My computer previously reproduced that image but the text was too small for me to read.
Since I can't read your text, I can't see how you derive the NAP from a combination of self-ownership and the absence of ontological authority (whatever that is). Can you just write out your argument in the form of readable premises and conclusion?
I don't understand what you mean by “ontological authority”, and I wonder whether you and I have different ideas about what the self-ownership principle implies, what the NAP states, what constitutes justice, or what counts as a derivation.
I'll hazard a guess that by “ontological authority” you mean what Michael Huemer calls “political authority”: “the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which governments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else and in virtue of which citizens must obey governments in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else.” Incidentally, that's similar to what I call the authoritarian theory of justice as it applies to politics: a special right of some agents to control the lives of other agents who have a special obligation to obey the former agents.
I maintain that saying that one is a self-owner amounts to saying that one has the (perfect) right to one's own life. That is, saying that one has the right to life and saying that one is a self-owner amounts to saying the same thing. Ownership is a bundle of rights, including the right to control what is owned. The right to life is said to be the basic right from which all other rights are derived, somewhat as follows: Given that your life is your own, only you have the right to control your life, to decide how to live your life; i.e., you have the right to liberty. Similarly, since your labor belongs to you, only you have the right to the fruits of your own labor—i.e., to your justly acquired property.
I further maintain that an injustice is a violation of any of those rights. Suppose the NAP is expressed as: No one can justly aggress against a nonaggressor. My substitute for the NAP is: No moral agent can justly violate any perfect right of any moral patient. I claim that my substitute for the NAP is self-evident: An injustice just is the violation of a perfect right of a moral patient by a moral agent. A moral agent is one who is capable of distinguishing between justice and injustice and between good and evil. A moral patient is one who is worthy of moral consideration. All moral agents are moral patients, but not vice versa. An example of a moral patient who is not a moral agent is a human baby. All and only moral patients have perfect rights, which are rights of justice and are distinguished from imperfect rights, which are rights of goodness or benevolence. Only perfect rights may be justly enforced.
The conclusion of a valid deductive argument can contain no information that's not at least implied by the premises. The self-ownership principle implicitly contains information about rights but says nothing about aggression. Hence, it's hard to see how the NAP, which mentions aggression but says nothing about rights, can be derived from self-ownership. Furthermore, the NAP seems to have counterexamples, as can be revealed by thought experiments. Let's consider a couple. Al and Bob enter an amateur boxing contest. When the bell rings Al stands motionless overcome with fear. Bob approaches Al and knocks him to the mat. It appears that Bob aggressed against a nonaggressor, but it doesn't appear that he committed an injustice because both men had consented to the terms of the match. Al, a masochist, arranges for a prostitute to visit him in his hotel room under prearranged conditions. Mabel, the prostitute, enters Al's room, finds him lying on the bed, and proceeds to whip him all in accordance with Al's previous instructions. Looks like another case of aggression against a nonaggressor that isn't unjust. Al and Bob get Farmer Brown's permission to hunt deer in the forest on his land. There is no fence between Brown's land and land belonging to Farmer Jones who loves deer and won't permit hunting on his land. Al and Bob inadvertently cross over onto the land belonging to Jones who threatens to shoot them if they don't leave. Since Al and Bob are unintentional trespassers, it's not clear that they aggressed against Jones, who pretty clearly aggressed against them. Yet it seems that Jones was justified in coercing Al and Bob to leave. If you don't like these examples, you should be able to think of others.
I'll end by giving an example of what it's like for a proposition to be self-evident and how to derive one proposition from another.
The three laws of thought, first enunciated by Aristotle--the law of identity, the law of excluded middle, and the law of contradiction (aka the law of noncontradiction) --are said to be unprovable because they are the fundamental principles of proof, without which no proof would be possible. However, there are two good reasons to accept them as true: They are said to be (1) self-evident in the sense that their contradictories are self-contradictory (and hence false) and (2) self-guaranteeing in the sense that they must be accepted even in the attempt to deny them (the denial of a self-guaranteeing proposition is self-refuting, aka self-defeating). Take the law of identity, for example. It can be formulated in various ways. It is sometimes expressed symbolically as “A is A.” The contradictory of that expression is “A is Not-A,” which amounts to saying that a thing is not what it is, an obvious self-contradiction. Thus, the law of identity is self-evident. Suppose I try to deny the law of identity. You might reasonably ask me whether I maintain that my denial is, indeed, a denial rather than, say, an affirmation. In order to attempt to maintain that my denial is a denial, I have to accept the law of identity. Thus, the law of identity is self-guaranteeing.
Concerning propositions, the laws of thought can be formulated as follows:
1. The law of identity: p if and only if p. Every proposition is true if and only if it is true.
2. The law of excluded middle: p or not-p. Every proposition is either true or not true.
3. The law of contradiction: not both p and not-p. No proposition is both true and not true at the same time and in the same sense.
The three laws of thought are inter-derivable. That is, one can start with any one of the three laws and from that law logically obtain the other two laws using standard rules of inference. Here is a demonstration:
1. p if and only if p The Law of Identity
2. if p, then p and if p, then p 1, Material Equivalence
3. if p, then p 2, Simplification
4. not-p or p 3, Material Implication
5. p or not-p 4, Commutation: The Law of
Excluded Middle
6. not-not-p or not-p 5, Double Negation
7. not both not-p and p 6, De Morgan
8. not both p and not-p 7, Commutation: The Law of
I watched your interview on Post Post Modern. What were you doing in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union? If you were 23 in 1991, you're 55 or 56 now. You look 15 to 20 years younger. What's your secret? I hope you find financial success as an author. We need all the advocates for liberty we can get. What I found most interesting is how you apparently arrived at pure libertarianism. (According to Bryan Caplan, that's a score of 160 on his Libertarian Purity Test.)
There are many paths to libertarianism. The book Arguments for Liberty (2016, Aaron Ross Powell & Grant Babcock, eds.) has chapters by 9 authors each of whom presents a different complex argument for liberty. Those arguments involve utilitarianism, natural rights, Kantianism, contractarianism, Rawlsianism (!), virtue ethics, Objectivism, ethical intuitionism, and moral pluralism. That's not an exhaustive list. For instance, a logically consistent pacifist would be an anarchist. Besides their conclusions, what do all those arguments have in common? Apparently, a high degree of logical consistency. I'll explain below.
The fundamental principle of liberty is self-ownership because its opposite is slavery, the ownership of one person by another, or tyranny, which is slavery writ large—i.e., the assumed ownership of most people in a nation by a tyrant or set of tyrants. In Patriarcha, Robert Filmer argued for the divine right of kings from the fundamental principle of authoritarianism, the principle that the ruler owns his entire domain and everything in it, including all his subjects. Patriarcha is the chief work John Locke and Algernon Sidney argued against.
Whatever is owned by someone is that person's property. Property is a bundle of rights, including the right to control what one owns. Concerning any political issue, either ordinary people will be assumed to have the right to control their own lives as self-owners or some government agent will be assumed to have that right, making ordinary people effectively owned by the state. No person can be both a self-owner and owned by the state.
Pure libertarianism is that set of issue positions all of which are consistent with self-ownership. All possible political ideologies besides pure libertarianism and pure authoritarianism (i.e., pure totalitarianism) presuppose self-ownership for some issue positions and state ownership (Filmer's basic principle) for others. Hence, they are logically inconsistent mixtures of libertarianism and authoritarianism.
Pure totalitarianism presupposes only state ownership. Since the exact opposite of pure libertarianism is pure totalitarianism, the latter might also be thought to be logically consistent. Surprisingly, it is not for the following reasons. Pure totalitarianism entails that no subject can ever rightfully choose between alternative courses of action because that would introduce an element of libertarianism, thus making totalitarianism inconsistent. So, whatever is not prohibited must be required. But two pure totalitarians could disagree on virtually every issue because what one could prohibit the other could require. Hence, pure totalitarianism is logically inconsistent. So, the only possible political ideology that's logically consistent is pure libertarianism.
According to the principle of explosion in classical logic, from any two contradictory propositions any arbitrary proposition or its negation follows. That principle can leave the advocates of any inconsistent political ideology unable to maintain any position on any issue as distinct from its negation. In order to be objectively correct, a political ideology must be able to maintain distinct positions on various issues. For instance, it can't both favor and oppose a legal minimum wage. Since only pure libertarianism is logically consistent, it's the only possible political philosophy that can be objectively correct.
If (1) being a self-owner implies that one has property in oneself, (2) such property is a bundle of rights, (3) justice involves securing rights, and (4) an injustice is a violation of a right, then liberty and justice are mutually consistent. Conditions (1), (2), (3), and (4) are the case. Therefore, liberty and justice are mutually consistent. Since no other political ideology can be objectively correct, only libertarianism can be the correct philosophy of both liberty and justice.
The foregoing is a summary of some of the main points of a much longer complex argument. I can't imagine any better case for libertarianism than that one. If anyone out there can think of one, please present it.
It was my first series of fantasy books I ever read in 1966. I returned to that trilogy many times as I grew older. Loved the mythology Tolkien borrowed from the Skandinavians and told so well.
When the movies came out much later in my life I found I couldn’t enjoy them as the CGP didn’t compare to my mental vision I had.
I liked your discussion of the Viktor Frankl moment (pause before reacting) the freedom of which we all have when emotions arise!
Chris your Book that you spent a decade writing/developing is it
Yes, I tried that link. The largest image I can print won't entirely fit on an 8 1/2 X 11" sheet of paper, and the text is still too small to read. I'll respond further by email.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to reproduce an image of your chart with print large enough to read. I'll probably have to wait for a hard copy of your book after it's published. I expect text surrounding the chart will help me understand it.
I didn't answer a couple of questions you asked me last month.
On or about Feb 7 you referred to something I'd said about my metatheory of justice which is intended to classify all theories of justice into four pure theories. I mentioned two such theories and you asked about the other two. Sometimes, in order to be adequate, a short question requires a long answer because a short answer raises many questions and is unpersuasive. I wrote an answer I found adequate but was unable to include it in the comment section because it required more space than I was allowed.
On or about Feb 9 I said, “I maintain that the fundamental principle of justice, which is similar to the NAP, is derivable from the self-ownership principle, which is the basic principle of liberty.” You asked if I have a succinct version of the NAP to state. I could have said that the simplest, most elegant version I've seen is “No one can justly aggress against a nonaggressor.” That's a principle of justice, but I deny that it's the fundamental principle. In my view the NAP has counterexamples and isn't derivable from the self-ownership principle. There are cases in which an unjust act doesn't involve aggression as “aggression” is normally understood and consequently cases in which aggression against a nonaggressor in order to stop an injustice is justified. Furthermore, an injustice is not merely an act of aggression but a violation of a right. Self-ownership involves rights but the nonaggression principle doesn't mention rights, so it can't be logically derived from self-ownership. I suspect an adequate response to your question of Feb 9 would have required more space than that required to respond to the question of Feb 7. So, I didn't try to post a comment.
If you were to send me an email or snail mail address, I'd be able to send you longer comments. I may not be able to send much right away because there are several other people to whom I must send information. Besides, I need time to work on a book I'm writing.
Did you receive my email?
I doubt it. I can't print a page large enough for your text to be readable. Please await my email.
I answer this question elsewhere together with the answer to the other question you asked me on the same date.
My computer previously reproduced that image but the text was too small for me to read.
Since I can't read your text, I can't see how you derive the NAP from a combination of self-ownership and the absence of ontological authority (whatever that is). Can you just write out your argument in the form of readable premises and conclusion?
I don't understand what you mean by “ontological authority”, and I wonder whether you and I have different ideas about what the self-ownership principle implies, what the NAP states, what constitutes justice, or what counts as a derivation.
I'll hazard a guess that by “ontological authority” you mean what Michael Huemer calls “political authority”: “the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which governments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else and in virtue of which citizens must obey governments in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else.” Incidentally, that's similar to what I call the authoritarian theory of justice as it applies to politics: a special right of some agents to control the lives of other agents who have a special obligation to obey the former agents.
I maintain that saying that one is a self-owner amounts to saying that one has the (perfect) right to one's own life. That is, saying that one has the right to life and saying that one is a self-owner amounts to saying the same thing. Ownership is a bundle of rights, including the right to control what is owned. The right to life is said to be the basic right from which all other rights are derived, somewhat as follows: Given that your life is your own, only you have the right to control your life, to decide how to live your life; i.e., you have the right to liberty. Similarly, since your labor belongs to you, only you have the right to the fruits of your own labor—i.e., to your justly acquired property.
I further maintain that an injustice is a violation of any of those rights. Suppose the NAP is expressed as: No one can justly aggress against a nonaggressor. My substitute for the NAP is: No moral agent can justly violate any perfect right of any moral patient. I claim that my substitute for the NAP is self-evident: An injustice just is the violation of a perfect right of a moral patient by a moral agent. A moral agent is one who is capable of distinguishing between justice and injustice and between good and evil. A moral patient is one who is worthy of moral consideration. All moral agents are moral patients, but not vice versa. An example of a moral patient who is not a moral agent is a human baby. All and only moral patients have perfect rights, which are rights of justice and are distinguished from imperfect rights, which are rights of goodness or benevolence. Only perfect rights may be justly enforced.
The conclusion of a valid deductive argument can contain no information that's not at least implied by the premises. The self-ownership principle implicitly contains information about rights but says nothing about aggression. Hence, it's hard to see how the NAP, which mentions aggression but says nothing about rights, can be derived from self-ownership. Furthermore, the NAP seems to have counterexamples, as can be revealed by thought experiments. Let's consider a couple. Al and Bob enter an amateur boxing contest. When the bell rings Al stands motionless overcome with fear. Bob approaches Al and knocks him to the mat. It appears that Bob aggressed against a nonaggressor, but it doesn't appear that he committed an injustice because both men had consented to the terms of the match. Al, a masochist, arranges for a prostitute to visit him in his hotel room under prearranged conditions. Mabel, the prostitute, enters Al's room, finds him lying on the bed, and proceeds to whip him all in accordance with Al's previous instructions. Looks like another case of aggression against a nonaggressor that isn't unjust. Al and Bob get Farmer Brown's permission to hunt deer in the forest on his land. There is no fence between Brown's land and land belonging to Farmer Jones who loves deer and won't permit hunting on his land. Al and Bob inadvertently cross over onto the land belonging to Jones who threatens to shoot them if they don't leave. Since Al and Bob are unintentional trespassers, it's not clear that they aggressed against Jones, who pretty clearly aggressed against them. Yet it seems that Jones was justified in coercing Al and Bob to leave. If you don't like these examples, you should be able to think of others.
I'll end by giving an example of what it's like for a proposition to be self-evident and how to derive one proposition from another.
The three laws of thought, first enunciated by Aristotle--the law of identity, the law of excluded middle, and the law of contradiction (aka the law of noncontradiction) --are said to be unprovable because they are the fundamental principles of proof, without which no proof would be possible. However, there are two good reasons to accept them as true: They are said to be (1) self-evident in the sense that their contradictories are self-contradictory (and hence false) and (2) self-guaranteeing in the sense that they must be accepted even in the attempt to deny them (the denial of a self-guaranteeing proposition is self-refuting, aka self-defeating). Take the law of identity, for example. It can be formulated in various ways. It is sometimes expressed symbolically as “A is A.” The contradictory of that expression is “A is Not-A,” which amounts to saying that a thing is not what it is, an obvious self-contradiction. Thus, the law of identity is self-evident. Suppose I try to deny the law of identity. You might reasonably ask me whether I maintain that my denial is, indeed, a denial rather than, say, an affirmation. In order to attempt to maintain that my denial is a denial, I have to accept the law of identity. Thus, the law of identity is self-guaranteeing.
Concerning propositions, the laws of thought can be formulated as follows:
1. The law of identity: p if and only if p. Every proposition is true if and only if it is true.
2. The law of excluded middle: p or not-p. Every proposition is either true or not true.
3. The law of contradiction: not both p and not-p. No proposition is both true and not true at the same time and in the same sense.
The three laws of thought are inter-derivable. That is, one can start with any one of the three laws and from that law logically obtain the other two laws using standard rules of inference. Here is a demonstration:
1. p if and only if p The Law of Identity
2. if p, then p and if p, then p 1, Material Equivalence
3. if p, then p 2, Simplification
4. not-p or p 3, Material Implication
5. p or not-p 4, Commutation: The Law of
Excluded Middle
6. not-not-p or not-p 5, Double Negation
7. not both not-p and p 6, De Morgan
8. not both p and not-p 7, Commutation: The Law of
Contradiction
I watched your interview on Post Post Modern. What were you doing in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union? If you were 23 in 1991, you're 55 or 56 now. You look 15 to 20 years younger. What's your secret? I hope you find financial success as an author. We need all the advocates for liberty we can get. What I found most interesting is how you apparently arrived at pure libertarianism. (According to Bryan Caplan, that's a score of 160 on his Libertarian Purity Test.)
There are many paths to libertarianism. The book Arguments for Liberty (2016, Aaron Ross Powell & Grant Babcock, eds.) has chapters by 9 authors each of whom presents a different complex argument for liberty. Those arguments involve utilitarianism, natural rights, Kantianism, contractarianism, Rawlsianism (!), virtue ethics, Objectivism, ethical intuitionism, and moral pluralism. That's not an exhaustive list. For instance, a logically consistent pacifist would be an anarchist. Besides their conclusions, what do all those arguments have in common? Apparently, a high degree of logical consistency. I'll explain below.
The fundamental principle of liberty is self-ownership because its opposite is slavery, the ownership of one person by another, or tyranny, which is slavery writ large—i.e., the assumed ownership of most people in a nation by a tyrant or set of tyrants. In Patriarcha, Robert Filmer argued for the divine right of kings from the fundamental principle of authoritarianism, the principle that the ruler owns his entire domain and everything in it, including all his subjects. Patriarcha is the chief work John Locke and Algernon Sidney argued against.
Whatever is owned by someone is that person's property. Property is a bundle of rights, including the right to control what one owns. Concerning any political issue, either ordinary people will be assumed to have the right to control their own lives as self-owners or some government agent will be assumed to have that right, making ordinary people effectively owned by the state. No person can be both a self-owner and owned by the state.
Pure libertarianism is that set of issue positions all of which are consistent with self-ownership. All possible political ideologies besides pure libertarianism and pure authoritarianism (i.e., pure totalitarianism) presuppose self-ownership for some issue positions and state ownership (Filmer's basic principle) for others. Hence, they are logically inconsistent mixtures of libertarianism and authoritarianism.
Pure totalitarianism presupposes only state ownership. Since the exact opposite of pure libertarianism is pure totalitarianism, the latter might also be thought to be logically consistent. Surprisingly, it is not for the following reasons. Pure totalitarianism entails that no subject can ever rightfully choose between alternative courses of action because that would introduce an element of libertarianism, thus making totalitarianism inconsistent. So, whatever is not prohibited must be required. But two pure totalitarians could disagree on virtually every issue because what one could prohibit the other could require. Hence, pure totalitarianism is logically inconsistent. So, the only possible political ideology that's logically consistent is pure libertarianism.
According to the principle of explosion in classical logic, from any two contradictory propositions any arbitrary proposition or its negation follows. That principle can leave the advocates of any inconsistent political ideology unable to maintain any position on any issue as distinct from its negation. In order to be objectively correct, a political ideology must be able to maintain distinct positions on various issues. For instance, it can't both favor and oppose a legal minimum wage. Since only pure libertarianism is logically consistent, it's the only possible political philosophy that can be objectively correct.
If (1) being a self-owner implies that one has property in oneself, (2) such property is a bundle of rights, (3) justice involves securing rights, and (4) an injustice is a violation of a right, then liberty and justice are mutually consistent. Conditions (1), (2), (3), and (4) are the case. Therefore, liberty and justice are mutually consistent. Since no other political ideology can be objectively correct, only libertarianism can be the correct philosophy of both liberty and justice.
The foregoing is a summary of some of the main points of a much longer complex argument. I can't imagine any better case for libertarianism than that one. If anyone out there can think of one, please present it.
My favourite author is
Haruki Murakami
Yes
Thanks for sharing
Chris
I spent a lifetime hiking and hunting. Taught to myself and brothers by our Father and grandfather.
We used topographical maps at the time as technology had not advanced to the electronic age till later.
We planned hunts and hikes using the maps and compasses.
However I learned the Territory (Terrain,unique flora and fauna of the geographical area)was not the same as my 2 dimensional map.
You explained how the process of writing the book changed your perspective through a decade.
Hopefully this helps explain my question better
Jon
Thanks for sharing your story
Enjoyed this interview of you!
I too was influenced by Tolkien when I was young.
It was my first series of fantasy books I ever read in 1966. I returned to that trilogy many times as I grew older. Loved the mythology Tolkien borrowed from the Skandinavians and told so well.
When the movies came out much later in my life I found I couldn’t enjoy them as the CGP didn’t compare to my mental vision I had.
I liked your discussion of the Viktor Frankl moment (pause before reacting) the freedom of which we all have when emotions arise!
Chris your Book that you spent a decade writing/developing is it
The Map or The Territory?
Thank you for being so personable and inspiring
Your responses have been kindly and welcoming
Jon
Tack så mycket
Vi ses
God Hälsningar
Great to see you both! Cool convo. Love it!
Bravo 👏 I loved it! Thank you two! 😍
It was a fun convo that could have gone on for days!!
Thank you for your friendship and all of your support for my endeavours, Mr. Christopher Cook! Sincerely. :)
Yes, I tried that link. The largest image I can print won't entirely fit on an 8 1/2 X 11" sheet of paper, and the text is still too small to read. I'll respond further by email.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to reproduce an image of your chart with print large enough to read. I'll probably have to wait for a hard copy of your book after it's published. I expect text surrounding the chart will help me understand it.
I didn't answer a couple of questions you asked me last month.
On or about Feb 7 you referred to something I'd said about my metatheory of justice which is intended to classify all theories of justice into four pure theories. I mentioned two such theories and you asked about the other two. Sometimes, in order to be adequate, a short question requires a long answer because a short answer raises many questions and is unpersuasive. I wrote an answer I found adequate but was unable to include it in the comment section because it required more space than I was allowed.
On or about Feb 9 I said, “I maintain that the fundamental principle of justice, which is similar to the NAP, is derivable from the self-ownership principle, which is the basic principle of liberty.” You asked if I have a succinct version of the NAP to state. I could have said that the simplest, most elegant version I've seen is “No one can justly aggress against a nonaggressor.” That's a principle of justice, but I deny that it's the fundamental principle. In my view the NAP has counterexamples and isn't derivable from the self-ownership principle. There are cases in which an unjust act doesn't involve aggression as “aggression” is normally understood and consequently cases in which aggression against a nonaggressor in order to stop an injustice is justified. Furthermore, an injustice is not merely an act of aggression but a violation of a right. Self-ownership involves rights but the nonaggression principle doesn't mention rights, so it can't be logically derived from self-ownership. I suspect an adequate response to your question of Feb 9 would have required more space than that required to respond to the question of Feb 7. So, I didn't try to post a comment.
If you were to send me an email or snail mail address, I'd be able to send you longer comments. I may not be able to send much right away because there are several other people to whom I must send information. Besides, I need time to work on a book I'm writing.