the salt makers

Hello Nick, I don’t really know you but Zack invited me to enter into the discussion. The nature of philosophy is such that it can only be done amongst friends for the sake of the civility that generates authentic thoughtfulness, so I may be venturing into murky waters here, but hopefully you’ll find this discussion in a spirit of good will. I apologize for being a bit rushed over a complex issue.

Your argument rests on some pretty basically fallacious assumptions. I might as well have stopped reading right here – “I feel that what is best for everyone is justice. What is fair and right. Libertarians draw a line and define what is wrong in a legal sense not morally. Morality is subjective so what is considered illegal should be drawn from some other measure.” In fact, I did pretty much stop reading after the first paragraph, because without your assumptions all other political observations reveal themselves as blindness rather than insight.

Apparently what you are doing is contrasting “objective” judgments – which by your reckoning I can only suppose are scientific and fact-orientated – with “subjective” judgments, i.e. judgments outside the realm of fact. Since I don’t feel like going into what is already a dubious distinction that rests on the assumption that truth can only be revealed through the natural sciences, I’ll simply show you first that you violated your own principles and second that libertarian views rest on the same assumption as statist views.

You claim that libertarians are concerned with justice. I’m assuming that this is an objective concern focused entirely on the law and not “subjective” morality, but you’ve hardly raised the question of what justice is. I can only guess your definition is based on naturalistic observation – that the human race is made up of a group of individuals. From this observation we get the curious libertarian “axioms” of private property and non-aggression, which I can only assume arise from some appreciation of every individual’s abstract intrinsic self-worth. Since I thought we were dealing with what I thought were scientific observations, where this intrinsic self-worth can be found remains enshrouded in mystery. Of course the very idea of axioms – besides the axioms of the legitimacy of scientific methodology – flies in the face of objectivity. It’s quite a leap of conceptual self-deception to go from objectivity to the protection of every naturally valuable individual.

Ultimately, the problem with libertarianism is coeval with the problem of statism. You assume, first, an atomistic model of human society, wherein all people are little particles colliding into one another and tending toward centripetal motion, and all societal norms and customs are masks for the power and control of these morsels of individuality. This ultimate form of power and control you call the state. Of course, that something, namely the state, that has only existed throughout human history in the last two hundred or so years suddenly becomes an “objective” principle of human society is quite extraordinary.

Libertarians, far from dismissing the state as an illusion, in fact assume the state. For the libertarian and statist mind the state of nature, an external rather than internal theory of human nature which overturns 2000 previous years of thought, is the state in which all men as individuals seek power. From this state of nature we derive the state, which is the umbrella of power-relationships under which these individuals must coexist to avoid mutual self-destruction. From the new creation of the state we get two divergent and all-too English theories – the Hobbesian monopolization of this power in the state and the Lockean dispersion of this power throughout the individuals – a single power relationship and an infinite multiplicity of power relationships amongst individuals. Both positions are equally reasonable given their wacky assumptions about the state of nature.

In the end it seems that you confuse the superstructure with the substructure. In other words, you assume an artificial model of what is an organic phenomena – the web of human relationships, in which no man can be abstracted to an individual particle or abstracted to that castle in the sky known to gushy humanitarians as mankind.

- Ethan Guagliardo
Written 6.1.06