Curt Doolittle

Theme: Responsibility

  • “I don’t disagree with Miller’s multiple “standards of justice”. I just would st

    —“I don’t disagree with Miller’s multiple “standards of justice”. I just would state ‘standards of justice’ very differently, using the terms: necessities, demands, incentives, and evolutionary strategies. So, I say the same thing. I just say it very differently. 🙂 That said, a standard of logical decidability in all matters is provided by one universal moral rule: voluntary exchange – but we can build infinitely complex systems upon it. That one rule provides us with Decidability in law regardless of construction of social norms, and that single, necessary inescapable, universal logical test is very different from the contractual terms by which we construct social orders out of various exchanges, and inside of which we produce multiple standards of justice.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-02-01 11:36:00 UTC

  • “What, if i may ask, is your criticism of Miller? it would be interesting to see

    —“What, if i may ask, is your criticism of Miller? it would be interesting to see if it holds water”— Ayelam Valentine Agaliba

    (reposted for archival purposes)

    Val,

    I don’t disagree with Miller’s multiple “standards of justice”. I just would state it very differently, as necessities, demands, incentives, and evolutionary strategies. I mean, I say the same thing. I just say it very differently.) That said, standard of logical decidability in all matters is provided by one universal moral rule that is necessary – but we can build infinitely complex systems upon it. That one rule provides us with Decidability in law regardless of construction of social norms, and that single, necessary inescapable, universal logical test is very different from the contractual terms by which we construct social orders out of various exchanges, and inside of which we produce multiple standards of justice.

    One thought: (A Criticism)

    —“By mistakenly supposing that thinking intelligently is identical with

    thinking logically, critical thinking textbooks almost invariably regard the purpose of argument to be a combination of justification and persuasion, authoritarian goals that critical rationalists, and other supporters of the open society, must shun. “— David Miller (Abstract)

    Well, his criticism is correct, in that our populace is being taught very bad (justificationary ideas). But then, he doesn’t solve the problem. Popper’s argument is much narrower than Miller intuits.

    So, I think that this is not quite right. Instead:

    (a) I must justify my actions in accordance with objective morality, local norms and laws. (I must show that I met terms of the contract for cooperation – thus if I err I am blameless and free of restitution.)

    (b) I must warranty my testimony is truthful by critically prosecuting it.

    (c) I must(can) Innovate (reason / Develop Theories) by any free associative principle possible.

    I believe that is the correct hierarchy. Because it is a NECESSARY hierarchy. Just as these are necessary hierarchies:

    (a) Tautology, Deduction, Induction, Abduction, Guessing, and Free associating.

    (b) Teleological ethics, deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and intuitionistic ethics.

    (c) Murder, violence, theft, fraud, omission, indirection, socialization, free riding, privatization, rent seeking, corruption, conspiracy, conversion, invasion, conquest, and destruction.

    (d) manners, ethics, morals, laws, constitutions, property.

    (e) life, movement, memory, cost, property, cooperation, norms, property rights laws, government, state, empire.

    So, I while I understand Miller’s assumption, he is making a mistake of ‘one-ness’ or ‘monopoly’ that is a byproduct of some rather structural errors implicit in the use of logic in the discipline of philosophy. Which, if were instead, express not as manipulation of sets (which is how he works if I remember correctly) , but as a sequence of possible actions (existentially possible categories of actions), then he might not make this mistake. I mean, it seems that falsification is a hammer, and everything appears to be a nail. But at some point this is nothing but framing (using concepts one has specialization in, rather than integrating those concepts into the greater whole.

    And in this case, the greater whole, is the universal language of truth telling: science. And until insights obtained through logical analysis can be converted into truthful speech (scientific language) then it remains UNFALSIFIED. <– ***Which is my underlying argument.***

    One of the things economics teaches you is to think about equilibrating processes that negate all our actions into the realm of marginal indifference, rather than seeking binary truth of states.

    So I would argue that we should be taught the following:

    1) Manners, ethics, and Morality under the Golden Rule, Silver Rule, and the one-rule of property and voluntary exchange. The miracle of cooperation. How we insure one another in a multitude of ways.

    2) Truthfulness, Witness and Testimony (Operationalism and Existential Possibility) as well as how to spot errors in truthfulness, witness, and testimony.

    3) Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, Debate and Oratory (as we once were), including how to spot ignorance, error, bias, deception, and Loading-Framing-Overloading (“Suggestion that overwhelms reason”).

    4) External Correspondence (empirical observation, analysis and testing) with a nod to Instrumentalism. And how to falsify external correspondence. What a pseudoscience is, and how to spot it.

    5) How to use free association (what we call ‘creativity’) “Filling the shelves of your mind, and then ‘playing’. Which is a discipline if you work at it. (It’s my preferred discipline.)

    6) arithmetic, accounting, finance, economics (in that order)

    7) Mathematics, Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry, and at least the ‘idea’ of calculus. But taught as the history of the development of these problems that people were solving, instead of as wrote. With far more emphasis on word problems.

    8) Mind. Biology. Chemistry, Physics, (in that order)

    And honestly, I think all philosophy is discardable except as an interesting inquiry into the intellectual history of the struggle to develop science: Truth telling.

    I hope this puts my criticism of Miller in perspective.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2015-02-01 10:29:00 UTC

  • LOANING ONE’S VIOLENCE TO THE STATE (oldie but goodie) —“”To the State: If for

    LOANING ONE’S VIOLENCE TO THE STATE

    (oldie but goodie)

    —“”To the State:

    If for a moment, you forget that you are dispensing my violence on my behalf;

    and you seek to treat me not as a citizen who bestows upon you my violence, to be justly administered, but a subject who must obey rules;

    and if you believe and act as though the law not as a convenient tool for the resolution of differences between peers, but a scripture that I must obey as a subject;

    then it is not only my right, but my duty to myself and others, to take back from you my borrowed violence, and to remind you if I can, and teach you if I must, that the source of that violence you dispense is the citizenry.

    If I must remind the state, then I hope it is by this simple, gentle oratory. But if that will not suffice, I will not resort to the display of petty personal violence, nor to the disorder of rabble and protest. Because that is not the capacity of violence that I gave to the state.

    I will instead raise an army and show you what violence it is that I do restrain, so that you are once again reminded, that you are an actor on my behalf, and on behalf of my fellow citizens – and nothing more.

    And if you doubt for a moment that I can do such a thing, I will be only so happy to prove it to you, by starting in this very room, on this very day, if necessary.””—

    Cry not havoc but order. And bring forth the men of war.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-25 15:40:00 UTC

  • DON’T SUPPORT RON PAUL EITHER Ron Paul committed political suicide, in an act of

    http://idontsupportronpaul.com/I DON’T SUPPORT RON PAUL EITHER

    Ron Paul committed political suicide, in an act of profound moral cowardice, joining the Mises Institute in their decades of ideological suicide, by using the hardship of real people as an excuse to produce propaganda against the monopoly bureaucratic state – a fight which the Ukrainians themselves are more the victim of than any other.

    It was an act of unconscionable immorality, demonstrating the immorality of libertine free rider libertarianism – But moreover it violates the western aristocratic moral imperative that is the source of all liberty: that any who desire to be free of tyranny in pursuit of property rights, shall have our alliance, if we obtain their alliance in return. The west was constructed using this ethic.

    The low-trust, free riding, Rothbardian ethic of the Ghetto mandates that we walk away from all fights that are not directly initiated against us. But under this ethic, not only would the west never have arisen, but neither would have liberty, because liberty was the result of this system of ever-expanding alliances between families, tribes, city states, and nation-states: the reciprocal grant of sovereignty over life and property in exchange for reciprocal insurance in the defense of life liberty and property. This exchange is the origin of liberty and property rights, and all men sought this status, and the prosperity it gave them, by demonstrating their commitment in martial service to one another. This is the only source of rights that is existentially possible – every alternative justification is a mere verbal excuse to escape the high cost of constructing a condition of liberty by taking responsibility for using, and spending, your wealth of violence, to construct and preserve it.

    The war for liberty is not against the nation state – if anything we must re-nationalize liberalism to save the west – but instead, libertinism, like marxism, socialism, postmodernism and neo-conservatism, are a war intentionally produced by cosmopolitan separatists against western solidarity, for the purpose of preserving their dual-ethical social model, and its dependence upon free riding on the martial strength, martial expense, and martial risk, of others. There is no possibility for one to claim moral righteousness by free riding upon the costly defense of others, and no moral righteousness not coming to the martial aid of all those who seek to join the alliance of free men. It is merely free riding: theft. An act of fraud by which one seeks to obtain the expensive liberty at a discount. If this escapist strategy is followed to its end, it will leave a people homeless, diasporic, and dependent upon the kindness and charity of host people, nations, and civilizations. It has. It does.

    What differentiates the west from the west is not the six apps that Nial Ferguson compliments us for – they are effects, not causes. The source of those six apps, and the west’s ability to innovate faster than all other civilizations combined, despite our poverty, small numbers, and distance from the origin of the bronze age, is that we discovered the truth, we speak the truth, we trust because we speak the truth, we hold each other accountable for speaking the truth, and we exchange the promise of our ready and willing hand of violence in the defense of the life liberty and property of our allies. Western excellence is the result of the unique western reliance upon truth as the most expensive, and most disciplined commons ever constructed by man.

    Reality intervenes on all ideals, but the west, western ethics, western prosperity, and western liberty, evolved because more often then not, we preserved sovereignty with the reciprocal commitment for truth and violence, and we appeal to the jury of our peers as a test of both.

    So, leave Ron Paul, and his marxist-inspired allies. Return to classical liberalism and abandon the immoral ethics of the Ghetto. Unless you prefer to live in one. Because the ghetto is the result of those ethics libertines espouse.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    WEB SITE

    http://idontsupportronpaul.com/

    LOU ROCKWELL GETS OFFENDED

    http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/robert-wenzel/troika-seeks-to-purge-ron-paul/

    TARGET LIBERTY GETS OFFENDED

    http://www.targetliberty.com/2015/01/sfl-faction-starts-website-to-oppose.html

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-15 16:42:00 UTC

  • FINALLY DEVELOP ARISTOCRACY – AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE COMMONS? ( I am a

    http://freebeacon.com/national-security/europes-leading-rabbi-jews-must-begin-carrying-guns/JEWS FINALLY DEVELOP ARISTOCRACY – AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE COMMONS?

    ( I am a very big fan of the armed society )

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-15 08:26:00 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

  • A THEORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JUSTIFICATION, CRITICISM AND MORALITY If em

    A THEORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JUSTIFICATION, CRITICISM AND MORALITY

    If empiricists are correct, and that all memories are the product of observations (both internal and external), and that intuition serves as a search engine(which cognitive scientists seem to agree at present), and imagination a hypothetical engine(again a search engine), then all mental content originates with reality, all knowledge as theory, and the function of thinking, reasoning, and science are to criticize imaginary intuitions, hypotheses to see if they can take the standing of theories (which is analogous to belief), and law (which is analogous to norm, ritual, or sacred tenet).

    The difference between justificationary and critical points of view buried unconsciously in our language, is that feeling, belief, knowledge and truth describe a justificationary epistemology, and intuition, hypothesis, theory and law describe a critical epistemology.

    I would add that I believe (hypothesize) justificationary epistemology is necessary in highly interdependent small polities where most reproduction and production functions as a commons in which all members are shareholders; and therefore the use of most property, is as common property, and so even normative rules (the normative commons) must be justified to others. Whereas under an advanced economy, we are individual actors, and need not justify to others how we make use of resources – only that we do no harm to them. Under both Justification and Criticism we must warranty our words and deeds. Just as we do in all of life.

    This is probably the correct interpretation of why we evolved from systems of beliefs (justifications within a commons) to systems of theories (criticisms under individual property rights) – we must claim knowledge is ethically and morally obtained and practiced. But what constitutes moral action changes as property is increasingly privatized. We move from needing permission to use property, to not. But in the process, we increasingly privatize responsibility for our actions as well.

    It appears that all justification and criticism are merely the conditions of warranty under different structures of property. And that we have increasingly applied our cooperative methodology to those areas of the world where cooperation is no longer involved.

    In other words, it was necessary to privatize property to gain the normative permission to seek the truth. Having privatized it, we have now obtained a condition where we see that the only truth possible is critical. And having abandoned morality from the pursuit of truth, it appears I am unconsciously, unknowingly, and unwittingly, reinserting it into the search for truth as a constraint upon the externalities produced by our search, in an effort to constrain people who would take advantage of the justificationary system for criminal, unethical, and immoral purposes to which it has been put for the past century and a half.

    More to come as I drill into this further.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-07 03:29:00 UTC

  • MORAL SUPERIORITY BY REJECTION OR ACTION? Well, you can claim moral superiority

    MORAL SUPERIORITY BY REJECTION OR ACTION?

    Well, you can claim moral superiority and reject the rest of society – accomplishing nothing other than a dramatic disapproval: the equivalent of a raspberry. Or you can make a plan, rally fellow warriors, and change society to suit your will. The moral question is simple: if you seek to impose greater suppression of free riding, and increase the requirement for voluntary exchange you are in fact, increasing the moral content of society. If you are increasing predation, parasitism and free riding, then you are acting immorally. But whether you use violence to achieve either end is immaterial. Violence can be put to good (suppression of free riding, parasitism and predation) or ill (increasing free riding, parasitism and predation.) So contrary to feminine sentiment, violence not only solves most conflict, it is necessary for the solution of conflict. Violence is a virtue, if put to virtuous ends. And the suppression of free riding, parasitism and predation is a virtuous end.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    L’viv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-06 09:09:00 UTC

  • THE HIGH TAX OF TRUTH TELLING It is a terribly high tax – a payment into the com

    THE HIGH TAX OF TRUTH TELLING

    It is a terribly high tax – a payment into the commons – to speak the truth, to speak it truthfully, to promise, to hold one’s promise, to take only what is voluntarily exchanged, productive, and free of negative externality. That is why no other people does it. No one other than Germanic man. It is terribly expensive. And why we do it may be traditional, or genetic, a combination of the two.

    Over the past century and a half, the counter-enlightenment efforts of the Germans and the Jews have taught us to lie again, through the use of new media, just as they forced us to stop learning the truth by closing the greek schools and then forcibly taught us to lie in the first place, via the new media of the church and bible. We rescued ourselves from the system of lies after more than a millennium of enforced ignorance and deception. And then the anglo evangelical puritans, and now, after the Germans have been conquered, anglo neo-puritans, have allied with the Cosmopolitan Jews and taught us to lie, justified lying as in the common good, ridiculed us for telling the truth, taken over our academy (seminaries) and our government, and our media (churches), and forced our children to listen to lies, to lie, and to obey lies.

    Truth telling is enough. With courts of common law, property rights including the physical, normative, and informational commons, and the requirement for productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of negative externality – and its inverse: the prohibition on involuntary imposition of costs – we can, each of us, police the division of knowledge and labor at our own discretion, according to our fragmentary knowledge and ability, and use truth and violence to construct our unique, prosperous, innovative, moral order, and eradicate from government the parasitism we have eliminated from tribe, and locality, and centralized in the bureaucratic state.

    This is what the high tax of truth telling, and the equally high tax of using violence to enforce truth telling buys us: the most prosperous and innovative society on earth, that leads man toward his potential of being the god he imagines directs him, but who, if exists, seeks only to succeed him, as do all parents.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-06 04:26:00 UTC

  • I think such arguments are not cast in useful frames, because the difference bet

    http://johnquiggin.com/2014/12/31/consequentialist-arguments-for-deontological-positions/comment-page-1/#comment-249747John,

    I think such arguments are not cast in useful frames, because the difference between Imitative(virtue) ethics, rule(deontological) ethics, and outcome(consequentialist) ethics, is merely the information one has at one’s disposal in making judgements. Just as abduction, induction and deduction are different levels of guesswork depending upon the information we have at our disposal. In that light, I am not sure that the assumption that one combines rule justifications and consequent justifications is any more than an artifact of the normal process of debating moral rules because of the outcomes they produce. There isn’t anything irrational about it.

    But, rather than frame the question as one of rationalism, we can also frame it scientifically: Humans demonstrably justify our moral intuitions through a fog of cognitive biases that are unequally distributed in intensity across all of us – not the least of which are by gender, kin, class, family structure, and pressures from local geographic competition. It is as painfully obvious that you are an Australian as it is to you that I am an American, or someone else is a Canadian, Brit or German. Yet each of us in the final analysis relies upon an intuitionistic judgment. And appeals to scientific judgement are rare. In your post you make this same argument: that in the end we result to intuition.

    So, the very idea of a common good achievable by moral argument among well intentioned equals is probably illogical – which is why we cannot achieve it. We were relatively equal in interests under craftsman-agrarianism and the absolute nuclear family. But outside of those conditions, our inequality of interests is increasingly visible, expressed and our inequality of interests dominant. And particularly with the dissolution of the family and the de-nationalism of liberalism, our inequality of interests is increasingly expressed in political preferences.

    Instead of operating under the pretense of equals under majority rule, if we treat one another as possessed of different sensory biases (roles) in a division of inter-temporal reproductive labor, and that we use voluntary exchange as our information system, then under those conditions, majority rule is only slightly less terrible a means of cooperating than tyranny, and a failure to construct exchanges lost opportunity for cooperation.

    And so our purpose, if better served, in economic science (the study of human cooperation), is to provide institutional means for facilitating superior communication (exchanges) between individuals and groups, rather than attempting to construct unknowable optimums under majority rule.

    At that point fallacious arguments predicated upon false premises will no longer be necessary and we can simply argue about what we are each willing to do, instead of what we justify to be good albeit if in our own illusory and biased interests.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev,

    http://johnquiggin.com/2014/12/31/consequentialist-arguments-for-deontological-positions/

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-30 23:13:00 UTC