[ExI] your big chance

[Dan TheBookMan]

This isn't a silly word game. A duty to not violate rights (and rights imply duties, no?) isn't at all the same as a duty to obey someone else. Hence, my wording: there's no right to rule over anyone else and no duty to obey anyone else.

Libertarianism as such doesn't mean there are no values apart from individual ones, just that no one may violate the rights of others in striving for any values -- be these individual values or not, reasonable values or not, transcendent values or not. Thus, let's say someone believes, idiotically, that "survival of the fittest" is his master value. Fine. He can pretend to pursue that value up until he starts to violate others' rights.

Yes, applying this and doing policy isn't the sort of crunch out deductions from a set of axioms, but it seems to me your talk here is a smokescreen to avoid what seems to be clear: personal autonomy, which you wax so starkly about elsewhere, must mean someone isn't ruled by others. (And unless you're positing said autonomy is the purview of one or a few people -- which wouldn't be libertarian at all -- then it means no one has a duty to obey others either. Again, don't get caught up in thinking you not abusing anyone you please is you being ruled by them.)

Regards,

Dan


On Saturday, January 11, 2020, 01:24:55 AM PST, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 6:14 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

Similarly, a duty to obey means you (or whoever has such a duty) must obey. Again, this isn’t about doing whatever you want — if you have no duty to obey a person or a group. You’d still be bound by other just claims.

### Wait, you have no duty but you are bound?

Libertarianism is not a silly word game about the meaning "duty" and "right to rule". Libertarianism is based on acknowledging the value of individual desires as the primary or only basis for building a society, and thus generally refusing to recognize any societal values independent of individual desires. Various communitarian, religious and authoritarian philosophies claim there are values independent of individuals, that justify suppression of individual desires to achieve diverse self-transcendent goals - e.g. religious salvation despite lack of belief, dominance, complete equality of outcomes despite diversity of abilities and desires, protection of the environment despite individual wishes, etc.

We libertarians refuse such transcendent claims. We know that self-transcendent value claims are usually power- or prestige-grabs used by various striving sociopaths to elevate their social ranks.

We (or at least the reasonable ones among us) apply rational methodologies to find out the specific strategies that are most likely to help us achieve our desires, in a complex system of interactions between multiple individuals. This is a process of discovery, not a simple derivation of rules from axioms, and therefore the outcomes may be occasionally surprising and are always contingent. In some places a ruthless, overbearing state is desirable, in other places a pleasant anarcho-capitalist governance might be possible.

Rafal
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