Why is Dalkey Press doing this?

The pool of candidates for positions will be primarily derived from unpaid interns in the first phase of this process, although one or two people may be appointed with short-term paid contracts. . . .

The Press is looking for promising candidates . . . [who] do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.) . . .

Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.

I don't think it's just because they're exceptionally assholy. They're doing this because they can. All of the neoliberal policies of the last 30-40 years, as Corey Robin has made a career of describing, have increased the near-absolute power employers can wield over their employees.

(via PZ Myers)

Violence and the state

In his comment on Qeustions about libertarian socialism, Charles Magney makes a number of interesting points.

According to Charles, the theory for how to resolve differences of opinion "is 'don't use violence'. When it comes to non-obvious non trivial decisions, then stop threatening and killing eachother [sic]." In one sense, Charles' statement is no more a theory than "don't get sick" is a theory of medicine, or "throw yourself at the ground and miss" is a theory of levitation.

In another sense, to the extent that Charles' statement really is a theory, it seems too obvious and common to be useful. most modern societies, including our own, already hold this theory: we use social processes, not violence, to come to agreement about controversial issues. When we have a difference of opinion, for example, about who should be president, we don't (as we used to do to resolve differences about who should be King), have each candidate organize an army and fight it out. We conduct a (mostly) peaceful election, and the one with the most votes gets to be president. When we want to decide whether or not we should increase or decrease taxes, or whether to allow people to wear saggy pants or camp on Wall Street, we have some elected representatives deliberate and create a law. We actually do resolve our differences peacefully, most of the time. Again, I don't understand how this theory differs from a bog-standard capitalist republic.

I'm not, of course, trying to argue for capitalist republicanism. But I have a definite theory that substantively differs from capitalist republicanism: I want a very specifically and substantively different kind of social process than capitalist republicanism: true democracy (the people, not their representatives, actually rule) and social ownership of the means of production. I still don't know specifically what kind of social process libertarian socialists actually want. If they want some social process, well, we have a social process. What's wrong with it? What should be different?

Charles conflates the state with extortion, and misunderstands the causation of legitimacy and the monopoly of violence:

The state is only able to get away with this stuff [that Charles doesn't like] because they have a monopoly on force to extort their blood money from people. Basically, libertarians just don't think "being the state" grants them any special pleading ethical immunity to phohibitions of violence.

This is a minor but important technical error. The state does not have a monopoly on violence because it is the state, the state is the state because the citizens have granted it a legitimate monopoly on violence. It's not this alien institution dropped from outer space to oppress the human race, it is a creature of humans to manage and employ the violence that is part of our objective, physical natures.

Charles objects to taxation by "violence": "[I]t's not the 'tax' that is the problem. it is how that state gets the taxes (not voluntarily)." But I don't know what "voluntary" means in this context. Again, there are two ways of interpreting "voluntary." The first is in the vacuous sense: every action we take other than things like accelerating towards the center of the Earth at 10 m/s² is voluntary. If a man holds a gun to my head, you can bet I will voluntarily give up my wallet. Obviously, I don't think Charles or anyone else attaches any moral distinction to this sense of voluntary. The other sense is that an action is "voluntary" when it is taken absent any coercion. In this sense, then, any social system that has the potential for free-ridership becomes untenable. You can, of course, get a "Gandhian" system, but such a system would require political socialization so very different from that which presently obtains that it starts to fade into Utopianism. (And even the Gands coerce each other, albeit subtly.)

Of course, we could take a more nuanced, subjective, view of volunteerism. For example, an action is "voluntary," i.e. legitimate, when it is the result of a social process to which the participants voluntarily participate in. But we're back to no difference between libertarian socialism and republican capitalism. Our taxes are the result of a social process all the citizens voluntarily participate in. (We do not, at least in the Western industrial republics, coerce anyone into staying in the country.) Indeed, it is the conformance with this social process that substantively distinguishes taxation from Charles' specious comparison of taxation with extortion. So Charles' conception of volunteerism is on the horns of a trilemma: vacuity, Utopianism, or triviality.

Charles certainly does not like the outcome of the current social process:

Personally, I'm not anti-tax. When I work, I would be more than willing to contribute to the community. The more services that are publicly provided, the more I would be willing to contribute.

However, we live in a society without adequete housing, medical care, and food for the poor. Yet, our tax burden (on avergae) is around 50% (after state, local, federal, sales,gas, property, etc...). Like Thoreau, as long as that money is spent on murdering children in other nations,destroying communities here, and givng handouts/privileges to corporations, I think it is more than ethical to not pay.

I share his objections. But simply saying that the outcome of a social process is not to one's liking is not an objection to that social process. Presumably, our tax money is spent on murdering children, etc. because that's what most people actually want, or are at least willing to tolerate. Legitimacy is and has been popular since the beginning recorded history. There are plenty of examples where the people have withdrawn their legitimacy, and when the people withdraw legitimacy, no institution, however violent, can long stand.

There's a difference between moral and political objections: a moral objection is an objection to some particular outcomes; a political objection is an objection to the social process itself. There are some people in every political system who will have moral objections to its outcomes: they believe that the rest of the citizenry is acting immorally or holding immoral beliefs. Such objections are, I think, always legitimate per se, but I don't see that the argument, "Political system X has outcomes I personally morally object to, therefore system X is objectively illegitimate," to hold any water. You don't like that the government spends tax money on murdering children? Great. Neither do I. There's a social process in place, use it to stop the murder of children. If you can't do so (and I think you can't), you need to tell me why you can't, and what kind of social process could stop the murder of children and maintain popular legitimacy.

It's a tricky problem.

Either we have a "state" (in the broadest sense as an organization with a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence) or we do not. If we endorse any kind of state, then the discussion stops being about whether or not we have a state, and starts being about what kind of state we want, and why we want that kind of state. There's almost infinite room for the latter kind of discussion. What I object to as intellectually dishonest is calling the state necessarily immoral, arguing that we should not have any state at all, and then advocating for what is in effect a state on the grounds that we're not calling it a state.

American politics as Advance Fee Fraud

Come on, just the tip:

[S]mall, incremental victories mean little to me in the context of the long, steady, thirty-plus year downward slide toward a lower standard of living that has defined post-1980 America. . . .

Like any good con, it's always the next sacrifice that will be the one that does it, the magic bullet that finally solves the problem. And then when it doesn't, there will be just one more next year, and then maybe another one a few years from now, and then…ten or twenty years pass and we don't even remember what it was we were promised when we starting cutting flesh, and we're reduced to hoping that the next sacrifice will be enough to keep us from losing the house.

Modeling and Control of Complex Dynamics

via Daniel Little

Philodor's parable

May a nation of a million beings destroy a creature who otherwise will infect all with a fatal disease? Yes, you will say. Once more: ten starving beasts hunt you, that they may eat. Will you kill them to save your life? Yes, you will say again, though here you destroy more than you save. Once more: a man inhabits a hut in a lonely valley. A hundred spaceships descend from the sky and attempt to destroy him. May he destroy these ships in self-defense, even though he is one and they are a hundred thousand? Perhaps you say yes. What then if a whole world, a whole race of beings, pits itself against this single man? May he kill all? What if the attackers are as human as himself? What if he were the creature of the first instance, who otherwise will infect a world with disease? You see, there is no area where a simple touchstone avails. We have searched and found none. Hence, at the risk of sinning against Survival, we — I at least; I can only speak for myself — have chosen a morality which at least allows me calm. I kill — nothing. I destroy — nothing. (ch. 2)

Jack Vance, The Last Castle, Spatterlight, 2012 [1965], Kindle Edition.

Self-ownership

According to Charles Magney, Libertarianism

all stems from one first principle, "self ownership". Past that it is a big chain of reasoning from that first premise:

1. You own yourself. You have sole ethical jurisdiction over your body, and self determinism.
2. You owned yourself in the past, and you own yourself in the future.
3. If someone takes materials that you labored on in the past, they have taken your labor, which violates your determinism.
4. If someone takes your liberty, they have taken your self determinism.
5. If someone takes your life, then they have taken your self determinism in the future.
6. Since no one has the right to do those things, then they also do not have the right to delegate those activities to another, no matter how many of them there are.

But I'm not sure the first premise is reasonable or useful.

First of all, ownership is typically understood as a social construct. A person owns a particular thing just because that is the preponderance of opinion in a society (or would be the preponderant opinion if all individuals were to examine the social facts). People might or might not use some physical facts to come to that opinion, but it still remains: if most people in a society, and especially those with superior coercive power, such as the government, do not believe you own something, then you don't own it.

Thus, the sense of the premise "you own yourself" seems ambiguous. Does that mean a social construct does in fact presently exist? A social construct that should exist? An individual construct that individual Libertarians would like to exist? Or is it an objective fact: anyone who does not hold the idea of self-ownership is mistaken in the same sense they would be mistaken if they believed the Earth was flat?

Second, ownership is typically understood as a complex construct. It includes the components of positive and negative control, right to determine and derive benefit, right to destroy, and right to sell (alienability). Alienability is a legal principle that if I appear to give something to someone, but I don't give them the right to sell it, then I still own it. We do not, as typically understood, own something (at least not completely) if we do not have the right to sell it. Thus, if I really do own myself, then I ought to have the right to sell myself, which would seem to suborn slavery.

Third, it's just odd to use the concept of ownership to describe the self. Ownership is typically used to talk about the self's relationship to material objects; My self has a qualitatively, perhaps fundamentally, different relationship with my body and brain that it does with the material objects in my possession.

Fourth and finally, the premise seems either too restrictive or vacuous. Interpreted superficially, the statement, "You have sole ethical jurisdiction over your body, and self determinism," seems to preclude legitimatizing any coercion. If I really do have sole ethical jurisdiction over my body, than any coercion, even in self-defense or as punishment for infringing on others' ethical jurisdiction over their bodies, seems illegitimate. If someone want to kill someone else, it is illegitimate for me to interfere at all: I would be interfering with the would-be killer's sole ethical jurisdiction over his or her own body.

On the other hand, if we relax our conditions for legitimacy, then self-ownership becomes irrelevant. The real meat of the political philosophy would consist of the exceptions to self-ownership and sole ethical jurisdiction. The analysis, then, would ask why one exception would be legitimate but another illegitimate.

Even if the concept were coherent and internally consistent, I just don't see how one can derive anything but absolute law-of-the-jungle individualism from the premise of self-ownership. Self-ownership is a red herring; the premises from which anyone could derive a workable political/social system are all unstated.

Do the ends justify the means?

Do the ends justify the means? To understand this question we have to deconstruct it. There are, I think, three ways to look at this question. First, we can say that we can ethically judge only the means: good ends, whatever they might be, are just the ends that results from good means; on this view, the ends cannot justify the means. Second, we can say that we can ethically judge only ends; good means, whatever they might be, are just those that result in good ends. The third is to say that we can judge both the means and the ends, and sometimes we have to weigh the good of the ends against the bad of the means (and vice-versa): sometimes we might have to employ bad means to obtain a good end (e.g. lying to the Nazis to hide the Jews); sometimes we have to accept bad ends to employ good means (e.g. risking a Romney victory by not voting for Obama because he's insufficiently progressive). The first is usually labeled deontic ethics, the second pragmatic ethics, and the third is a mixture, juxtaposition, or dialectical combination of deontic and pragmatic ethics.

All three constructions are problematic.

Deontic ethics have an essentially epistemic problem: how do we know whether some means are intrinsically good or bad, independently of the ends? We have our intuitions about means, but how do we know our intuitions are accurate? Remember, for everyone who asserts that lying or killing is intrinsically wrong, independently of the outcome, there's another who asserts that atheism, or homosexuality, or equal rights for women or black people, etc. is intrinsically wrong, regardless of the outcome that would result from tolerating the intrinsic wrong. But how do they know? By definition, we cannot evaluate the intrinsic ethical character of some means by looking at their ends, so what can we observe to determine the character of means, especially when there's controversy about people's intuitive opinions of means?

Pragmatic ethics suffer from the "Omelas" problem, from Ursula LeGuin's story. What if we really could achieve very great positive ends (the deep "spiritual" fulfillment of a whole society) by small but horrific means (the unremitting torture and degradation of a single child)? It intuitively seems that there are some acts that shock our consciences so deeply that even though the harm is relatively small, no possible gain could justify it, especially when the harm is intentionally inflicted, rather than accidentally occurring. That there are some means that seem so desperately wrong that no ends could possibly justify them deeply challenges pragmatism.

A mixed strategy just brings in both problems without resolving either.

Fundamentally, I've come down on the pragmatic view. We can, in theory, judge only ends, not means; it therefore trivially follows that the ends justify the means. We can see people's happiness and suffering more directly than we can see the ethical value of means, and our judgment of happiness and suffering (broadly defined) as good and bad, respectively, seem relatively uncontroversial. Once we accept that human (or sapient, or sentient) happiness and suffering are morally relevant, our epistemic problem disappears.

But the pragmatist must explain our intuition that means really do have intrinsic moral character. Even (and perhaps especially) if these intuitions were completely erroneous, why would we have them? Why do they seem so compelling? Why do some walk away from Omelas? Why do we have very different intuitive reactions to the different constructions of the Trolley Problem, even though the outcomes seem exactly identical?

Although pragmatism solves the foundational epistemic problem posed by deontic ethics, it has its own practical epistemic problem. We cannot know all the ends that will from any means even in the short term, and we know no ends at all in the long term. Theoretically, a pragmatic philosophy must look at every implication of every actions, however trivial, until the end of time, to make an optimal choice. This kind of infinite analysis seems entirely impossible.

A curious paradox! We can know what the means are exactly, but we have no basis to judge them. We can judge the outcomes consistently, but we cannot know completely and exactly what they actually will be. We cannot judge what we can know, and we cannot know exactly what we can judge.

However, while the epistemic problem of deonticism seems fundamentally unsolvable, the epistemic problem of pragmatism is at least partially tractable. We cannot analyze outcomes completely, but we can often analyze outcomes well enough to make justifiable decisions. We can, for example, analytically predict with measurable confidence that laws against murder really will result in greater overall happiness, with the benefits clearly outweighing the drawbacks, even though we don't completely know the outcome in precise detail. If chance* really does exist, then chance seems to be proportional to distance and time: it is impossible to predict the effect that my eating eggs in the US for breakfast this morning will have on a middle-class family in China because all the chance between me and them renders the effects of my actions unpredictable.

*In the sense of in-principle unpredictability, which is compatible with ontological determinism.

In addition to our reasonable analytic capacity, we also develop our pragmatic understanding from cultural evolution. We know from history, for example, that people seem happier and suffer less in societies that have a particular range of liberty, somewhere between absolute submission to authority and chaotic, uncoordinated individualism. This finding is not directly analytical, but seems scientifically supported by a study of history. Thus, there is evidence that our moral intuitions about means is just our accumulated understanding of what has and has not pragmatically worked in the past; it's not some mystical judgment about the means themselves, independent of any possible ends.

Indeed, I've argued before, the main problem with Omelas (and related arguments) are their lack of realism. It's difficult to believe that the torture of a child really could result in the spiritual fulfillment of a whole society. We might be reacting negatively to the torture of a child simply because, on some intuitive level, we do not believe that such torture really could have good results; we might really object that the result of the torture could not possibly be as LeGuin describes it. Other counter-arguments, such as the Trolley Problem, can be similarly recast in pragmatic/habit forms.

We cannot differentiate between deontic and pragmatic meta-ethics directly by experiment. Every pragmatic conclusion can be recast as a deontic conclusion, simply by saying that it's irrelevant that deontically good means tend to have pragmatically good ends, simply because we've become conditioned to approve of the ends that come from good means, just as in a pragmatic philosophy, we say that we become conditioned to deontically approve of the means that generate good pragmatic ends. We can, however, differentiate between deontic and pragmatic meta-ethics metaphysically: pragmatism is simpler and more direct than deonticism, with fewer ontological entities. Hence, pragmatism is a better meta-ethical system than deonticism.

What gives you the right?

A friend of mine asked me yesterday, "What gives a society the right to coerce [some] of its members?" He didn't ask this question rhetorically, he believes that sometimes society really does have the right to coerce its members, so he wants to know where these rights come from, and how we know what they are.

My friend has stated earlier that he's a moral objectivist and perhaps a realist: morals, values, ethical principles really do exist, independently of our opinions about them, and we can (somehow) know they are true. I, however, have a different view. I have written at some length on meta-ethical subjective relativism, where I hold that our moral beliefs are fundamentally related to our subjective natures.

From my subjective relativistic view, I see our use of language to discuss rights is confused and sometimes fundamentally in error, especially when we draw conclusions from linguistic habits. We talk about "rights" as if they were objects "out there" in the world, in the same sense that rocks and trees, or physical laws, are "out there." But they're not. Instead, "rights" refer to two different, but related, kinds of subjective facts. First, rights refer to explicit, socially constructed legal or customary standards of behavior. The First Amendment and its associated jurisprudence, for example, establish the legal right, and the limitations of that right, of free speech. But legal rights don't exist in a vacuum; we create the legal right to recognize certain facts about the minds of people, i.e. subjective facts. First, people want free speech, at least for themselves individually. Second, we have found from experience that when we legally protect speech, our society operates more smoothly, peaceably, and responsively.

Meta-ethical subjective relativism is a fundamentally pragmatic philosophy. It's not about what we should do whether we like it or not; it's about our preferences, what we actually do like. Of course, our preferences are not infinitely labile; we are products of our biological and cultural evolutionary history, and this history constrains our actual preferences, our available preferences, and how preferences change over time.

Similarly, the natural world constrains our preferences, both individually and socially. Given how things are today, some changes in one individuals' preferences cannot easily propagate to others, and eventually disappear. Other changes in preferences result in social collapse in cultural "group selection" events, such as revolutions, conquests, military defeats, again causing those preferences to disappear from people's minds, or become so marginal that they do not much influence our overall society and culture.

So what "gives" society the right to coerce some of its members? That should be obviously not a well-formed question. Rights are not objects that can be given or received. Instead, people assert rights, and, if the right becomes sufficiently popular, begins to enforce it. People create rights, such as the right to not be murdered, because they want to live in safety. People create the government's right to tax themselves and their neighbors because they want public goods such as roads, bridges, schools, police, etc., and they want to manage the allocation of resources by taxation, because they believe that's the most effective and efficient way to obtain those public goods. Indeed we can say that a society, as opposed to some random collection of people, is defined by the rights its members hold in common.

Rights are social constructs, they are aggregate statistical features of the minds of people in a society. In any society, but especially in large societies such as most modern nations, none of these social constructs are assented to by everyone. Societies, therefore, create "meta-rights": what rights must an individual affirm to remain a member of society. These meta-rights range from the absolute (enthusiastically affirm every right in word or deed or die) to the pluralistic (some rights demand conformance in behavior or suffer punishment or death, but verbal dissent does not remove one from the society), with many gradations in that range.

Since rights are social constructs, any individual can challenge a right merely on his or her own preference. If you would prefer we manage our society without taxation, you may, in a pluralistic society such as our own, speak out and say so with neither permission nor legal consequence, on no authority but your own. The rub is, of course, that to change a right, which is a social construction, you must not only dissent from it, but convince enough other people to dissent from the right that it becomes socially "unconstructed." Thus, we socially constructed, for example, that alcohol was bad, and unconstructed the right to consume alcohol, and constructed the right for the government to punish people who bought, sold, transported or consume alcohol. Thirteen years later, we decided that was a bad idea, and reconstructed the individuals' right and unconstructed the government's right.

But what if "the people" socially construct an "unjust" right? Suppose, for example, they decided that freedom of speech was no longer either a shared preference nor a valid legal principle? Wouldn't they be mistaken, in the same sense that, for example, people who do not admit the scientific validity of evolution are just mistaken? Isn't it true in some sense that freedom of speech is a "natural" right?

Under an objectivist view, a natural right is a right that is true even if everyone were to believe it false, in again exactly the same way that evolution was true even when everyone believed it false, and in the same sense that some profound new theory of physics we may discover in a hundred years is true today even though today no one believes it. But this view is epistemically problematic. How could we know such a natural right? We cannot know it by scientific means. We know that a scientific law is actually true by never observing an exception, but of course we observe people contravening even those rights that we do hold, much less those we do not hold (because no one believes them). It seems that the only way to hold this kind of natural right as true is by divine or mystical revelation.

In the subjectivist view, a "natural" right is one that most people actually hold, due in some sense to the more-or-less fundamental biological or cultural evolution of our minds, or a right that is more consistent than its opposite with other rights that most people actually hold. A right that almost no one holds is not presently a natural right, but if human nature changes (and we are changing, biologically and culturally; change is inevitable), it might become a natural right.

We talk about the difference between natural and legal rights simply because historically, many governments have functioned with only minimal popular legitimacy. These governments regularly operated in ways that shocked the consciences of its own populace. The government didn't abridge an objectively true right, it abridged the subjective sensibilities of its own people.

I think this subjective view of rights accords more closely with history. Our changing views of rights, governments, ethics, are, unlike science, not a matter of conforming more and more closely with objective truth but a matter of reflecting how our culturally- and socially-constructed minds decide what kind of society we actually prefer, and how those preferences change over time.

Libertarianism ad nauseam

Andrew Louis comments:

I've commented at length on my blog, but in short I'd say the major disagreement that you still seem to be standing on shaky ground with the idea of objectively determinable - i.e. you can't go from possession to ownership (as in, I'm being robbed, someone is taking my property) and still call that plainly objective with a context within which to define ownership.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just not being clear.

First, any short article has to take a lot for granted. The best I can do is try to be explicit about anything controversial I'm taking for granted. It's not really helpful to say, "Well, you have no justification for taking this or that for granted." Well, duh. That's what it means to take something for granted. The question is, how does taking or not taking this or that for granted actually change the argument? The same goes for distinctions of convenience. How does making a different distinction affect the argument? Louis and Horowitz do point out that yes, I'm taking things for granted, and yes, I'm making some distinctions of convenience that might have some gray areas, but I don't see in their work how it affects my argument.

More importantly, I do not go "from possession to ownership... and still call that plainly objective." Louis is skipping over the important bit. I explicitly define ownership as subjective and socially constructed. The question is, how do we evaluate social constructions? One method of evaluation is to say that we can socially construct political judgments (judgments of justice and injustice) only on the basis of objectively determinable facts. If we make different socially constructed political judgments about two situations where the relevant objective facts are the same, we are being inconsistent or hypocritical. Another method of evaluation is to say that we can socially construct not only on the basis of objective facts, but also on subjective facts, such as agreements, laws, etc. If we have agreed, for example, that citizens must pay taxes, or that renters must pay rent, then that agreement becomes relevant: we can consistently and non-hypocritically have different political judgments of two cases with the same objective facts, because they are distinguished on subjective facts, i.e. we might recognize that an agreement exists in one case, and no agreement exists in another.

I want to emphasize again that I do not believe that political and ethical judgments must necessarily be objectively consistent as in the first case above. I am introducing the distinction because I have with my own ears heard Libertarians argue that taxation are objectionable, regardless of any social constructions, because it has the same objective facts as other cases we judge as unjust expropriation. They also argue, however, that enforcement of agreements is permissible, even though they have the same objective facts as unjust expropriation, because of the existence of the social constructions of agreements and ownership. There are, perhaps, other ways to argue for the superiority of ownership, but arguing that social constructions in general cannot establish justice-relevant facts when one does not like a particular construction, and arguing that social constructions in general can establish justice-relevant facts when one does like a particular construction, is self-contradictory.

This distinction goes right over Louis's head:

Secondly I'd suggest that your analogy between taxes and absentee ownership (both being social constructs) isn't a valid analogy. In fact I'd suggest it's a category mistake. Yes they're both social constructions, however the initiated coercion is not against a concept of ownership in both cases. i.e. while they are both social constructs (which all ownership is), they are not both representative of the initiation of coercion against ownership. If I own property, whether directly (in that I, e.g., live there personally) or as an absentee owner, then what I do with that property is to a certain degree my business. If I’m an absentee owner renting space to an individual who fails to pay his rent (and we have some sort of rental agreement), then through coercion I’m going to kick him out. Now to make the analogy work with taxes it would have to presuppose that the government “owned” the money it was taking, but in fact it doesn’t. That we socially agree (to one extent or the other) to pay taxes does not entail ownership over that money and therefore the analogy fails.

Why should it matter that we label one social construction as "taxation" and another social construction as "ownership"? The choice of label seems the most specious distinction possible to make. If we can socially construct the concept of "ownership" to justify coercion, then we can just as easily socially construct the concept of "taxation" justify coercion. (If Louis is especially hung up on labels, then I suppose we could just change our socially constructed notion of ownership to actually give the government ownership of our money.)

Andrew reveals the crux of his argument and the relevance of my analysis: we "have to presuppose that the government “owned” the money it was taking, but in fact it doesn’t [emphasis added]." What facts, precisely, is Louis referring to here? Objectively determinable facts, in which case my argument about whether subjective social constructions must strictly supervene over only objectively determinable facts or whether subjective social constructions can create normatively relevant facts is directly pertinent.

Alternatively, Louis might simply be saying that some social constructions, such as ownership, are in some sense per se factual; some social constructions, such as as taxation, are in some sense per se non-factual, fictitious, or delusional. Another approach might be to say that some social constructions are per se privileged over others: the socially constructed concept of ownership inherently supersedes taxation.

Or maybe Louis has just had a revelation from God.

Perhaps someday, I'll see a Libertarian offer something better than argument from vehement assertion. I've given up on either Louis or Horowitz giving something better.

The Libertarian argument

Having laid the philosophical framework in previous posts, I want to restate one fundamentally problematic Libertarian argument.

The problematic argument starts with a common, relatively unobjectionable, moral intuition: if someone comes up to you, points a gun at your head, and takes your stuff (wallet, watch, car, or suchlike), you have been the victim of injustice. They follow with the assertion that the act was unjust precisely because you were deprived of your property by force without your consent. This reasoning isn't philosophically airtight (nothing really is), but most people would not argue the obvious opposite, that walking up to people and taking their property at gunpoint was just or even neutral. This step establishes a moral intuition (seemingly) about nothing but a set of objectively determinable facts about the world.

The second step is to argue that taxation fits this fact pattern. Taxation consists of the government essentially walking up to you with a gun and taking your stuff. Because it fits the same objective facts that we earlier agreed were unjust, taxation is therefore unjust. Anyone who disagrees is either mistaken or hypocritical. They may mistaken or ignorant about the objective facts, not realizing that that taxation entails taking property at gunpoint. They may be mistaken in their moral judgment, believing that taking people's property at gunpoint is just or neutral. Or, they may be hypocritical, judging one behavior at unjust and another just, even though the objective facts are identical. Taxation is just as bad as any other sort of coercive theft because the objective facts are identical. This step establishes consistency of application.

It's noteworthy that, unlike random robbery, the counter-argument that taxation is legitimate by social construction can be rebutted only by saying that the fact of social construction is irrelevant; any social construction that judges one case of coercion as unjust and another case, with identical objective facts, as just, is as mistaken or hypocritical as a single individual making the same judgment. Without this stipulation, the argument for the injustice of taxes falls apart, because the socially constructed legitimacy of taxation is not in doubt.

Up to here, although this Libertarian argument is still controvertible on other grounds, it remains consistent and coherent. We might have to be a little creative and broad about precisely which specific objective facts we attach our moral beliefs to, but we could create a political system that consistently and coherently applies the same political judgments of justice/injustice to the same relevant set of objective facts. It might or might not be a society we like or want, but it cannot be dismissed on the grounds of inconsistency or incoherence.

One type of Libertarian might just stop here. Coercion is bad, period, and should be employed as a necessary evil only to resist another's coercion. No mere social construction legitimatize any form of coercion except resistance.

However, the Libertarian who supports absentee property ownership is now in something of a bind. I define absentee ownership here as the situation where the objectively determinable direct use of physical coercion against the person of the owner is not required to deprive him or her of its objectively determinable use. For example, the occupant of a rented house is already in physical possession of the house; if the renter arbitrarily decides not to pay the rent, no objectively determinable coercion against the person of the owner is necessary. Indeed, it is the owner who must, in a objectively determinable sense, initiate coercion against the possessor to exert meaningful ownership.

One response is that coercion to enforce absentee ownership is socially constructed to be legitimate, even though the absentee owner does not possess the property. However, if social construction can legitimatize coercion to maintain absentee ownership, then social construction can legitimatize coercion to collect taxes. Remember, the argument against taxation above must be in some sense that because it is coercive, taxation is unjust regardless of any social constructions that legitimatize it.

Another response is that absentee ownership creates relevant, objectively determinable facts, such as titles, deeds, and leases*; the distinction between forcibly evicting someone from the house that they own is objectively different from forcibly evicting someone from the house that their landlord owns. But it is again difficult to distinguish absentee ownership from taxation: if absentee ownership can do so, then taxation can also create the same sorts of objectively determinable facts, such as statutes and regulations.

*accepting, arguendo, that titles, deeds, and leases can be classified as objectively determinable facts.

One very bad possibility is to simply declare that the objectively determinable facts magically change in an objectively indeterminate way when one approves of the coercion. Sadly, many Libertarians seem sufficiently philosophically naive to actually argue in a way that is impossible to interpret as anything but that the facts magically change. To paraphrase Jon during my recent debate, when the government is enforcing taxation, it is initiating coercion regardless of the social constructions that might legitimatize it, but when owners enforce their property rights, they are not initiating coercion.

The only other alternative is to simply say that yes, we can subjectively legitimatize differential coercion, applying different political judgments of justice and injustice not just on the objectively determinable facts, but also on socially constructed subjectively determinable facts, such as agreements, titles, deeds, leases, statutes, and regulations. There are, however, better and worse social constructions: the social constructions that legitimatize taxation are worse in some subjectively determinable way than the social constructions that legitimatize absentee ownership. Furthermore, we must determine the quality of social constructions by means other than looking at only the objectively determinable facts. (Alternatively we could allow that all social constructions create objectively determinable facts.)

The problem there is that I don't think the latter case can actually be made, which is why Libertarians don't often try to make it.