Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

TO LEE ON JAN LESTER

—“Lester does not equate liberty with property because he has a “pre-propertarian” theory of liberty.”—

No. That’s just the word-game he uses. (And in doing so abuses critical rationalism on a scale that only a rationalist could.) It’s embarrassing really.

Oh wait, “People use the term liberty as such… therefore….”. OMG. Honestly?

We move, we remember, so we can acquire.

We acquire. When we acquire, costs are subjective, therefor value is subjective.

We developed emotions to reward us for acquisition and punish us for loss.

We defend what we remember having acquired (property). We developed emotions to reward us for defense, and punish us in the presence of theft or loss.

We cooperate (to increase production). We developed emotions that reward us for cooperation, and punish us for failure.

Cooperation evolved in-group (kinship), We evolved to grant priority to in-group members. (males more so than females who were portable between groups of males)

We prohibit free riding (to preserve the incentive to cooperate) even in kinship groups, by defending production with the same vehemence we defend our property. We developed emotions (moral intuitions) to prevent parasitism.

We developed moral intuitions to eliminate or control alphas (to wider distribution of mates).

We developed norms for more elaborate rules preventing parasitism.

We developed myths rituals and religions for institutionalizing them.

We developed laws to institutionalize them further.

We developed property rights as a contractual limit upon what our group of mutual insurers (those we cooperate with) are willing to act to enforce without damaging the cooperative incentive itself.

We developed prohibitions on parasitism via alphas, authorities, norms, rules, rituals, and institutions because it is reproductively to our advantage to control our options.

NO PRE-PROPERTY LIBERTY CAN EXIST BECAUSE PROPERTY (Defense of one’s acquisitions) EVOLVED PRIOR TO COOPERATION – MORAL RULES – AND COOPERATION PRIOR TO MORAL CONSTRAINT UPON INSTITUTIONS/AUTHORITY/ALPHAS: LIBERTY.

I don’t disagree with him that (a) value is subjective, and (b) that imposing costs upon others is a violation of the necessary physical law of cooperation, and that this law is the cause of moral intuitions, and moral facts. What I disagree with is that he abused critical rationalism, and committed the kind of rationalist word-game that I would like to see made illegal in matters of property (of all kinds), because it is precisely the vehicle that the other side uses to lie, cheat, steal, free ride AND IMPOSE COSTS upon us with.

You kept advocating his work, and I finally read it. But it’s nonsense. It’s 20th century pseudoscience.

So, it’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that he worked backward from liberty and therefore justified it rather than constructed it from first principles by causal necessity and then criticized it.

He said that I wasn’t doing philosophy, that he was doing philosophy, and that I was doing anthropology or social science. He’s right. That’s what I’m doing. Worse: I’m actively trying to outlaw what he is doing, as Hayek’s warning against 20th century mysticism.

The only reasons philosophy and science are not synonyms are (a) that prior to now, we didn’t understand that there is but one logical rule to morality – prohibition imposition of costs, or positively stated, requirement for voluntary transfer. And (b) that without operationalism (action) it is impossible to eradicate imaginary information from rational content. In other words, there isn’t any difference between philosophy and science any longer, and it’s time to put rationalism to bed along with mysticism.

Curt Doolittle