[ExI] Libertarianism wins again...

[Stefano Vaj]

On 23 July 2011 02:57, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> OK. Then let's not use the word "crime" to describe governments raping
> and pillaging their citizens and the citizens of the nation next door.
>

Yes, we definitely should not. In fact, it does not make much sense, and it
is rather unpractical, to consider each and every soldier of any given
country as a "criminal". In fact, it took a few thousand years to realise
that it was in everybody's interest to recognise some special status of
enemy combatants, even though this awareness is today waning in favour of
self-righteous rhetorics...


> Let's use a different word. How about immoral. Can you accept that a
> government can be immoral? And that governments often are? Or do you
> beleive that governments are amoral?
>

Governments who do not comply with my own moral certainly are to be
considered as "immoral" from my point of view. Same as saying that one need
not like the laws in force, btw. An entirely different matter is that of
government officers breaking the rules of their own legal system. They may
deserve praise, if they do it in view of purposes I like, or blame, if they
do not.



> Moreover, morals are equally plural, and variable with time and cultures.

 To some extent. There are some morals that have transcended time
> without much change. The prohibition against murder, rape, stealing...
> these are fairly constant.


This is a typical argument of the partisans of a concept of a "natural" law.
In fact, on closer inspection, what different legal systems do is not to
prohibit murder, but to specify when killing could be considered as "murder"
and thus forbidden, as to its object, agent, and possible exhonerating
circumstances.

> This is a crucial point, not to mention the most important for the topic
> of
> > this list. Now, I contend that defending the freedom of societies to give
> > themselves the rules they like best (as in "self-determination" and in
> > "popular sovereignty" and in "diversity"), rather than the idea that some
> > kind of a "natural" law would exist that, as an avatar of the Will of God
> > under a thin secular veneer, should simply be obeyed by everybody, is
> much
> > better bet. Both in order to avoid puttin all eggs in one nest, as we say
> in
> > Italy, *and* because Darwinian competition between different
> civilisational
> > models, as opposed to globalisation, keeps *all* of them as little
> > neoluddite and primitivist and conservative as possible, for obvious
> > reasons.
>
> This is what confuses me. You want to preserve these freedoms, and at
> the same time give wide license to the welfare state to take from your
> pocket and put into mine. Don't you see that the one form of tyranny
> leads towards (not inevitably... perhaps) the other form of tyranny?
>

Let us assume that welfare is tyranny (the yes or no opinion on the subject
is not really a religious matter for me), and that tyranny is bad (easier,
since nobody defines as "tyranny" a regime he likes, including tyrants). The
freedom of any given community to give itself a legal system of its choice,
without reference to hypothetical "natural" law who would over-ride both
popular will and local traditions, gives place to competition amongst
different systems, offer terms of comparison to one's members, and
eventually allow people to vote with their feet.

Interestingly, old-style US conservatives who in principle would be rabid
anti-transhumanists are quite concerned about China's progress in the area
of transhumanist technologies. This does not make them "chinese" in their
political views, but at the very least their efforts to adopt, and to
generalise on a worldwide basis, "natural law" prohibitionist tenets, are
accordingly weakened. In turn, it is competition with the US that that is
putting in crisis the ayatollahs' dream of a society of illiterate peasants,
and commanded Chinese reforms, or . Otherwise, the Gang of Four's
neoprimitiviste dream would still be in place.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110723/c86f051c/attachment.html>