Curt Doolittle

Theme: Reciprocity

  • JUSTIFIABILITY IS A MORAL CONSTRAINT, NOT AN EPISTEMIC ONE – BUT MORAL JUSTIFICA

    JUSTIFIABILITY IS A MORAL CONSTRAINT, NOT AN EPISTEMIC ONE – BUT MORAL JUSTIFICATION IS NOT FALLACIOUS.

    Even scientific arguments must be morally justifiable. (Really!)

    Compare: Morally justifiable vs rationally justifiable vs truthfully justifiable.

    1) Statements can be justified morally. That is where we got the concept of justification from.

    2) Rational statements cannot be justified, only internal consistency can be demonstrated.

    3) Truthful statements cannot be justified, only warrantied. If we warranty our statements to truthfulness then we are justified in speaking them.

    But the degree of parsimonious correspondence (truth), and therefor the epistemological quality – the quality of the theory – can never be justified.

    It is this combination of morally justifiability and parsimonious correspondence that we conflate in the discussion of truth, and that is why volumes of parchment , paper, bytes, radio waves and speech have been wasted in a tragically simple error.

    Thus endeth the lesson. 😉

    Justifiability still matters. But it’s justifiability in the warranty of the argument, not justifiabitly in the truth of it.

    (Almost two years I’ve spent on this damned problem. In April it will be two years! Argh.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-02-11 03:25:00 UTC

  • REPEAT AFTER ME: The Warranty of Truthfulness 1) Internally Consistent – meaning

    REPEAT AFTER ME: The Warranty of Truthfulness

    1) Internally Consistent – meaning “logical”

    2) Externally Correspondent – meaning “observably predictive”

    3) Voluntarily transferred – meaning “ethical and moral”

    4) Parsimoniously Stated – meaning “the limits are defined”

    5) Operationally Defined – meaning “existentially possible”

    6) Thoroughly Falsified – meaning you have tried to demonstrate these statements are false, and failed.

    If you cannot demonstrate these, then you cannot warranty your statement is free of imaginary content, error, bias, obscurity, misrepresentation, and deceit.

    REPEAT AFTER ME: The Hierarchy of Logical Claims

    1) In the choice between meaningful and logically consistent, meaningful fails.

    2) In the choice between logically consistent and externally correspondent, logical consistency errs.

    3) In the choice between externally correspondent and operationally possible, external correspondence errs.

    4) I the choice between operationally possible and objectively moral, operationally possible errs.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-02-06 06:36:00 UTC

  • CONTRA KINSELLA’S VAPID CRITICISM OF LESTER (From Elsewhere H/T Lee Waaks.) 1) i

    CONTRA KINSELLA’S VAPID CRITICISM OF LESTER

    (From Elsewhere H/T Lee Waaks.)

    1) it’s possible to classify lester’s argument as “pre-property RIGHTS”, even if it’s not pre-propertarian (pre-property). Property rights require OTHERS. Property requires only the self (an actor).

    2) Lester is correct that the imposition of costs (Subjective Value) is the cause of moral sentiments (retaliatory sentiments).

    3) There is zero need for a theory of liberty. We have a term called ‘liberty’ that has been around for centuries. All ‘liberty’ means and ever has meant, is that interpersonal moral constraints, or interpersonal local norms, are not violated by organized imposition of order (of one kind or another). in the original versions (latin, greek and babylonian) it meant ‘not a slave’ or ‘having permission’.

    4) There is NOTHING fuzzy about the imposition of costs. That would invalidate subjective value. (ie: that would be profoundly stupid).

    5) Kinsella uses IP as the litmus test and works backward from there rather than seeing IP as a potentially legitimate contract for exclusive supply in a polity in order to obtain products and services that could not be constructed without such subsidies. The problem is not the use of contracts of exclusivity when they are to one’s advantage. Instead, it is that these contracts are used indiscriminately when they are a disadvantage to consumers. There would be no reason for a voluntary, corporeal government to issue exclusivity contracts, as long as those contracts were open to suit under universal standing. If the government met the burden of proof, then it could stand, and if not it would fall. The politicization of these contracts, and the insulation of participants from suit is the principle problem with them. Otherwise, it’s merely denying people a tool that can be to their advantage.

    Kinsella doesn’t like rational debate. He doesn’t engage in it. He’s a dogmatist. He’s a moral intuitionist. He’s a justificationist. He’s insulting when he doesn’t get his way. He is terribly ignorant outside of libertine scripture. And honestly, he isn’t very intelligent. Even in the PFS community he’s just loud and has Hoppe’s ear but most of us thought he was a bit of a twit – and an annoying one. His position on IP is largely correct. If he constrained himself to those arguments he would be fine. But he’s just an antagonistic belligerent mirror image of Stefan Molyneux. I like Molyneux as a popular rationalist, even if as a student of philosophy he’s weak, and as an author of it he’s severely lacking. I’d like Stephan as well if he just said “Well, I don’t specialize in that, so I stick to IP and Argumentation.”.

    Honestly, if libertarian theory were anything worthwhile we’d have people at top universities spending time on it, rather than the fruitcake fringe.

    I’m trying to save it but you can’t. It’s a cult for losers, not a philosophy for change.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-31 07:48:00 UTC

  • There is only one moral rule. There are many evolutionary strategies that implem

    —There is only one moral rule. There are many evolutionary strategies that implement more of that rule (northern european), and many evolutionary strategies that implement less of that rule (almost everyone else). One cannot ask a man dying in the desert not to steal from water from another. One cannot ask an inferior people, with inferior families, with inferior ideas, with inferior norms, with inferior institutions to be ‘forgotten’ or ‘left behind’. They will not go quietly into the dark.—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-31 07:20:00 UTC

  • TO LEE ON JAN LESTER —“Lester does not equate liberty with property because he

    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

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-28 15:17:00 UTC

  • Liberty (property) provides decidability to moral propositions by requiring cons

    Liberty (property) provides decidability to moral propositions by requiring consent to transfers. Progressivism favors consumption and conservatism favors accumulation – of human capital in particular.

    Of the three decisions only liberty provides operational decideability, and only operational decideability under voluntary exchange makes full use of the knowledge of the other two dimensions.

    Humans operate under a moral division of labor, and we libertarians are the moderators – the market makers.

    Libertine Fundamentalism is an equally dishonest attempt to escape our own requirement for voluntary transfer.

    Although that might take a bit of pondering to grasp.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-22 16:24:00 UTC

  • The Central Argument To The Origin Of Morality: Cost vs Scarcity

    [S]carcity is a universal, unknowable, marginal indifference. It is praxeologicaly non-existent. I cannot know and act on it. Cost is particular, knowable, and decidable because of marginal differences. It is praxeologicaly existential. I can know and act on it.
    Scarcity is a necessary constraint between states, that need not reduce local transaction costs, but which must avoid conflict despite differences in in-group (local) rules.

    Morality is important between individuals, because they must reduce transaction costs sufficiently to engage in production in a division of knowledge and labor. Morality prohibits free riding, and is determined by costs that are knowable by the actors.
    Polities must form laws (rules) of cooperation, that mix the necessary rules of morality (prohibition on free riding), with the rules necessary for the production of commons, with the utilitarian allocation of privileges (norms) that assist in either parasitism or the organization of production or both.

    Rothbard, as a cosmopolitan, was trying to justify separatism. Not describe necessary properties of cooperation, nor the necessary properties of rule of law, under which a group of people can cooperate without allocation of discretion to individuals with authority.

    ( That basic argument should put the bullet in Hoppe’s Scarcity argument forever. Just like I have put the bullet in his Argumentation forever. Just like I have put a bullet in ghetto ethics forever. Just like I have put a bullet in the NAP(IVP) forever. Just as I suspect I may have put a bullet in ‘meaning’ forever. )


    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • The Central Argument To The Origin Of Morality: Cost vs Scarcity

    [S]carcity is a universal, unknowable, marginal indifference. It is praxeologicaly non-existent. I cannot know and act on it. Cost is particular, knowable, and decidable because of marginal differences. It is praxeologicaly existential. I can know and act on it.
    Scarcity is a necessary constraint between states, that need not reduce local transaction costs, but which must avoid conflict despite differences in in-group (local) rules.

    Morality is important between individuals, because they must reduce transaction costs sufficiently to engage in production in a division of knowledge and labor. Morality prohibits free riding, and is determined by costs that are knowable by the actors.
    Polities must form laws (rules) of cooperation, that mix the necessary rules of morality (prohibition on free riding), with the rules necessary for the production of commons, with the utilitarian allocation of privileges (norms) that assist in either parasitism or the organization of production or both.

    Rothbard, as a cosmopolitan, was trying to justify separatism. Not describe necessary properties of cooperation, nor the necessary properties of rule of law, under which a group of people can cooperate without allocation of discretion to individuals with authority.

    ( That basic argument should put the bullet in Hoppe’s Scarcity argument forever. Just like I have put the bullet in his Argumentation forever. Just like I have put a bullet in ghetto ethics forever. Just like I have put a bullet in the NAP(IVP) forever. Just as I suspect I may have put a bullet in ‘meaning’ forever. )


    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • MORALITY IS A PROBLEM OF COST NOT SCARCITY I am writing something longer, but fo

    MORALITY IS A PROBLEM OF COST NOT SCARCITY

    I am writing something longer, but for now:

    Scarcity and Property exist prior to cooperation. However, scarcity is an analytic concept. Humans think in terms of cost, not scarcity. Because scarcity requires knowledge we cannot possess other than through prices/costs. So we cannot know something is scarce any more than we can know something is analytically true. We can only know that it is costly. The very concept of scarcity is modern, even if the precursor existed in the late medieval period (Norman English). Prior to the modern period, everything is ‘scarce'(costly) except an oversupply of labor and an over-demand for consumption. So it is praxeologically irrational to construct operational definitions out of that which is operationally impossible. (the profundity of that statement may not be immediately obvious.)

    Cooperation evolves out of the increased productive value of cooperating minus the loss of value in free riding, parasitism and predation. Humans evolved moral intuitions as pre-cognitive assessments of changes in the state of that which they had expended effort upon (paid costs for), so humans ‘feel’ changes in inventory as emotions, and ‘feel’ reactions to violations of parasitism, and react expensively to prevent future such actions – and so, humans act morally on costs, not analytically on scarcity. They must because reason is too expensive and failure prone compared with intuitive responses. We avoid one another because of potential conflict, yes. And, indeed, many of our primate relatives avoid conflict, but do not cooperate. Yet we cooperate with one another out of a desire for returns and discounts. We cooperate because we evolved the ability to empathize with intentions. We cooperate because it is more productive to cooperate than not. We are wealthier, more numerous and more powerful than our primate relatives, because we can not only prevent takings, but because we can cooperate – and they cannot.

    But for cooperation to be both rational and evolutionarily survivable, it must be relatively free of parasitism (beneficial for all parties: meaning mutually productive). And that is why humans are so highly agitated that we inflict punishment on all violators of the contract against parasitism: violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, rent seeking, conspiracy, statism, conversion, invasion, and conquest. We call this sequence ‘criminal, ethical, and immoral behavior’. Or we shorten it to ‘morals’.

    As such, it is impossible for an economy to form without cooperation – where there are prohibitions only on violence, but an absence of a prohibition on parasitism that make cooperation possible. It is only possible for an economy to form in the presence of morality: suppression of free riding.

    The only possible solution for any organism is the sequence:

    1) movement/memory/scarcity/defense(property)

    2) intention, incentives, cooperation, morality (non parasitism) – cooperation on the production of normative commons.

    As such the only CAUSALLY POSSIBLE origin of moral rules is the prohibition on parasitism, not scarcity.

    3) Just as we had to suppress ethical and moral parasitism in order to create cooperation, we must expand our suppression to include organized parasitism (state monopolies). But that does not mean that we must abandon prohibitions on parasitism. And it does not mean that it is possible to. Transaction costs alone would force the logical restoration of the state on the one hand, and the organized genocide of low trust peoples (gypsies and jews, and now apparently, muslims) that all host cultures (except the west) always enact. The only possible means of obtaining liberty is to increase the scope of moral prohibitions (prohibitions on parasitism) to reflect innovations in parasitism of the marxist and Keynesian era.

    So, for a bit of irony, the scarcity exists prior to cooperation, and therefore it is not praxeologically possible to come into existence post-cooperation.

    As such human societies evolve out of an ever-expanding suppression of parasitism, largely by centralizing parasitism to pay for the suppression of local parasitism. Once centralized, the next opportunity for increasing prosperity by suppression, is to eradicate centralized parasitism, by eliminating monopolies that make parasitism possible.

    Ergo, the only possible libertarian society is one of high trust, and total suppression of free riding (parasitism).

    Ergo the only possible social order using the ghetto ethic is one of those imprisoned either in the ghetto, or on Crusoe’s island.

    PRAXEOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS

    One must question the dogmatic advocacy of operational definitions (praxeology) in the construction of any economic statement that we say is ‘true’, while at the same time constructing economic statements that are not operational, but merely rational. This is a contradiction.

    Furthermore, operational (praxeological) definitions only prove that something is existentially possible, and if constructed as measures they produce reproducibility. But they do not demonstrate that they are in fact the way something occurred (truth), nor do they demonstrate the exclusive means by which something can be accomplished.

    Meaning is useful, but it is rarely true – except by accident. In fact, we may view science as an effort to replace the subjectively meaningful, with the objectively truthful.

    Defense of meaning is justification. Man justifies. Justification is just another means of deception of others, and satisfying confirmation bias of the self – which in itself is merely an attempt to obtain a discount. But it is psychologically understandable that one would argue desperately to defend his investments in justification, despite the universal evidence to the contrary of his arguments. It is also logical that it is so easy to use loading, framing, overloading, obscurantism, conflation, and justification, to do so. But justification is merely justification – an error or a deceit.

    Hoppe and Rothbard work to justify Ghetto ethics. In large part i have solved the problem that Mises came so close to, failed to, and was ostracized over. I have tried to correct hoppe’s deductive arguments by converting them to scientific arguments, and thereby abandoning the ghetto influence of Rothbard, and preserving Hoppe’s arguments against the incentives of state vs private ownership. And his use of insurance to eliminate monopoly insurer of last resort. And his use of economics to operationally and intuitionistically describe operations and construct theories of all human behavior.

    It so happens that the interests between states (out group parties) are not commensurable, and therefore can only be reduced to questions of property and contract. But for in-groups to form, sufficient to hold the territory necessary to implement sufficient suppression of parasitism that it is possible to construct a condition of liberty, requires the suppression of all forms of parasitism regardless of the means by which such costs are imposed.

    Man perceives and operates on property he has expended costs, even mere forgone opportunity costs, to obtain. He treats his body, mind, kin, allies, several property, corporate property, common property, normative property, and sovereignty as property that he must defend. He seeks cooperation because it is a non linear multiplier of productivity. But he cooperates *under normative conditions*, meaning that he habituates cooperation, only under conditions of total prohibition on parasitism. Those peoples that learn truth can produce trust, and trust can produce greater velocity and adaptability than lower trust societies, because transaction costs are lower than all other competing groups. To create truth and trust a minority organize and systematically apply violence to those who practice lower levels of truth and trust, to compel them to either abandon their parasitism, or to leave, or to kill them, because their parasitism forces an exported cost upon all other high trust practitioners in the local region.

    Hoppeian and Rothbardian mis-application of the ethics of international trade for the purpose of avoiding military conflict, to the local polity where the purpose is reducing transaction costs so that they can cooperate in production of goods, services, commons, institutions and norms, not-withstanding. (They are making a rather stupid error in retrospect. But like all people of those eras fighting socialists, they resorted to the same tactics. Fighting dishonest marxism with dishonest libertarianism is probably a tactical necessity, but now that we are no longer so ignorant of the science we can abandon imitating the marxists and just argue the case for liberty scientifically.)

    Curt

    ( it will take me a few more times to get it tight, but it’s pretty close.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-17 07:46:00 UTC

  • NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW (followup) Shannon, Thanks for the reply. I have a s

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html#comment-170243ON NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW

    (followup)

    Shannon,

    Thanks for the reply. I have a sort of job to do, and it is both easier and more educational to criticize those with whom we have small differences, than those whose ideas require vast effort to differentiate and render comparable. This means it is often more illustrative to criticize one’s allies on tertiary points than it is to make long wholesale arguments against direct opponents. So my apologies. But the end is that we must provide conservatives with the means to argue their ancient group evolutionary strategy in ratio-empirical terms, rather than the metaphorical and intuitionistic terms that they are stuck with – and which no conservative thinker has been able to use to elevate conservatism out of the subject of oft justifiable ridicule.

    My objection was three fold – although obscured by my often-criticized philosophical density:

    First, your article positions the choice between divinely ordained, and rationally chosen social contract. However, that I know of, there are three justificationary positions: divinely ordained (magical, authoritative and conservative), logically necessary for voluntary, peaceful, cooperation(scientific, voluntary and libertarian), and socially contractual(preferential, communal and equalitarian-socialist). (Jefferson was certainly not a Deist. Anything but.)

    Second, that if we look at the data, the demographic correlations show that the origins of these different justifications reflect family structures, and family structures reflect agrarian social models (even crops), and that these persist even when immigrants migrate from the old world to the new. (See Emmanuel Todd).

    Third, that the consistent thread throughout history, from the Stoics to the present, through various magian, rational and empirical expressions, does not position natural rights as equivalent to Moses’ tablets (albeit the ten commandments are translatable into an early list of property rights), but instead, that the there is an optimum natural order of things – a ‘divine order’ that we must adhere to as a defense against our hubris, and the hubris of those in power in particular if we are to flourish (cooperate peacefully) and govern beneficially. It so happens that we can capture these rules as property rights: life liberty and property. Or conversely: ‘impose no involuntary costs upon others’.

    So whether we justify that optimum order as god’s will, justify it as rationally or empirically utilitarian, or abandon the prohibition on hubris with positive law (legislative commands), is largely a product of our heritage – a reproductive bias that suits our evolutionary strategy, and which quite possibly exists as a bias in our genes. And while there appears to be little chance of persuading others to change the justification they use for their arguing in favor of their preferences, the entire planet has adopted the language of science as the universal language of truthful speech. And if indeed the only difference between the allegorical and ratio-scientific arguments is the means of justification, then it is in our interests to argue using the universal language of truthful speech, and maintain metaphors for the pedagogy of our offspring for whom such language is inaccessible.

    As such the debate is between the deist(ancient), scientific(modern), and 20th century (postmodern) strategy, and the deist and the scientific both retain the prohibition on hubris, while the postmodern (leftist) abandons it.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to use your post as an example. I hope you appreciate my good intentions.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Lviv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 18:29:00 UTC