Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

SUMMARY OF JFG/DOOLITTLE ON THE MOLYNEUX DEBATE

That was fun. I always enjoy JF. The public isn’t used to seeing how philosophy, law, science and math are done between practitioners – tediously precisely. I realize this kind of thing is difficult for the audience. And JF has to keep the audience engaged. Between my long expositions and jf’s audience representation it required a little cat herding on my part. That said, I think we got there.

SUMMARY:

(a) we are born with a distribution of moral preferences (Demand for treatment from others, and resistance to demands from other)s,

(b) we exercise our moral preferences in a market competition for cooperation wherein we discover cooperation (sexual, social, economic, political, military) with people that satisfy our moral preferences,

(c) groups of people increase in a division of labor and as they do so converge on moral norms (requirements for cooperation) that allow them to cooperatively succeed in their geographic, demographic, economic, institutional, and military conditions – and some of these they institute as laws (punishments for violations)

(d) across human groups we converge on the same underlying rule within each of those different markets (e) that rule is reciprocity that preserves cooperation and prevents retaliation, within the limits of proportionality that cause members to defect.

(e) but moral rules are only useful in creating and preserving cooperation and the outsized returns on cooperation,

(f) and cooperation must be more beneficial than parasitism(free riding, black markets, rent seeking, corruption etc), and predation (conquest).

(g) all human organizations of all kinds seek the minimum morality, maximum free riding, rent seeking, and corruption until there is insufficient free capital to incentivize adjustment to shocks, and the civilization collapses

(h) so there is no moral rule outside of the utility of cooperation because ‘moral’ can only mean ‘within the limits of reciprocity and proportionality among those of us cooperating’. There is no morality in war.

(i) the only universal moral rule is reciprocity – do not impose costs, including risks, directly or indirectly upon the demonstrated interests of others in your group.

(j) there are no possible via positiva universal moral statements. Anything that is not immoral (reciprocal) is moral. People who claim otherwise are engaging in an act of fraud by claiming their preference must be paid for by others irreciprocally. They claim debts or injustice when there is none.

CLOSING

As such, JF was correct at the personal level in that all individuals demonstrate variation in moral demand of others;;

And SM was half right at the socio-political level, and half right at the universal level, but stated the via positiva preference for a good instead of via negativa prohibition on the bad.

In this sense both parties, adopting ideal types, rather than the use of series, talked past each other.

P-law makes use of disambiguation through “operationalism, competition, and serialization’, and relies on the logic of incentives, supply and demand.

We convert psychological , social, legal and political concepts into economic terms to take advantage of the minimization of error that results, at the expense of more reasoning and less intuiting.

-Cheers