Here’s the abstract:

Colin McGinn maintains that Othello is about the problem of other minds. But Othello’s version of the problem – the inaccessibility of particular others in particular respects, not of other minds per se – might seem to lack the generality needed to count as philosophical. Drawing on examples from Othello, Caleb Williams, and Amerika, I argue that Othello’s problem, while distinct from the traditional problem of other minds, is indeed a genuine philosophical problem, but one produced and sustained by alterable features of human society (specifically, race, gender, and class distinctions) rather than by unalterable features of cognition as such.

And speaking of Shakespeare, check out this neglected masterpiece.

Now clearly one can abide by the non-aggression principle without acting to promote liberty; the NAP is a purely negative duty, while an obligation to promote liberty would be positive. So Walter now thinks that being a libertarian involves commitments beyond non-aggression! (Indeed, that makes his libertarianism even thicker than mine, as I’ve never made acting on such commitments a condition for being a libertarian.)

Alas, Walter invokes this distinction in order to show that Wendy McElroy is not a libertarian – on the grounds that she does not support the candidacy of Ron Paul. Walter makes this argument despite the fact that Paul supports a number of policies that Walter would agree with Wendy are anti-libertarian (including anti-abortion laws, anti-immigration laws, and most notoriously the existence of the state itself). If we anarchists can lose our libertarian credentials for refusing to support a statist, something’s gone wrong somewhere.

1. Right-libertarians sometimes accuse left-libertarians of misrepresenting right-libertarians’ relation to corporatism. “They say we support government favouritism toward big business,” they complain, “yet no libertarian supports any such thing.”

To answer this, I need to invoke the de re / de dicto distinction.

Suppose I’m reading Ozma of Oz, and I think, “hey, this guy Baum is a good author.” Assume I don’t know that Baum also wrote a novel (a lousy one, in fact, though that doesn’t matter for the example) called The Master Key. Would it be true or false to say, “Roderick thinks the author of The Master Key is a good author”?

Well, it’s ambiguous. I don’t have a thought of the form “The author of The Master Key is a good author,” since I’m not aware of any such book. But I do think of Baum that he’s a good author; and since Baum is the author of The Master Key, I thereby think of the author of The Master Key that he’s a good author. So the philosopher’s way of marking the distinction is to say that I believe de re (“of the thing”), but not de dicto (“of what is said”), that the author of The Master Key is a good author.

Or again, suppose I want to marry Griselda. And suppose Griselda is, unbeknownst to me, a pathological liar. Then is it true or false that I want to marry a pathological liar? Well, in one sense it’s true and in another sense it’s false. I don’t have such a desire de dicto; I don’t form any thought expressible as “I want to marry a pathological liar.” But I do have such a desire de re, since there’s a pathological liar that I want to marry.

So when left-libertarians accuse (some) right-libertarians of supporting corporatism, this is to be understood in a de re sense, not in a de dicto sense. Thus the claim is that right-libertarians are supporting certain policies/institutions/phenomena that are in fact instances of corporatism; we are not claiming that right-libertarians are deliberately supporting them qua instances of corporatism – and so pointing out that they’re not is not relevant as a reply to the original point.

2. The left-libertarian call for worker empowerment can itself be construed as a (left-wing) form of corporatism.

Lew Rockwell recently wrote:

[S]yndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

not a left-libertarian

Lew doesn’t draw the inference that left-libertarians are corporatists, but he illuminates a way in which that inference might be drawn. After all, we too favour economic control by producers, right? So why doesn’t that make our position akin to corporatism?

I think there’s a perilous ambiguity here. In one way, “economic control” can mean ownership; in that sense, we left-libertarians do favour economic control by producers.

But in that sense capitalists (taking that term in the Rothbardian sense) do not favour economic control by consumers; they favour economic control by producers too, even if capitalist employers loom larger in their conception of “producers” than in ours.

When Lew says that capitalism favours consumer control, he’s not talking about ownership; he means that consumer preferences determine production decisions through the price system – which is true enough (although I think that way of putting it makes producers seem too passive – what about advertising? entrepreneurial experimentation?) but that’s just as true when the producers are workers’ co-ops. So there’s no one sense of producer control which is both advocated by left-libertarians and akin to corporatism.

(These issues are closely related to those I’ve discussed under the name of the “POOTMOP” problem, here and here, as well as to the different ways that the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the French industriel movement understood the concept of producer control, discussed here.)

3. There is a tendency among right-libertarians to treat racism and sexism as equivalent to hostility toward persons of a different race or gender. Thus where such hostility is absent, racism and sexism are presumed to be absent also – with the upshot that left-libertarians are seen as exaggerating the amount of racism and sexism around.

For example, Walter Block argues that because heterosexual male employers are attracted to women, they are more likely to be prejudiced in their favour rather than against them.

But racism and sexism are found in more forms than simply that of hostility (not that there isn’t plenty of that form around too – and we all know, too well, that being a heterosexual male is not exactly an obstacle to hostility against women). A white male employer who feels no hostility toward women or minorities may still be inclined to pay them less or deny them positions of authority if he holds, say, prejudicial expectations about their likely capacities.

But what if these expectations are rationally justified? The problem is that they generally aren’t. And the arguments on behalf of such expectations are so shockingly sloppy (as, e.g., Anne Fausto-Sterling shows), and the historical track record of such arguments is so wretched, that an employer’s indulgence in such expectations is overwhelmingly likely to be the result of an irrational bias, most often one unconsciously absorbed from the culture. In such cases we will say that the empoyer’s decision is shaped by racism or sexism – but in saying that, we are not (necessarily) saying that the employer is an evil, hate-filled person. After all, by analogy: most people are statists, but that doesn’t mean that most people are filled with hated for individual liberty.

Walter says in the same piece that the persistence of unjustified racist or sexist prejudices is unlikely, since “as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets.” Now of course we have “continued statist interference with markets,” so for anything Walter says here we could still have plenty of prejudice in the real world. But in any case I question the implied (and un-Austrian!) assumption that the market always gets us to equilibrium in the long run. There’s a difference between saying that the market has a tendency to equilibrium and saying that the market eventually reaches equilibrium. After all, everything on earth has a tendency to move toward the center of the earth, but that doesn’t mean that everything eventually gets to the center of the earth. Culture matters; it’s not just an epiphenomenon of the price system.

And of course, comme l’on dit, “we are market forces.”

Co-Editor Charles Johnson and major contributor Roderick Long to the book Markets Not Capitalism (2011) will be at The Gnu’s Room for a discussion of the topics addressed in the book. The economic crisis needs fresh new responses, which emphasize the ways in which poverty and economic inequality have resulted from collusion between government and big business, which has enriched a few corporate giants at the expense of the rest of us. Rather than turning back to politics, the authors argue that working people must begin to free themselves of the mistakes of the past, and work together to take back control over their own lives and livelihoods through individual freedom, mutual exchange, and nonviolent grassroots social activism.

Bruce Murray [Letters, 5/31/00] tells us that without divine revelation, we cannot know right from wrong. Yet he offers us no reason to accept this breathtaking dismissal of the last 2500 years of moral philosophy.

Do we really need a revelation from a supernatural being before we can figure out that cooperation and mutual respect are better than violence and cruelty? If we can discover through our own reasoning power what the square root of 529 is, why can’t we discover through our own reasoning power how we should behave? The apostle Paul himself acknowledged (Romans 2:14-15) that those who have not received the moral law through revelation can find it for themselves through their own consciences.

Murray seems to think that morality is something that has to be handed down by an authority; but this claim betrays a logical confusion. For an authority’s commands merit our obedience only if the authority itself is good. Since an authority must already be good for its commands to count as good, no authority’s commands could be the standard of goodness.

“Absent the Creator,” Murray opines, “all moral claims are equally opinion.” But then why desn’t he also think that, absent the Creator, all mathematical claims are merely opinion as well? After all, the Bible doesn’t tell us what the square root of 529 is. Nor does it tell us what we should think about abortion, or affirmative action, or genetic engineering, or any number of other important moral issues. Should we just remain agnostic on these issues until we receive a special revelation from the Creator? Or should we instead accept the responsibility of reasoning through such issues, weighing the arguments pro and con to see which side has the strongest case?

Why would God have given us the capacity to reason unless he expected us to make use of it to discover the truth? Murray tells us that without divine revelation we are only animals. But as philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have pointed out, what separates us from mere animals is above all the possession of reason,a nd the responsibilities that come with it. In Hamlet’s words, we were surely not given “godlike reason to fust in us unus’d.”

Roderick T. Long          Elizabeth Brake

The second was published in the Auburn Plainsman, 2 November 2000 (back in my partyarch days):

To the Editor:

Do voters deserve to have full information beore they make their choice in the voting booth next Tuesday? The Auburn Plainsman doesn’t seem to think so.

When The Plainsman covers other kinds of races – for student government or Homecoming Queen, for example – they cover all the candidates, not just the top two contenders. Likewise, in the past, The Plainsman has tried to represent all sides fairly rather than simply cheering for the dominant faction. But apparently the rules are different this time.

George Bush and Al Gore are not the only candidates for President on the ballot. But although The Plainsman has offered space to representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties for guest editorials supporting their candidates, third-party supporters have been denied equal time.

As faculty advisor to the Auburn Libertarians, I asked to write a guest editorial making the case for Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party candidate, since the faculty advisor to the College Republicans recently had a guest editorial making the case for George Bush.

After I was initially told yes, my editorial was eventually turned down because the Libertarian Party is not one of the “main” parties.

Instead, The Plainsman published a vague write-up of the Libertarian Party that made it appears indistinguishable from the Republicans. For example, the party was described as seeking merely to “reduce” the federal income tax (rather than eliminate it), and there was no reference to the Libertarian Party’s stand against all victimless crime laws, including drug laws.

Is it really any of the government’s business what you choose to inhale or inject into your body? Is your body government property? Moreover, the government’s war on drugs doesn’t just interfere with the freedom of drug users; it threatens everyone else. The drug war is the government’s principal excuse for increasing the invasion of civil liberties.

When government anti-drug programs fail, governments respond by demanding increased powers, by weakening constitutional safeguards against search and seizure, and – of course – by raising taxes.

Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol in the 1920s, and it isn’t working with drugs now; it only breeds organized crime and police corruption, as it did then.

Democrats want to control your economic life, through increased taxes and regulations. Republicans want to control your personal life by dictating what you can read, what you can inhale and whom you can sleep with. Both parties seem to think that politicians and bureaucrats can make better choices than you can about the proper use of your mind, your body, and your money.

Harry Browne is the only candidate for President who doesn’t claim the right to control your life. If you want to be fully informed about your choices on Nov.7, check out the full details on Libertarian positions at www.harrybrowne.org and www.LP.org. And please vote your conscience next Tuesday.

Roderick T. Long

There’ll be brief presentations from two or three faculty members (including your humble correspondent) and two or three students, followed by general discussion. (My presentation will focus on how, contra Locke, the undesirability of people being judges in their own case is actually an argument against the state, not for it.)

These meetings tend to be fairly popular, and the Gnu’s Room’s meeting space is not exactly enormous, so those interested should try to arrive early to be sure of finding a seat. (Also make sure to try the coffee – it’s the best in town.)

I finally paid out the drakhmas to get the proceedings (both print and electronic, so over $100 total) of the Athens conference I went to in 2008. Here’s my contribution: “Thrasymachus and the Relational Conception of Authority” (in Patricia Hanna, ed., An Anthology of Philosophical Studies, vol. 3 (Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2009), pp. 27-36).

And here’s the abstract:

Thrasymachus defines justice as the interest of the stronger/rulers. Hence one might expect him to hold that when the stronger/rulers act in their own interest, they are being just. Yet Thrasymachus says just the opposite – that when the stronger/rulers act in their own interest, they are being unjust. This apparent inconsistency is to be explained by Thrasymachus’s having a relational conception of the notion of stronger/ruler; to act in the interest of the stronger/ruler is to act in the interest of someone stronger-than-oneself, of a ruler-over-oneself. Hence when a subject acts to benefit the ruler, he acts justly, by putting a superior’s interests before his own; but when the ruler acts in his own interest, he acts unjustly, since he pursues his own interests and defers to no superior.

This is something I think almost everyone who teaches Plato’s Republic gets wrong.