A few years ago I came across a letter I wrote to Edith Efron back in 1978 in response to an article she had published in Reason criticizing anarchists within the libertarian movement. After rereading my letter — I had forgotten ever writing it — I found her article on the
As a Error Theorist I've often been disappointed by the lack of other moral anti-realists and such among the libertarian movement. Not only is it the case that the other libertarians I've met are strong realists with respects to ethics, but also Metaepistemology and other domains. I did also find the reference to Krafft-Ebing to be pretty funny.
I think most people, with the possible exception of philosophers, are moral realists, whether or not they admit it.
The classic moral relativist story is the Eskimo putting his grandfather on an ice flow to die. You should not interfere because what he is doing is consistent with Eskimo morality. The "should not" reveals the presence of unacknowledged moral realism. Why shouldn't you, if interfering is consistent with your morality?
So it isn't surprising if most in the libertarian movement take it for granted that the NAP, considered as a moral claim, must be either true or false.
I think on the first point you are roughly correct, although I would hesitate to describe most people as realists, since most people seem to have very incoherent or confused beliefs on ethics and other issues, a real life example would be a friend of mine who confuses descriptive moral relativism with ethical subjectivism, but I think your point is still correct with respects to peoples intuitions which are very strongly realist (I think also non naturalist) and fundamentally very similar.
I think the point about peoples realist intuitions is also true of many anti-realist philosophers, Jonas Olson for example seems to have the usual ethical intuitions that say torturing small children for fun is morally wrong, just that when he weighs it against his intuitions about various different arguments, such as arguments from queerness and evolutionary debunking arguments he concludes that the proposition "torturing small children for fun is morally wrong" is false. I should say that unlike Olson and others, I personally don't have (and never have had) any such initial ethical intuitions.
I am also very sympathetic to people such as Huemer and given his intuitions I think his beliefs are very reasonable, it's just that I don't share his intuitions. I also agree that It makes sense to say that the NAP is either objectively true or false (I'm not a relativist or non-cognitivist), just that like all other moral propositions the NAP is false.
Have you considered the possibility that Huemer is correct and you are the moral equivalent of blind, somehow missing the ability most humans have to (imperfectly) sense moral facts?
If you did conclude that was true, what would the implications be for action? Someone who is blind can still take advantage of information about the physical world provided by sighted people. If you are blind to moral facts, should you accept what other people tell you they see in deciding how to act?
I've spent a lot of time considering the possibility that I am blind to moral properties, I even have a very long list of other kinds of properties that I am maybe blind to, (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological/comments) one of my comments here references that I regard mental disorders as something that I'm blind to, that is in the same way as you can have a reducible account of moral properties you can have a reducible account of mental disorders, but in actuality people don't have a reducible account (or even a pragmatic account) rather people seem to be referencing abstract entities or something similar. This is only one example of something on the list but it's very long.
To go with the list I also have a story that I think quite nicely explains why I don't seem to sense any of these properties, and also why other people can very easily intuit their existence, but very very roughly speaking I think there is some sort of mental module that most people have due to evolutionary reasons that I don't have, and that makes me "blind" to a large part of the social world, although I don't actually think I'm blind rather I think everyone else is basically hallucinating.
To directly address the second question you raised, I would say that supposing I did come to believe in certain moral properties I would in actuality probably only adhere to such norms if they were very close to my preferences or if there was some sort of supernatural punishment for violating them. I would acknowledge that I was morally wrong for doing something that violated a norm (and that I shouldn't do it) but if I even modestly wanted to do it, I would in fact do it.
I have a lot to say but to keep it short I would like to plant a seed of doubt above and beyond the usual queerness and evolutionary debunking arguments. That is that not only do I think that moral discourse can't be used to infer facts about the positive world (in a way that alternative explanations can't nicely offer), but that I think moral discourse/reasoning very heavily detracts from understanding the positive world. I would say the same thing about other items on the list, to offer an example I could mention one of the -isms. Maybe the least controversial would be greater male variance in a characteristic such as IQ, where one very popular objection would be that this (or its implications) could not possibly be the case since such a belief is sexist therefore it is false and evidence to the contrary is wrong. I think all of the items on my list have similar examples whereby lots of actual ordinary people use those properties to incorrectly infer positive facts about the world. Lots of my sympathy for utilitarians and such comes from their tendency to be very High-decouplers, who are much less subject to such backwards reasoning, but my suspicion is evolutionarily this sort of Low-decoupler style of reasoning about moral facts and such is a intended feature and not a bug.
I would also add that I think the issue of disagreement about priors might be important to the overall picture but I haven't really seen much talk about it. (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/deceive.pdf)
"Maybe the least controversial would be greater male variance in a characteristic such as IQ, where one very popular objection would be that this (or its implications) could not possibly be the case since such a belief is sexist therefore it is false and evidence to the contrary is wrong."
I don't think I have ever seen anyone offer that as an argument. The pattern I see, and which may be what you are referring to, is people holding beliefs that make facts fit their moral views but defending those beliefs with non-moral arguments.
My standard example is that lots of libertarians believe libertarianism is morally right but also, by a curious coincidence, produces more attractive outcomes than any alternative.
"I don't think I have ever seen anyone offer that as an argument. The pattern I see, and which may be what you are referring to, is people holding beliefs that make facts fit their moral views but defending those beliefs with non-moral arguments." I think you are referencing a specific subtype of this effect that is popular amongst more intellectually minded people, although I think lots of actual people do the more general approach of not doing the second part that is, not defending their "beliefs with non-moral arguments.".
I can give lots of examples but the in the Larry Summers case from what I can tell most people who disagreed with Summers took it for granted they were right about the positive facts (due to their moral convictions) and simply dismissed Summers without attempting to engage with non-moral arguments. I should also say I'm less predicting people's stated arguments and more speculating on the reasons for people's beliefs, although in many cases I think peoples stated argument is explicitly X is sexist or racist etc. therefore it must be false (although as I said earlier this is more popular with ordinary people and not certain kinds of intellectual types). This is also the least controversial example, I think the more general effect becomes more apparent with more controversial topics, take for example Lynn's claims about average differences in IQ by sex etc. I'm sure in your own experience you can see that some people try to rationalize their beliefs and lots of other people simply infer the truth of a belief from their moral or moral like beliefs and don't even attempt to hide this (I think in almost all cases the "that's somethingist" or "that's morally repugnant" are much more psychologically powerful arguments which might be a reason as to why they don't try to hide it).
The end part of my original comment was not a formal argument (although you could make it such) rather it was the seemingly peculiar observation (at least if moral properties are real and not evolutionarily useful hallucinations) that those of use who are seemingly more in touch with the normative realm (and I am referring to people who you might object to as not being representative of being in touch with the normative realm but I have reasons for doing so) had less accurate beliefs (with respects to the positive realm) and less reasonable belief forming methods than those of use who could keep separate the two realms or not even perceive the normative realm. This isn't a slam dunk argument (there rarely are such arguments) but I think it's a reason to be more sceptical/suspicious of moral properties and other similar sorts of properties. I should also add that I do have lots of examples (and would be happy to give some more) but I wanted to keep things short and lots of them are perhaps a bit too controversial.
Does there now exist the same sort of libertarian intellectual movement that David describes from the ‘60s through the ‘80s? David himself is obviously still doing great work but is there the same sort of intellectual/political group developing libertarian ideas with the same degree of rigor that existed back then?
I am loving digging into this. My position is that in order to be a human you must be a herm. You are a real thinker who gives yoyr opposition their arguments. My women come over to me by saying i am allman. But guess what, i would die from those adrenachromes. By themselv3s male hormones are reactive and I donot know what else
you should read “In Praise of Decadence” by Riggenbach. the derision of hippies by so-called traditional libertarians is fundamentally wrong. the greatest impetus to becoming a libertarian in the 60’s was not theoretical arguments based on the myth of natural rights but rather the military draft which sent individuals to die in wars (as governments are wont to do).
As a Error Theorist I've often been disappointed by the lack of other moral anti-realists and such among the libertarian movement. Not only is it the case that the other libertarians I've met are strong realists with respects to ethics, but also Metaepistemology and other domains. I did also find the reference to Krafft-Ebing to be pretty funny.
I think most people, with the possible exception of philosophers, are moral realists, whether or not they admit it.
The classic moral relativist story is the Eskimo putting his grandfather on an ice flow to die. You should not interfere because what he is doing is consistent with Eskimo morality. The "should not" reveals the presence of unacknowledged moral realism. Why shouldn't you, if interfering is consistent with your morality?
So it isn't surprising if most in the libertarian movement take it for granted that the NAP, considered as a moral claim, must be either true or false.
I think on the first point you are roughly correct, although I would hesitate to describe most people as realists, since most people seem to have very incoherent or confused beliefs on ethics and other issues, a real life example would be a friend of mine who confuses descriptive moral relativism with ethical subjectivism, but I think your point is still correct with respects to peoples intuitions which are very strongly realist (I think also non naturalist) and fundamentally very similar.
I think the point about peoples realist intuitions is also true of many anti-realist philosophers, Jonas Olson for example seems to have the usual ethical intuitions that say torturing small children for fun is morally wrong, just that when he weighs it against his intuitions about various different arguments, such as arguments from queerness and evolutionary debunking arguments he concludes that the proposition "torturing small children for fun is morally wrong" is false. I should say that unlike Olson and others, I personally don't have (and never have had) any such initial ethical intuitions.
I am also very sympathetic to people such as Huemer and given his intuitions I think his beliefs are very reasonable, it's just that I don't share his intuitions. I also agree that It makes sense to say that the NAP is either objectively true or false (I'm not a relativist or non-cognitivist), just that like all other moral propositions the NAP is false.
Have you considered the possibility that Huemer is correct and you are the moral equivalent of blind, somehow missing the ability most humans have to (imperfectly) sense moral facts?
If you did conclude that was true, what would the implications be for action? Someone who is blind can still take advantage of information about the physical world provided by sighted people. If you are blind to moral facts, should you accept what other people tell you they see in deciding how to act?
I've spent a lot of time considering the possibility that I am blind to moral properties, I even have a very long list of other kinds of properties that I am maybe blind to, (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological/comments) one of my comments here references that I regard mental disorders as something that I'm blind to, that is in the same way as you can have a reducible account of moral properties you can have a reducible account of mental disorders, but in actuality people don't have a reducible account (or even a pragmatic account) rather people seem to be referencing abstract entities or something similar. This is only one example of something on the list but it's very long.
To go with the list I also have a story that I think quite nicely explains why I don't seem to sense any of these properties, and also why other people can very easily intuit their existence, but very very roughly speaking I think there is some sort of mental module that most people have due to evolutionary reasons that I don't have, and that makes me "blind" to a large part of the social world, although I don't actually think I'm blind rather I think everyone else is basically hallucinating.
To directly address the second question you raised, I would say that supposing I did come to believe in certain moral properties I would in actuality probably only adhere to such norms if they were very close to my preferences or if there was some sort of supernatural punishment for violating them. I would acknowledge that I was morally wrong for doing something that violated a norm (and that I shouldn't do it) but if I even modestly wanted to do it, I would in fact do it.
I have a lot to say but to keep it short I would like to plant a seed of doubt above and beyond the usual queerness and evolutionary debunking arguments. That is that not only do I think that moral discourse can't be used to infer facts about the positive world (in a way that alternative explanations can't nicely offer), but that I think moral discourse/reasoning very heavily detracts from understanding the positive world. I would say the same thing about other items on the list, to offer an example I could mention one of the -isms. Maybe the least controversial would be greater male variance in a characteristic such as IQ, where one very popular objection would be that this (or its implications) could not possibly be the case since such a belief is sexist therefore it is false and evidence to the contrary is wrong. I think all of the items on my list have similar examples whereby lots of actual ordinary people use those properties to incorrectly infer positive facts about the world. Lots of my sympathy for utilitarians and such comes from their tendency to be very High-decouplers, who are much less subject to such backwards reasoning, but my suspicion is evolutionarily this sort of Low-decoupler style of reasoning about moral facts and such is a intended feature and not a bug.
I would also add that I think the issue of disagreement about priors might be important to the overall picture but I haven't really seen much talk about it. (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/deceive.pdf)
"Maybe the least controversial would be greater male variance in a characteristic such as IQ, where one very popular objection would be that this (or its implications) could not possibly be the case since such a belief is sexist therefore it is false and evidence to the contrary is wrong."
I don't think I have ever seen anyone offer that as an argument. The pattern I see, and which may be what you are referring to, is people holding beliefs that make facts fit their moral views but defending those beliefs with non-moral arguments.
My standard example is that lots of libertarians believe libertarianism is morally right but also, by a curious coincidence, produces more attractive outcomes than any alternative.
"I don't think I have ever seen anyone offer that as an argument. The pattern I see, and which may be what you are referring to, is people holding beliefs that make facts fit their moral views but defending those beliefs with non-moral arguments." I think you are referencing a specific subtype of this effect that is popular amongst more intellectually minded people, although I think lots of actual people do the more general approach of not doing the second part that is, not defending their "beliefs with non-moral arguments.".
I can give lots of examples but the in the Larry Summers case from what I can tell most people who disagreed with Summers took it for granted they were right about the positive facts (due to their moral convictions) and simply dismissed Summers without attempting to engage with non-moral arguments. I should also say I'm less predicting people's stated arguments and more speculating on the reasons for people's beliefs, although in many cases I think peoples stated argument is explicitly X is sexist or racist etc. therefore it must be false (although as I said earlier this is more popular with ordinary people and not certain kinds of intellectual types). This is also the least controversial example, I think the more general effect becomes more apparent with more controversial topics, take for example Lynn's claims about average differences in IQ by sex etc. I'm sure in your own experience you can see that some people try to rationalize their beliefs and lots of other people simply infer the truth of a belief from their moral or moral like beliefs and don't even attempt to hide this (I think in almost all cases the "that's somethingist" or "that's morally repugnant" are much more psychologically powerful arguments which might be a reason as to why they don't try to hide it).
The end part of my original comment was not a formal argument (although you could make it such) rather it was the seemingly peculiar observation (at least if moral properties are real and not evolutionarily useful hallucinations) that those of use who are seemingly more in touch with the normative realm (and I am referring to people who you might object to as not being representative of being in touch with the normative realm but I have reasons for doing so) had less accurate beliefs (with respects to the positive realm) and less reasonable belief forming methods than those of use who could keep separate the two realms or not even perceive the normative realm. This isn't a slam dunk argument (there rarely are such arguments) but I think it's a reason to be more sceptical/suspicious of moral properties and other similar sorts of properties. I should also add that I do have lots of examples (and would be happy to give some more) but I wanted to keep things short and lots of them are perhaps a bit too controversial.
Does there now exist the same sort of libertarian intellectual movement that David describes from the ‘60s through the ‘80s? David himself is obviously still doing great work but is there the same sort of intellectual/political group developing libertarian ideas with the same degree of rigor that existed back then?
I am loving digging into this. My position is that in order to be a human you must be a herm. You are a real thinker who gives yoyr opposition their arguments. My women come over to me by saying i am allman. But guess what, i would die from those adrenachromes. By themselv3s male hormones are reactive and I donot know what else
you should read “In Praise of Decadence” by Riggenbach. the derision of hippies by so-called traditional libertarians is fundamentally wrong. the greatest impetus to becoming a libertarian in the 60’s was not theoretical arguments based on the myth of natural rights but rather the military draft which sent individuals to die in wars (as governments are wont to do).