The initiation of violence

Commenter Rod tries to define "voluntary cooperation":

A society of voluntary cooperation means that there is no legal initiation of violence. There is however legal violence when a criminal initiates violence against someone's person or property, and by doing so forfeits his own right not to be violated.

Voluntary cooperation does not mean that violations of person and property will be absent or should go unpunished by a legal system. When a criminal initiates violence, the victim has the right to use violence for restitution and punishment.

I would definitely agree with Rod in that there are uses of violence I consider in some sense "legitimate", and others I consider in some sense "illegitimate". The problem with Rod's definition is it that includes property, and the interesting controversy is not about the initiation of violence, but rather about precisely what constitutes property.

Furthermore, if we take the literal meaning of the "initiation of violence" as "the first use or threat of physical force against a person" (few would constitute the use of physical force against a nonsentient object as a violation of that objects own rights; the use of force against "property" is a violation of the sentient owner's rights) then the acquisition of property entails the initiation of violence: I must be the first to use physical force against a person who attempts to expropriate or infringe on the use of my nonsentient property. To escape the conundrum, the Libertarian must define the "initiation of violence" as something other than the plain meaning of the phrase: It must mean the use of force in ways the Libertarian considers illegitimate. But that's the fundamental definition of every form of government: a type of government is defined by its distinction between the uses of violence considered legitimate and illegitimate. We have to wonder why Rod is trying to bullshit us by using an English phrase with an unambiguous and uncontroversial literal meaning to represent the abstract, non-defining case.

("Radical" Libertarianism, which does not include property, is coherent and has, as Eric Frank Russell describes, considerable appeal. It might or might not be viable or evolutionarily stable.)

There are only four definitions of "property". The first is the recognition of ownership by mutual consent. If, for example, I find your wallet on the street, I'm going to give it back to you because I do in fact agree that the wallet is your property. But if property is established by mutual consent, theft is logically impossible. If I actually do agree that some object is yours, why would I take it? Contrawise, if I take some object, by definition I do not agree that it is in fact yours. So on this definition there can be no "violence" against property rights; where violence exists, there is by definition no mutual agreement to establish property.

The second definition is "the objects a person can physically protect," i.e. those objects a person can successfully initiate actual violence to maintain possession or ownership of. This "might makes right" definition seems so obviously contradictory to Rod's formulation that we cannot attribute it to Libertarians, at least not the garden-variety sort.

The third definition is "the objects over which a person has ownership by virtue of a social process." This definition overcomes the problems of property by mutual consent and avoids the "might makes right" implications of the second definition. But the problem is that almost all modern societies, including our own, implement this definition of "property". (All societies everywhere throughout history implement this definition of property, if you include passive compliance with a king or other authoritarian regime as a "social process".) And if ownership can be granted by virtue of a social process, it can equally be taken away by that process. When the government taxes you, it is taking away ownership by the same means it granted it to you in the first place; it is inconsistent on this definition to assent to one and object to the other.

The fourth definition is "the objects over which a person has ownership by virtue of some natural right." This seems like the definition that most Libertarians would prefer to use. The problem with this definition is that any conception of "natural" rights are at least as complicated as any body of legislation. More importantly, there is no objective means to settle disputes over natural rights in the same sense that there is an objective means to settle scientific disputes. Trying to establish some basis for natural rights just moves the problem around: Why choose a basis that establishes a "natural" right to some object for one person over another that establishes a "natural" right for another person?

I'm in favor of the third option: property is ownership established by a social process. The question then becomes not about property per se or the initiation of violence, but what sort of social process we want, and what we want it to do or not do. If any Libertarian agrees with the third definition and would like to describe a social process that grants a "Libertarian" definition of ownership, I'm all ears, and I'll evaluate that candidate social process on the basis of whether it is in my own interests. If any Libertarian agrees with the fourth definition, and can give a coherent account of "natural" property rights that is at least as rigorously provable as scientific claims about natural law, I'm equally receptive.

The Stupid! It Burns! (default edition)

Default Positions, Atheism, and Fulfillment

Atheists claim that atheism is the default position that people take. Many atheists use this to bolster their philosophy of methodological naturalism in the sciences. ... I tend to agree with the atheist, but only to a point. ...

However, the atheist is claiming that naturalism is the true worldview. The default position in naturalism, though, is not atheism, as they believe. The default worldview of a person is relative to the culture in which the individual grows up. ... Atheists claim that it is wrong for someone to not investigate their worldview (I agree). They also claim that it is bad for us to abandon our "default" position (what they think is atheism).

I see a few issues...

Yeah, like you've completely mangled the concept of "default" position, and its use in scientific epistemology. <facepalm>

Geoff on SuperScholar and Sam

Geoff notes that SuperScholar’s list of the 25 most influential living atheists includes only four women, the top at #15. Geoff doesn't think that'll make Ophelia Benson happy; it certainly doesn't fill me with glee.

But he's more concerned about Sam Harris, "commanding a $50K honorarium and traveling with an entourage that includes a security detail (for his criticism of Islam), Harris is the “rock star” of contemporary atheists."

Geoff snarks, "Not bad for a mushy-minded, one-dimensional, tendentious, Wilber-admiring Trojan Horse for the New Age eh?"

Don't be shy, Geoff: Tell us what you really think.

(I'm not a huge Sam Harris fan either.)

Simple, statistical and emergent properties

Consider John Conway's Game of Life. This game is important because it gives us a conceptual handle on simple, statistical and emergent properties.

Briefly, we have a grid of cells, and each cell in the grid has a state: It can be "alive" or "dead" (or on/off, 1/0, etc.) The state of a cell is a simple property.

There are also statistical properties of a grid, such as the number of alive cells, the mean or median number of alive cells in some set of distinct arbitrarily-defined subgroups of cells (e.g. the mean or median number of alive cells in distinct squares of nine or sixteen cells, or the mean number of consecutive alive cells, etc.) We can define these sorts of statistical properties in terms of computability: A property is statistical if it can be computed for a finite grid by a polynomial of the size of the grid.

The Game of Life also specifies transformation rules: Given a grid G₀ of finite size, with some specific set of alive and dead cells, there is exactly one grid G₁ of the same size as G₀ that results from the transformation rules applied to grid G₀. It might or might not happen to be the case that G₀ and G₀ are identical. If G₁ is not identical to G₀, then we can apply the transformation rules to G₀ to determine grid G₂.

If we preserve the grid size during transformations, then we know that for every grid G, there is either a final grid G_n such that G_n is identical to G_n-1, or there is a final period of grids G_n,m (with count m - n) such that G_m+1 is identical to G_n. (A final grid is the same as a final period of grids of count 1). The maximum final period must be less than 2^s where s is the size of the grid. (It has to be strictly less because we know that some grids are part of are part of periods smaller than 2^s.) It should be clear that the final period of grids is determined exclusively by the initial grid G: For every grid G, there is exactly one final period of grids G_y,z. Thus the final period is ontologically reducible to the initial grid. (Note that a final grid is not necessarily epistemically reducible to the initial grid: There are many initial grids that produce the same final period of grids.)

However, we cannot generally compute the final period of grid G in polynomial time. For size-preserving transformation rules, we can generally compute the final period in only exponential time, i.e. 2^c, where c is less than the grid size s. We'll classify these properties as emergent.

Things get even more interesting when we do not preserve grid size. Conceptually, we can compute G_n+1 by first adding an extra margin of dead cells around G_n, applying the transformation rules, and then trim the result to the grid containing all the live cells. Alternatively, we can start with an enumeration of a finite number of alive cells, each with a position of finite size, and apply the transformation rules, which will result in another finite number of alive cells (which may be more or less than the original number) each with a position of finite size. Again, it seems clear that the result (whatever it happens to be) is strictly ontologically reducible to the initial state: one initial state will produce exactly one result.

The result can be strict periodicity such as a block or boat with count 2, or a blinker with count 2; or abstract periodicity such as a block plus a glider. But since the grid size is not constant, we are not assured even that there is always any periodicity, strict or abstract. So not only can we not generally calculate the computational complexity at all to determine the final period, we can't even generally tell in finite time if some finite initial state even has any final period. And yet we have not at all removed the conditions of strict ontological reducibility.

The Game of Life, and the notions of simple, statistical and emergent properties is not just interesting in and of itself, it has some interesting philosophical implications for both atheism and economics.

The value neutrality of reason

Erstwhile TSIB recipient Ayaz appears to have reformed and has moved on to more sensible positions. I withdraw the charge. Bygones.

In response to my query, Ayaz makes an interesting assertion:

There definitely are huge areas of human life over which reason can have no say. Reason is value-neutral and necessarily hypothetical. Reason essentially boils down to definitions. It can say if x is true, then not x must be false. But it can never provide reasons in themselves.

Reason might tell you that if you don't want to hurt others then don't do x,y and z and that's how secular ethics largely function. But as to why we shouldn't hurt others. Well we basically just assume that on trust/faith/instinct/basic principle.

It doesn't seem a huge problem as most of us agree on those basic tenants, but it's unsettling nonetheless that when the odd psychopath comes along we can't actually use reason to demonstrate why he's wrong, all we can do is disapprove.

I disagree here on a couple of points. First of all, I think we have to disambiguate logic from reason. I think what Ayaz defines as "reason", i.e. hypothetical and concerned with definitions, would be better characterized as logic. Reason, on the other hand, consists of a certain set of logical operations and modes of inquiry based in some sense* on perceptual facts. (If you prefer a different disambiguating term, e.g. science, that's fine. I'm not too hung up on terminology.) Logic is very broad, and includes kinds of operations that do not appear immediately relevant (e.g. the Banach-Tarski "paradox") to the real, physical world and the world of perception. Reason consists of particular kinds of logic and its application to draw conclusions about the real world using perceptions as — in some sense — a "foundation."

*I say "in some sense" because one particular sense, naive empiricism, which holds perceptual facts as specifically logical axioms from which we can draw formal deductions, does not appear viable.

This view of "reason" entails a deep sense in which reason is not just value-neutral but also fact-neutral. Reason doesn't tell us what we "ought" to perceive; we just use reason to draw conclusions about what the world has to be like based on what we actually perceive. Reason would work equally well, at least at the most fundamental level, even with an entirely different body of facts. (Based on earlier exercises of reason on perceptual facts, we tend to incorporate a lot of older conclusions (causality, for example) directly into our methodology (sometimes to our detriment). But there's a big difference between a fundamental metaphysical principle and merely taking something for granted because it's so well-established.)

We can say the same thing about the "value-neutrality" of reason. We can take values as (at some level) brute facts, just as our perceptual experiences are brute facts. They are simply properties of how individual human beings actually are. (Again, I say "at some level" because the supposed "brute facts" of subjective values are probably reducible to more fundamental brute facts of neurological operation. But presumably there are still some brute facts somewhere.)

We just are what we happen to be, that there's no fundamental "reason" why we "ought to be" some particular way. There's a causal story — we have a long biological evolutionary history, and a somewhat shorter social evolutionary history — but no teleological story. We are who we are because we happened to evolve this way; we have tried a minuscule fraction of the stupendous number of ways of living, and what we have today is what wasn't selected against of the ways we've tried. We could have by accident and happenstance turned out very differently. But we have had the accidents we've had and not others; physical law has exerted its selective forces; so here we are.

I've never felt at all unsettled or disturbed by this story. It doesn't bother me in the least that I don't have a teleological reason why the "psychopath" is wrong; I'm perfectly happy basing my response directly on my own and others' disapproval. To be honest, I don't really understand, at least not internally, why any atheist would feel such discomfort; I have to take them at their word. My only response is that feeling uncomfortable without a teleological ethical narrative is no more probative than feeling uncomfortable that the physical world might not be the product of a deity's intentional design. Reason is reason, and the conclusion that our values are just complicated properties of our complicated, evolved brains seems inescapable. Simply wishing the world were more in line with our emotional prejudices doesn't change the world. And I think Ayaz wants to look outside reason for a moral narrative precisely because he doesn't like the moral narrative that reason does give us. There isn't any way the world — and human society is part of the world — "ought to be"; there is only the world as it is, and what we as physical, finite, limited, evolved creatures make of it.

The Democratic Power Class

Matt Stoller: Understanding the Strategy of the Democratic Power Class:

It isn’t that [Obama is] not fighting, he fights like hell for what he wants. He whipped incredibly aggressively for TARP, he has passed emergency war funding (breaking a campaign promise) several times, and nearly broke the arms of feckless liberals in the process. I mean, when Bernie Sanders did the filiBernie, Obama flirted with Bernie’s potential 2012 GOP challenger. ...

The lack of willingness to fight on behalf of the public isn’t the same of an unwillingness to fight. It’s just their unwillingness to fight anyone but you.

The subtleties of political and economic philosophy

The fundamental mistake I think that Libertarians make (besides being obtuse) is that the question is not whether or not we should have "liberty", but rather what kind of liberty do we want, and what kinds do we not want. There is, I think, something fundamentally intellectually dishonest about casting the kind of liberties you like as "liberties" and casting the kind of liberties you don't like as "coercion" or "oppression" or "hierarchical authority". This kind of discourse conflates an objective evaluation with a normative evaluation. I'm all for both objectivity and normativity, but they are fundamentally different kinds of discourse, fundamentally different kinds of arguments to establish fundamentally different kinds of positions.

There are of course still real "authoritarians", but the core authoritarian principle — that submission to authority is itself a good — is not really that popular, and those who state it explicitly are marginalized. Instead, a softer kind of authoritarianism generally cloaks itself in the language of small-ell libertarianism: some elite deserves privilege because only that elite — the owners of capital, the spokesmodels for God, the ideologically pure party — can establish and maintain the kind of liberties we want.

Objectively, liberty is doing what you want, with no social consequences for actually doing it. It's just not that hard. There are some liberties we know we want: I want, for example, the liberty to be an atheist, free of social consequences even though the majority of the population finds atheism objectionable. There are some liberties we know we don't want: I don't want — and I definitely don't want other people to have — the liberty to hit people on the head if you don't like them. Once we've made these normative judgments, we can start to describe them in objective terms, but we have to make the objective distinctions post hoc: It may be objectively true that in general we tend to actually dislike liberties that directly cause material harm, but it is not in any sense objectively true that we ought to dislike liberties that directly cause material harm.

So when I'm hearing about your political philosophy, I really don't care about the direct moral quality of your fundamental principles. Just saying you're for "liberty" and against "coercion" tells me little other than that — like everyone else — you're for everything good and against everything bad. I want to know what you consider good and bad; I want to know how those principles work out in the real world: What kinds of actual behavior among actual human beings as they exist today would those principles socially permit or constrain?

For example, I just don't want Bill Gates to have tens of billions of dollars, to use as he sees fit. I'm more-or-less pleased that he doesn't use his billions to be as gigantic an asshole as, say, the Koch brothers, but I don't want to depend on his good will to exercise so much economic power. I don't think there's really any reasonable sense in which we can say Gates "earned" his money (except in the tautological sense similar to "it's at the end of his arm, it must be a hand*," i.e. he has it, therefore he must have earned it.) But fundamentally I really don't care whether or not he "earned" it; he has way more economic power than I'm comfortable with any individual person having. In much the same sense, I don't want individuals to have private armies or police forces, no matter how or why they were able to assemble them.

*Two thousand internets if you can name the reference.

There are two options: either show me how your political system really does prevent the collection of such a large fortune, or show me how the collection of such a large fortune is in my interest, or in the interest of the vast majority of people (and why I should not care about those whose interests are not served.)

It's not really helpful to me to say you're against "coercion" or "hierarchical authority". Neither term has a particularly relevant objective definition. Coercion is the use of force or violence for ends you don't like; hierarchical authority is authority used in ways you don't like. What I really want to know is: What kind of a day-to-day behavior do you want? How does your system make that behavior happen? How do we keep the system from making a society I don't like? Broad outlines are acceptable to some extent, but I really want to make sure you're not just ignoring some of the considerable practical and philosophical complexities of politics and economics.

Let's look at a common Libertarian cliché: People should keep what they earn. Sounds good, but what does that principle really mean? Did Bill Gates actually earn tens of billions of dollars? How do we know, other than that we know he actually has that much money and he's never been convicted of putting a gun to someone's head. The principle that people should be able to keep whatever they get their hands on without using obvious violence or outright fraud sounds a lot less appealing, at least to me. Additionally, even a superficial study of economics reveals that "earn" is an extremely vague, ambiguous term. Do you mean an exchange of equal cost, or an exchange of equal use-value? Who decides the use-value of something? If it's an exchange of cost, should it be an exchange of individual unit cost, average cost, marginal cost, median cost, maximal cost or some other statistical property of cost? Most political and economic concepts have a lot of these kinds subtle implications; I want to see someone who advocates some political system to explore these subtleties.

I'm more than happy to discuss the subtleties of my own political-economic positions at considerable length, so long as I'm not being blatantly hectored or abused. Angrily denounce me a Stalinist and I'll dismiss you as an idiot; ask me how I would avoid Stalin's fucked-upedness and I'd be happy to discuss it.

9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along

9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along

The Stupid! It Burns! (moral law giver edition)

Atheists & Morality (Again)

I affirm that atheists teach morality; I deny that atheists are nessesarily immoral. [Damn White of you, Smith] ... The moral argument says that atheists are moral,, but they have no grounds for their morality outside of a moral law giver.

The defining literature of Evolution

Xunk: Evolution is obviously false!

Snikwad: What are you talking about? Evolution is an extremely well-supported scientific theory.

X: What is evolution?

S: Without going into the considerable complexity of the theory, it's natural selection working on heritable variation.

X: How is this "heritable variation" supposed to work?

S: By genes. You know, DNA, C-A-G-T.

X: Nonsense! There's nothing at all about "genes" or "DNA" in the defining literature of evolution. Search as you might, you'll find nothing about "genes" in Darwin, Wallace, or Huxley.

S: Well, we discovered genes after those pioneers died.

X: Whatever. If it's not in Darwin, it's not evolution.

S: Fine. Whatever. We'll call it something different. Would you prefer "genetic evolution"?

X: It's still got "evolution" in it.

S: How about the "New Synthesis"?

X: New Synthesis of what?

S: Well, of evolution.

X: There's that "evolution" nonsense again.

S: Good grief. OK, if it'll make you happy, we'll make up a new word: Call it "Qwghlm theory".

X: Does this "Qwghlm theory" talk about heritable variation and natural selection?

S: Well, yes, of course.

X: So it's evolution.

S: Well, yes, but...

X: What, do you think you can fool me by calling a failed theory by a different name?

S: Seriously? Are you even sane?*

*With apologies to Justin Jason

---

There's a point to this exercise: a commenter recently challenged me to find "in any of the defining literacy [sic*] of communism (Marx, Lenin's, Trotsky's books, your choice) any defense of democracy, individual liberties, free speech etc." Despite being completely false (there are lots of defenses of democracy, individual liberty, etc. in communist literature), the demand itself is completely absurd. It would be completely irrelevant even if there weren't any defense at all of these items in the past.

*English is not Knux's native language; his meaning is nonetheless clear.

If I talk about the social ownership of the means of production, no matter what else I say, I'm talking about communism. If I call it something else — "democratic communism", "socialism", "communitarianism", "Qwghlm theory", whatever — I would be accused — with some justice — of obfuscating what I was talking about... i.e. communism. So I call myself a communist, and I myself — not Marx, not Lenin, not Mao, and certainly not what some idiot on the internet — get to decide what I mean by "communist".

I hold the opinions I hold, and I say what I say. If you want to criticize what I actually say, then fine. Everything I have to say is freely available here on the blog. If you want to criticize what Marx said, or what Lenin, Trotsky or Mao said, or what anyone else said, find out what they actually said — most of it is freely available on the Internet — and criticize that. Accusing me of holding opinions I do not hold on the basis of what some guys said decades ago — or what you imagine they might have said — is not just ridiculous but dishonest.

It's really interesting: When they're not just lying outright, creationists focus a lot on errors and flaws (real and supposed) of scientists decades ago (Haekel's embryos, Darwin's eye, Piltdown man, etc.) If a scientist sneezed a hundred years ago, evolution is responsible for the common cold. They almost never talk about science that's happening today (except to mangle it almost beyond recognition). Similarly, every idiot critic of communism wants to talk about everything but the social ownership of capital.

There's no such thing as the defining literature of communism. The "defining literature" of communism, at least the kind of communism I'm talking about, is not found in Marx or Lenin or Mao or anyone else. The "defining literature" of communism is reality.