A week ago I sent an e-mail to Walter Block. I decided not to publish it here until our exchange was finished. So here it is.
Professor Block,
I had read your argument on matching funds before but I didn’t decide to send you mail until I read your exchange with Arakaky. Accepting state money is not analogous to breaking into Fort Knox. The state does not want you to break into Fort Knox and take its money. That is why it is heavily guarded. In contrast, the state whole-heartedly hands out money in the form of student aid, government contracts, welfare, subsidies and so on. As an Austrian economist you must agree that both parties to such a consensual trade benefit in an ex ante sense. The anti-statist must be like Max Stirner, who in The Ego and Its Own dismissed any “right” to free speech state legislators may have seen fit to grant him in their “Constitution” and instead seized that freedom for himself.
I have not read any Ayn Rand (nor do I have any intention to), but I did read your book Defending the Undefendable recently. I have a blog post on it at here.
Being of consequentialist bent (though I am an emotivist/non-cognitivist and so don’t believe in “utility”) I differ with you on certain issues. Behaviors that take place in a background of statism and violate public property can often be analogous to transgressing against the private property of others. Since a counterfeiter or litterer (two examples I dispute) do not have the capability of destroying the state, they cannot be considered heroes because they have not alleviated the burden of statism from anyone. Instead what they do harms others. Imagine if statism were all the more severe and we were all prisoners. We would be fed prison food made by the slave labor of prisoners. A person who spits in the food before it is served is defying the state and transgressing against its property, but he is also diminishing the quality of what food is available to the state’s victims. The congestion caused by cars on the road given the state’s monopoly is a significant harm which is why I have some (but not large enough to tip the balance) reservations about ending restrictions on taxi services.
Sincerely,
TGGP
In response Walter Block wrote “You make some very good points. I urge you to write them up formally, and get them published. In my view, it doesn’t much matter whether the state wants you to take its money; why should we pay attention to its desires?”.
My response is that I don’t care much for formal publication, so the blog is sufficient. The reason we are interested in the state’s desires is that it bears directly on whether accepting money it gives is analogous to its enemies stealing money from it. Imagine that our hypothetical pirate or bandit hijacks a truck full of government money. Under your theory that is commendable. Let’s specify further that the money was bound for grad students. The pirate has just prevented the grad students from taking government money. If preventing that is good, then how can the grad students taking the money also be so?
May 31, 2008 at 1:01 pm
“Being of consequentialist bent (though I am an emotivist/non-cognitivist and so don’t believe in “utility”)”
Sorry not to respond to the substance of your post, but this allusion to your core ethic struck me as one of the awesomely weirdest I’ve ever heard of. Consequentialist ethical relativism? And then, minus the concept of utility? I’d love to hear your explanation of this. Feel free to point me to a paper or even a blog post, if you don’t feel like making a whole formal explanation of your core philosophy just now; I’d appreciate it.
May 31, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I look forward to TGGP’s response. My guess is that his views edge somewhere near to David Gauthier’s, assuming he accepts a “prudential” basis for arguing from utility (presumably without really believing in it).
From Wikipedia:
“Gauthier takes value as a matter of individuals’ subjective preferences, and argues that moral constraints on straightforward utility-maximizing are prudentially justified. He argues that it’s most prudent to give up straightforward maximizing and instead adopt a disposition of constrained maximization, according to which one resolves to cooperate with all similarly disposed persons and defect on the rest. In other words, moral constraints are justified because they make us all better off, in terms of our preferences (whatever they may be). A consequence is that good moral thinking is just an elevated and subtly strategic version of plain old means-end reasoning.”
May 31, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Oddly enough, just a little while ago I was listening to Will Wilkinson talk about how he was one of the earliest contribtors to Wikipedia. His first draft of the consequentialism article discusses how Egoism is a variety of it that weighs consequences for the agent above those for others. Though I do not accept utilitarianism, I consider it a handy framework to debate in (though if I am talking to a deontologist I can try their approach). I cannot expect others to weigh consequences for myself as high as I do. I dug the non-cognitivist contractarian approach of the Against Politics site, where I first heard of Gauthier. There seems to me to be a commonality between subjective utility as a basis for market contracts for goods and subjective norms as a basis for rules/institution making contracts.
June 1, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Yo TGGP, here’s the newest Critical Review:
http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/current_issue.html
June 2, 2008 at 2:05 am
Here’s the essential weirdness for me: consequentialist systems are moral systems that prescribe goals for everyone (do the “best for everyone overall,” something like that). Non-cognitivism denies the objective reality of any sort of moral system or prescription. They seem to me to be opposites. Are you using the terms in a different way? I’m open to weirdness (some may say I seek it out), I just can’t parse this one yet.
The idea of “utility” is useful as a sort of cute measurement in some forms of consequentialism, and definitely in classical economics models, but it’s hard to say it corresponds to anything in reality. My first thought was that you were doing something like rejecting “utility” in favor of everyone determining his own value (not necessarily incompatible with some ideas of utility) – but that seems more in line with deontological systems than consequentialist systems. The main objection to consequentialism I’ve heard is that it has no room for freedom – you have to do the best for everyone, however you define that, with no room, really, for personal (agent-relative) values.
June 2, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Egoism is for the self. It gives no directives for others. Why would you bother doing what I tell you to? If I wanted to convince of something (which I might not be able to do or want to bother doing) I might try a variety of approaches without actually accepting them as guides for my own actions.
Your point about not leaving any room reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowksky’s Science Isn’t Strict Enough.
June 2, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Ah, I see. To the extent that egoism is a form of consequentialism, though, it has to say something like “we should do the best for everyone,” and also “the best situation for everyone is obtained when everyone pursues his own happiness.” That does impose directive on others – “pursue your own happiness,” as opposed to other things. And to the extent that it doesn’t have anything to say to direct the behavior of others, it’s not consequentialism, but some sort of subjectivism or relativism.
Re: Eliezer – I read that post but didn’t make the connection. But yeah – science, as an enterprise, would benefit from Bayesian “strictness” – picking out the “right” hypothesis to test every time wouldn’t exactly impinge on anybody’s freedom, it would just save resources and time. On the ethics side, though, having your actions constrained to the one “right” action could be seen as a harm, to the extent that freedom is valuable (and I think even consequentialists tend to put “freedom” up there with “happiness”).
I think there are many parallels between ethics and philosophy of science. The nasty thing about ethics is that, rather than nice laboratory observations that everybody can see, all we have for raw material is (largely evolutionarily determined) intuitions – and, even better, people have bloody different ethical intuitions. I don’t think that means that we can just toss out ethics as an enterprise – it just makes it a very strange enterprise, compared to science.
August 4, 2008 at 10:32 pm
“Accepting state money is not analogous to breaking into Fort Knox. The state does not want you to break into Fort Knox and take its money.”
In my discussion with Walter Block, I felt the same way too, but after reading his article on why Ron Paul should take matching funds, I began to change my opinion. The state would also be willing to give him the money for his campaign, should he not take it because of that? I understand if you say no, since I felt the same way at first, but remember that Murray Sabrin even took matching funds.
What can I say, the man is good. How was I supposed to win a debate against the great Walter Block? I was doomed from the start. Once I agreed with him that there is nothing wrong with RP taking matching funds, then I was convinced he was right and that there was nothing wrong with me taking financial aid.
I understand if you disagree however. I got a lot of emails after the article was published with a lot of different opinions and points of view. I’m glad our discussion was able to produce some dialogue.
August 4, 2008 at 11:04 pm
In the broad scheme of things, your actions are a drop in the bucket. Consider it analogous to going on welfare. Ought a person not go on welfare, or as with Cinderella Man insist on paying back what has been given? Or perhaps decline to lobby the government to seize some small amount of property from one who has much by eminent domain and transfer it to you? Some libertarians will say yes, but as an emotivist Stirnerite I am rather indifferent. It is inevitable that all of us but a hermit leach off the state to some extent. Just don’t pretend you are Hagbard Celine liberating stolen property from villains. You are just enmeshing yourself in a system you claim to deplore.