Author: Curt Doolittle

THE “RUSE” OF MORAL PRINCIPLES

LIBERTY CAN ONLY EXISTS UNDER RULE OF LAW, AND THEREFORE ONLY UNDER EXPRESSION OF GENERAL RULES EXPRESSED AS LAW.

The only question is the scope of permissible law: the range of property humans intuit to aspire to acquire, that the community agrees to organize and apply violence to defend. And that which we are willing to defend depends entirely upon the marginal indifference of our political needs. Which is why diverse polities have lower trust and higher demand for more authoritarian intervention, and more homogenous polities have higher trust and less demand for authoritarian interventions.

So no, despite the attempted distraction via overloading and framing of libertines, a ‘moral principle’ is just a deceptive argument, and a ‘guiding principle’ is just a ruse – a justification for not solving the very hard problem: of that which we consider to be property by our actions, and that which we are willing to enforce with our actions.

Everything else is just an elaborate deception or convenient justification. In the cast of libertines, it’s an excuse to intentionally conflate libertinism with libertarianism. And worse, it’s an attempt to forbid the law from use as a means of retaliating against free riding, imposed costs, and involuntary transfers (all synonyms), each of which makes cooperation irrational.

So the purpose of libertinism is to use a moral principle as a ruse to define a limit to the law, that specifically licenses free riding, imposed costs, and involuntary transfers – the labels we use for these thefts include unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions – by prohibiting both physical and legal retaliation for them.

Worse, since the western competitive advantage is our ability to construct commons free of privatization, including the commons of property rights themselves, libertinism is an well designed attack on our ability to produce commons, and therefore our reproductive and competitive evolutionary strategy. Libertinism is as genocidal for the west as is the Cathedral’s democratic secular socialist humanism’s universalism.

And I use the term “justification” as a synonym for self-deception – and yes, it is possible for our genes intuitions to deceive our consciousness through overloading. Just as it is possible for others to deceive us through loading, framing then overloading. That is why religions work in the construction belief despite overwhelming experiential evidence. Unconscious selection bias exists and is testable. Suggestion exists and is testable. There is no reason why evolution would favor a superiority of reason over intuition. That would a losing proposition.

The only question is, what scope of suppression of involuntary transfers (imposed costs/free riding) is necessary for liberty to be rationally preferable over a state that imposed universal rules? The answer is to the rational question is found in transaction costs. At what point are local transaction costs sufficiently suppressed that the remote explicit costs of a state are no longer preferable?

The moral ruse has harmed the course of liberty. Thankfully, the question, reframed as transaction costs, and rational choice, necessary to eliminate demand for the state, can restore the course of liberty.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine.