THE PROBLEM OF JUSTIFICATION IN PHILOSOPHY There is a pretty interesting play in

THE PROBLEM OF JUSTIFICATION IN PHILOSOPHY

There is a pretty interesting play in philosophy between justification and innovation. It certainly seems that most innovations are the byproduct of justification. That is, we seek to justify some objective and we search for means of justifying it, rather than seek what is in fact ‘true’.

Because, what is ‘true’ in ethics depends upon (a) the allocation of property rights as implied in the norms, (b) the structure of the family and (c) the structure of production.

I think some people gasp this, but most do not grasp the degree to which some of us practice either justificationism or critical rationalism.

Mises and Weber, Rothbard and Hoppe, Hayek and historians, have all sought justification. The most interesting recent writer is JC Lester, who came very, very close to the answer of propertarianism, but was so enthralled with trying to justify his methodology, and libertarian bias, he missed the fact that propertarian reasoning makes all moral codes commensurable.

It’s not that property per se, mandates libertarian moral biases. It’s that the distribution of property rights determines what is moral in any population. Individual property rights benefit the nuclear family, but they do not benefit the extended family structure. For members of the nuclear family, all other members of the society who also exist in, and cater to, the nuclear family, are treated as potential mates, or near relatives. As such, everyone is family. And as such, all in-family morals are applied to all extra-family members of the society. This is what makes the high trust society.

So private property rights are inseparable from the nuclear family, and a homogenous polity, that can reasonably be expected to act as an extended family. This is why norms are so rigid in high trust cultures, yet require so little enforcement.

There is nothing in propertarian reasoning specific to libertarianism whatsoever. Propertarianism is an explanatory system for rendering all human behavior commensurable, without linguistic and moral loading.

Propertarianism is what praxeology would have been if it was complete. Because propertarianism is praxeology completed.

That said, our ability to stay ahead of Malthusian poverty is predicated on our rate of innovation, and it is not possible to innovate and provide incentives sufficient to organize or participate in production of an innovation without private property rights. Just can’t. It’s just math. The friction is too high. And the future too Kaleidic for individuals to constantly make cooperative decisions on the multitude of possible ends to which we put our time, effort, and scarce property to productive use.

Libertarian societies will always out-perform communal societies. And in that sense, they are the only societies that can defeat malthus.