Individualism
Promoting Truth and Individualism
Mises
08/20/2010

Conceptual Origination


David Hume, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, writes thus:

Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.

This passage seems odd to me. First off, Hume states, “it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses.” This would seem to be saying that the mind cannot exceed the original stock of ideas furnished by internal and external senses.

Now allow me to correct Hume – bring him up to date, so to speak. Sensations do not furnish passive minds with ideas. When we look out the window, we are not presented with the ideas “men,” “cars,” “bicyclists,” etc. Our vision presents us with a single image; our minds (not sensations) break that image down into different objects. We further create schema to accommodate those objects into our perceptual sets.

That minor correction aside, Hume goes on to assert that we have “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas.” Now here’s my question: If we have unlimited power of mixing and compounding, etc, then we are not limited to our “original stock of ideas,” are we? Hume seems to want it both ways; to deny conceptual origination while specifying precisely how conceptual origination occurs.

Let’s make this clear: If conceptual origination does not occur, we will not have any concepts in our minds that do not correspond with real objects.

05/16/2010

Feeble Child Theory of Man Repudiated


Jessica Watson sailed around the world. As she returned home, she was met by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who hailed her as “Australia’s newest hero.” “You do our nation proud,” he said. “You are a hero for young Australians … and young Australian women.”

But Watson said she had to disagree with Mr Rudd as “I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who had a dream. You just have to have a dream and set your mind to it.’’

Reading the comments on the blogs, we can see fairly clearly who is offended by the heroic theory of man and the accompanying repudiation of the feeble child theory of man.

05/13/2010

Bertrand Russell Not a Communist


In Bertrand Russell’s short essay, Why I Am Not a Communist, Russell provides two objections to Marx. First, Marx was “muddle headed,” and secondly “his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.”

Russell summarizes Marxism thus:

The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.

Russell could have gone a bit further back to look at the foundation of Marx’s claims – i.e., the moral theory of desert – but he doesn’t do that. Why? Perhaps because Russell himself wants to retain the use of desert in his own moral and political theories.

Russell then identifies another problem thus:

The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917, however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great majority being peasants. it was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultimately of one man – Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps.

But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous.

The idea is that if a larger percent of the population consented to the policies, they would be justified. But the dictatorship of the majority, as history has shown us, can be just as murderous as a dictatorship of a minority.

The history of leftism could be described as one long struggle against acknowledging a single fact. Leftism wants to impose collectivism on the people. This necessarily involves the forced surrender of individual sovereignty to the collective authority. This much is good, to the leftist. Now he can take your wages and distribute your earnings according to his morality. He can tell you who to employ, how to employ them and who not to employ. He can dictate that the your child’s education conform to his morality. He can force you to participate in schemes which serve his conception of the greater good. The leftist is happy.

The problem arises when the collective authority deviates from the leftist’s conception of morality. Modern liberals and communitarians in America denounce constitutional impediments to the exercise of popular sovereignty and democracy. Then they turn around and invoke individual sovereignty when the majority deviates from their morality.

A typical example of this hypocrisy is the invocation of popular sovereignty in the service of universal health care, and the simultaneous invocation of  individual sovereignty when they attempt to combat referendums – the very epitome of popular sovereignty in action – which denied gays the right to marry.

The question for the leftist then is, how do we give collective authority to the majority without the majority abusing that authority? As I’ve argued before, it cannot be done. Once you’ve declared that “justice” is synonymous with the will of the majority; and “injustice” is synonymous with any act that deviates from the will of the majority, you’ve just justified any and all atrocities the majority can will itself to commit.

The collectivist, however, refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual. By this time, he probably knows in his heart that the collectivism will necessarily result in atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, but he thinks the benefits he derives from collectivism – primarily, coercive wealth redistribution and the ability to indoctrinate children in their beliefs – these benefits outweigh the risks.

And that is where individualists disagree. No benefits can justify collectivism. Even if torturing just one child could wipe out all illness social and physical for all eternity, it would not be justified. Justifying that which is intrinsically unjust is logically impossible.

05/06/2010

Private Property Contradicts Consent


Michael Sandel, the communitarian professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has a beginners level lecture series online.He covers the spectrum of moral philosophies and overall it’s a good series.

He is, however, a communitarian; communitarians define themselves roughly as “opposed to any variant of individualism.” They believe in group rights, not individual rights. As pluralists, they will respect your rights only in terms of your group membership.A horrid and oppressive ideology, if you ask me.

Anyway, watching the series I noticed that he is for the most part fair in his representation of libertarian philosophy. I did notice one “oops” moment, though. He mentioned almost as an aside that John Locke had contradicted himself by arguing for consent-based justice while at the same time allowing private property ownership. Sandel says, “This great theorist of consent came up with a theory of private property that didn’t require consent.” To Sandel, Locke has contradicted himself; Sandel refers to this as “the darker side of Locke.”

There is no contradiction. Locke didn’t demand that individuals secure the consent of others for everything they do; only acts which affect the property rights of others – property of self or property in land.

MEN being, as has been said, by nature all free equal, and independent. no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent…

Now, for Sandel’s implied claim of a contradiction to be meaningful, he would have to show that private property deprives others of their property somehow.

Now, I know what Sandel is thinking. All private property within a nation, to Sandel, belongs to everybody. When an individual claims part of it, he is depriving others of property without their consent. But that is nothing more than willful ignorance of Locke’s theory of ownership.

How could all the land within a nation belong to everybody in the first place? Did they mix their labor with the land? Then it’s theirs; and nobody else can claim it. The difference here is that Locke doesn’t recognize Sandel’s collectivization of the land in the first place. To Locke, the land is unowned. It has no owner, so when an individual mixes his labor with it and thereby claims it for himself, he has no deprived anybody of their land.

What I’d really like to see is Sandel’s argument for collective ownership of land that nobody has mixed their labor with.

05/03/2010

Libertarianism from A to Z


Libertarianism, from A to Z by Jeffrey Miron

Jeffrey Miron is a professor of economics at Harvard University and an outspoken libertarian. His new book, Libertarianism from A to Z, has just come out and is available at Amazon.

There are many defenses of libertarian thought out there. I dare say libertarians do not need any more of those. (See: Lomasky’s Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community and Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea)

Libertarianism, A to Z, is more of an exposition of applied libertarianism. Miron shows how libertarianism deals with problems as diverse as abortion, affirmative action, bank regulation, disaster relief, drug prohibition, drunk driving laws, false advertising, gun control, immigration, marriage, national defense, organ sales, paternalism, prostitution, public schools, religion and taxpayer subsidized sports stadiums, just to name a few.

Highly recommended reading for anybody who aspires to political literacy.

05/02/2010

The Myth of Exploitation


Exploitation, according to the advocates of exploitation theory, is the failure to pay a person what he deserves. The idea central to this theory is that deserts are objectively truths.

According to the labor theory of value,  the value of a product is determined by the socially average amounts of human labor-time currently required to produce different goods and services. If it takes the average craftsman one hour to make a pair of shoes, then it is worth one hour of labor. If a doctor trades 15 minutes of his labor for two hours of a farmer’s labor, the doctor is exploiting the farmer.

There are two ways of reading the labor theory of value. One way of reading it is as a descriptive theory which purports to explain how market’s settle upon a certain price for any given product or service. Marx and others believed that the market would reach an equilibrium wherein no man would trade his labor for less labor than he had invested in his own product or service; such an equilibrium would be historically inevitable.

“What?” you say, “That’s insane! No doctor would trade an hour of his labor for an hour of a farmer’s labor!”

Marx would answer you, “Yes, they will, when the equilibrium has been reached.”

After all, if a doctor can trade 15 minutes of his labor for 2 hours of the farmer’s labor, then wouldn’t it make sense for the farmer to give up farming and become a doctor? And after so many people have given up farming and become doctors, the supply of farmers will dwindle, and supply of doctors will increase, and an equilibrium will be achieved whereby one hour’s labor by the doctor is of equal value to one hour’s labor by the farmer.

Of course, we know now the labor theory of value to be unadulterated hogwash. Farmers do not give up farming to become doctors. People do not choose their occupations solely or even largely on the basis of income potential. They choose occupations they believe to be a good fit to their skills or personality.

Another way to read the labor theory of value is as a moral imperative; that is, normatively instead of descriptively. Under this reading, Marx is saying it is morally wrong to trade one hour’s labor for less than or more than one hour’s labor.

The labor theory of value, read as moral proposition, is neither true nor false. It simply isn’t truth-apt, same as all moral propositions. Moral propositions are nothing more than an individual’s statement of his own subjective valuation of behavior. To say something is morally wrong is to say that you negatively value the occurence of that behavior.

As such, when an individual argues that one person or group is exploiting another, he is simply saying that he doesn’t value the behavior, in the same way he may not value cotton T-shirts. The statement does not have the possibility of possessing the authority of objective truth.

04/29/2010

The Problem of Circumcision


For several years, the anti-circumcision folks were gathering momentum. The all hell broke loose:

“WHO Recommends Circumcision, Citing HIV Data”

In addition, the US based CDC (Centers for Disease Control) now states that:

large retrospective study of circumcision in nearly 15,000 infants found neonatal circumcision to be highly cost-effective, considering the estimated number of averted cases of infant urinary tract infection and lifetime incidence of HIV infection, penile cancer, balanoposthitis, and phimosis.

On the issue of ethics, which is where the anti-circumcision crowd seems to have complaints:

Some persons have raised ethical objections to asking parents to make decisions about elective surgery during infancy, particularly when it is done primarily to protect against risks of HIV and STDs that don’t occur until young adulthood, but other ethicists have found it an appropriate parental proxy decision.

On the penile sensation front:

Well-designed studies of sexual sensation and function in relation to male circumcision are few, and the results present a mixed picture. Taken as a whole, the studies suggest that some decrease in sensitivity of the glans to fine touch can occur following circumcision. However, several studies conducted among men after adult circumcision suggest that few men report their sexual functioning is worse after circumcision; most report either improvement or no change.

With Time magazine declaring the discovery that “Circumcision Can Prevent HIV” to be the #1 Medical Breakthrough of 2007, the tide has definitely turned against the anti-circumcision crowd.

All that is fine and good. From what I’ve seen, the people who oppose circumcision oppose it on anti-religious grounds.

But the fact remains that circumcision has serious risks. The story of David Reimer ought to give all parents pause.

David was the victim of circumcision gone wrong. He lost his penis; was raised as a girl; grew up and rebelled against the forced gender alteration; underwent surgery to become male again; and eventually took his own life.

Granted, that is a nightmare most circumcised individuals will never go through. But the risk is there all the same.

So the question for the political theorist is, how do we differentiate harmful acts from non-harmful acts? And that isn’t even  it. We have no authority to prevent parents from harming their kids in most cases. Every time a parent puts a kid in an automobile, the kid is being exposed to some risk. You just cannot avoid risk, and you can’t prevent all harm.

The simple fact is, no parent would want their child to live a life of perfect safety. There are too many fun and challenging activities that involve risk, some which involve high risk.

It seems to me that there is an implicit contract between parent and child which provides the parent with the right to rear the child in a manner in which the parent sees fit; and placing an obligation on the parent to rear the child with interests of the child paramount.

Cutting off a finger for no reason – that isn’t in the interest of the child. Circumcision clearly is in the interests of the child when done for medical reasons.



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