Moral Authority: Who Needs It?

By On August 10, 2012 · 47 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Libertarianism

I have claimed in a number of my recent posts that libertarians have failed to recognize the potential for authoritarianism in their refusal to submit their property claims to the test of public justification. Ordinary, unreconstructed libertarians must be prepared to use coercion to impose property rights claims on those who reasonably reject libertarianism. If such coercion isn’t publicly justified, I think it is oppressive.

Many have protested my claims. One of my friends and co-bloggers has even claimed that the test of public justification requires libertarians to tolerate injustice, which seems really awful. In this post, rather than making the same arguments again, I’m going to try to get libertarians (and others) worried about the problem public justification is supposed to solve, namely the problem of moral authority.

I: The Moral State of Nature

Let us imagine for the sake of argument a moral state of nature. In this state of nature, each person recognizes that there exists a moral law, some objective set of prescriptions about what she must do. However, she disagrees with her neighbors about how to interpret the moral law, in some cases quite strongly. But at the moment, they recognize no adjudicative norms in common. In other words, members of the moral state of nature do not recognize any duties to resolve their disputes about the interpretation of the natural law in ways all consider authoritative. Each person decides for herself what she thinks is right, and she defers to the judgment of no one else. She must be moral, after all, and someone else might lead her astray.

The member of the moral state of nature might decide that some people know more than she does, and so she takes them to be more reliable indicators of what the moral law requires, but she regards them as purely epistemic authorities – their judgments about right action are more often correct, and so they are good sources of information. They are not moral authorities for her because she acknowledges no duty to comply with their judgments. Their judgments are just good advice.

To be more specific, no one in the moral state of nature acknowledges a moral duty to comply with another’s interpretation of the moral law that overrides her own judgment. In other words, in the moral state of nature, Reba denies that anyone has the right to blame her or hold her accountable for actions that in their view violates the moral law, but not hers.

II: What’s Wrong With the Moral State of Nature

Now, what is wrong with such a world? Well, for one thing persons will often find themselves in conflict with one another, probably all the time since they acknowledge no common, authoritative moral rules other than their interpretations of the moral law.

What will people do? In many cases, they’ll use violence to get their way. Other times they may pursue peace to avoid the risk of getting hurt or killed. But by stipulation they do not acknowledge that a dispute has been resolved by a mutually recognized, authoritative moral rule, that is, a rule that is mutually recognized as overriding an individual’s private judgment.

A regime of moral rules helps to resolve these disputes because persons will take themselves to have reason to comply with publicly, mutually recognized moral rules, and so can appeal to authoritative social mechanisms to resolve conflicts and the fear of conflict in ways mutually recognized as moral. We can therefore avoid coercion, including state coercion. So we have one reason to leave the moral state of nature and put on relations of moral authority.

Another reason to seek moral authority is to avoid people’s responses when they believe you have committed a moral infraction. What do people do when they think you have acted immorally? They will frequently blame you, resent you, lower their evaluation of your character and sever relationships with you. Think about road rage as an example. Even if you act according to your own interpretation of the moral (traffic) law, other people interpret and apply the laws differently, and thus come to see you as committing infractions. This means that sometimes the road is not a pleasant place to be. So the second reason to leave the moral state of nature is to avoid the costs imposed by social ostracism and blame, not just threats to person and property.

But these two reasons (protecting person, stuff and psyche) fail to fully satisfy. They only show that moral authority has instrumental value. I think moral authority is desirable because it is a constitutive means to a number of crucial social goods. That is, relations of moral authority are part of what is required to have the sorts of complex social relationships we all value highly.

III: The Good of Moral Relations

In the moral state of nature, your relationships with others are insecure and unstable. You have no moral rules to resolve your disputes and so no commonly acknowledged way to take legitimate responsibility for your actions in the eyes of others. Further, you have no commonly acknowledged method of making amends to those you hurt, since they recognize that you acknowledge no reason to defer to their judgments about your behavior if you do the same thing in the future. The idea, briefly, is that without moral authority, we cannot ground the relations of accountability and responsibility required to treat one another not only as equal citizens, but as friends, neighbors and family.

Human well-being depends on getting along with one another on moral terms in each other’s eyes. Think about how hurt and upset we become at even the most mild moral infractions committed against us and those we love, and think about how quickly we can feel guilty for committing the same infractions. As children, we demand that our sisters and brothers “Take it back!” because their disapprobation obsesses us, enrages us and brings us to tears.

You may be skeptical, but I submit that the moral state of nature requires such a radical departure from normal human social functioning that it is hard to imagine the sort of alienation it would provoke. We rarely recognize the huge number of morally authoritative social norms we implicitly acknowledge in day to day life. Without them, we would spontaneously evolve them to avoid the problems I have pointed to.

Some individualist libertarians may think people should just toughen up, but I don’t think anyone seriously believes this in their hearts. Rousseau and Hume were right to point out that the sentiments of others shape our emotional and mental health, along with our very identities. The benefits of moral authority, then, are massive, as they enable the achievement of the greatest of all social goods – being on good terms with one’s family, friends, colleagues and fellow citizens.

And if Ficthe, Hegel and their followers are correct, then we cannot even identify persons outside of the social recognition assigned to them by others. Not only do the sentiments of others shape who we are, they can often define us, even in our own eyes. To be recognized as a moral being by others, for Ficthe and Hegel, is to become a full human being. Moral infractions not only make us feel bad but diminish us as persons.

IV: Libertarians Need Moral Authority

Most libertarians will grant the instrumental benefits of moral authority. But as I understand the libertarian political tradition over the last forty years, few have tried to integrate a thoroughly social model of moral psychology into their political philosophy. In fact, most libertarians think that the case for libertarianism should be independent of these facts about our moral psychology, namely our need for full moral personality via compliance with mutually authoritative moral norms.

But I think libertarians enormously err in this regard because they miss one of the greatest potential virtues of a libertarian political order – its extraordinary capacity to generate genuinely moral forms of cooperation that enable us to enjoy enormous social goods. Libertarians can and should argue that strict limits on state coercion are necessary for moral authority to do its redeeming work and to allow communities to build moral relations with one another, rather than simply resting their associations on who has more power.

The cost of accepting this picture of moral authority is acknowledging the need for authoritative arbiters. These arbiters need not be nation-states, or even coercive bodies, or heck, even agents – they can be social processes of many kinds. But I do think a case for political authority – the authority to use force – emerges from concerns about moral authority and disagreement. I shall speak to that in another post.

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  • Hume22

    Kevin, Another great post. The major problem, as I see it, is that most philosophers are never actually committed to recognizing some exogenous “moral authority”. Rather, they themselves create a hypothetical entity circumscribed by an idiosyncratic choice situation the conditions of which either directly entail their preferred normative conclusions (Rawls) or an “optimal set” strictly circumscribed in a way conducive to the philosopher’s leanings (Gaus). In other words, they do not recognize moral authority, but instead set forth their own moral/political world view. Gaus’ entire project is a moral prescription that others can either agree with or disagree with (otherwise his characterization of social morality in undermined). But what happens when I disagree with Gaus? He is committed to beating his chest while I am committed to slamming my fist on the table. One interesting feature of Gaus (2010) is that he never once appealed to *my* reasons. This, I think, is an implicit recognition that we are *always* in a ‘moral state of nature’ unless others agree with our considered moral judgments, and that it is virtually impossible to engage in the kind of public reasoning envisaged. We do not have time to assess another’s worldview, the reasons they accept, not to mention the norms of rationality they follow. But if Gaus’ isn’t precribing an (impossible) moral practice, then he is engaging in a descriptive project, at which point it is open to challenge the accuracy of his view: is this justice? is this legitimacy? We are once again back to chest beating.

    • Kevin Vallier

      Hi Hume, thanks for your constructive comment. If you’re interested in Jerry’s view, check out his discussion in Ch.4, 12.4(b) on the reflexivity requirement. You seem to assume that the public justification theorist must publicly justify his conception of public justification to members of the public. I don’t think that’s a plausible restriction, though a number of people do.

      What I think Rawls and Gaus are trying to do is present a deliberative model that represents the justificatory reasoning of normally functioning moral agents (for Gaus) or members of a liberal democratic society (for Rawls). So the standards of evaluation they offer are *supposed* to rest on descritive facts about the forms of critical justification implicit in our social practices.

      Gaus takes this process to another level, as he relies heavily on recent research in moral psychology about the social function of moral rules and the sentiments and reactive attitudes tied to them. The idea of public justification is supposed to be the best philosophical explanation of the critical content of our moral emotions. That is, when we hold others accountable, when we blame then, we expect them to act on their best reasoning (or a “respectable amount” in Gaus’s terms) and so have assume that we share a rational, cognitive standard of evaluation that we can bring out on philosophical reflection.

      So given this, why do we set aside the reflexivity requirement? Because the theory of public justification only holds that to treat others as free and equal, we must only impose rules on them that they have reason of their own to endorse. That means we only need to treat people according to their own reason. The model of public justification explains what it means to treat people according to their own reason, but there’s no need to justify this explanation to the agents. For after all, they are only coerced on the basis of their reasons, not on the basis of the model of their reasons.

      To appeal to philosophy of language, we’re effectively working with two moral languages, an object language and a meta language. The object language (the rational commitments of agents) lists all the relevant elements (reasons) and the meta-language (the theory of public justification) orders and structures and defines the object language (by giving an account of reasons). But so long as we treat persons in accord with their object language, and not the metalanguage, we treat them as free and equal.

      This might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage

      • Hume22

        Kevin, Thank you very much for the response. I should have re-read Gaus’ discussion on the reflexivity issue (didnt you write paper on this as well?). That being said, I’m not sure I agree that we can justifiably make this claim, that social morality is prescriptive but philosophical theories of justice (“we must treat people as “free and equal”, and this is how to do it”) are not. I think we need to get into meta-ethics, debate cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral realism, etc. I’m not sure I buy into prescriptivism, and I wonder what this entails for theories of public justification. [This is all shooting from the hip. I'm a big fan of Gaus (and Arizonanian philosophy in general), I've read 5 of his books, although I havent read 1990, and I have been greatly influenced by his views. In fact, I am in the early stages of a providing a case for 'libertarian democracy', and Gaus is a major motivating force. My major concern is prescriptivism as an interpretation of morality.]

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

        we must only impose rules on them that they have reason of their own to endorse

        But this is a much weaker criterion than the public-reason approach needs. After all, one can always claim — not implausibly, I think — that if everyone paid attention to the right aspects of their current perspective and followed out the logical implications, they’d end up with the right view of justice. And so on that sense everyone has reason to accept the right view of justice. But that’s consistent with saying that some people’s failure to do this is innocent.

        • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

          “After all, one can always claim — not implausibly, I think — that if
          everyone paid attention to the right aspects of their current
          perspective and followed out the logical implications, they’d end up
          with the right view of justice.”

          I don’t find it at all plausible that a Muslim fundamentalist, a Masai, a Marxist, a Rothbardian and a Christian fundamentalist, to name just a few, would all end up with even the same view of justice, let alone a right one, if they simply followed the logical implications of ‘the right aspects’ of their current perspective.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

            Either they (ultimately) accept common standards for the use of the term “justice” or they don’t. If they do, then they’re committed to agreeing. If they don’t, then they don’t mean the same thing by the term and so they can’t disagree. Attempts to defend the second disjunct are unsustainable. Ergo, the first.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            If that were right, it would be impossible to disagree about anything. For, if people are using words in the same way, they agree; if they are not, then they can’t disagree. Given that disagreement is endemic, something’s amiss, isn’t it?

            What you say seems to be an expression of the logical positivist verification theory of meaning; to know the meaning of a statement is to know how to verify it; therefore any disagreement is either resolvable by going through the verification procedure or shows that the disputants mean different things by their words (or mean nothing by them). But that view is discredited. For one thing it leads to contradictions (at least if we stay within classical logic), because ordinary logical operations on supposedly verifiable propositions generate unverifiable propositions. For another thing, it gets things back to front, since one could have no idea how to verify a statement unless one first understood what the statement says (i.e., knows its meaning). Third, the characteristic statements of science are not verifiable, as Popper argued at length (in fact, no statements are verifiable). Fourth, our concepts (both scientific and everyday) do not even have necessary and sufficient conditions: they have ‘open texture,’ they are fluid and bendable, and they have to be if they are to be serviceable to us in coping with the complexities of the world (for a brilliant discussion of this see Kuhn, ‘Second Thoughts on Paradigms’ in his book ‘The Essential Tension’). In short, our concepts, and thus the terms that express them, are made for disagreement.

            This is true of ‘justice.’ The concept of justice is important in all cultures because the concept of a person is interpersonal and because interpersonal relations essentially involve justice and injustice. However, in different cultures, and even subcultures, the concept of justice manifests itself in somewhat different forms, which are not only recognisably similar despite their obvious dissimilarities, but which can be seen as developments of each other (compare the notion of mass in Newtonian and in relativistic physics). For more on this see Feyerabend ‘Achilles Passionate Conjecture’ in his book ‘The Conquest of Abundance’ – indeed, read the whole book.

          • http://twitter.com/badocelot James M. Jensen II

            “If
            that were right, it would be impossible to disagree about anything. For,
            if people are using words in the same way, they agree; if they are not,
            then they can’t disagree.”

            Not true. Suppose, for example, that you and I disagree about whether Barack Obama is 5’10″ or 6’3″ (we’d both be wrong, btw). Does that mean we’re using “Barack Obama” differently? Obviously not: we can’t disagree unless we agree on what we’re disagreeing about. Otherwise, it’s just two monologues happening in lockstep.

            And yet because we’re referring to the same person, we’re committed to recognizing that there is a fact of the matter whether or not we currently possess the means to know the correct account.

            Now, in this case, its conceivable we might never know (e.g. replace “Barack Obama” with “Socrates”). But justice differs in being an a priori rather than empirical question. We’re all committed to the correct standards of justice in the same way we’re all committed to the correct standards of math. Even someone’s who’s not acquainted with the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms or the non-aggression principle (or whatever really are the correct ones).

            (In addition to Long’s work, I also recommend Donald Davidson’s “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” It’s another explication of the implications of Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use” principle on epistemology.)

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            The passage you quote from me was my re-statement, or explication, of what Roderick was saying (which I went on to criticise). So, in criticising it, in your first two paragraphs, you are not criticising my position. I am sorry I did not write my post more clearly.

            However, I still take issue with some of what you say there. You say:

            “we can’t disagree unless we agree on what we’re disagreeing about.”

            That’s not quite right. We can disagree if there is something we are disagreeing about, even though we do not agree about what that thing is. Imagine two chemists disagreeing about the results of an experiment, but one insists that what they are disagreeing about is phlogiston, while the other insists that what they are disagreeing about is oxygen. From our perspective we can say that what they are disagreeing about is oxygen (because there is no phlogiston), but they do not agree that that is what they are disagreeing about. Of course (and this is your point), there has to be a common topic or a common reference (in this case the phenomena of combustion); but the participants need not agree about what that topic is.

            Perhaps disagreers need to agree on what they are disagreeing about in cases where there is no objective reality that they are talking about. For example, a fundamentalist Muslim and a modern ‘liberal’ Christian may disagree about the attributes of God (I guess they will). Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is no God. Do they agree about what they are disagreeing about? Well, they would both say ‘God.’ But that is just a word. What do they actually mean by the word ‘God’? If they have radically different conceptions, if they cannot agree what God is, are they really talking about the same thing? Peter Geach said ‘no.’ I am inclined to disagree; but the explanation of that would take us far afield.

            Your second paragraph makes the same point as I made in my third point against the verificationist theory of meaning. The fact that meaningful statements generally (I would say universally) are not verifiable, simply entails that people can agree on the meaning of a sentence while disagreeing about whether it is true. That by itself refutes Roderick’s position. Recall what he said:

            ‘Either they (ultimately) accept common standards for the use of the term “justice” or they don’t. If they do, then they’re committed to agreeing. If they don’t, then they don’t mean the same thing by the term and so they can’t disagree.’

            People can agree about what ‘justice’ means and disagree whether a particular act is just. This can be a matter of dispute over the applicability of an empirical description. For example: was the money he picked up his own or was it that other person’s? Or it can be due to moral complexities – pick a trolley problem case, about which Thomson disagrees with herself!

            It is debatable whether justice ‘is an a priori question.’ I think theories of justice need to be tested empirically, i.e., according to their consequences for human flourishing. But I do not need to insist on that here. Recall what I said in the previous paragraph. A theory of justice will distinguish some action-types as just and others as unjust. Let’s suppose we agree on those. It is always an empirical question whether any act which we see performed actually falls under one of the just or unjust action-types. For example, we agree that stealing is unjust. But was that person’s action one of stealing money or was it one of picking up his own money? Even if we can agree on that, though, there is always the question of whether there are any complicating factors in the situation that modify the principles we agree on (this is the analogue of judge-made rules – see Hayek, L, L & L, Vol 1). For instance, we agree that it is unjust to kill an innocent person. But what if that person is on the track to which we can divert a trolley to avoid killing five other innocent people? Is it just to divert the trolley and kill one or is it just to let the trolley roll on and kill five? There is no consensus on such problems. As I mentioned above, even Thomson said at one time that it was just to turn the trolley while at another time she said that it was not (offering principled arguments in each case).

            You say: “We’re all committed to the correct standards of justice in the same way we’re all committed to the correct standards of math.”

            That is an arbitrary claim and one which appears to be plainly false. When libertarians and socialists disagree over the justice of confiscating private property, in what sense are they both committed to the correct standards of justice? When libertarians and religious fundamentalists disagree over the justice of suppressing blasphemy, in what sense are they both committed to the correct standards of justice? The same goes for maths. In what sense is an intuitionist committed to the standards of Z-F set theory, given that he explicitly rejects the law of excluded middle?

            Thanks for the reference to Davidson. I have read most of his stuff (he was the big thing when I was a postgrad), probably including the piece you refer to (though I cannot remember). I’m afraid I have a low opinion of him.

            The ‘meaning is use’ principle got junked with the development of pragmatics, in linguistics and philosophy of language, which distinguished word-meaning from speaker-meaning.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

            The ‘meaning is use’ principle got junked with the development of
            pragmatics, in linguistics and philosophy of language, which
            distinguished word-meaning from speaker-meaning.

            That would be a problem only for a crude and unsophisticated version of “meaning is use” — so not Wittgenstein’s.

          • http://twitter.com/badocelot James M. Jensen II

            > Perhaps disagreers need to agree on what they are disagreeing about in
            cases where there is no objective reality that they are talking about.

            I don’t think “objective reality” is relevant in any special way here.

            In the case of the chemists, if they do not recognize *some* common ground — that they are talking about the experiments, combustion, etc. — or if they think they have common ground when they don’t, I’d say a genuine disagreement is impossible. In the first case, we can’t coherently even see ourselves as disagreeing if I’m talking about pianos and you’re talking about transfinite cardinals. And if we somehow manage to get into that situation without realizing it, the mistake is thinking it’s actually a disagreement.

            > If they have radically different conceptions, if they cannot agree what God is, are they really talking about the same thing?

            Sure, there’s a fuzzy boundary between different ideas about the same thing, and ideas about different things, but it’s no worse than the “How many grains of rice in a heap?” issue.

            > It is always an empirical question whether any act which we see
            performed actually falls under one of the just or unjust action-types.

            You’re confusing principle and application. It’s always an empirical question whether any actual set of oranges contains an odd or even number. It’s not an empirical question whether adding an odd number of oranges to an odd set will result in an even set.

            > When libertarians and socialists disagree over the justice of
            confiscating private property, in what sense are they both committed to
            the correct standards of justice?

            While capitalists and socialists have markedly different sense of
            property justice, they can (and routinely do) relate these differences
            back to principles both would ordinarily accept (e.g. giving everyone
            their due) — though certainly each rejects the *way* in which they are
            related to those principles.

            > In what sense is an intuitionist committed to the standards of Z-F set
            theory, given that he explicitly rejects the law of excluded middle?

            That’s why I added, “(or whatever really are the correct ones).” Z-F set theory might be wrong. The non-aggression principle might be wrong. That doesn’t seem to me to make any difference. What we’re all committed to are the standards of math and justice, not necessarily any particular formulation of those standards.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            As you say, the chemists would agree that they are talking about combustion or a particular experiment. But imagine a chemist talking with a mystic who thinks that what we take to be the external world is merely the appearance of some spirit or spirits. So he won’t even admit that there has been an experiment or combustion or anything else that the chemist thinks has happened. From the mystic’s point of view that is all illusory.

            Well, even there they can agree that there appeared to be combustion and that what they are disagreeing about is the interpretation of that appearance. So I think you are right: in order to disagree about something, the disputants must at least agree to some description of what it is that they are talking about. But it may be a very thin description, such as ‘whatever it is that appears to you to be a hammer’ or whatever.

            I agree that we should distinguish, as you put it, principle and application. What appears to be a dispute over justice may instead be a dispute over what non-normative properties a particular event has. It is then not strictly the justice of the thing that is in question. Point taken.

            You say:
            “While capitalists and socialists have markedly different sense of property justice, they can (and routinely do) relate these differences back to principles both would ordinarily accept (e.g. giving everyone their due) — though certainly each rejects the *way* in which they are related to those principles.”

            I think you are mistaken there. They might agree on the form of words: ‘justice means that every person gets his due.’ But they mean different things by ‘due.’ Some socialists, and some libertarians, will interpret ‘due’ as moral desert. But other libertarians will not. For example, I think that justice means getting what you have a right to; and that having a right to something does not entail that you morally deserve it. For example, someone who inherits a fortune may have done nothing to deserve it; but justice requires that he have it. Somewhat similarly, if I buy a house and, thorough some unexpected change in local circumstances, the value of my house doubles in the space of two years, I have a right to the windfall I can get by selling the house, even though I have done nothing to deserve it.

            Some socialists will interpret ‘due’ in another way: each person is due what he needs. Since someone might have done nothing to morally deserve what he needs, this is a separate moral principle from the previous two.

            You might say: but this sort of socialist thinks that people do morally deserve what they need. That, of course, just introduces a different sense of moral desert, so it does not avoid acknowledging the existence of another moral principle.

            Similarly, either type of socialist may express his position by saying that justice means that everyone gets what he has a right to; but they then mean different things by ‘has a right to’ (either moral desert in the first sense or need).

            In short, the claim that different people agree on their underlying moral principles is false; and it can be made to seem true only by using the same words for very different things.

            The same goes for maths. Why do you think we must all be committed to the same mathematical principles? Why would someone think that? And what is the point of the claim? It is a very mystical kind of commitment that a person has when he explicitly, sincerely and persistently denies that he has it, and when he might even spend the best part of his life trying to show that it is false. What is the point of attributing to someone such a mysterious kind of commitment? How could we ever know that a person really had it? What kind of an entity would such a commitment be? Doesn’t such talk belong with that of angels standing on points of needles?

          • http://twitter.com/badocelot James M. Jensen II

            In retrospect, 1 am is not the best time to be talking in abstract generalities that are increasingly getting away from the topic at hand. I’m pretty sure some of what I said wasn’t relevant to the discussion.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            I don’t mind. It is worth going off at a tangent if it is interesting to do so. You have helped me to clarify my own views, if nothing else.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

            If that were right, it would be impossible to disagree about anything. For, if people are using words in the same way, they agree; if they are not, then they can’t disagree. Given that disagreement is endemic, something’s amiss, isn’t it?

            What’s amiss is your attributing to me the claim “if people are using words in the same way, they agree” when what I actually said is “If they do, then they’re COMMITTED to agreeing.”

            What you say seems to be an expression of the logical positivist verification theory of meaning

            No, I have no sympathy whatever for the logical positivist verification theory of meaning, and I have no idea what makes you think I do.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            Why should people who are using words in the same way be committed to agreeing? The source of knowledge is disagreement. As the history of science illustrates, we improve our knowledge by overturning currently successful theories. If we want to improve our knowledge, then we should be committed to disagreeing, to get the lively debate without which we remain in ignorance.

        • http://www.facebook.com/kevinvallier1 Kevin Vallier

          See, I deny your second sentence, but that goes back to our disagreement about the nature of reasonable disagreement which we had in the comments here: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/on-reasonable-pluralism-and-being-mean/

          Not sure if you want to revisit it. But I think if you conjoin my claim that you cite with the claim that reasonable pluralism obtains in the sense I describe in the post, we’ve got the stronger requirement the pj approach needs.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

            But even if reasonable pluralism (of the relevant kind) were true, it wouldn’t explain why people with reasonable and correct views should be disarmed against aggression by people with reasonable but mistaken views.

  • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

    I appreciate that you are trying to say a lot in a short post, but I’m afraid this seems to me to be a hodge-podge of confusions. Because most of these confusions have been pointed out in previous comments on your posts, and because you have not answered them, I will list them briefly and ask you to respond specifically to each one.

    First, you say that co-operation, community, markets, and more, all depend upon everyone recognising a set of moral norms as authoritative. But that is not so. It does depend upon sets of people recognising a set of rules that they will abide by, for the sake of peace and co-operation. But for each such set of people, no one in the set need accept that the rules they abide by are true or legitimate or the right ones: none need accord those rules moral authority. Further, the people in question will belong to overlapping sets of people, each set having somewhat different rules (as people in minority communities often abide by their own traditional rules in their minority community while adhering to the rules of the majority in their activities within mainstream institutions).

    Second, it is important if there is to be progress in human life that people do not accept currently existing rules as authoritative. Rather they should question those rules and try to come up with better ones. They should also acknowledge that, if they succeed, their better rules need not have moral authority either, but may also be open to improvement and should certainly be open to challenge.

    Third, having a duty to comply with a judgement does not depend upon the giver of the judgement being a moral authority, or being authoritative about the rules (or about anything else). If two people go to arbitration and agree to be bound by the result, the duty to comply with the arbiter’s decision follows from the agreement they have made: it is a contractual duty. The two parties might even accept beforehand that the chosen arbiter is an asshole.

    Fourth, you say, in effect, that we are inherently social animals who thrive in community with others and that other people’s appraisals of us are important to our own well-being. That is true. But you overlay that with victimhood philosophy when you say that we are defined, even in our own eyes, by the attitudes of others towards us. That is false. What people actually do, in market societies at least, is seek to define themselves, and then to live according to that definition, so that others come to recognise them for what they have defined themselves to be. For an illuminating discussion, see E Goffman, ‘The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life’ (and ignore all the lefty, Hegelian ‘politics of recognition’ victimhood claptrap).

    Fifth, you insist on the need for ‘public justification’ despite the fact that it has been known since ancient times that it is impossible to justify anything. The attempt to justify either goes round in a circle or goes off on an infinite regress, and therefore never succeeds. The ancient sceptics showed this (as Sextus Empiricus informed us), Hume re-hashed their arguments to show the impossibility of ‘inductive’ justification, and the logicist programme of attempting to justify mathematics was brought up against this stark reality with the discovery of Russell’s paradox. Not only is there no need for public justification; it is not possible.

    More later.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

      it has been known since ancient times that it is impossible to justify anything. The attempt to justify either goes round in a circle or goes off on an infinite regress, and therefore never succeeds

      I have to comment on this also. Aristotle refuted Sextus Empiricus five centuries before the latter was born; see here and here.

      • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

        You should take another look at Sextus Empiricus. Aristotle is offering, in one form or another, a criterion of knowledge. But that raises the question: by what criterion do we know that Aristotle’s proffered criterion is true or correct? If by itself, that is circular. If by another criterion, we are off on an infinite regress.

        It is no use, incidentally, saying that the criterion is self-evident. That will help only if self-evidence is a criterion of truth/knowledge. And then the question arises again: by what criterion is it known that self-evidence is a criterion? Once again, we get either a circle or an infinite regress.

        Reflective equilibrium arguments are also useless. In moral theory reflective equilibrium imprisons us within the framework of our inherited cultural norms. In empirical science, it imprisons us within an inherited conceptual framework. A century-and-a-half back, statements describing the motions of Uranus were in conflict with Newton’s theory. To achieve reflective equilibrium, Leverrier posited the existence of a previously unknown planet with just the properties necessary to reconcile Newton’s theory with the observed motions of Uranus. Reflective equilibrium achieved. But did such a planet exist? Scientists decided to find out. They searched the sky at appropriate times and, surprisingly, found the planet, which they called ‘Neptune.’ Was, then, Newton’s theory justified? We know it wasn’t: it was later replaced with relativity theory, which introduced a new conceptual framework.

        The idea (but not the term) of reflective equilibrium, as the method of mathematics and logic, goes back to Bertrand Russell. He had been an adherent of the view that maths could be justified by being deduced from logic, which in turn was justified by being deduced from self-evident axioms. He then discovered that one of the supposedly self-evident axioms was self-contradictory (Russell’s paradox). He then changed his view of logic and maths and declared that the axioms were accepted on the basis of the acceptability of the theorems they entailed, because the theorems were more certain; but even the theorems were hypothetical because they too might contain a latent contradiction. None of it, then, was justified. This has been borne out by the progress in logic since Russell’s time. There is now a bewildering variety of systems of logic competing with variations of Russell’s system. Some of these new systems reject hallowed supposedly self-evident principles like the law of excluded middle or even the law of non-contradiction.

        It is impossible to justify anything. Further, the attempt to justify sucks: it puts a block on progress.

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pedro-Eidt/1653980475 Pedro Eidt

          “But that raises the question: by what criterion do we know that Aristotle’s proffered criterion is true or correct? If by itself, that is circular.”

          Not really. You should take the time and read Roderick’s book. The whole point of it seems to be that there is no need to prove in advance what seems true to you, before taking it to be true. I don’t need to have a criterion of knowledge before taking myself to have knowledge.

          “Further, the attempt to justify sucks: it puts a block on progress. ”

          Then why are you trying to justify yourself?

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            The trouble with taking something to be true is that it might not be true. That is not necessarily a problem if, like me, you dispense with justification. But it is a severe problem if you claim that what you take to be true is justified. The plain fact is that it is not justified simply by the fact of you taking it to be true. To be justified there must be something that justifies it. The question then arises: is that something itself justified? If it is not, then it cannot justify what it is supposed to justify. But if it is justified, then what justifies it? It cannot justify itself, because that would be circular. But it cannot be justified by something else, because then you are off on an infinite regress.

            If ‘all thinking people’ converged on the same set of theories, the problem of justification might be less visible. But the fact that there are competing theories, or at least the possibility of alternatives, in every field of enquiry, and the fact that there are competing systems even in logic, shows vividly that acceptability to one person or group, or the coherence of reflective equilibrium, does not amount to justification.

            You ask me why I try to justify myself. But I never try to justify anything. Whatever I say, as I often point out, is a conjecture which I think either does, or can eventually be made to, stand up to criticism better than any available alternative. That does not justify my conjecture: it is still a conjecture that may be replaced by a better conjecture at any moment. Indeed I invite all-comers to criticise it, to try to show me that I am wrong. That is how knowledge grows: not by trying to justify prevailing views (or appealing to ‘the reasons people already have’) but by criticising prevailing views and proposing possible alternatives (looking for new reasons that no one had previously thought of). All my arguments are either critical or defensive. But a defensive argument is not an attempt at justification; it is just an attempt to show that criticisms that have been made of a theory are unsound.

            The history of philosophy has been bedevilled by running together the notion of knowledge with the notion of justification. The sceptics showed that we cannot justify anything and inferred, wrongly, that we cannot know anything. Philosophers keen to maintain that we can have knowledge have attempted to show how justification is possible. They all fail because the sceptical arguments against justification are correct. But philosophers feel obliged to keep up the pretence of justification because they do not want to join the sceptics in rejecting the possibility of knowledge. Popper showed the way out of this dilemma. We simply separate the notions of justification and knowledge. We cannot justify anything. But we can still have knowledge – fallible knowledge. It is knowledge if it is an improvement on what went before; but it is always fallible because it might always be replaced by something better. And if we are interested in the growth of knowledge we should try to stimulate disagreement, criticism, open-mindedness and creativity, rather than waste everyone’s time with the dogmatic, closed-minded conservatism of the attempt to justify existing claims to knowledge. See Popper’s book, ‘Realism and the Aim of Science,’ pp. 18-30. Also, my forthcoming paper on doxastic voluntarism, which is available here:
            http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick/Papers/336792/Doxastic_Voluntarism_A_Sceptical_Defence

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pedro-Eidt/1653980475 Pedro Eidt

            “The trouble with taking something to be true is that it might not be true. That is not necessarily a problem if, like me, you dispense with justification. But it is a severe problem if you claim that what you take to be true is justified. The plain fact is that it is not justified simply by the fact of you taking it to be true. To be justified there must be something that justifies it.”

            I think that’s exactly the view that roderick attacks in his book.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            Thank you for that bald statement. Can you explain Roderick’s argument? Just an outline would do, then we can take it from there.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pedro-Eidt/1653980475 Pedro Eidt

            “You ask me why I try to justify myself. But I never try to justify anything. Whatever I say, as I often point out, is a conjecture which I think either does, or can eventually be made to, stand up to criticism better than any available alternative.”

            It seems like you use the word “justification” in an incredibly queer way, since you’ve just tried to justify yourself again.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            I was explaining myself. There is a difference between explanation and justification, just as there is a difference between argument and justification.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

            Justification, in epistemology as in ethics, is largely negative; you’re justified in believing what seems to be true, so long as you can’t be shown to have done anything wrong in doing so. Justification, not its lack, is the default. It’s lack of justification that requires argument. To believe otherwise is contradictory (since one would then be believing, without positive justification, that one should believe nothing without positive justification).

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

          In order for relying on a criterion to be justified, the criterion has to be correct. But the criterion doesn’t have to be known to be correct; one needn’t even have thought about the criterion.

          • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

            I think you need to explain what you think is the point of labelling something ‘justified.’ If a person is justified in believing what seems, to him, to be true, so long as he has done nothing wrong to make it seem to him to be true, then different people will be justified in believing propositions which contradict each other.

            For example, suppose I meet one of those tribal blokes with a bone through his nose (no, not a punk rocker), and we both notice a fruit falling from a tree. It seems to me that a lump of matter is falling to earth. It seems to him that the fruit is striving to fulfil a desire to be on the ground. Neither of us has done anything wrong. We are each merely perceiving events in terms of our inherited conceptual schemes. So you, it seems, must say that each of us is justified in believing what we, respectively, believe. But at least one of us is believing something false; and we certainly do not agree.

            Take another example. The set of all sets that are not elements of themselves is either an element of itself or it is not. If it is not an element of itself, then it is an element of itself. But if it is an element of itself, then it is not an element of itself. To Bertrand Russell it seems that there can be no such set, because its existence entails a contradiction. To Graham Priest it seems that some contradictions are true. Both are expert logicians, and neither need have done anything wrong; so you, it seems, must say that each is justified in his view. But they cannot both be right.

            Yet, surely, the point of labelling a view as ‘justified’ is to distinguish it from rival views as epistemically superior. Your view of what justification consists in cannot do that. So what is the point of labelling a view as ‘justified’ in your opinion? Why do we need the notion? Why should we want it? Isn’t it just misleading, suggesting the existence of some superiority that is not there?

            You say that it is lack of justification that requires argument. But, given the examples we just considered, that is not so, is it? If different people can be justified in their views even though those views cannot be true together, this is surely a situation in which argument is required – at least if we have an interest in improving our knowledge.

            You say that, for a criterion (of justification? of knowledge?) to be justified, the criterion needs only to be correct; it does not need to be justified. But how, then, can we know what the criterion is? A criterion that we can never know to be a criterion ain’t much of a criterion. A criterion is supposed to be a tool that enables us to distinguish one thing from another. If we cannot know which criterion is correct, we cannot know what is justified/knowledge and what is not. That leaves you saying that some theories/beliefs are justified and some are not, but we can never know which is which. What, then, is the point of talking about justification at all?

            I appreciate that the sorts of things you are saying are part of contemporary philosophical orthodoxy, so I am criticising that orthodoxy, not just you. I realise that, for people steeped in that orthodoxy, my objections may seem naive or untutored. But they are not. I am familiar with the orthodoxy (I’ve been through grad school, I have even taught the stuff), and I reject it root and branch, and not only in relation to these questions. I think that contemporary academic philosophy is a scholastic quagmire that needs tearing apart; and almost everything I write is an attack on some part of it.

  • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

    To continue.

    Sixth, I think it is a mistake to begin theorising with a supposed ‘state of nature,’ for the reasons Hayek gave in his numerous arguments against constructivist rationalism. People have evolved in social groups with non-designed, evolved rules of interaction, and arrangements for arbitration the origins of which are lost in the sands of time (rather than being agreed between currently existing people). Interdependence and existing rules and institutions are there from the start. Our species could not have evolved into people unless that was so. Trying to get to interdependence, rules and institutions starting from people who never had those things is an impossibility. This is another reason why your ‘public justification’ is impossible.

    Seventh, it is a mistake to think that we can “avoid the costs imposed by social ostracism and blame” by having a mutually agreed set of moral rules, or in any other way. There will always be people who break the rules for their own gain: none of us is a saint. There will always be people who question the rules, so long as we retain our intelligence. There will always be people who try to improve the rules by setting an example of different rules that may be followed instead: there will always be innovators, so long as we retain our spirit. All these people will face some degree of ostracism and blame from some of the other people in the community.

  • The Myth of Sisyphus

    The thesis of this post is arrant, unsubstantiated nonsense — no matter of one’s views on the merits of libertarianism. The matter of fact is (a) all human society is based on coercion and (b) the coercion in violating fundamental property rights is greater than the coercion necessary for their enforcement. For evidence of the latter, consider that all societies with weak property rights are and have always been strongly authoritarian, and often downright totalitarian.

    mythdesisyphus.wordpress.com

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

      Having just attacked Kevin’s thesis, I now want to defend it — not per se, but against this argument. Since there are different accounts of property rights, and what counts as violating property rights on one theory will count as defending them on another, it doesn’t make any sense, absent further argument, to say that “the coercion in violating fundamental property rights is greater than the coercion necessary for their enforcement.”

      It also doesn’t make sense to say that “all human society is based on coercion.” For reasons that La Boetie and Hume explained long ago, no system of coercion can survive unless most of its participants acquiesce in it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

    Ordinary, unreconstructed libertarians must be prepared to use coercion to impose property rights claims on those who reasonably reject libertarianism. If such coercion isn’t publicly justified, I think it is oppressive.

    Yet previously when I asked you if one needs public justification to exercise one’s right of self-defense against (reasonable but mistaken) aggression, you said no. Since all libertarian rights, including property rights, are variations on the right to self-defense, I still don’t see how to reconcile your two answers. Either people have the right of self-defense or they don’t.

    members of the moral state of nature do not recognize any duties to resolve their disputes about the interpretation of the natural law in ways all consider authoritative. Each person decides for herself what she thinks is right, and she defers to the judgment of no one else

    This seems like a false dichotomy: either deferring to no one, or else submitting to “ways all consider authoritative.”

    I’m happy to grant, indeed insist, that, where practicable, people should submit their disputes to a neutral arbiter rather than impose their own violent resolution — both for consequentialist reasons (avoiding bias) and deontological reasons (the inherent, albeit defeasible, value of peaceful as opposed to violent interaction). And I think they have a duty to comply with the results despite disagreeing with them (though this duty is certainly a defeasible one — after all, the arbiter might come up with a monstrously wicked as opposed to merely wrong resolution, and no one can or should surrender their moral right and duty to exercise their judgment as to whether this has happened). So farewell to the “moral state of nature” as you’ve described it.

    But from the ordinary duty to submit disputes to arbitration and comply with results, to the conclusion that every confused or wrongheaded but “reasonable” member of society should have a veto power on an innocent person’s right to self-defense (and if that’s not what you mean then I do not know what you mean) seems like a staggering leap — and a leap from justice into injustice.

    • Hume22

      Roderick, I think you highlight an important issue when you say “And I think they have a duty to comply with the results despite disagreeing with them”. What is necessary is to be conceptually clear about the different circumstances of authority. So we can be discussing “moral authority”, “practical authority”, technical authority, or political authority. I think there is an important difference between a “moral authority” and a “practical authority”, and I think the failure to be clear on this distinction is causing discomfort. I would say that a “moral authority” is one with the moral power to decide what is morally true or false, right or wrong, etc., and this power is final (by which I mean it conclusively decides the issue in question). A “practical authority”, on the other hand, has the power to decide what is to be done, all things considered. It does not, however, conclusively settle the issue, it does not settle what the moral facts are so to speak. One is free to revisit the issue, hope to persuade the person to decide otherwise, etc. This is the “arbiter” in your example. So you may have a moral obligation to act in accordance with the decision, but that does not change the moral landscape in the same way that a moral authority’s pronouncement does.

    • http://www.facebook.com/kevinvallier1 Kevin Vallier

      How about we do this. I will concede for the sake of argument that people have a genuine, not publicly justified, right, to defend their physical bodies against assault. No one needs to justify using violence to defend their person. What requires justification is the initiation of coercion against one’s body. But beyond that, the standard pj approach holds for any use of coercion.

      I suspect your next question will concern the relevant asymmetry between your body and everything else. I think the idea is that its harder to know or determine in the abstract – independently of mutually recognized conventions – what counts as initiating coercion against anything else other than the body.

      • good_in_theory

        Why not bite the bullet and say that self-defense, too, has to be publicly justified? Obviously this can’t be done in advance, but it can be done after the fact.

        I don’t see anything especially problematic about expecting people who injure or kill others in alleged defense of themselves establishing that their use of force was warranted. Maybe the burden of proof will be different than other cases, but whatever.

        There is a very recent and real example of this. From Florida’s SYG law:

        “(1) A person who uses force as permitted in s. 776.012, s. 776.013, or s. 776.031 is justified in using such force and is immune from criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such force”

        This strikes me as clearly bad. Sections 776.012-3 refer only to a person’s “reasonable belief” that they were in danger &etc.

        This is simply private judgment. Public justification is snuck in through ‘reasonable”, but, as far as I can tell, reasonability is whatever the police and the state prosecutor say it is. Funny to see libertarians deferring to the judgments of ‘state thugs’ over a jury trial.

        The justification for all this seems to be that a person who has just undergone the tribulations of defending themselves from assault or robbery should not have to be inconvenienced by spending any time publicly accounting for their act of killing. Why?

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

          I think that’s a different issue. The question of whether one has the right to use defensive force that not everyone would agree with, and the question of whether one has an obligation to present public evidence after the fact that the force was indeed defensive, are two different question. See my point above about submission to arbitration being less than the public-justificationist needs.

          • good_in_theory

            Probably right. I had a feeling I might have been reading things askew.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

        I think the idea is that its harder to know or determine in the abstract – independently of mutually recognized conventions – what counts as initiating coercion against anything else other than the body.

        Maybe, but that doesn’t translate into the conclusion that all aggression against property is either less severe or more controversial than all aggression against the body. Not less severe, because stealing all of a person’s food supplies for the winter is worse than stepping on their toe; not less controversial, because the dispute over abortion is precisely a dispute over what counts as aggression against whose body.

  • SimpleMachine88

    There are levels of compliance with the law. We don’t go straight to calling out the minutemen when our rights our violated. This means we can still keep an orderly society, even with different definitions of what is “right”.

    As a petty little example, take the government’s prohibition on marijuana. I think that is a violation of our rights. That does not, however, mean, that I intend to foment insurrection over it. We should also recognize the important element of proper fear. I don’t walk down the street with a joint out of a rational amount of fear of the state, just like I don’t jump into tiger cages. That doesn’t mean I think tigers have the right to eat me, that’s just how it is. The State is kinda the same, an unthinking dangerous animal, but probably necessary for the balance of life or something.

    But, just because I am afraid of this law doesn’t mean I respect it. I won’t do anything to help the State lock people up for doing something that is their right. I also treat the law as “if they don’t catch you, it’s not illegal”. Without some sort of cooperation from the people, the State really has a lot of difficulty actually enforcing its laws. It’s not like they’re actually stopping people from purchasing pot. Also, I’ll use my vote to try to undermine this prohibition wherever possible.

    On the other hand, there are laws that I do respect. First there’s the somewhat pointless regulations which I find annoying, but go along to get along. The State says don’t speed- whatever, OK. It’s not an outrageous request and I get where they’re coming from even though 60 is ridiculously slow. I’d set it at 70 or 80, but we all have to be going the same speed, I get that, 65 it is.

    Then there’s the laws that I agree with, because they protect others rights, like “don’t murder or steal from people”. I obey them myself, without coercion, because I’m a decent human being. Give me the ring of Gyges, and you’re still safe.

    In fact, I will aid the state in enforcing these laws. I may not think the government can prevent adults from consuming marijuana, but if my neighbor is selling meth to twelve-year-olds, I’ll rat them out. I’ll even do it myself. If I had a gun, and you were robbing a store I was at, I’d point it at you. Laws that are supported by the populace at large are easier to enforce.

    The State has to be really oppressive before I’ll resort to violence, not just step on my toes every once in a while. I might not like our government, but this is not Lexington. They have also provided me with weapons that are more effective for overthrowing the government, namely the right to vote and speak, which keeps us away from plan B.

    All this means that there are levels of cooperation with the law that mean that we can act according to other people’s viewpoints without believing “public reason” is anything of the sort. I don’t support the State in preventing murders because I respect the state, or the public really, but rather my own moral compass. I respect most of the State’s laws that I disagree with out of fear, not “public reason”. This isn’t such a bad thing in general in society. There are many people who might think I don’t have a right to not be robbed, but they should probably be afraid if they’re planning on doing something about that. The rest I just put up with because I’m nice enough to not make a big to-do out of, it’s like looking past the public’s little foibles.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Wiebe/1440756026 Michael Wiebe

    Why did you use the Mises forum as the reference for “constitutive means”? Surely there’s something more authoritative, e.g., SEP, IEP?

  • good_in_theory

    So, Libertarians, read your Hobbes?

    • good_in_theory

      Hobbes on private judgment of morality and moral authority:

      “The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing nor the same man at all times, are in common discourses of men of ‘inconstant’ signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signify our conceptions, and all our affections are but conceptions, when we conceive the same things differently we can hardly avoid different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive be the same, yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions. And therefore in reasoning a man must take heed of words, which, besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the name of virtues and vices; for one man calleth ‘wisdom’ what another calleth ‘fear,’ and one ‘cruelty’ what another ‘justice’; one ‘prodigality’ what another ‘magnanimity’; and one ‘gravity’ what another ‘stupidity,’ etc. And therefore such name can never be true grounds of any ratiocination.”

      “For these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the person of the man, where there is no commonwealth, or, in a commonwealth, from the person that representeth it; or from an arbitrator or judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the rule thereof.”

      On that to which moral authority is, I guess, a “constitutive means”:

      “In such condition [a condition without a source of moral authority, e.g. the state of war] there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters”

      But Kevin has, I think, noted this:

      http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/02/a-libertarian-rehabilitation-of-hobbes/

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  • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

    A libertarian society could not come directly from anarchy, nor, I think from a degraded tyrannical state. It could only come forth from a society in which many standards of normal behavior were already established, and in which people were already obeying “rules” of morality, whether codified or not.

    The libertarian moral authority would be something akin to the Christian Golden rule. ‘do unto others”, and in regards to the action of any sort of government it would be akin to the Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm”.

  • Hume22

    Kevin,

    To what extent is the claims of “The Public” vis-a-vis the rest of the world similar to the claims of the “Libertarian Dictator” (LD)? There is a potential similarity: the LD makes the following claim: “respect my jurisdiction” (i.e., respect my rights). The Public makes the following claim against the rest of the world: “respect our jurisdiction”. This claim is not subject to public justification (I dont think, I have to re-read Gaus on international issues, I think in appendix to Gaus (1996)). Any thoughts?