“Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources they’re going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems. And, by the way, if they come up with a better solution but it can’t be cheaper – which, in the beginning, most things aren’t – nobody says you have to buy it. If you think this new drug is too expensive, it’s not a good deal, we have a crisis, buy the old one. It’s a generic now. It’s cheap. You can’t look at the problem and say, “I want them to do more, better, faster miracles – and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.” It’s unrealistic. And people know that about most things. They do. Nobody expects that just because they’ve made computers better they’re going to give them to you free.”
– Dean Kamen, warning about how US medicine will be demaged by socialistic “reforms” by Mr Obama. Mind you, I get the distinct impression that health care could turn out to be one of the biggest problems for The Chicago Community Organiser, who seems to be losing a lot of his post-election goodwill. And not before time.
It’s hard to know which comes first, the collectivist mindset which looks for services which must be free, or a primordial valuation of a service that it is so basic that it then drives the logic it should be free.
Whichever, it is now long held that medical care is like air and water – so basic that it is a Right. The job of any anti-statist should be to delineate the not so subtle difference between a basic natural resource like air or water (i.e. something without which any at all will end your life in fairly short order) and something that springs from the mental and physical labor of other individuals. Perhaps if we were able to throw the argument so far down the list such as food – is it a Right or something that requires labor to vest a Right into? If nothing else it will illustrate just labor based the service of medical care is versus a naturally existing Right.
Of course statist functions blur such arguments when it seeds medical research with collective funds. It is the insidiousness of statism that a little gets you more and more. To my mind this is precisely why a hardline needs to be maintained against all collectivist spending, even for something seen as relatively neutral such as space exploration. All of the advanced knowledge which springs from such research has the pre-existing nature of the collective about it.
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Regarding Obama, it is inspiring that his popularity is waning a bit, but it is still alarming just how much our election process has turned into a media stimulated popularity contest. Ever since Clinton wheezed into that saxophone its been about appealing to the American Idol caste in our society. It is sad that judicious people of principle don’t stand a chance. It doesn’t do much good to discover the threadbare nature of leaders once they have assumed power.
Why is medical care not treated like food? Food is not a right. Sure, somebody will feed you if you’re starving out of charity but nobody forces farmers to plant fields and work for government collective to get it done. The analogy of medical care to food is much closer than to air. The vast majority of the time, you can put it off a day or two. In the very small range of circumstances when you cannot, we already have emergency treatment laws that ensure you don’t die in the streets anywhere in the 1st world (including the US).
First I’ll make a comment about creative types. They can’t be kept down no matter how hard the envy driven non-creative control freaks try.
Second Obama’s electoral majority reminds me very much of when the Parti Quebecois – separatists – had their first win in Quebec with the strong support of the Anglo community.
The Anglo support was of the feel good I’m not a bigot I support franco aspirations type. Not too long after when Bill 101 was passed into law banning the display of the English language in all public venues did it dawn on the sheepish Anglo feel goodies what was really going on. They were being cast as the Jews were in Hitler’s Germany, the source of all Quebec’s evils.
The Anglo exodus followed with Highway 401 to Ontario being renamed in Anglo humour circles Highway 101.
We need to keep it simple — almost slogan level. A long-winded explanation of rights & their implications will be lost in the left-wing gale.
What has been forgotten over recent years is that there are responsibilities as well as rights. One person’s right is another person’s responsibility.
What rights? There are no rights, only wants.
Because you’re never going to be faced with unexpected food expenses in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, without which you’ll die.
I’m not arguing for state-run health care, or any other policy. But, in the interest of not straw-manning, I believe this is the strongest argument of the pro-state-health-care advocates and needs to be part of the debate.
Millie, creative types may not be stopped by “control freaks”, but they do require resources with which to work. It is generally capitalists which provide those resources, and they can be deterred by high taxes, oppressive regulations, or the fear of nationalization (i.e., theft by the government or its proxies).
Tedd, what you’re talking about is catastrophic events, for which insurance is ideally suited. However, routine medical care is analogous to food. Furthermore, absent the stifling effects of governmental involvement and the ever-present risk of meritless lawsuits (itself an artifact of government) its cost would be just as low.
Tedd is right, the catastrophe argument is the one most often deployed by the people whom I discuss health policy with; it is usually seen by them as a decisive argument in favour of state provided health care.
It is almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about health care in the UK. The NHS has replace the Church of England as the state religion and to argue in favour of more private health care is to argue against Britain; if you even suggest the possibility people stop listening to you.
Has anyone noticed in the extensive use of anecdotal evidence of individual cases to advance collectivist policy in the U.S. ?
Alice is also right. Every entitlement for some (or many) places an obligation on others (even generations unborn) to provide. However, “responsibility.” whilst a form of obligation, may not be the exact term for most cases – since “responsibiloity” usually arises out of a specitic relationship.
Perhaps we are not looking at something coming apart in “Heathcare Policy,” but rather something that was not and could not be “stitched together.”
Capitalist medicine: You get the medical care you choose; you have to pay for health care; if you can’t afford to pay, you go without.
Socialist medicine: The government provides health care, whether you can pay or not; you get the health care the government chooses.
Obamacare: You get the health care the government chooses; you have to pay for health care; if you can’t afford to pay, you still have to pay, or be fined.
The high cost of health care has been, to a very great extent, caused by the vast subsidies and endless regulations that have been imposed upon it.
So for the collectivists to complain about the high cost of health care (and to demand yet more statism as a supposed “cure” for the high cost) is very much in the tradtion of……..
“First they smash your face in and then they say you were always ugly”.
Sadly we can not know what things people would have come up with – if only they had been allowed to interact freely.
To the enemy “the personal is the political” and civil interaction can not be allowed to take place outside the “community” (treated as a collective entity – not as the sum total of non political civil interaction between human beings).
This whole business looks to me a lot like classic rent seeking by the medical industries. It’s hard to explain how forcing 45 million new people to become customers of the health insurance industry, paying up to 12% of their income before they become eligible for government subsidies, is a measure to “help the poor”; after all, if they could afford to pay for health insurance, they would already be doing so. But it’s obvious how it enriches the health insurance industry: they get 45 million new customers who aren’t legally permitted to refuse to buy from them. Businesses have long been willing to give up some control of their own economic activities in exchange for government-guaranteed revenues, going back to the railroads in the late 19th century and AT&T in the early 20th; this looks like the same kind of dealmaking. And of course it’s being sold to the public as “helping the poor” and “increasing economic efficiency” and even as an antibusiness measure. Any competent professional politician can do a credible job of ranting about the evil of the business whose lobbyists he’s getting funded by.
“I get the distinct impression that health care could turn out to be one of the biggest problems for The Chicago Community Organiser…”
“Distinct” you say? I don’t see it the same way Jonathan – conservative Americans are in an uproar about it, but I don’t see any “distinct” reason why that in itself would create a problem for Obama in eventually getting his healthcare plans through Congress. Like the Republicans are going to effect some sort of “take-down”. But I’m too busy to be constantly monitoring this – so enlightenment anyone?
“What rights? There are no rights, only wants.”
Part Two then Alisa? : I say you’re wrong. Here:
“Rights” are political instruments enabling individuals to get along in a social context, but that doesn’t mean they are “social constructs” (i.e. arbitrarily connected [or not] to reality).
Rights are a derivation from an ethics itself derived from the kind of creature that man is: his distinctive means of survival is his individual mind, which, tied to an individual body, has a capacity for rational action. There is of course, no guarantee that this capacity will always be exercised since it is a matter of free choice.
If each individual human being is to survive – qua individual human being, and not some lobotomised beurobot – in a social context, then he and his fellows must comprehend an ethics which respects his (and their) individual nature. To whit: do not murder, steal, kidnap etc – in short, to follow a “non-initiation of force” ethical heuristic. From this you get to your political rights, all negatively framed, on life, liberty and property.
These are not “wants” – they are the actual necessities of survival as an individual in a social context.
Exactly what Laird said.
The vast majority of healthcare is hum-drum, day-to-day, and cheap. It is not well-suited to the insurance model when that insurance model also covers the very-rare but very-costly exceptions. IOW, when your insurance premiums cover both the million-dollar hospitalization and the sprained ankle – and half-a-hundred other things which are not really medical necessities at all but rather politically-mandated rent-seeking and vote-buying – everybody loses. Premiums increase – because of everything that has to be covered – and costs increase – because people overuse their insurance for every thing, or for things that are lifestyle choices and not medical necessities. This is especially true for the gold-plated no-copay insurance schemes that are the legacies of Big Labor, that have turned intensive healthcare into something of a lifestyle choice for many users. It is absolutely insane that my GP will write me a prescription for ibuprofen that I can buy at any discount store for pocket change – but she does it because many of her patients are covered by insurance which makes that prescription free.
You have car insurance to protect your estate and fortune from the results of a major, but rare, disaster – not to pay for oil changes.
That’s why we are starting to see a lot of stratification in US healthcare, as the tax code and people’s own common sense make the standard model of employer- or state-provided cover-all insurance less and less attractive. That’s one reason that Obamacare is getting such a fearful drubbing in the court of public opinion – lots and lots and lots of people look at it and see that one more monolothic, one-size-fits-all system is just not a good fit for their interests at all.
One possible advantage of the current high unemployment rate and the matching retrenchments of employer-provided healthcare is that a lot of people are suddenly realizing that the sky does not fall when your health insurance situation changes, and that there are new and different ways of ensuring their healthcare that break form the current models and which are actually better for their situation. One or two people that I know in this situation (I’m in Detroit, remember – I know nothing but newly-unemployed people, it sometimes seems) have described how this has actually been a positive and liberating experience for them, allowing them for the first time to actually have an active role in their healthcare decisions instead of being just another Unit in the Company Plan. As one said to me – how much of a schmuck do you have to be to pay $20 prescription co-pay each monthfor your heart meds when the same stuff is sold at WalMart for $3.33, cash money?
I’m not saying it solves all problems – merely that the insurance model is a poor fit for complete healthcare delivery. It’s time we named it & shamed it for what it is – a wealth-redistribution mechanism that does healthcare as a sideline – and moved on from there to something better. Lots of US voters are already doing just that.
llater,
llamas
Mike, you give yourself away – “If each individual human being is to survive – qua individual human being, and not some lobotomised beurobot – in a social context, then . . . “ – and “These are not “wants” – they are the actual necessities of survival as an individual in a social context. “
Rights are a social construct in that whether one is a collectivist or an individualist fundamentally changes them in essentially opposite directions. All arguments I have ever heard for natural (individual) rights are predicated on the idea that you also assume; that “each individual human being is to survive – qua individual human being, and not some lobotomised beurobot “. But to a coherent collectivist that is not at all the goal. Their goal is the good of society as a whole. To them, society itself is where life itself, and therefore rights, are vested. Looking at so many of their most ardent supporters it is clear that many have already achieved the state of “lobotomised beurobot”.
Individualism/Collectivism is not a dichotomy that can be resolved by reason. Individuals will forever be targeted by collectives for either assimilation or destruction. Aspiring collectives will forever face insurrection by individuals for actions they take in pursuit of a collective society. Established collectives will face the continual drain of their most productive members through porous borders. The most advanced stage collectives have murdered millions of their unassimilable rather than allow them to escape and become external threats. The only way I see to wage this war is to make as clear as possible to the ambivalent middle what the stable goal state of each society is. I think even soft collectivists will find that future horrifying enough that they elect to take their chances with individualism.
Mike, obviously I disagree, but I did oversimplify, although not much. So let me try again: there are no rights, only wants and agreements to satisfy them. Now you can start afresh as well if you like.
“Mike, you give yourself away…”
Anything for my fellow-travellers, Mid.
“Their goal is the good of society as a whole.”
First off the bat, this is of no major importance, but I must say I despise the use of that phrasing to describe “their goal” – as if our goal isn’t also “the good of society as a whole”, albeit as a secondary product of the free actions of individuals.
“All arguments I have ever heard for natural (individual) rights are predicated on the idea that you also assume…”
Could it not be that that is because it is the only predicate – life as an individual – for a concept of rights the truth of which is mirrored by the nature and demonstrative power of death? Each of us dies as an individual, because that is the (ontological) nature of human life – it is framed from within the physical limitations of an individual body.
The alternative predicate for natural rights – that human life is fundamentally social – involves a mistaken use of the idea of “fundamental” which is shown up by consideration of the ultimately individual nature of death.
“To them, society itself is where life itself, and therefore rights, are vested.”
Taking society as the predicate for “life itself” and therefore “rights” (absent the conditioner “natural”) leaves the suspicion that the question springs not from any pursuit of the value “truth”, but from that of “power”. If this were not so, then the ontologically individual nature of human life would not be ignored. Such people can become Lady MacBeths to unsuspecting ears.
“Individualism/Collectivism is not a dichotomy that can be resolved by reason.”
Oh it can be resolved in a jiffy and in the correct way too – but there is simply no guarantee that it will be in the case of any given individual not already convinced. But that is because reason is not an automatically self-initiating or infallible capacity of the mind. It is also because, in some cases, there are just evil fucking monsters who couldn’t be persuaded of the colour of the sky if it meant relaxing their grip on a human throat.
“The only way I see to wage this war is to make as clear as possible to the ambivalent middle what the stable goal state of each society is. I think even soft collectivists will find that future horrifying enough that they elect to take their chances with individualism.”
So in other words, having censured me for claiming that the individualism – collectivism fight can be resolved by reason, you propose to use… erm, reason to persuade the soft collectivists to go with individualism?
You’ll excuse me, I hope, if I ask whether you aren’t now giving yourself away?
But Mike, my goal is not the good of society. My goal is the good of individuals. The fact that all individuals within a society will (by all of my measures) experience substantially better lives in no way makes society the, or even a, justification for it. Using ‘society’s’ fate in anyway for a justification corrupts and destabilizes the individualist case. I very strongly believe that the weak and helpless members of society who are unable to care for themselves will only survive in an individualist society. In a collectivist society ultimately only those members of society who are both productive and submissive will be supported. I am not the only one who understands that, most of the ‘mobs’ fighting Obamacare know that as well.
Noting that individuals live better in an individualist society does not make society the purpose even as a ‘secondary product’. It is the fates of the individuals within that society that is the purpose. Saying that ‘society’ will be better when you mean ‘everybody within society’ will be better is an invitation to confusion when talking to somebody already unsure of what you are saying. I am expressing myself poorly but hopefully you can understand the distinction I am making. That distinction is one I personally neglect around here but it is very important when talking to people who live in a passively but indelibly collectivist ontology.
In their ontology, society is the living creature and humans are cells dedicated to the good of the body. It really is that simple but they will not even be aware that you do not see humans as cells in a societal body. Put crudely, seppuku is just one extremely obvious form of apoptosis. Speaking from experience it is possible to know someone casually for a long time and not realize they are using ‘human being’ with a different understanding of what one really is.
Cells die individually in a body. Does that somehow make the description ‘collective’ an inaccurate description of their existence?
It is easy to deny the honesty and question the motivations of collectivists by measuring them with an individualist standard. But that is not their standard. Their standard is one of a hive or a ‘borg’. It is genuine in a least a substantial number of collectivists. It is the passive middle that goes along with nice sounding platitudes and believe that Ayers, Wright etc were ‘mistakes’ by Obama (they were not, that is the real Obama) and that Stalin, Mao etc were to blame personally for the atrocities, but that with the right leaders, collectivism wouldn’t be that way. False. No matter who rises to the top of a collective heap, there will ultimately be genocide. Even if it takes the ‘peaceful’ form of substituting palliative medical treatments for healing medical treatments in certain classes of persons.
Of course. There is a world of difference between reconciling (transitive 4) the philosophical dichotomy and ‘turning’ less committed members of one over to the other. Reason will never prove the error of collectivism or even find any common ground. But reason will persuade many as yet unconcerned people that they don’t really want what collectivism delivers.
“Saying that ‘society’ will be better when you mean ‘everybody within society’ will be better is an invitation to confusion when talking to somebody already unsure of what you are saying.”
Conceded. I really should resist the temptation to get even the least bit carried away with that “good of society” phrase.
“Cells die individually in a body.”
Come off it – that’s apples and oranges. Cells don’t have any choice in how they act.
“It is easy to deny the honesty and question the motivations of collectivists by measuring them with an individualist standard. But that is not their standard. Their standard is one of a hive or a ‘borg’. It is genuine in a least a substantial number of collectivists.”
And it is a genuine error on their part. To a large degree, the concept of “honesty” presupposes the concept of “accuracy”. You presuppose entirely that the question of which standard to adopt is arbitrary. But it isn’t – it’s right there for anybody to see; any man could never serve any conceivable collective if he did not first serve himself as an individual “cell” in ensuring that he acted to stay alive. Membership of a collective may open the way to the pursuit of a great many values that allow an individual to thrive, but it is never the standard of value itself – that standard can only be one’s own life. To state that a man chooses to commit suicide* for the good of the collective is a misnomer – such a man has merely substituted the good of the collective as his own good. When he voluntarily destroys himself it is because he has deemed whatever damage to the collective would be rendered by his continued existence as unacceptable to him. If it were otherwise, he would be killed otherwise – forcibly, by others and entirely against his will.
“It is genuine in a least a substantial number of collectivists. It is the passive middle that goes along with nice sounding platitudes…”
Sometimes it is easy to tell the difference, but not always. That right there can sometimes be quite a challenge when dealing with specific individuals partly at least because of the emotional integration of mixed premises (you even – rightly so – clouted me for that just now).
“There is a world of difference between reconciling (transitive 4) the philosophical dichotomy and ‘turning’ less committed members of one over to the other.”
I did not say anything about “making compatible or consistent” the individualist-collectivist dichotomy – I used the term “resolve” – meaning to come down clearly on one side of the fence and not the other.
You can point to the inevitability of genocide (or at least, combat) resulting from collectivism all you like and I’ll be right there with you, but that will not always (I dare say even usually) be enough.
Let me give you an example: just last night in fact I was arguing with a 40+ year old departmental manager in a very large firm in the electronics industry. A smart and experienced guy, not some wet-behind-the-ears T-shirt monkey. He claims to be in favour of more individual freedom generally, but does not want to see Taiwan’s system of socialized healthcare (and the health tax disguised as health insurance) abolished and replaced with a free market system. My first pitch to him was the problem of pricing and economic calculation in any socialized market and the consequences of this. The argument from effect. Yet rather than respond to the technicalities of that however, he shifted immediately to the more philosophical claim that socialism is justified since it is a response to a natural fear of freedom. The argument from ethical principle. He is a soft collectivist-soft individualist – a person of mixed premises, and merely pointing to the scale of wasted resources or even numbers of people murdered is not going to convince him that socialism is wrong. Sooner or later, in dealing with people like this – you are going to have to come down to the question of an individualist standard of value or a collectivist standard of value. When that moment arrives, I have (and I did have) an answer to that question that does not amount to an arbitrary whim.
How would you have dealt with him, Mid?
*As an aside, I question your claim that harakiri (I hadn’t even known the term seppuku, actually) was not based on individualist premises. Or were you merely using a bit of poetic license?
I can’t address how Mid would have dealt with your friend (Mid is more than capable of speaking for himself), but my reaction is that a “natural [?] fear of freedom” is not an “ethical principal”, but is just about as far from “ethical” as one can get. First off, it is a projection of his own fear* on everyone else. Second, it is an implicit assertion that his own fear is not only universal but deserving of respect and solicitude to the point of denying anyone else freedom. These are not positions worthy of respect, and in fact I suspect that they are not really “positions” at all. This sounds like someone who has done absolutely no serious thinking about the issue, but has absorbed the collectivist zeitgeist and is simply mouthing meaningless platitudes. You can’t have a discussion with someone who won’t think; its just shouting past each other. The first step is to get people to think.
* Anyone who “fears” freedom is simply telling you that he doubts his own worth. His real “fear” is that he would not bring anything of value to a free society.
Actually they do. There are three places the ‘decision’ for cell death comes from in apoptosis. One is a killer (immune system) cell decides to kill it. One is from the surrounding ‘community’ of cells. And one is the cell itself ‘choosing’ to die.
Think for a few moments about ‘face’ in certain cultures. It is difficult for most Americans to imagine taking other people’s opinions of oneself so seriously that one would consider suicide. But in most of Asia this would not surprise anyone. You live there, am I right? I suggest for your consideration that the role of ‘face’ in a culture is an important, even signal marker for a collectivist meta-context.
One the contrary, I have both personally and from watching news known many people who would voluntarily die for their particular collective. It amazes me every time I hear an elderly person say that the don’t ever want to become a burden to society. This is not at all an unusual mind-set in for example, Madison. Even people with enough money to support their own care believe that spending it on themselves is an immoral waste and against the ‘good of society’. I think many of them would and do choose to donate their estates for the improvement of society and deliberately place themselves at the discretion of the system to supervise their ‘departure’.
Er, isn’t substituting the good of the collective for one’s own good the essence of collectivism in a nutshell or am I misunderstanding you?
There is a sort of person, quite common but usually not remarkable, that acquires their self image externally. They do not build their own self image and determine their own self worth, they acquire it from others. These people are natural collectivists. They occur at all levels in a collective society. Even the rulers demand adulation. It is their measure of self worth because that is how true collectivists measure these things. With these people I despair of any alteration in their nature. You mention (and I agree) that it can be difficult to tell the true collectivists from the ambivalent middle that just follows the platitudes (AKA useful idiots). One way that can help is to see how much weight they attach to ‘face’ and how much they look to others for their own self image compared to other members of their society. Another sign is how much they attach themselves to sports teams as fans or to other social groupings. Has the organization become their identity? Depending on which side of the local bell curve they fall on, it might save you from spending a lot of time on a hopeless case.
Actually, I introduced the word “resolve” into the conversation. When I used it I meant resolve in the transitive definitions 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7. You are I think using it with definitions 2 and 4, perhaps more. The situation between collectives and individuals can never be resolved however the individual collectivists can (and hopefully very many of them will be) convinced that individualism will much better achieve their expectations. When you mentioned several threads back your efforts to change minds of the everyday people you meet, I almost punched the air with a “Yes, we need more like him!”
It amazed me how quickly selective availability of health care based on classifying people jumped to the top of the billing in this health care debate. Even former Mayor Ed Koch is concerned. Read the paragraph beginning with “Most alarming for people like me . . . “
People understand intuitively that once a government bureaucracy is deciding who gets treatment and who gets sedation . . .
Concerning the departmental manager you were talking to, prioritize the philosophical question over the effects discussion. At least you’ll save your breath if common ground cannot be found. 🙂 Seriously, many people fear freedom. Even individualists. Giving up a nice paycheck to try starting one’s own business can be sickeningly frightening (occasionally with good reason). Freedom to succeed comes with the freedom to fail. He understands that (most American socialists don’t) so he comes right out and admits to fearing freedom. His rejection of the essentially ‘greater good’ arguments he may see in your calculations is a good sign and means he is probably already thinking to the exceptions – the individual outliers on the negative experience side. He may be thinking of them from a personal anticipatory fear and/or from a benevolent concern for others. Not knowing the individual arguments he may present I don’t know how to answer them. But I do know that there is absolutely nothing benevolent about collectivism. It is coherent. It is rational. But it lies to individuals in the freer cultures it invades just like all invasive infections. It claims to offer the things kind and caring people want but by its structural imperatives, it will only expend resources on itself, not non-productive members. If you see examples of socialist states actually benefiting non-contributing humans it is either a transition phase or a Potemkin construct for marketing purposes. You and I know this. Does he?
If you and he agree that the problem area is the fates individuals who fall on the bad end of the bell curve, you can bring the discussion to things that Paul Marks would be better able to answer. Like how free societies have historically taken care of the helpless. I believe that history will show that the comparative standards of living for helpless people will directly correlate with the individualist character of the society. People competing for a piece of a finite government pie are not benevolent. Only free people can afford that luxury.
On the other hand, I may have read him all wrong and Laird have the more accurate assessment. Only you will know the answer to that. And I am curious what your answer was/is.
Good luck. I hope you succeed with him and the others your work to persuade.
Interesting solution in this WSJ op-ed.
Mr. Mackey makes some wise points. Unfortunately I doubt that any of his ideas will be implemented, because they aren’t in the interest of any of the constituencies now pushing for “reform”.
“…but my reaction is that a “natural [?] fear of freedom” is not an “ethical principal”…”
You’re absolutely right Laird – and you’re right for pulling me over for misphrasing it like that. As best I can recall now, the words he used were something like:
“…but wanting a stable life – fear of freedom – is natural, it’s not right or wrong, so why should we have a capitalist healthcare system?”
The above is certainly not fully accurate, but it’s about as accurate as I’m going to get now it’s Wednesday night. So you’re right he did not state any argument from ethical principle, but in claiming that wanting a “stable life” (i.e. security) is “natural” the implication was left hanging in the air that either (a) there is no right or wrong in any of this or (b) that a free-market in healthcare is somehow unnatural and therefore either an unrealistic expectation or otherwise wrong. It was actually in my response to the unspoken implications of what he said that we got onto the ethics of the matter – with me making just the same point as you that fear of freedom is no justification for curbing the freedom of other people.
“This sounds like someone who has done absolutely no serious thinking about the issue, but has absorbed the collectivist zeitgeist and is simply mouthing meaningless platitudes. You can’t have a discussion with someone who won’t think; its just shouting past each other. The first step is to get people to think.”
Well that’s what I was trying to do – I was challenging his opinions. One of the things that gives me some sense of hope here in Taiwan is that there are strong individualist elements in the culture. You know, they have regular TV shows here devoted entirely to documenting and praising local entrepreneurs – insofar as my memory serves me well that would simply be unimaginable in the UK. Since the greater part of the economy is devoted to overseas trade, people like him are well aware of the importance to their firms of reducing tarriffs and so on. Of course, there are also very strong collectivist elements in the culture here too – Mid points to the “face” symptom. Yet I am not content to simply talk only to people who have already “done some serious thinking” on the status of the individual within society. That’s a luxury I can’t afford. I try to take this argument to everyone I meet if the opportunity arises in the course of conversation. Tonight in fact, as I was meeting my landlady to sign a new contract, the conversation naturally turned toward the disaster of Marokot last weekend. She mentioned something about police preventing people in the mountains of Pingtung from attempting to rescue family members. Naturally I pointed to the underlying collectivist presumption that one’s life is the property of the State and that there is always therefore the potential that any decisions as to what risks to take with it are going to be subject to the discretion of the State. I got the emotional nod in sympathy but the pragmatist shrug and laughter (“oh what can we do?!”) in response – which to be fair is about what I expected.
“Think for a few moments about ‘face’ in certain cultures. It is difficult for most Americans to imagine taking other people’s opinions of oneself so seriously that one would consider suicide. But in most of Asia this would not surprise anyone. You live there, am I right? I suggest for your consideration that the role of ‘face’ in a culture is an important, even signal marker for a collectivist meta-context.”
In some cases perhaps, although it seems to me a bit more complicated than that. Generally, the importance of face seems to be related to the importance attached to any given relationship. Parents may have committed suicide because they couldn’t get out of debt and were devastated by what they thought their own parents and even their children thought of them. On the other hand, I have seen neighbours quarrelling out loud in the street (a massive loss of face) over what seemed relatively trivial matters (e.g. proximity of one man’s parked car to his neighbour’s house).
“On the contrary, I have both personally and from watching news known many people who would voluntarily die for their particular collective.”
I know that, and I believe you missed the point. In order to die for the collective, you have to be alive first, which earlier stage required securing the values necessary to staying alive and thriving – even if only for the purpose of later serving the collective.
“Er, isn’t substituting the good of the collective for one’s own good the essence of collectivism in a nutshell or am I misunderstanding you?”
A man does not know what he should aim for in life, therefore he takes as his aim, the aim espoused by some collective. He makes it his own. He is first an individual who at all times has the power of free will over his decisions to act even as he later becomes a member of the collective. What I am trying to say is that because collectivism depends at all times on the freely chosen actions of individuals, it is a denial of reality to state that a person is not an individual in his own right, but rather, that he is primarily a member of a collective to which his status as an individual is incidental. Collectivism is parasitic on individualism. How many people were content to be extinguished for the good of their Soviet collective under Yezhov? How many of them baulked when they realized that their own lights were about to go out permanently? I’m sure that among the hundreds of thousands murdered, very few were in the former category. Further, I’d guess that among that minority there may even have been some who realized the mistaken nature of their collectivism too late. We’ll never know.
“You mention (and I agree) that it can be difficult to tell the true collectivists from the ambivalent middle that just follows the platitudes (AKA useful idiots). One way that can help is to see how much weight they attach to ‘face’ and how much they look to others for their own self image compared to other members of their society. Another sign is how much they attach themselves to sports teams as fans or to other social groupings. Has the organization become their identity? Depending on which side of the local bell curve they fall on, it might save you from spending a lot of time on a hopeless case.”
Yes, but to be honest, the technique I’ve been using is just to politely state a ragingly controversial opinion (e.g. legalize firearms ownership, abolish the national health “insurance” fraud, denationalize the NT dollar etc) and watch the resulting facial expressions. That usually sorts out the wheat from the chaff right there. Furrowed brows and curious grins are good, laughter and raised eyebrows are bad, but the naked stare could be either (i.e. either curiosity or suppressed aggression). The problem lies with the wheat. People whose strongest typical association lies not with sports teams or so on, but with their families. Once you know you’re dealing with someone like that who is capable of listening to what you say and can think about it (even if they do that later on their own) for themselves, the question arises as to whether the greater “weight” of their mixed premises lies with the individualist or collectivist side. When I say “weight”, I mean something like conceptual-emotional integration. The consolation is that in the end such people must change their minds on their own and that even a brief exposure to a serious challenge of their premises may be sufficient “seed of doubt”. Whatever the strength of their resistance I am always limited by time and other constraints anyway.
“Concerning the departmental manager you were talking to, prioritize the philosophical question over the effects discussion.”
Yes.
“Seriously, many people fear freedom. Even individualists. Giving up a nice paycheck to try starting one’s own business can be sickeningly frightening…”
Ha! That’s me right there actually (try that with the added handicap of having to study Mandarin to do it – there can sometimes be significant trust issues with translation).
“If you see examples of socialist states actually benefiting non-contributing humans it is either a transition phase or a Potemkin construct for marketing purposes. You and I know this. Does he?”
We didn’t get that far.
“If you and he agree that the problem area is the fates individuals who fall on the bad end of the bell curve, you can bring the discussion to things that Paul Marks would be better able to answer. Like how free societies have historically taken care of the helpless. I believe that history will show that the comparative standards of living for helpless people will directly correlate with the individualist character of the society. People competing for a piece of a finite government pie are not benevolent. Only free people can afford that luxury.”
Well yes, I’ll see him again next week and see how he’s got on with his thinking. It’s a line I’ve taken before but I’m sure brushing up on my history here wouldn’t hurt.
This comment thread has really strayed very far from the OP and even from what got me started (Alisa’s comment that there are no rights, only wants) and we still don’t agree on a naturalistic basis for the rights to life, liberty and property, but these to-and-fro threads with you are a good exercise for me Mid. I appreciate your efforts!
Not very far at all, Mike. My argument and Mid’s points are really several sides of the same coin, the coin being the idea that all moral values, including those you refer to as “natural rights” are strictly subjective.
Alisa:
I agree that values should not be separated from valuer, but I cannot overlook the point that said valuer must be alive in the first place. And if she is alive, then she is alive as an individual organism capable, to some degree, of survival on her own (although of course that degree rises significantly with certain forms of social cooperation). Even when a sick old lady makes known her preference for euthanasia on the grounds of benefiting “the good of society”, that is still fundamentally her own valuation as an individual (one which itself speaks to a deeper valuation of her current inability to act for other values as an unwanted state of being).
It is from the basic fact that one must be alive as a functioning individual in order to act that the entire matter of values arises in the first place. This is the basis of the view that human beings are constituted in nature as individuals, not as collectives. Value and valuation can never belong to a collective, but only to the individuals within that collective.
Hence the ethics of individualism. The natural rights of life, liberty and property are based on this metaphysical assertion that human beings are individuals whose essential method for surviving (and thriving) is the mind and the capacity it brings for valuation and rational action.
To argue that such natural rights are “subjective”, you must invalidate the connection I have drawn between being alive (which always entails the corollary of being alive as a physically bound individual) and valuation.
Been reading a lot of Ayn Rand, haven’t we?
(Not a criticism; merely an observation.)
Actually, no. I was channeling one part Von Mises (see e.g. “Theory Of Money & Credit”: Part One, Chapter 2, p47) to one part Rand (see e.g. “Atlas Shrugged” p1012-1013), although I don’t think the two would have agreed – for as Paul Marks has mentioned elsewhere, Von Mises wouldn’t eat his metaphysics.
May the fresh dung of a sick pig forever decorate the mustache(s) of the man or woman who changed Firefox crash save function. It used to be that when it asks on crash whether you want to save your tabs and windows, if you don’t want to overwrite the previously stored ones you say ‘Quit’ and it would leave the previous windows and tabs (from the initial crash) intact. My wireless software wasn’t booting correctly so I rebooted a couple of times after having started the FF load. Apparently some Appleist-authoritarian-we-know-better-than-you saboteur has changed Firefox so that now ‘Save and quit’ means save and quit, and just plain ‘Quit’ means go out and find the tabs and windows data, erase it, and then quit. It destroys data for no purpose and no gain. How does this improve Firefox?
I’ve just lost probably 50 to 80 tabs that were new and as yet unbookmarked. Some of them were with the intent of finally writing an article. All gone. May I add to the previous curse upon that unknown tamperer, “and may you forget often and lick your lips while committing your further acts of vandalism.” It was probably the same idiot that changed the bookmark function so that when you try to bookmark the same web page under multiple different topic folders, every time you add it to a new folder FF sneaks out without telling you and erases it from the previous folder you bookmarked it in. WTF? I don’t know how long that change was in place before I discovered it by accident.
Mike, we’ll have to pick this up again some time. I haven’t convinced you but I am confident that I will eventually. I enjoy these conversations and they compel me to be much more rigorous and clear conveying my points. When we do pick it up again, remind me of Nick M and rabbits. That will remind me of a hypothetical case I’ve developed for illustrative purposes. In the mean time, maybe you can translate a short form of that curse into Mandarin for us and we can add it to the Firefly curse lexicon. That would be shiny.
I bet a night out on the town with you is rather, umm … , ‘interesting’? 8-|
Is that Firefox 3.5.2 you’re using Mid? I’ve been using 3.5.1 as of the last week or so and I can’t recall it crashing yet.
“In the mean time, maybe you can translate a short form of that curse into Mandarin for us and we can add it to the Firefly curse lexicon. That would be shiny.”
Saying it would be one thing, but writing it would be quite another! I’d have to call for help on that.
“I bet a night out on the town with you is rather, umm … , ‘interesting’? 8-|”
Well you know “…if the opportunity arises in the course of conversation”. If there is decent football on the satellite screen, I’m as good as gold.
Mike, sorry, I am having a few hectic days, but I don’t want to abandon the discussion.
Humans, as opposed to trees, are not constituted, but rather constitute themselves. That pesky ‘free will’ thing allows us to constitute ourselves in any way we like, individually, collectively, or mixed (most choose the latter), including giving up that very same free will for whatever ‘greater good’ we might fancy at the time.
Of course, but that includes values that negate this very assertion, whether we like it or not. The fact that collectivism is destructive is hardly news.
The aforementioned trees are alive. There, invalidated.
Mike:
I’m still running 3.0.something on my ‘good’ computer and experimenting with 3.5.2 on my back-up computer. 3.5 is supposed to handle having a lot of tabs open better than 3.0, in fact IIUC that is a primary raison d’etre for it. Maybe I should make the change on the ‘good’ computer but it apparently has some ‘improvements’ that I don’t like. One is when I turn on scripts for the page I am on and then reload it (ie: eBay) it reloads all of the tabs from that domain. I need to be able to shut that off (whether in NoScript or FF?). I want only that page I reload to reload. One more case of stoopid idjit programmers makin’ stoopid idjit assumptions. I begin to despair of FireFox.
I learned something else interesting. If you continue to say ‘no’ to upgrading to IE-8 until you have time to check it out and read the TOS, MS stops offering further system upgrades to your OS. Once I rejected the TOS, I got a veritable plethora (18) of important patches offered to me. I wonder what the reason for that is. Never mind. I just realized that I wondered what reason MicroSoft had. My bad.
“Humans, as opposed to trees, are not constituted, but rather constitute themselves. That pesky ‘free will’ thing allows us to constitute ourselves in any way we like, individually, collectively, or mixed (most choose the latter), including giving up that very same free will for whatever ‘greater good’ we might fancy at the time.”
I meant “constituted” in the metaphysical sense, Alisa. You don’t have any choice about being bound within a single body and mind. Of course, you are free to decide how you are “constituted” in the man-made sense of what organisations you attempt to join and what ethical principles you choose to act on and so on.
“Of course, but that includes values that negate this very assertion…”
Sure but the negation is man-made rather than metaphysical. Like: “This is not a sentence.” The negation is semantic but not grammatical, and since the concept of “sentence” is one that pertains to the category “grammar”, the negation fails. So in the kind of case we’re interested in, when a collectivist expresses something like…
“I am not an individual, but a member of ACORN.”
… then the negation is of the man-made, voluntary kind, but not the metaphysical kind, and since “I” is a metaphysical concept, the negation fails. It is just another example of the stolen concept fallacy. There ain’t no getting around metaphysical facts, they just are. Denying one’s fundamental individuality is like denying the existence of time. OK a collectivist could say it, but it would just be nonsense.
“The aforementioned trees are alive. There, invalidated.”
Look – if it wasn’t obvious to you that I was talking about individual people being alive and not simply the concept of “life” abstracted from any particular creature, – then I’m not sure we’re going to get very far here.
It might help to think of it like this: values are “subjective” in the sense that they are only expressed via freely made choices which differ across individual people, but they yet have an objective source (life – as an individual human being) and purpose (thriving – as an individual human being). Some of the difficult choices in life are right (i.e. do not contradict the metaphysically individual nature of human life) and some are wrong (because they do, e.g. when policemen just three days ago prevented some Taiwanese men from attempting to rescue their family members trapped under landslides in Kaohsiung county – such policemen were wrong to interfere with these people’s choices to rescue their families and this “wrongness” is not subjective, it is built into the nature of what people are).
Mid: I’m running 3.5.1 and funnily enough it crashed yesterday (just after I had stated it not yet having crashed!). I suspect the reason for the distinction between the “Save and Quit” option and the “Quit” option is to allow for people with rather slow connections (e.g. I only have a measly 1mb) to quit and start again rather quickly without having to wait a freakin’ decade for a whole bunch of tabs to reload. I usually save my tabs, but there have been times when I didn’t really need to and/or didn’t have the time to wait for 10+ tabs to reload. But 80+ tabs?! I don’t think I’ve ever been above 15…
However, there is one problem I’ve noticed with 3.5.1 which is that sometimes it refuses to open my bookmarks categories despite my clicking on them – there is no problem with my mouse-pad since I can open folders and what-not – it’s the bookmark drop-down menus from the toolbar. It’s usually OK, but sometimes I need to go to the bookmarks manage option just to open up, say samizdata. Have you encountered that problem with 3.5.2? I’d also be thinking of looking for an alternative browser, but – are there any others out there that are better than Firefox?
It was quite obvious to me (me being an individualist). It can even be obvious to a most hard-core collectivist, but it is not going to change their mind, because it is merely a rational argument. There actually are truly evil people who really believe themselves to be good. No amount of rational argument is going to convince them to the contrary, because this belief of theirs is predetermined by their moral values – values being subjective by definition. So I play a devil’s advocate here and put it to you that trees are no different from individual people. Now invalidate that.
I didn’t even realize that 3.5 is out. In any case, I don’t touch betas unless I have a very good reason to do so.
BTW Mike, there is nothing metaphysical about any of this – all and any of this fits quite nicely within the purview of plain old physics.
Some further thoughts (I’m lucky enough to have a lot of free time this week!):
If I myself were to challenge the notion of natural rights, and argue instead that such rights were strictly subjective, how would I do it?
Well in the “strongest” way, I’d have to divorce ethics from the cardinal value of “truth”, which would lead, most immediately, to an ethical relativism surviving parasitically on its’ stolen concept.
In a less extreme form, I’d try to disconnect ethics from the concept of “universals” insisting that since there is no universal human nature, there can thus be no universal ethics. P*lyl*gism (the asterisks are my attempt to avoid the smite-bot).
The “weaker” method would be to reject induction, and claim – with Popper I believe* – that all metaphysical assertions on which ethics rests are fundamentally conjectural and although we may have some confidence in their accuracy, we nevertheless cannot be certain about them. Having then admitted uncertainty to surround an individualist metaphysics, other metaphysical assertions would then be possible, including perhaps a collectivist metaphysics in which individual human beings were viewed merely as cells comprising an organism “society”. (Although I can’t recall the details now, I seem to remember that Popper himself exploded this line in his “Open Society” and elsewhere in “Poverty of Historicism”). The point of contention between an individualist and a collectivist would then be in how to decide which metaphysical assertion is most likely to be true. In that case, it would seem to me that the onus would be on the collectivist to demonstrate the existence of “society” as an integrated entity (i.e. more than just a collection of individuals cooperating with one another for their own individual ends).
But in making the weaker argument in which I rule out inductive knowledge, Ayn Rand would then come along to kick me up the arse, with her take on the problem of universals, in which conceptual knowledge itself is only possible because of induction. The only book I have by Ayn Rand – if you’re reading Laird (my earlier Atlas Shrugged reference was second-hand) – is her “An Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology”. Chapter 2 on concept formation and the necessity of induction for this was enlightening for me, but the book also contains a transcription of her giving a Q & A session with some interested professors – pages 295-301 show her defending the role of induction in concept formation against criticism.
So, where truth and universals are the chief difficulties for the sillier arguments for subjectivity of ethical values (and thus, by implication political rights), the necessity of induction for conceptual knowledge seems to me the chief difficulty for a more sophisticated argument in favour of ethical subjectivity.
Is that any help Alisa, Mid?
*I may need to re-read Popper again – but damn and blast I only have my “Open Society” with me because I loaned out “Conjectures & Refutations” and the autobiography to others several years ago and never got them back. I’ll have to go and buy at least C&R again.
Alisa:
I hadn’t seen those comments before I posted that last bit.
“There actually are truly evil people who really believe themselves to be good. No amount of rational argument is going to convince them to the contrary, because this belief of theirs is predetermined by their moral values – values being subjective by definition.”
I know very well that there are evil people – I indicated that earlier. I am not proposing natural rights as a means of persuading them to leave me and you the hell alone. Firearms are more effective at that.
But look: I took the time and effort to respond to you in some detail as to the reasons for why I think what I do, which you seem to have dismissed entirely with a tart “values are “subjective by definition” and “there is nothing metaphysical about any of this”.
Now you tell me who is not going to be convinced by any amount of rational argument? You know what? I could have spent that time doing a bunch of other things if I had known I was just pissing in the wind. I’m done with you.
Mike, there is no need to get personal. If I was sounding short, it’s just because I am very busy and tense. I didn’t mean to sound unfriendly.
As to the substance, I am not dismissing anything you wrote, I just think that you are missing my point – but obviously I could be wrong. I hope to get back to this later today – hope you can too. Cheers:-)
BTW Mike, if you ever feel like dropping me a line, feel free to follow the link.
Alright you don’t have enough time. Although this week is an exception for me, I’m usually too busy to even read samizdata, let alone comment – I do so only now and then. But I don’t comment on weighty matters if I don’t have the time to do it properly.
You’ll get one more note out of me before I go for a steak and catch the footie:
The consequences of this question as to whether political rights are natural or subjective has nothing at all to do with attempting to reason with monsters. The consequences relate to the entire scope of justice and especially the nature of just governance in society. And that in turn is not the sort of thing to discuss with monsters like Yezhov or Eichmann. See John Wayne’s film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”…
Well, I hope the steak was juicy, and the footie…had lots of footwork in it:-) I finished a translation and put it aside to “brew” – which incidentally seems to be also happening to my brain right now.
I think that you are definitely one of the Good Guys Mike, which is why I dislike disagreeing with you, but I cannot help but disagree, as I think that you are missing a major point. But before I get back to the substance let me just say that the matters are indeed weighty, but it doesn’t mean that they require a lot of words to explain. You tend to write much longer comments than I do – it’s a difference in style. When I mentioned being busy, I was referring to the fact that I was late replying to your comments, but the difference in style cannot be ignored: I like conciseness. OTOH, I cannot possibly address every single point you make in a long comment. I pick those that seem most representative of the whole. Still, if you would like me to address a particular point you think I should have, please let me know. Another problem for you and me is that I haven’t read Popper, Rand or anyone else, and have no intention of doing so in the foreseeable future.
So, with all this in mind, will you still talk to me? And if you do, can we please agree to not take things personally? This medium is not perfect, in that it is much less immediate than a face-to-face conversation, and this fact has to be kept in mind at all times for us to take the most advantage of it. We are on the same side here, and it would be silly to let a mere few thousand miles and several hours to divide us.
I wouldn’t even think about divorcing them, as to me they were never married in the first place.
But my purpose was not informing you that there are evil people, rather that there are evil people who genuinely believe themselves to be good. There are two kinds of ‘bad’ people (from ‘our’ subjective POV): those who are immoral, and those whose morals are different from ours. Neither kind will be convinced by rational argument, as you yourself pointed out. However, I am referring to that second category of people whose moral values are fundamentally different from ours. I did this not for propaganda purposes (we already agreed that to be pointless), but to demonstrate the total subjectivity of moral values.
Amen to that.
Substance first:
“I wouldn’t even think about divorcing them, as to me they were never married in the first place.”
To be concise then, I should just say: really? To unpackage that a bit, I should say: if it is true that no particular ethical claim is true, then how is it determined that this, more general claim, is itself true? Aren’t you guilty of the stolen concept fallacy here? And if not, why not?
If the answer is that, by “truth” you really meant “certainty” and that what you really think is that all ethical claims are fundamentally uncertain, then why is that?
“…there are evil people who genuinely believe themselves to be good.”
How do you know that they really are evil if you believe at the same time that all ethics is subjective? What makes them wrong and you right and how do you know this? What convinces you and makes you certain about it, if indeed, you are certain?
As to my own view, I’m well aware of the existence of such people and I explain to myself their existence by applying the concept of “mistaken” to their beliefs. That’s not to say they can be persuaded otherwise – most probably many of them cannot be – but since the concept of “mistaken” admits of degrees, I cannot be certain that all such cases are a lost cause.
“However, I am referring to that second category of people whose moral values are fundamentally different from ours. I did this [….] to demonstrate the total subjectivity of moral values.”
But it doesn’t demonstrate that. Look: why am I wrong when I say that such people are mistaken, fundamentally mistaken even? And why are you right when you say they are just “different”?
Now the issue of “style”:
“So, with all this in mind, will you still talk to me? And if you do, can we please agree to not take things personally?”
I’ll try.
“But before I get back to the substance let me just say that the matters are indeed weighty, but it doesn’t mean that they require a lot of words to explain. You tend to write much longer comments than I do – it’s a difference in style.”
The problem I had with your comments was twofold in that firstly, owing to their very economy, they don’t explain clearly the reasons why you think what you do, and secondly – again precisely because your comments are so terse – they give the impression that you aren’t bothering to think about what I say. Which is bloody annoying after I have gone to the effort of making myself as clear as I can.
I can be concise too when I want to be, but there are times when concision serves my purposes well and times when it doesn’t. I’m not interested in just shouting past you, but in trying to understand which one of us is right and why.
“Another problem for you and me is that I haven’t read Popper, Rand or anyone else, and have no intention of doing so in the foreseeable future.”
Look I don’t need to always cite chapter and verse from these people. I know what their contributions are and I can use them myself, although I might sometimes need to check details. That you haven’t read them isn’t a problem for me. But since you are apparently genuinely interested in the whole realm of politics/ethics/society/justice blah blah, then I say you’re really not doing yourself any favours by ignoring people like Rand and Popper. I appreciate that a hefty 1000 + page tome is off-putting when you’ve got work and kids to take care of, but you can easily find brief, second-hand summaries.
Mike, I do believe in the existence of an objective truth, but I cannot claim to know what it is. All I can claim is my beliefs, which are by definition subjective. The same goes for those evil people we mentioned, or for anyone else for that matter. So I don’t know those people to be evil, but rather believe them to be so. Unfortunately this is all I have. Nothing makes them wrong and me right, as ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ are subjective values (as are all values*). They are wrong in my opinion, and they are right in theirs.
Back to rights: I don’t have a right to life, I simply want to live. I find that the best way to keep myself alive is to enter into mutual agreement with other people who also want to live. It is even better to make such agreements with people who also want other things I want as well. I want to live so much, that I am willing to kill anyone who would interfere with this want of mine, so I enter into agreements with people who feel the same way. Etc.
I am sorry you got that impression, and nothing could be further from truth. Apparently I am doing a very poor job of explaining my position, but if you still want to understand it, you are welcome to ask me more specific questions – it’s up to you.
*The main point here, I think, is separating truth, AKA reality, from our evaluation of it. The former is objective, unknown and maybe unknowable, the latter is subjective.
“Mike, I do believe in the existence of an objective truth, but I cannot claim to know what it is.”
Why is that? Does that uncertainty apply to all areas of knowledge, or only to values?
“So I don’t know those people to be evil, but rather believe them to be so.”
OK so you can form a belief that a person’s action may be evil but cannot claim this as knowledge. Is that because you are uncertain in applying the concept of evil to a person’s actions (hence belief), or because the concept of evil is itself fundamentally uncertain? Or do you go even further and say that the whole concept of “evil” is just quite literally one thing to you, but quite another to someone else? I ask because:
“Nothing makes them wrong and me right, as ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ are subjective values (as are all values*). They are wrong in my opinion, and they are right in theirs.”
When you use this term “subjective” to describe beliefs or values, it’s very confusing because I’m not sure whether you simply mean “fundamentally uncertain”, or whether you mean it in the stronger sense of solipsism. I’m guessing the former, but sometimes you give the impression it could be the latter. The two positions are literally worlds apart.
“*The main point here, I think, is separating truth, AKA reality, from our evaluation of it. The former is objective, unknown and maybe unknowable, the latter is subjective.”
Well that right there just scares the shit out of me. How do I evaluate something I do not or even cannot know? In that position I cannot even form subjective beliefs about right and wrong because I have no grasp of reality from which I can (subjectively) derive them or to which I can (subjectively) apply them.
Look, if reality actually was unknowable, then (a) how would we know this, and (b) assuming we somehow could know that reality was unknowable, how then could we evaluate something that we couldn’t know? Or would we be merely evaluating our subjective apprehensions of that reality? But then, if we (again, somehow) knew that our apprehensions of reality were merely subjective what then would be the point of conceiving reality – subjective apprehension or otherwise – apart from our evaluations? Why wouldn’t we just dispense with the entire concept of “truth”? On the other hand, if we didn’t know for certain that reality was unknowable, but yet had doubts tending in that direction wouldn’t those doubts be seriously corrosive to the human mind itself? That road would surely take us to insanity and the eventual impossibility of all knowledge, let alone ethics.
All of them.
Yes.
The former.
It used to scare the shit out of me too, but you get used to it. It is sort of like realizing for the first time ever that one day you simply cease to exist: you no longer go all day thinking “why the hell bother, it’s all for naught anyway”. You just live your life the best you can, base your actions on your subjective judgments made to best of your ability at the time. You try to do whatever works. You notice that fire makes you warm in the winter – you use that, no need to investigate further whether the fire or the warmth are real or merely perceived. You notice that cooperating with other human beings yields better results than doing things all alone, so you do it. Most of it works most of the time, even when other people are involved, because most of us perceive most of reality mostly similarly. We only really need to bother ourselves with objective vs subjective in the relatively few (but very weighty) instances when such similarity is not to be found.
I didn’t say that truth is unknowable, but that it may be so. I am agnostic on that:-)
Aha – you see! Now that you’ve written a slightly longer comment I have more information on your views with which to decide what the source of our disagreement is, and I think I’ve found it.
“All of them…Yes….The former.”
That clears away certain cobwebs. So you’re against induction as a serious method of knowing the world.
Now see here: that piece of information (i.e. that you believe all knowledge is fundamentally uncertain) is very enlightening when taken together with this…
“You notice that fire makes you warm in the winter – you use that, no need to investigate further whether the fire or the warmth are real or merely perceived.”
… for it shows that you haven’t understood at all my rejection of your criticism that all values are subjective.
If you observe that the fire makes you warm in winter – then that is real knowledge because it increases your capacity to deal with the winter. Action is the whole point of knowledge, and the only context in which the notion of “certainty” makes any sense. Your emphasis on the claim that all knowledge is fundamentally uncertain is misplaced because it ignores the role of purposeful human action in framing the context in which “certainty” and “uncertainty” are to be understood. Such and such a piece of knowledge is “certain” or “uncertain” relative to what possible action?
In dismissing natural rights as false because all values are fundamentally subjective, all contextual reference to action is entirely forgotten (and remember, it is this context of individual action in society from which the concept of “rights” takes its’ meaning). If you are going to maintain this view then you might as well dismiss everything else you know because it is also “fundamentally uncertain”.
Sure, no disagreement there. We (/I?) have indeed taken this whole thing too far and deep, and it is time that we discussed natural rights in the context of individual action. I’ll go first, because I am the one denying their existence. The practical problem I am having with the concept of a ‘right’ is the word has a built-in sense of being granted by someone to someone else, which forces me to ask: these rights you talk about, who granted them?
I see; your practical objection to rights is an apparent presupposition of some kind of “overlord” (e.g. a government, a God etc) granting them or taking them away – and that’s something you’d be against right?
You ask who grants natural rights. I could equally ask who makes your agreements to satisfy certain wants? I don’t see any immediately practical difference between the two questions. But there is one important difference here:
Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that we were setting up our lives in a new place that is as yet without any government. We organize a “town hall” meeting. At that meeting we try to make some basic agreements for how we will all get along together. One of us suggests the negatively framed principles of life, liberty and property and says that this is the natural and therefore only correct basis on which to frame these agreements. Another person agrees with the substance of this, but objects that such rights are neither correct nor incorrect but are “fundamentally uncertain”. Now the other people voice their own views, many of which are quite different. The question is raised as to whether some compromise can be reached by everyone. I say that the only person in that room who will not compromise is the natural rights guy. His subjectivist friend has no basis on which to reject any compromise upon the principles of life, liberty and property other than her unexplained wants that are not entirely shared by the others. She may agree or disagree to compromise, but that freedom is closed to the natural rights guy provided he is to maintain the integrity of his position.
Alternatively, imagine this scenario: again we are setting up our lives in a new place that is as yet without any government. Some people attempt to organize a town hall meeting – and many people attend it. The natural rights guy, however, does not attend but sends a letter explaining his position (viz that the rights of life, liberty and property are natural to individual human beings in a social context) and urging them to agree with this and immediately abandon any differing proposals. Perhaps some people will be persuaded by the letter, but others will not be. Would the subjectivist attempt to stride a middle-ground here and claim that, whilst she may agree with the principles of the natural rights guy, the principles themselves are yet fundamentally uncertain and as a result she works to persuade a majority of the mere utility of these principles instead? Let’s even go a step further and assume she succeeds in persuading a majority of the utility of natural rights, whilst at the same time, disavowing precisely their “naturalist” character (i.e. basis in reality). Would this majority now be in a position to form a government? I say that they would be because the only thing they are standing on is an agreement to improve “utility”, though utility for what and for whom is not openly recognized. It is only a matter of time before the guiding principles of this utility – life, liberty and property – are forgotten and discarded because they stand in the way of improving the utility of some action (by a powerful individual or group) directed at a goal which infringes upon those principles themselves.
Are these little sketches any help?
I also think that real order is an emergent property of a free society and not a consequence of government intervention, so that is another reason why I favour anarchy over minarchy. I even think it may be possible for the free market to conduct (retaliatory) wars.
My general caveat in all this adherence to theory though, is that there are real monsters out there (our own governments included) and I thus favour any action that destroys or maims one monster without strengthening the hand of another monster. I was quite happy, for example, to see Tony Blair make the argument for destroying Saddam Hussein’s government.
I don’t have to explain my wants to enter into an agreement, just as I don’t have to explain my desire for a meal when I enter into an agreement to get it at a restaurant and pay for it. Besides, most of the time I don’t really need to explain them either, because these wants are shared by the majority of others. In the rare cases where they are not, I don’t enter into an agreement with people who don’t necessarily want to live and prosper and let others do the same (i.e. the aforementioned people whose idea of good and evil is different from mine). The hard work is dealing with people who do share my wants: they need to be shown that these wants have a much better chance of being satisfied through adherence to certain values. And here the problem is again two-part: people who share my wants, but do not share my values (i.e. people who are immoral – again, a minority), and people who share both my wants and my values, but do not see the importance of the adherence to the values in which they actually do believe (the overwhelming majority, I am sorry to say). This is where the really hard work is: fighting the common “wisdom” of ‘moderation is a virtue‘, and ‘compromise is a virtue‘, and ‘reaching across the aisle‘ crap.
“I don’t have to explain my wants to enter into an agreement.”
Not generally no, but you might do if you want to enter into some particular arrangement with me – because in certain cases that might be something I’d insist on, but that wasn’t where my emphasis lay. My worry is what ethical decisions a person who believes all ethics is subjective is going to make next. If one man’s past actions are known to be consistent with the logic of certain known principles (e.g. natural rights), then there is some basis on which to predict his future actions. The confidence such successful prediction can engender is one important basis of trust between people – I trust that man because I know what basic ethical values he acts for and why, and I also know that, barring some very peculiar event (e.g. brain damage from an accident) that he will continue to act for such values in the future. Such trust is not simply a result of repeated observation of a man’s actions – but of understanding the basis of those actions.
None of that is true with a person whose ethical decisions are based on “wants” – to the extent that the source of those wants remains unknown and only guessed at with some uncertainty. Without principles with which to guide action, such a person could well be capable of anything.
Now I am not saying that the above description fits you – in truth it doesn’t since I get the impression you are essentially in agreement with the natural rights of life, liberty and property (except of course for your insistence that they are subjective).
“And here the problem is again two-part: people who share my wants, but do not share my values (i.e. people who are immoral – again, a minority), and people who share both my wants and my values, but do not see the importance of the adherence to the values in which they actually do believe (the overwhelming majority, I am sorry to say).”
It’s interesting to me that you distinguish here between “want” and “value”. I hadn’t realized you had been thinking with this distinction in mind – and so I’m curious as to what that distinction is precisely. I ask because one definition of “value” (Ayn Rand’s) is – “that which one acts to gain or to keep”. With respect to the latter point you make (about good people who are merely a bit ignorant and/or stupid – i.e. share your wants and values, but do not recognize the importance of adhering to those values), I concur. I’m quite certain now that that is what I have been dealing with on my visits to a certain large firm for the past few weeks.
In any case Alisa, I am busier now than when we started this debate last week and I have one or two very time-consuming jobs to do in the next few days so it’s likely that I’m not going to get around to samizdata all that much until the weekend (maybe). I’ve enjoyed this discussion with you and I apologize for getting out of my seat a little bit earlier on. I suppose at times I might come across as a bit of a prick, but I believe that’s only a side-effect of the seriousness in which I hold these matters.
One of the things I’ll be trying to do this weekend is to sort out more presentational details (entailing an upgrading of photography equipment) for my new blog which will house all my letters to the Taipei Times. I’d welcome any suggestions for improvement if you’d care to have a look…
Mike, believing that ethics are derived from subjective value judgments is not the same as saying the ethics are subjective. Once I chose my values, my ethics are (to the best of my abilities) the objectification of those values (with caveats for epistemological factors).
It is the values that are subjective. Once you establish that you and somebody else have the same values then the ethics that serve those values are bound by reality and reason. The point I was trying to make earlier is that values (not ethics) are subjective. I am also interested in hearing Alisa’s distinction of ‘wants’ and ‘values’. To me it sounds like wants are things one, er, wants. Values are in your’s and Rand’s terms “that which one acts to gain or to keep”. Perhaps emotional desiring versus thoughtfully valuing.
The most fundamental value choice a human can make is ‘collectivist human identity’ or ‘individualist human identity’. There are many self contradictory values that can be held between these two pure states and it is by finding people who hold values that are best served by individualism and most harmed by collectivism that we must try to swing over to coherency. But for the people that truly do value a collective human identity, there is nothing we can do but defend and disrupt.
The weakness of collectivism is not that it is irrational, it is that the values it claims publicly and its true values as represented in its ethics are in conflict. It appeals to ‘wants’ that are best served by individualist human identity but adopts and advances ‘values’ that further the collectivist human identity. In short, collectivism lies to its enemies and targets. So do good military commanders. But that does not make them irrational, only dishonest.
Once again I point out that these conversations go to a much greater level of resolution that most of my conversations so I have trouble saying what is on my mind clearly. When I say contradictory things, please point them out so I can correct my phrasing. We are building new stuff here. Too bad we are all so busy.
Mike, it looks as if you and I are taking shifts working:this week turned out to be much saner than the last one. But still, it is late, and I’m several hours short on sleep from last week, and you are busy, so just that clarification you and Mid asked for: ‘wants’ are, obviously, things we want (mainly, life, and by extension: food and shelter, by further extension: property, etc.). ‘Values’ are the means/conditions to get the things we want. In other words, ‘wants’ are the ‘what’, and ‘values’ are the ‘how’. Do I steal food, or do I ask for it, or do I work for it? Is there anything or anyone I am willing to die for?
Mid, in light of the above, I don’t see an immediate difference between values and ethics, but I’ll think about it.
As always, my ‘eureka’ moments occur in the shower, so I had to come back for a moment to correct myself: values are not the ‘how’, principles are (AKA ‘ethics‘?).Values are just that: the value we attach to things we want, thus prioritizing them.
“Mike, believing that ethics are derived from subjective value judgments is not the same as saying the ethics are subjective. Once I chose my values, my ethics are (to the best of my abilities) the objectification of those values (with caveats for epistemological factors).”
Alright some of my earlier comments are guilty of conflating the two concepts of value and ethics. (Note to self: use “value” as a synonym for “preference”.) That’s a fair point of criticism.
“The point I was trying to make earlier is that values (not ethics) are subjective.”
I see what you mean. There is no argument against natural rights except insofar as one relegates the underlying valuation attached to life as an individual. Should a man attach greater value to membership of a nation than to his own individual nature, for example, then the entire ethical basis of natural rights loses its’ purchase – for him. Indeed, having made his choice, he may well go on to act in such a way as to forfeit any later claim to such rights.
This takes me back to the metaphysics. I have to be careful not to go context-dropping here, but there are two “ultimate” goals of action which an individual person may choose, one is survival and one is “thriving” (for want of a better term). It may be that in certain situations, particular individuals view the attainment of these goals through the lens of their membership of and participation in a collective, i.e. that the collective (e.g. the Party, the Police etc) becomes the only means they can understand by which they can stay alive and exert some control over their lives. Of course, in historical terms this may well have been true for many people – but to value this over and above any individualist alternative (even if only imagined) is to commit a metaphysical error. It is tantamount to saying “I prefer to be not-I” or perhaps even “I am not-I”, which is a straight up logical contradiction.
Since the nature and source of values is the living individual, any valuation which negates this fact is also self-negating. See my earlier comparison to grammar and semantics:
“Like: “This is not a sentence.” The negation is semantic but not grammatical, and since the concept of “sentence” is one that pertains to the category “grammar”, the negation fails. So in the kind of case we’re interested in, when a collectivist expresses something like…
“I am not an individual, but a member of ACORN.”
… then the negation is of the man-made, voluntary kind, but not the metaphysical kind, and since “I” is a metaphysical concept, the negation fails. It is just another example of the stolen concept fallacy.”
I agree with you entirely Mid when you say that “for the people that truly do value a collective human identity, there is nothing we can do but defend and disrupt.” Even though my position is that their metaphysical premise (the individual as “cell” in the “organism” society) is mistaken, that doesn’t mean I think they can be persuaded to desist by any other means than the threat of imminent destruction either to themselves as individuals or the collective they prize above themselves. I don’t think we have any differences on the question of who to persuade.
“Mike, it looks as if you and I are taking shifts working:this week turned out to be much saner than the last one.”
Heh. Well, however busy it gets, I’m happy at least that I chose my work voluntarily. I still want out though!
“I had to come back for a moment to correct myself: values are not the ‘how’, principles are (AKA ‘ethics’?).Values are just that: the value we attach to things we want, thus prioritizing them.”
Right: value as preference, ethics as the restriction of certain means and the sanctioning of others.
Exactly.
For the next paragraph, and much of the rest of the comment regarding the validity(?) of the collectivist choice, one can use for example the case that the source of life is life itself, but that does not stop living things from killing themselves. The basis for individuality is the possibility of most humans to live as an individual, but that does not stop them from ‘killing’ their individual self. I suspect that the major component of many religious and secular groups conversion or initiation processes is the ‘killing’ or abandonment of the ‘self’ or individual identity so that it can be replaced with the collective’s values, will and identity.
On terminology, it appears we could use some narrowed definitions. Here is a working proposal.
‘Values’ = moral values, ie ‘self ownership’
‘Preferences’ = values that do not have a moral component ie ‘chocolate versus strawberry’
‘Ethics’ = the rules one adopts that support and enforce a particular set of (moral) values
‘Principles’ is a problem in that it can be one or both of two completely different things. One is the case of moral principles, ie individualism v collectivism, theism/atheism (faith) versus agnosticism (non-faith/absurdism), and a great many flavors of ontological beliefs out there. The other is the usage that Alisa at August 19, 2009 12:00 AM, used. The ‘principle’ of something in the sense of ‘how it works’. I guess I tend to reserve ‘principles’ for cases where it is both, ie ‘collectivism versus individualism’; that has both a ‘how it works’ and an ontological component.
I hope Johnathan doesn’t mind us using one of his dead threads for a discussion. It is convenient for many reasons. It leaves the discussion available to both us and others for future reference and it allows some people who are too busy to follow a 6 day thread to have a thoughtful discussion. If you are still reading the thread Johnathan, maybe you can let us know.
“For the next paragraph, and much of the rest of the comment regarding the validity(?) of the collectivist choice, one can use for example the case that the source of life is life itself, but that does not stop living things from killing themselves. The basis for individuality is the possibility of most humans to live as an individual, but that does not stop them from ‘killing’ their individual self.”
I’m sorry Mid, you’re going to have to have another stab at that because it isn’t abundantly clear to me what point you are making. People kill themselves and sometimes kill themselves “for the greater good”. So what heretofore obscured point does that reveal? I say such people are committing a gross metaphysical error in attaching greater value to their membership of the collective than to themselves as individuals. What are you saying about it?
“I suspect that the major component of many religious and secular groups conversion or initiation processes is the ‘killing’ or abandonment of the ‘self’ or individual identity so that it can be replaced with the collective’s values, will and identity.”
Sure, I think that’s a plausible description of what’s going on there, but what point does that demonstrate? Again, I say the members of such groups are committing an enormous metaphysical error in doing so.
Incidentally, it occurs to me just now (should have done earlier) that your earlier example of the old lady who would prefer to die ostensibly “for the greater good” has another possible explanation. Could it not sometimes be that a person who has become so sad at her own terminal incapacity (e.g. from a debilitating disease) that she would prefer death merely does not want to admit this? Facing down death is one thing, but facing down irreversible pity may be quite another.
“On terminology, it appears we could use some narrowed definitions. Here is a working proposal. ‘Values’ = moral values, ie ‘self ownership’..”
When I think of the term “value” as a noun, I go to the Randian usage. Yet when I think of the term “value” as a verb (though perhaps that should be “evaluate”?) I go to the sense in which Von Mises uses it – i.e. to mean “to prefer”. Otherwise I can go along with that.
“I hope Johnathan doesn’t mind us using one of his dead threads for a discussion.”
Jonathan is such a prolific poster that I’d be surprised if he knows the three of us are still going at it on this thread! He’s probably busy with other things like looking for the next angle to bash Andrew Sullivan from… we could be calling him all kinds of rotten names and he wouldn’t know! 🙂
For the ‘old lady’ example, think of the grandfather and grandson in an airplane without power in the mountains and there is only one parachute. The grandfather elects to give it to his grandson as a value choice. That is quite easy for us to imagine. But now, in the role of the grandson, imagine society/the collective.
Is individualism something we are born with? Is it a seed that must be planted and nurtured? Is it something that blossoms in adolescence unless destroyed? I don’t know the answer and I am not sure it can be known. But I do know that its absence can be genuine. There is an article at the top of the front page right now about a Muslim women that desires to be publicly flogged for her sin. Laird’s benevolent hopes aside, I believe this could be genuine.
To get back to your question:
I don’t believe it is a metaphysical error. I believe that their case is a form of personal nihilism in which, in order to find meaning, they become part of something that can live at least theoretically to the end of time. They are not valuing membership in a collective; that would be a ‘cooperative’. They are in fact the collective itself. They cease to be ‘members’ and become an organic part of an organic being. They give up themselves as individuals and become a cell in the body of a collective. Some of them may think this through but for most of them I think it is significantly reflexive.
To anthropomorphize for a moment, imagine a single celled organism looking at an early multi-celled organism. Might it not look at the cells in the multi-celled organism as making a metaphysical mistake? The case is very similar. Individual cells abandoned capabilities they already had in order to live in a multi-celled identity.
I can’t imagine what could bring someone to willingly abandon their individualness and frankly I hope I never do understand it in any empathic way. But these people exist and they appear very normal to all but the most rigorous analysis. Survival in a collective hinges a lot on how well somebody adopts the bio-markers of the surrounding cells.
Sometimes you don’t recognize these people until you are in their presence when you both are in the presence of a third party that you personally reject. The chameleons /collectivist doesn’t know whether to be the person you like or to be the person the other guy likes and it is very traumatic for them. Barring outside action, they will generally either avoid situations where you and the person you reject meet or else abandon one person and stay part of the other’s circle.
Yes he would, Mike: he gets all these comments in his inbox the moment they are posted, and it is us who should be hoping that he doesn’t call us all kinds of rotten names for hijacking the thread and keeping at it for so long:-)
We are dynamic beings, Mike. We are born as individuals, but because we have free will (you don’t dispute that, do you?), we can later decide to stop acting like individuals and become part of a collective. And yes, it does lead to death, although not always physical. That’s an individual’s bug, but a collectivist’s feature.
What exactly is a ‘metaphysical error’?
Sorry, didn’t see you Mid:-)
“..he gets all these comments in his inbox the moment they are posted..”
Does he really? My word, that’d sharp fill up wouldn’t it? There are seventeen articles posted on the samizdata main page right now, some of which have over thirty comments! I don’t know how anyone could be bothered to have all of them sent to email.
“What exactly is a ‘metaphysical error’?”
Well it’s when you get your metaphysics wrong! What is metaphysics? Well Aristotle called it “first philosophy” – it’s about all the basics of reality – time, space, causality, existence and so on. “Ontology” is one part of metaphysics, which has to do with what things exist and how they relate to one another (e.g. how does the concept “man” relate to the concept “society”?). Ontology is the main thing we’re dealing with here.
So in our case, when I say that collectivists are guilty of making a “metaphysical error”, what I am saying is that they aren’t just acting on a subjective judgement which is as equally valid as any other – I am saying that such judgement is in error and the kind of error it is is very basic, i.e. metaphysical (though I could also be more specific and call it an “ontological error”). I say “error” but it could just as easily be “lie” in some cases.
There is a great scene in Donnie Brasco, when, after having killed the wrong guy on someone else’s orders, Lefty claims he is “a spoke on the wheel” – but the way he says it makes it look like he’s trying to shield himself from the truth Johnny Depp’s character is hitting him with. (You might want to play that clip from 3.45 onwards). That right there is a metaphysical error, but in Lefty’s case it isn’t an honest one.
No Mike, my question was about the possibility of a metaphysical error, as that would imply a known (as opposed to perceived) reality. Besides, as I have already pointed out, in my opinion the field of metaphysics is superfluous, seeing as physics is capable of explaining the same things quite nicely. But that is just an aside.
Let me try and sum up my POV, to un-muddy things a bit: I want to live and to do it in a certain way, for my own subjective reasons. Those reasons are based on my perception of reality. I fully realize that this perception is subjective and therefore can be wrong, but it is all I have to go by. I also realize that other people’s perception of reality is some times different from mine (due to perception being subjective by definition), resulting in them wanting things that are different from, and even diametrically opposed to the things I want. From my (and others’) subjective experience I conclude that it is impossible to change the way those people perceive reality, so I have no other choice but forcibly resist them, if I am to satisfy my desire to live the way I want. If at some later time, for whatever unlikely reason, my perception of reality were to change, then I would join the other camp. But, again, from my (and others’) subjective experience, that is highly unlikely.
“No Mike, my question was about the possibility of a metaphysical error, as that would imply a known (as opposed to perceived) reality.”
This is starting to get ridiculous – reality is known, but not without effort and the possibility of error.
“Besides, as I have already pointed out, in my opinion the field of metaphysics is superfluous, seeing as physics is capable of explaining the same things quite nicely. But that is just an aside.
OK then Alisa, since metaphysics is “superfluous” let me see your purely physical explanation of the problem of universals…
Edit:
“OK then Alisa, since metaphysics is “superfluous” let me see your purely physical solution to the problem of universals…
If you are getting impatient, we can always take a break of an undetermined length.
This is a contradictory statement, since the possibility of an error makes for an unknown element.
The question of universals may be an interesting one (and readily answerable by physics), but I certainly don’t see it as a problem.
“If you are getting impatient, we can always take a break of an undetermined length.”
I’ll take that, as I’m getting tired of this. Looking through my previous comments, I’m not even sure you read them fully, or if you have, you clearly haven’t understood, which makes me suspect you’re not going to understand any time soon and that I’m wasting my time here.