism? Speech alone can get someone to commit murder without knowing it, and then forget that they did it (as demonstrated by Derren Brown). Ditto inducing any other act by another.

 

How about shouting loudly - very very loudly - into someone's ear? Repeatedly? Or a campaign accusing Stephan of cannibalism? Is it only speech (speaking) that's free? Or all forms of expression (eg print, ads, cartoons, gestures, social media etc)?

 

 

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[Peter Voss]

" I’ve concluded that simple (more commonly simplistic) final answers are rare, and that rigorous open-minded enquiry is a journey without end."

So true - and great examples in text.   I hope that AGI will help us think things through... https://petervoss.substack.com/p/what-is-agi-really-and-how-do-we

Peter Voss | CEO, Chief Scientist | pe...@aigo.ai | 424-335-9579 | www.Aigo.ai 

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[Stephen vJ]

Considering how we share a large percentage of our DNA with all other mammals, a sufficiently objective jury may well find merit in accusing me of cannibalism. Leon's words seem to have compelled me to confess to eating others who are genetically very similar to myself. In fact, I'm about to throw the ribs of one such individual on the grill tonight. I doubt he / she consented. I'm doing it anyway, because that is the nature of things. If anyone sees a contradiction or grey area, we should talk about it... but let's do it after dinner. ;-)

Stephen.

On Jul 28, 2024, at 13:59, Leon Louw <leonl...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Gabri Rigotti]

Firstly, reflecting on it for a while, the difference between abstract mathematics and applied mathematics is that the former is unlimited in its scope, it can ponder whatever it wishes to ponder without consideration of any practical application whatsoever.

The latter however benefits in that ready-made abstract mathematics can then be absorbed to solve real world challenges, that is, the applied mathematician can create solutions for actual application in the real world.

The relationship is synergistic, neither role diminishes the other ...

My reason for writing this is, and it is intended as a compliment to both parties, Stephen can be considered as representing the abstract mathematicians whilst Trevor is representative of the applied mathematicians, hard nosed and pragmatic ...

The main problem with libertarianism is that it is a geometry with axioms that have not yet been sufficiently distilled, and we tend to chase our tails with the NAP (Non Aggression Principle).

The NAP however is a very fundamental milestone, still substantially hazy as it is not firmly bedrocked into axioms that would shine light unambiguously.

The HCR, Harm Consent Rule, which Trevor distilled, can be thought of as a more precise NAP, a yin-yang construct in that the mirror image of No Harm Without Consent is Harm With Consent, NHWC and HWC respectively.

Whatever we conceive of, ultimately, it is just a model, in the same way that the curvature of spacetime is an incredibly useful fantasy that allows us to make the most wonderful advances in technology.

So too the quantum model, and its bizarre Copenhagen interpretation, whilst it advances technology, it is useful and for that alone it is justifiable.

Thinking of the HCR as a more precise version of the NAP and that it is a yin-yang construct or a coin construct with opposite sides of the coin making up the coin or however else we wish to imagine it is really just an "applied mathematics" parallel ... if it is useful in the real world it is useful in the real world.

That said, the harm that Trevor refers to, and generally most libertarians do, and almost all Objectivists, is physical harm.

The physicality of harm is a fundamental real world distinction, so these two clauses below that Trevor extracted from his website help towards that distinction:

• Freedom of speech: Words do not physically affect others and so the consent of others is not required before speaking, except in the case of fraud.

• Harm: For an action resulting in harm against another to require the consent of the other, then that action  must be immediate in time and space, must  have significant consequences for the other, and must have physical reality.

For example, as abhorrent as it is, the psychological bullying that takes place not only on social media but also in classrooms and playing fields where say jocks and the popular girls torment incel nerds can and does sometimes result in the nerd taking an AK47 into a school and massacring everything that moves.

The nerd however remains responsible for the physicality.

However, in a genuine free market, there would be schools that would expel the jocks and popular girls if they bully other learners psychologically.

And name and shame them as far and wide as possible on the evidence of their bullying, so that others, in other free market spaces, can then decide whether or not they want such characters in their employment, as life partners, fathers or mothers of their children, friends, neighbours, gin and tonic clubs, whatever and etcetera.

On the other hand, take asbestos fibres.

The customer of asbestos products signs a term of service (ToS), precisely harm (physical harm) with consent, HWC.

But via natural selection we, as a species, have evolved to be what we are, collectively as an eight billion plus group, and individually in our eight billion plus instances. 

On an evolutionary time scale we are relatively speaking almost unchanged to what we were say ten thousand years ago when we first began to group into the first of the communities that have progressed to be the societies we live in today.

Today we can scientifically sample our natural tolerance to asbestos fibres with very sophisticated techniques and we can determine a real world level of tolerance that is objectively measurable.

We can express it as the mean (average) plus a standard deviation which will include the 95% of us that will develop cancer if we are exposed to higher levels of asbestos.

It is not absurd to use this real world metric, the bell shaped curve, as much of what we do technologically utilises the mean and the standard deviation, be it in engineering through to political polls.

Thus if an asbestos producer is dispersing levels of asbestos fibres into the surrounding air that exceeds this objective threshold, we can, for the sake of living in the real world, consider the health damages to third parties who have not signed the ToS as viable claims.

Most economists, even the pro free market ones, would so far consider this "abuse" an "externality", or a "failure" of the free market.

The failure however is not in the free market but in the society within which the activity is taking place not recognising that the asbestos producer has initiated the use of physical force against others, these others being the non ToS contracted third party others, and at the very least the producer is guilty of involuntary manslaughter as the term still used to describe such taking of life.

Just because you can produce asbestos products, and even if it is "profitable", you have no right relative to this version of libertarianism, to spew these harmful asbestos fibres to such an extent that it will harm others who have not signed your ToS.

We are who we are as a species due to natural selection, six