"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
Oh Jesus…wait… nevermind.
Government meddling seems not to be the only meddling that causes problems. This sort of meddling reminds me of the point of the apparently censored remark you made at the LvMI about spontaneous order.
Neil, I’m confused, isn’t it the government who is abusing rights? The idiots expressing the view that homosexuality is evil didn’t do any rights-violating (I don’t think they advocated such, either).
p.s. – Professor Long was censored at LvMI? When and where? That strikes me as odd and contrary to the policy of that website (where is seems that almost every comment is allowed, even the derogatory and inflammatory).
Neil, I’m confused, isn’t it the government who is abusing rights?
I think you missed the part about the farmhand who raped Stosh Mugisha, and the references to mob violence.
The idiots expressing the view that homosexuality is evil didn’t do any rights-violating (I don’t think they advocated such, either)
Some of them think the death penalty is too harsh a penalty, but any penalty at all would be rights violating.
Regardless, it’s obvious that there’s a connection between the widespread homophobia and laws like this, especially considering that the proposal for the law follows so soon after the three American homophobes gave that little talk “expressing their views”.
Ya, I guess I was confused by the term “meddling”. I assumed Neil was referring exclusively the talk by the homophobes since I don’t usually associate the word “meddling” with the horrible crimes of rape and assault.
To be clear, I am against aggression committed by government and by private actors. However, I don’t think that expressing one’s views can ever constitute aggression, even if that expression “clears the path” for such aggression.
I may say that governments are evil/immoral, but the wacko who hears me, is convinced and subsequently starts shooting bureaucrats is responsible for those actions, not me.
Kant thought (following canon law, I believe) that we’re responsible for the unintended bad results of our bad actions, and the unintended good results of our good actions, but not vice versa. That principle would get you off the hook for the bureaucrat-shooter without getting the homophobes likewise off the hook. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a good argument for Kant’s principle.
(I should clarify that Kant’s principle, as I understand it, doesn’t mean that if you do something bad that inspires someone to commit a rights-violation, then your bad action counts as a rights-violation. It just means that you bear moral, non-enforceable responsibility for that result.)
So wait, Kant is saying we’re responsible for both the intended and unintended consequences (both good and bad) of our actions?
Good action – good unintended consequence – responsible.
Good action – bad unintended consequence – not responsible.
Bad action – good unintended consequence – not responsible.
Bad action – bad unintended consequence – responsible.
How does that handle probability though? For example maybe flying a plane for a pleasant afternoon cruise has a 42.5% chance of crashing and hurting people (bad unintended consequences). At what point does this probability make the action a bad action?
David Friedman brings up the example of the airplane when questioning why under libertarianism you have the right to fly an airplane or shine a flashlight when those actions lie on a continuum going from good to bad (e.g. collimate the flashlight beam enough and you’ll destroy houses with the flashlight ).
That doesn’t seem like a special problem for either Kant or libertarianism. It’s just a general problem about human action as such.
The question, then, is one of causation – as in when a bad outcome can even be deemed a result/consequence of good or bad action.
In this case I would say that it’s a stretch the to say that a the horrible crime of one person was the consequence of a talk by another person advocating a related, but different, position.
But, I guess the principles should be/are different when we’re talking about moral accountability vs. ‘legal’ accountability.
Billy, it seems that The Onion is on it like white on rice. Also, there are sorts of meddlings that aren’t necessarily rights-violating in and of themselves, yet can clear the path for future rights violations to take place.
The apparently censored remark I am referring to is somewhere in one of of the Mises videos/mp3s. It’s been a while since I watched it, so I don’t remember which one it was, but it had something to do with people producing bads as an example of Hayekian spontaneous order. If I’m not mistaken it’s the “spontaneous order” remark itself that seems censored, as if someone cut the mic.
I don’t have any recollection of that, but it seems unlikely that it was censored.
I think that it seems unlikely too, but the timing is so coincidental that it gives an uncanny appearance of it being the case. I may try to dig it up sometime, but I do remember the crowd grumbling and you apologizing.
If the mic cut-out occurs during a discussion of malign spontaneous orders, one thing to keep in mind is that Roderick does have a pun associated with that discussion — “spontaneous ordure” — which may be the occasion for both the groaning and the apologies, rather than anyone getting upset over the content of the claim.
Thanks for that. You see, I wouldn’t know since I couldn’t hear it.
[...] Props. [...]
I could not help but noticing how much this post resembled (implicitly) your post on “Avatar”.
There is intervention of something a bit “superior” – shall we say – American conservative religious thought in Uganda, Human DNA in “Avatar”
It is the deciding factor which leads to a definite outcome.
The film turns out a bit better than does the real story, the difference being victory in the film and selective genocide in our world.
The “leavening agent” may have been flat in this, our real world.
Perhaps…and this is merely speculation…perhaps there is an outpost of Na’vis ( or whatever ) nearby, and they have combined their DNA with ours, and they have avatars upon the earth….
It would explain a lot.