Theme: Reciprocity

ALTERNATIVES TO PROPERTARIANISM

—“I’m interested in application and other methods that purport to arrive at ‘legitimate’ conclusions that are either orthogonal or nearly synonymous but methodically separate from propertarianism. For example, Popper may have advocated CR but there is plenty left to be said about psychoanalysis or metaphysics or philosophy of mind that is not derived through its application…..Propertarianism may be one tool but how many tools are in the box? And how many boxes are there?”—

Curt Doolittle

I don’t deal with “legitimate” in other than legal terms, because I don’t know what that means in other than legal terms. Instead I deal with moral necessity. MEANING can be achieved through whatever devices we can creatively invent and apply. But I am not solving a problem of meaning (it is infinitely recursive) I am solving a problem of ethics, law, and politics: using language that must be rationally calculable (not open to loading and framing) independent of meaning. And as such, expressly NOT one of meaning. In Propertarianism I operate with the principle that cooperation requires prevention of parasitism, and that every theft (involuntary transfer) is a lost opportunity for exchange (production). As far as I know this the only universally ethical statement because ethics must be reducible to cooperation to have any logical content (meaning). This is not rationalism but science, since this is what we demonstrate no matter how primitive or advanced the society. We just prohibit more or less parasitism, and use more or less government depending upon our level of parasitism.

So as far as I know cooperation can be represented by a formal grammar, which is an increase in the precision of the formal grammar of institutions. And all moral and immoral operations can be stated in this grammar. (This is what I suspect Mises was trying to get at.)

But that doesn’t tell us anything other than how to make contracts and resolve conflicts. It doesn’t help us understand that women and men value states of affairs differently, and that they react positively and negatively (with joy or sorrow) to different states of affairs. And that we make compromises for in pursuit of a Nash equilibrium in everything we do, leaving all of us more satisfied than any other possible condition, while less satisfied that the condition we aspire to.

It is the reality of this equilibrium that causes us our disappointments, and the fact that the genetic lottery aggressively makes you a loser as you vary negatively from the norm.