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assumed [...] that to infringe on my property rights is to commit violence.
I did wonder :-). For what it’s worth, I think that’s pretty much an indefensible position, but I know it’s popular in libertarian circles and maybe there are ways to defend it that haven’t occurred to me.
I really cannot come up with a reason why [a massive defamation campaign] would be immoral
I will gently suggest that you should maybe see this as a deficiency in the ethical framework you’re working in...
while I personally hate discrimination, I don’t think it should be illegal
That was what I expected. But if you do that, there are possible scenarios where people literally starve to death because of it. Of course nothing forces you to care more about that than you do about the evils of government coercion, but I want it to be clear what the tradeoffs actually are here. (And I suggest that starving to death is as clear a loss of liberty as any.)
I would call that violence
OK, but see where we’ve now ended up. An action involving no direct violence is being classified as “violence” because, over a period of years, it is statistically likely to cause physical harm. But this same description covers an enormous number of other things that I bet you don’t want to class as violence or infringement of liberty. One example: If a factory emits a lot of pollution, it injures the health of people around it; some of them will die.
how do we determine what are the objectively right values?
Yup, that’s a really tough problem, and its toughness is one reason why many people (including me) are inclined to think that in fact there aren’t any objectively right values. Some believers in objectively right values hold that they can be found in revelations from a god or gods. Some believe that they can be found by careful consideration of what it could mean for humans to flourish. Etc. Personally, I’m pessimistic about the prospects of all these approaches. Including, I’m afraid, yours :-).
I will gently suggest that you should maybe see this as a deficiency in the ethical framework you’re working in...
All this does is weaken my argument for libertarianism, not my model for evaluating moral theories! Let’s not conflate the two.
the evils of government coercion / starving to death…
To be clear—it’s not exactly the government coercion that bothers me. It’s that criminalising discrimination is… just a bit random. As an employer, I can show preference for thousands of characteristics, and rationalise them (e.g. for extroverts—“I want people who can close sales”) but not gender/race/age? It’s a bit bizarre.
statistically likely to cause physical harm
This is the subject of another post I want to write, and will do when I have time—I think the important thing here is the intent. But let’s discuss this in more detail in another post!
pollution
This is tricky, as many negative externalities are. To be honest, I’d say this falls into the category of “issues we cannot deal with because the tools in our disposable, such as language, are not precise enough”, much like abortion. I think no moral theory would ever give you solid guidance on such matters.
there aren’t any objective values
Fair enough. My approach is predicated on the existence of values. If you want to say there is no such thing, absolutely fine by me—as long as you (and by you here I mean “one”—based on this conversation, I don’t think this applies to you specifically!) are not sanctimonious about your own morals.
(but note that you can still use my framework to rank theories—even if no theory is actually the correct one, you can have degrees of failure—so a theory that’s not even internally consistent is inferior to others that are).
All this does is weaken my argument for libertarianism
Really? Then maybe I misunderstood what you said before, because I thought you were saying that you can’t find any grounds for moral disapproval of massive defamation campaigns. That seems to me like a defect not in some particular argument but in what counts for you as grounds for moral disapproval.
[Meta-note: If you want to quote already-quoted material, you can use two “>” characters.]
criminalising discrimination is … just a bit random.
I understand, but I think it’s less random than you may think, in two ways. (1) What picks out gender, race, age, and other things that put people in “protected classes” (as I think the terminology in some jurisdictions has it) is that they are things that have been widely used for unfair discrimination. History does produce effects that in isolation look random: you get laws saying “don’t do X” but no laws saying “don’t do Y” even though X and Y are about equally bad, because X is a thing that actually happened and Y isn’t. It looks random but I’m not sure it’s actually a problem. (2) There is, I think, a more general and less random principle underlying this: When hiring (or whatever), don’t discriminate on the basis of characteristics that are not actually relevant to how well someone will do the job. If you’re employing a chemistry teacher, someone with blue eyes won’t on that account teach any worse; so don’t refuse to employ blue-eyed people as chemistry teachers. (Artificial example because real examples might be too distracting.) What makes this a little more difficult is that in some cases the “irrelevant” attributes may correlate with relevant ones; e.g., suppose blue-eyed people are shorter than brown-eyed people on average and you’re putting together a basketball team, then you will mostly not choose blue-eyed people. But in this case you should measure their height rather than looking at their eyes, and so I think it goes for other characteristics that correlate with things that matter.
statistically likely to cause physical harm [...] the important thing here is the intent [...] let’s discuss this in more detail in another post
OK, but I do want to emphasize that (though I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise) this looks to me like a really serious problem for libertarianish positions that say that only liberty matters and therefore we have no business erecting legal obstacles to anything other than violent freedom-infringement.
negative externalities [...] issues we cannot deal with [...] much like abortion
I may be being insufficiently charitable, but this feels like a cop-out. There’s nothing about this that obviously indicates to me that negative externalities are too subtle to be addressed by the mental tools at our disposal. Are you quite sure you aren’t just saying this because it’s something that doesn’t fit with the position you’re committed to?
My approach is predicated on the existence of values.
OK. But if you hold that there’s a way of finding out what these values are, then doesn’t that call into question the impossibility of getting everyone to agree about them? (Which is a key step in your argument.) It seems as if the argument depends on its own failure!
degrees of failure
Yes, I agree. (But cautiously; if someone concocts a perfectly consistent moral theory that aims at maximizing human misery, I am not convinced that that would be better than a theory that matches better with widespread intuitions about values, but has some inconsistencies in handling edge cases.)
because I thought you were saying that you can’t find any grounds for moral disapproval of massive defamation campaigns
Yes, I meant I couldn’t find grounds for disapproval of defamation under a libertarian system.
On discrimination, your argument is very risky. For example, in a racist society, a person’s race will impact how well they do at their job. Besides, on a practical level, it’s very hard to determine what characteristics actually correlate with performance.
Are you quite sure you aren’t just saying this because it’s something that doesn’t fit with the position you’re committed to?
That’s a bit unfair—I readily admitted the weakness in my whole theory re property rights. The problem with externalities like pollution is that it is difficult to say at what point something hurts someone to a significant extent, because “hurting someone” is not particularly well defined. Similarly for non-physical violence (e.g. bullying), and to an extent, this applies to defamation too.
OK. But if you hold that there’s a way of finding out what these values are, then doesn’t that call into question the impossibility of getting everyone to agree about them? (Which is a key step in your argument.) It seems as if the argument depends on its own failure!
Not clear on what you mean here… could you paraphrase please?
I meant I couldn’t find grounds for disapproval of defamation under a libertarian system.
Ah, OK. Then what I want to suggest is that you should probably see this as a reason to be dissatisfied with libertarianism. (Though of course it might turn out that actually there’s nothing you can do to stop massive defamation campaigns that wouldn’t have worse adverse consequences in practice. I doubt that, though.)
in a racist society, a person’s race will impact how well they do at their job.
It might. I think there are two sorts of mechanism. The first is that a racist society might mess up some people’s education and other opportunities, leading them to end up worse at things than if they belonged to a favoured rather than a disfavoured group. The second is that some jobs (most, in fact) involve interacting with other people, and if the others are racist then members of disfavoured groups might be less effective because others won’t cooperate with them.
Both of these mean that the principle “don’t discriminate on the basis of things that don’t make an actual difference” isn’t enough on its own to prevent all harmful-seeming discrimination, so appealing only to that principle probably justifies less anti-discrimination law than actually exists in many places. I’m OK with that; you’re saying that there shouldn’t be any anti-discrimination law because of its arbitrariness, and I’m pointing out that at least some has pretty good and non-arbitrary justification. I’m not trying to convince you that all the anti-discrimination measures currently in existence are good; only that some might be :-).
it’s very hard to determine what characteristics actually correlate with performance.
I agree, but my argument was that “this characteristic correlates with performance” generally isn’t good grounds for discrimination in hiring etc.
That’s a bit unfair—I readily admitted the weakness in my whole theory re property rights.
You did (for which, well done!) but someone can be epistemically virtuous on one occasion but not another :-). And I did admit that maybe I was being uncharitable. But I really don’t see how it’s plausible that negative externalities are just Too Much for the human race’s mental tools to cope with. You say the problem is that it’s difficult to draw boundary lines (if I’m understanding you right); yeah, it is, but that’s a problem with pretty much everything including, I suggest, infringement of liberty. The real world comes in shades of grey; our institutions sometimes need to be defined in black and white; the best we can do is to draw the boundaries in reasonable places, and I don’t think it makes sense to throw up our hands and despair merely because practical considerations sometimes require slightly arbitrary decisions to be made.
(It is only a matter of practical considerations. We could organize our laws and whatnot to acknowledge that most things vary continuously, and e.g. instead of having an offence of “murder” that one either has or hasn’t committed say sometimes that someone has committed 0.1 of a murder, etc. But it would be far more complicated and the gain would probably not be worth the cost.)
could you paraphrase please?
You argued: There is no universally agreed moral system or moral authority, nor any prospect of their being one. Therefore, it can never be right to force your moral system on someone else. Therefore, we should be libertarians. (As I’ve said, every step in this seems dubious to me; my apologies if as a result I have presented it badly.) And this is how you derive libertarianism. Now, you say that libertarianism is the one true objectively right moral system, which you know to be right by means of this argument. And here’s the thing: if this is really a good argument, then others ought to be persuadable by it too, in which case ultimately everyone should end up libertarian. But then it would no longer be true that there’s no universally agreed moral system! But that was an essential premise of the argument. So it’s self-undermining. If it’s a good argument, then it provides a universal moral system, whose nonexistence was a premise of the argument.
Greater-than sign at the start of the paragraph. (When you’re composing a comment, clicking the button that says “Show help” will tell you about some of these things. It won’t throw away the comment you’re editing.)
I did wonder :-). For what it’s worth, I think that’s pretty much an indefensible position, but I know it’s popular in libertarian circles and maybe there are ways to defend it that haven’t occurred to me.
I will gently suggest that you should maybe see this as a deficiency in the ethical framework you’re working in...
That was what I expected. But if you do that, there are possible scenarios where people literally starve to death because of it. Of course nothing forces you to care more about that than you do about the evils of government coercion, but I want it to be clear what the tradeoffs actually are here. (And I suggest that starving to death is as clear a loss of liberty as any.)
OK, but see where we’ve now ended up. An action involving no direct violence is being classified as “violence” because, over a period of years, it is statistically likely to cause physical harm. But this same description covers an enormous number of other things that I bet you don’t want to class as violence or infringement of liberty. One example: If a factory emits a lot of pollution, it injures the health of people around it; some of them will die.
Yup, that’s a really tough problem, and its toughness is one reason why many people (including me) are inclined to think that in fact there aren’t any objectively right values. Some believers in objectively right values hold that they can be found in revelations from a god or gods. Some believe that they can be found by careful consideration of what it could mean for humans to flourish. Etc. Personally, I’m pessimistic about the prospects of all these approaches. Including, I’m afraid, yours :-).
All this does is weaken my argument for libertarianism, not my model for evaluating moral theories! Let’s not conflate the two.
(but note that you can still use my framework to rank theories—even if no theory is actually the correct one, you can have degrees of failure—so a theory that’s not even internally consistent is inferior to others that are).
Really? Then maybe I misunderstood what you said before, because I thought you were saying that you can’t find any grounds for moral disapproval of massive defamation campaigns. That seems to me like a defect not in some particular argument but in what counts for you as grounds for moral disapproval.
[Meta-note: If you want to quote already-quoted material, you can use two “>” characters.]
I understand, but I think it’s less random than you may think, in two ways. (1) What picks out gender, race, age, and other things that put people in “protected classes” (as I think the terminology in some jurisdictions has it) is that they are things that have been widely used for unfair discrimination. History does produce effects that in isolation look random: you get laws saying “don’t do X” but no laws saying “don’t do Y” even though X and Y are about equally bad, because X is a thing that actually happened and Y isn’t. It looks random but I’m not sure it’s actually a problem. (2) There is, I think, a more general and less random principle underlying this: When hiring (or whatever), don’t discriminate on the basis of characteristics that are not actually relevant to how well someone will do the job. If you’re employing a chemistry teacher, someone with blue eyes won’t on that account teach any worse; so don’t refuse to employ blue-eyed people as chemistry teachers. (Artificial example because real examples might be too distracting.) What makes this a little more difficult is that in some cases the “irrelevant” attributes may correlate with relevant ones; e.g., suppose blue-eyed people are shorter than brown-eyed people on average and you’re putting together a basketball team, then you will mostly not choose blue-eyed people. But in this case you should measure their height rather than looking at their eyes, and so I think it goes for other characteristics that correlate with things that matter.
OK, but I do want to emphasize that (though I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise) this looks to me like a really serious problem for libertarianish positions that say that only liberty matters and therefore we have no business erecting legal obstacles to anything other than violent freedom-infringement.
I may be being insufficiently charitable, but this feels like a cop-out. There’s nothing about this that obviously indicates to me that negative externalities are too subtle to be addressed by the mental tools at our disposal. Are you quite sure you aren’t just saying this because it’s something that doesn’t fit with the position you’re committed to?
OK. But if you hold that there’s a way of finding out what these values are, then doesn’t that call into question the impossibility of getting everyone to agree about them? (Which is a key step in your argument.) It seems as if the argument depends on its own failure!
Yes, I agree. (But cautiously; if someone concocts a perfectly consistent moral theory that aims at maximizing human misery, I am not convinced that that would be better than a theory that matches better with widespread intuitions about values, but has some inconsistencies in handling edge cases.)
Yes, I meant I couldn’t find grounds for disapproval of defamation under a libertarian system.
On discrimination, your argument is very risky. For example, in a racist society, a person’s race will impact how well they do at their job. Besides, on a practical level, it’s very hard to determine what characteristics actually correlate with performance.
Not clear on what you mean here… could you paraphrase please?
Ah, OK. Then what I want to suggest is that you should probably see this as a reason to be dissatisfied with libertarianism. (Though of course it might turn out that actually there’s nothing you can do to stop massive defamation campaigns that wouldn’t have worse adverse consequences in practice. I doubt that, though.)
It might. I think there are two sorts of mechanism. The first is that a racist society might mess up some people’s education and other opportunities, leading them to end up worse at things than if they belonged to a favoured rather than a disfavoured group. The second is that some jobs (most, in fact) involve interacting with other people, and if the others are racist then members of disfavoured groups might be less effective because others won’t cooperate with them.
Both of these mean that the principle “don’t discriminate on the basis of things that don’t make an actual difference” isn’t enough on its own to prevent all harmful-seeming discrimination, so appealing only to that principle probably justifies less anti-discrimination law than actually exists in many places. I’m OK with that; you’re saying that there shouldn’t be any anti-discrimination law because of its arbitrariness, and I’m pointing out that at least some has pretty good and non-arbitrary justification. I’m not trying to convince you that all the anti-discrimination measures currently in existence are good; only that some might be :-).
I agree, but my argument was that “this characteristic correlates with performance” generally isn’t good grounds for discrimination in hiring etc.
You did (for which, well done!) but someone can be epistemically virtuous on one occasion but not another :-). And I did admit that maybe I was being uncharitable. But I really don’t see how it’s plausible that negative externalities are just Too Much for the human race’s mental tools to cope with. You say the problem is that it’s difficult to draw boundary lines (if I’m understanding you right); yeah, it is, but that’s a problem with pretty much everything including, I suggest, infringement of liberty. The real world comes in shades of grey; our institutions sometimes need to be defined in black and white; the best we can do is to draw the boundaries in reasonable places, and I don’t think it makes sense to throw up our hands and despair merely because practical considerations sometimes require slightly arbitrary decisions to be made.
(It is only a matter of practical considerations. We could organize our laws and whatnot to acknowledge that most things vary continuously, and e.g. instead of having an offence of “murder” that one either has or hasn’t committed say sometimes that someone has committed 0.1 of a murder, etc. But it would be far more complicated and the gain would probably not be worth the cost.)
You argued: There is no universally agreed moral system or moral authority, nor any prospect of their being one. Therefore, it can never be right to force your moral system on someone else. Therefore, we should be libertarians. (As I’ve said, every step in this seems dubious to me; my apologies if as a result I have presented it badly.) And this is how you derive libertarianism. Now, you say that libertarianism is the one true objectively right moral system, which you know to be right by means of this argument. And here’s the thing: if this is really a good argument, then others ought to be persuadable by it too, in which case ultimately everyone should end up libertarian. But then it would no longer be true that there’s no universally agreed moral system! But that was an essential premise of the argument. So it’s self-undermining. If it’s a good argument, then it provides a universal moral system, whose nonexistence was a premise of the argument.