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2776 sats \ 14 comments \ @Undisciplined 15 Mar libertarian

This is the third entry in my series attempting to answer Bob Murphy's tough questions for libertarians. This is the post introducing the series and listing all of the questions: #458128

Question

Does Argumentation Ethics imply that everyone is entitled to enough land to have an argument from?

Context

This question is closely related to the previous question about animal rights and argumentation ethics that I addressed in this post: #463762. I'm going to use the word "rights" a bit loosely in this post, for the sake of expedience. As I detailed in the previous post, Argumentation Ethics is a different philosophical foundation for libertarianism. It is consequentialist, rather than deontological, so "rights" are really meant as conventions consistent with the goal of peaceful dispute resolution.

Also, as I noted in the previous post, this question is about Argumentation Ethics as I (or you) articulate it. The point isn't whether Hans Hoppe or Stephan Kinsella have really clever sophisticated answers. Like I said in the first entry of the series, these are tough questions for libertarians, not necessarily tough questions for libertarian philosophy.

This particular question is getting at why Hoppe diverged from his doctoral advisor Jurgen Habermas. In Habermas' Discourse Ethics, he does conclude that people are entitled to the resources necessary for survival, because they can't have a conversation if they're dead.

Hoppe does pursue this line of reasoning, but since he already established that there is no "right" to coerce others, the answer cannot be that others are obligated to provide you resources. So, if you need resources to be alive to have an argument, but others are not obligated to provide them, we are left with each individual having a right to obtain resources from nature. That's homesteading. We can also easily establish a right to transact with other owners of resources, since this is about dispute resolution and voluntary transactions are not in dispute.

That's most of libertarianism right there. Self ownership, homesteading, and free trade.

What about this issue though of actually needing to occupy a physical space with your body? Sure, no one is required to give you the space, but you do have to be somewhere. If all the land were owned and none of those owners grant you access, what happens to you?

Answer

We can flip this question around and I think see what the answer might be. Does the owner of wherever I am have the right to relocate me? Well, they don't have the right to put stuff on other people's property, so if no other owner is willing to take me, then they don't have anywhere to rightfully put me.

That doesn't grant me ownership, but it does imply that we have something like a temporary easement to the space we're currently occupying, until the owner finds somewhere to put us.

This line of reasoning will likely come up again for a later question.

Late me know what you think in the comments.

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1272 sats \ 6 replies \ @elvismercury 16 Mar

I've wondered something similar to this for a long time. I never hear it discussed that what was a sensible system at time X is not necessarily sensible at time X+100. For instance, in an era where there was a frontier, and property claims loose or nonexistant [1], certain political economies were sensible in a way that they are not when there is no frontier.

One solution to this is to try to retrofit something, which is what your answer seems to do. Another solution would be to say: these axioms don't make sense in the world now, where there is no practical place to "exit" to. There's no practical opting out of modern ideas of governance; if you don't believe in whatever system of social organization is on offer, there's no higher-entropy state to retreat to. If you head into the wilderness, it's somebody's wilderness.

The answer you offer seems, to me, to duck the question. Temporary easement leaves the fundamental problem unresolved. I don't think libertarianism can solve it.

[1] e.g., in the USA, Native Americans seemed to not have the same idea of land ownership as the European settlers did; and even when entire continents could be 'claimed' for a sovereign, the power of the claimant was hard to exercise.

218 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 16 Mar

I didn't get into the more standard libertarian response to the slightly different "What would happen in this case?" question, because I thought that would really be ducking the question. As you'll see libertarianism comes to some odd conclusions on the edges, I don't think that means the axioms are wrong, so much as life is strange and our intuition is tuned towards the median. Physics gets real weird on the edges too.

The standard answer to what would happen in this scenario is that you pay some one to remove the trespasser. It would be part of however the prison system operates in such a world. For the sake of taking the question head on, though, I stipulated that there was no one who would take this person voluntarily.

While it may have been an unsatisfying answer to you, I am actually pretty intrigued by where the answer took me. It's not the answer I anticipated giving when I started writing the post.

What do you see as the fundamental problem, in this case? My answer to the question is basically "Yes, but you can be removed from your current location if someone has a better claim to it and there's somewhere to remove you to." I've never seen a libertarian grapple with that second part, as far as I recall.

Zooming out, I do like your point about how our social systems can take certain factors for granted and be ill-equipped to handle changes to those factors. Having a wilderness to remove people to is one of those. I tried to think about an answer to this question that would require there to be some wilderness, but I just don't think that follows.

361 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 16 Mar

What do you see as the fundamental problem, in this case? My answer to the question is basically "Yes, but you can be removed from your current location if someone has a better claim to it and there's somewhere to remove you to." I've never seen a libertarian grapple with that second part, as far as I recall.

I may be getting too wide, as I understand that you are addressing very targeted questions posed by Murphy, and I'm more riffing on things that your writing provoked in my imagination. But to answer your question:

To me, the fundamental problem is that there's no clean answer to what to do in a situation like this that does not violently collide principles together in some fundamental and unresolveable way. If a dude shows up on your property, starving and exhausted (let's say), you can say: get off my lawn, bro, it's private property.

And so it is. But this very reasonable and fundamental way of architecting a social system (your legitimized right to control your private property) is now running up against the guy's need to simply exist in the world in a reasonable way.

More briefly and dramatically, this scene, between the starving and exhausting guy, and the landowner:

What am I supposed to do? I am starving and exhausted.
Not my problem. Go somewhere else. This is my yard, not some homeless encampment.
Where? Every 'somewhere else' is owned by someone else. This same scene will just play out again.
Buy your own property if you want somewhere to go, like I did.
First, you bought your property under way more favorable circumstances. And anyway, you're assuming I want to do that. I never agreed to be bound by these rules or this system.
Too bad, that's the system. It works for us. If you don't like it, leave.
Where can I leave to? See point #3.
Again, not my problem, bro. We have arranged the affairs of the world to our liking.
Isn't that the exact same argument that proponents of the current system make? Like, I literally remember you telling me that you never agreed to be taxed, and so it's immoral for you to be taxed, despite taxation being part of the system that you are inhabiting.
???

So perhaps the heart of my deep dissatisfaction with ideologies like this is that I have never heard anything compelling (or even anything at all) that goes into slot #10. What would you say? Or have you said it with your existing answer?

225 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 16 Mar

Maybe there is no set of institutions consistent with peaceful dispute resolution and it really is just might makes right. I'm not ready to give up on the idea that society can be rooted in consent though.

This whole project is a search for a set of norms that provide an unambiguous resolution to any dispute over scarce resources, so that violence doesn't have to be employed. Anyone objecting to such a system would therefor be asserting a right to violently expropriate someone else.

Saying you don't consent to a system is sort of a category mistake. None of us consented to the reality we're born into. There needs to be some particular interaction that you didn't consent to and where your desired course of action wasn't victimizing someone else.

I don't even think I need to address your question 10, because the point of my post was that the property owner in your example is wrong about points 2 and 4. It is his problem to find somewhere for this person to go (or at least it might be, if I'm right in my conclusion).

The last point I'll make in response is that libertarianism is specifically a legal philosophy, not a full moral philosophy. There are plenty of moral philosophies that are fully consistent with libertarianism and that require a more humane intervention on behalf of these unfortunate people. Any realistic hypothetical society is going to have services to help desperate people like the ones stipulated here.

45 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 16 Mar

I don't even think I need to address your question 10, because the point of my post was that the property owner in your example is wrong about points 2 and 4. It is his problem to find somewhere for this person to go (or at least it might be, if I'm right in my conclusion).

Ah, I didn't fully grasp that the first time through. So the idea is that the property owner takes on an additional obligation -- to produce a place to 'relocate' the trespasser that he will find palatable to relocate to?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 16 Mar

a place to 'relocate' the trespasser that he will find palatable to relocate to?

Not quite. It needs be somewhere without an owner who objects to the relocation. It's not required that the person being relocated finds it palatable. I'm not sure it's an additional obligation. It's more just a recognition that if something unwanted (person or otherwise) is on your property, your options are to either tolerate it being there or find somewhere to remove it to. The difference between a person and a downed tree, say, is that you aren't allowed to just incinerate the person on site.

I think the relocation needs to be plausibly survivable, because self ownership is the first established principle, with these external property rights coming from subsequent arguments. Basically, you can't just relocate someone to the inside of a volcano or toss them out the airlock, if they're only guilty of trespassing.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @UCantDoThatDotNet 17 Mar

As you partially point out above, there will be and has never been any such thing as a society that has zero individuals or orgs willing to help those who are starving to death and have nowhere to go.

24 sats \ 1 reply \ @UCantDoThatDotNet 16 Mar

The potential fallacy is that any theory must be 100%. A system of philosophy will always fall short of perfectly calculating for all conditions. The best among them leave gray area that is very small, very specific, very unlikely to occur, and can only be resolved with common sense ethical behavior, such as is the case in this example.

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 16 Mar

The potential fallacy is that any theory must be 100%.

That's right. There's a known incompatibility between completeness and consistency. Libertarianism is intentionally incomplete as a moral philosophy: i.e. it's restricted to questions about the use violence to solve problems.

I think you're correct as far as what will ever be put into practice. I doubt a pristine libertarianism will be enshrined. What strikes me as more likely are a bunch of legal precedents based on "common sense ethical behavior", because that's what people will actually opt-in to.

24 sats \ 3 replies \ @quark 15 Mar

My guess is that the owner kills the person that can't relocate to solve the problem. War.

20 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 15 Mar

That violates the self-ownership that had already been established.

24 sats \ 1 reply \ @quark 15 Mar

Ah yes that is true. But the problem with war is that it doesn't care about the rules. My answer may have been affected by current wars in the world as it was the first thing that came to my mind, sadly.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 15 Mar

Fair enough. Remember that the whole point of this intellectual exercise is to develop a system of norms that allow conflicts to be resolved without violence.

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 15 Mar

I forgot to include the clip from Bob's podcast where he asks this question:

https://fountain.fm/clip/7m8VNLQ4Ejq2MJqDBOV5