Via such blogs as this one (see the list of recent postings on other blogs), and this one (the previous list being how I got to that blog), I today encountered a video of someone called Ian Plimer plugging his latest book, which is called Heaven and Earth. Watch it here.
And here (via this posting) is a piece about an Aussie politician who seems to be following Plimer’s lead.
I am no scientist, and politically I am heavily in favour of the free market capitalism that the Green Movement wants to shut down or at least castrate. So I would say all this. But I can honestly say that I find Plimer more convincing than those persons who talk about climate change as if the urgent need now is to stop all climate change (impossible) of as if those who doubt their prophecies of apocalypse (such as me) believe that climate is not now changing. The climate always changes.
Plimer is eloquent, and relatively brief. Even pro-AGW greenies would find this, I think, a quite useful short compendium of all the arguments against their views, in fact they already are using it this way. That’s if they are interested in answering arguments, as some are.
The clearest insight that I personally got from this video performance was Plimer’s claim that the AGW (as in anthropogenic global warming) people are all atmospheric scientists (insofar as they are scientists at all), who are plugging their apocalypse without looking at any other kinds of scientific evidence, or much in the way of historical evidence either. He also says that this particular evidence is itself very threadbare, but that is a distinct argument that I have long known about.
I was also interested that Professor Donald Blainey [Correction: Geoffrey Blainey], an Australian historian whom I have long admired, is in his turn an admirer of Plimer’s book. Big plus, for me.
Plimer is optimistic that the current economic woes, woes that really are now being experienced by our entire species if not our entire planet, together with the little bit of cooling that has recently been happening, will concentrate people’s minds on what a load of humbug the AGW scare is. No doubt pessimists commenting here will say that the damage has already been done, and will take decades to undo. I’ll pass on that argument.
I now guess that the next argument for AGW here in Britain is going to be that since the BNP also says AGW is humbug, it must be true.
Over the last month or so Plimer has been catching a lot of stick here, and the book has been heavily promoted.
Funny thing is though, here, on the Gold Coast, Australias sixth largest city, I haven’t been able to find a single copy. Book shops offer to get it in, but even the new multi story Borders aren’t stocking it. Even though they confirmed to me that there had been enquiries.
Given how heavily it had been promoted I find this fascinating.
Am I being paranoid?
I read Plimer’s book and I was not impressed.
Unfortunately Steve Fielding is the sole member (IIRC) of a conservative christian party that has sprung up only in the last few years. He seems a sensible chap but he has almost no weight or authority in the debate simply by being on the fringes of political sentiment. Still, it’s good to see him trying to put some fuel ont he fire here.
I followed up your links, Tim Lambert, and I waded through the venom about ‘denialists’ for an hour or so looking – in vain, it seems – for something that clearly focused on my cause for skepticism over AGW.
(Incidentally, I did not ignore everything and will try to make time for more reading).
For now however, perhaps you could enlighten me? My concern essentially, is this:
If AGW is really happening, what solutions do you propose that do not require State theft of the productivity of the individuals – such as myself – reading blogs like this one?
You do understand, I hope, the background of individualist values from which a ‘denialist’ like me looks out and sees the expansion of the State yet further into my life?
I don’t believe in AGW. But libertarians/free marketeers do need to address the issue of, “what if it were real, what would you do?”. It’s no good just arguing it isn’t happening and no similar potential catastrophe could occur. It makes us look weak, because we are weak on it.
I personally take the view that if AGW is real, then it is a true externality beyond the capacity of market systems to accomodate. I contend that that includes pseudo-markets such as cap’n’trade. What is particularly wrong about such markets is the concentration on emissions which penalise participation in one phase of the carbon cycle– that is, the emission of CO2 by a rotting plant in my back garden is erroneously considered equivalent to the emission of CO2 from fossil fuel burning.
Under the AGW hypothesis, emissions are not the problem. The problem is the addition of CO2 to the total carbon in the biosphere. Once it is in the biosphere, it is in the wild, and you cannot sequester it in a tree, or offset it anywhere. It’s part of the cycle. Clearly the only problem is to prevent fossil fuel extraction.
As such, I think we should be arguing that if AGW really is occurring, then cap’n’trade and emissions quotas are entirely wrong-headed and emissions measurements meaningless. The only solution IMV would be to target fossil extraction, which would mean moratoria on coal and oil production. That would mean shortages and very high price rises.
The fairest solution to that would be a rationing system. We may offer larger rations to farmers and other people who need the fuel, while switching to other energy sources. Al Gore should get no larger a fuel ration than Fred Bloggs, which might mean an end to private jets, boo hoo.
Harsh, yes. But if the planet is in danger, there seems to be no alternative. But it wouldn’t be a problem that either free markets or government run pseudo-markets can address.
In any other science, the AGW-type of argument would be laughed out of court, based as it is upon scanty, inaccurate (if not actively falsified) data and extrapolated with predictive models which are so dishonest as to leave most statisticians (even bad ones like me) standing slack-jawed with amazement.
Every single data set used to “prove” AGW/ AGC/ climate change has been discredited both in its origin and its application, and yet still the Green movement gains in currency because the statists finally have a wonderful tool with which to bring about their stupid utopia.
What to do if AGW is real?
First stop exagerating the consequences and talking up ‘tipping points’. The IPCC does not predict massive temperature rises that will cause all sorts of droughts, floods, expanding deserts, plagues of frogs and the like. The putative temperature rises are modest and take place mostly in high latitudes at night and in winter.
Second, examine the upsides as well. An expansion of the available agricultural land and a lengthening of the growing season are not to be sniffed at. Neither is the fact that cold kills more people each year than heat and that periods of warmer climate, (of which there have been many in the past), correspond with greater numbers and diversity of life than the all too frequent ice-ages. Oh, and CO2 is plant food. Higher temperatures and more CO2 mean a greener planet.
Third, stop pretending that any policy, whether Kyoto, Son of Kyoto, or Mutant Ninja Kyoto has any hope in hell of restricting the growth of ‘man made’ greenhouse gases. Only mass genocide could do this. (And for some greens this is the preferred solution).
Fourth, stop trying to mandate, (by massive taxpayer subsidy), non-solutions to the so-called crisis. I refer, of course, to windmills, bio-fuels, solar and the like.
Fifth, adapt. The only solution to climate change, whether hot or cold, man-made or natural, is to adapt.
Sixth, free up the people of the world to adapt and innovate in the face of climate change. I probably have no need on the blog to enumerate the ways this can be done, but here’s a hint: State imposed ‘solutions’ and robbing the rich to enslave the poor don’t work.
Finally, return to growing civilization rather than tearing it down, so that our children and their children have the wealth and knowledge to cope with change.
So the short answer of what to do if AGW is real?
Nothing.
“The only solution IMV would be to target fossil extraction, which would mean moratoria on coal and oil production. That would mean shortages and very high price rises.”
Yes, but you’re channeling the light into such a narrow little stream away from the surrounding landscape of political and ethical context. How long might such a moratoria need to last, and how long would it actually last? What happens in the meantime to the values of so many people whose efforts to stay alive and flourish require, you know, energy?
“The fairest solution to that would be a rationing system. We may offer larger rations to farmers and other people who need the fuel…”
‘We’ – i.e. the presumption of the State. Yes I know you know all this Ian, but what good does it do to keep that implicit?
“Harsh, yes. But if the planet is in danger, there seems to be no alternative. But it wouldn’t be a problem that either free markets or government run pseudo-markets can address.”
Well it is widely seen as a problem necessitating some form of world government. But it is not widely seen so by me.
Can you convince me that that really is not the point of all of this Mr Lambert?
What to do if AGW is real?
First, re-read Kevin B’s response. He hits the nail squarely on the head.
Second, think more deeply about his answer #5 (“adapt”). Even if the (bogus, in my opinion) climate models are correct, they predict only a few inches of rise in sea levels over the next century. So build a few dikes, and abandon a few low-lying areas which aren’t worth protecting. This isn’t going to happen overnight; at the absolute worst we have decades to prepare. Let’s use them intelligently, rather than indulging in panicky and ultimately suicidal overreaction.
In large measure, a slightly warmer planet is a good thing. Find the positives and embrace them, and work on ways to mitigate the few negatives. Because they are truly few.
I have serious doubts about anyone’s ability to predict the weather more than a few days ahead. Modern weather forecasts are mostly very accurate one day ahead and slightly less so two or three days ahead, any further ahead they are pretty hopeless. I understand that the climate and the weather are not quite the same thing but I have to say that I am pretty sceptical about anyone having the ability to predict the climate either.
I also think that it is easy to form false impressions due to the fact that humans can’t help but think in terms of infinitesimally small timescales. This is because of the immense contrast between our seventy odd year lifespan and the four and a half billion year history of the earth. Even the entire history of our species is like a fraction of a second in the grand scheme of things. As a result of this small scale thinking it was easy to get very worked up about Global Warming after we had experienced three or four really hot summers and mild winters. Oh but now it is the beginning of June and it is pretty cold outside and it will only need a couple of especially cold winters to convince many of us that we are off the hook.
The Grumpy old sod also mentioned that the Earth Day had been around since 1970 and it was very illuminating to read what the doomsayers were predicting back then and contrasting their predictions with what actually happened. For this reason I predict that Al Gore’s film will in thirty years time be a comedy classic.
ADAPT. We have humans successfully living near the equator where the temp never drops below 60-70F and at the arctic, barely above 40F. Why does everyone retire from NY to Florida? Warmer climate. Takes a couple years to adapt.
Hmm, two points. First, Donald Blainey? Geoffrey Blainey is also a Professor of History and well-known 😉
Second, Black, Senator Fielding has quite a lot of power. The balance of the two major parties in the Senate is quite close, so that the Greens (represented by four Senators), the independent (but mainly centre-right) Nick Xenephon and Senator Fielding are in effect the power-brokers.
Mike, I wasn’t addressing what might be the point or motivation of various players. I was addressing what might be necessary if the worst case scenarios of the AGW proponents are correct- that is that Global Warming is real, human driven, and will produce catastrophic effects. Because that is the scenario that needs answering.
I’m sure we’ve all been multiple times around the mulberry bush of whether it is real, whether if it is real it is as serious as is claimed, and whether it’s really a communist plot. What sceptics are less eager to discuss is what they would actually do in the hypothetical case where the science is sound and the prognosis dire, and we need to address that question too, IMV.
Patrick
Yes, Geoffrey Blainey. Thanks. I don’t know where Donald came from.
“What sceptics are less eager to discuss is what they would actually do in the hypothetical case where the science is sound and the prognosis dire, and we need to address that question too, IMV.”
Try reading Bjorn Lomborg on this – he’s an AGW believer (or at least he says he is), but has put together a team of rather more sensible economists to work out the best response. It’s economic modelling, of course, which is hardly in any better state than climate modelling, but it’s what we’ve got. To simplify, he says the best option is to carry on as we are until about 2050, and only then switch over to renewable sources of energy. It trades a little more damage for a lot greater ability to respond/adapt/change. And he says that the free market will do that anyway, without the need for state interference.
His earlier book – The Skeptical Environmentalist is rather better in my opinion than his later one specifically on global warming. But there are plenty of his essays about.
(Video here.)
Frankly, I’d as soon address the question of what we should have been done in the 1970s had Paul Ehrlich’s predictions of imminent global catastrophe from overpopulation been more than brainsick economic illiteracy and delusion. It was the respectable consensus at the time, with governments taking it seriously enough to engage in mass sterilisation programmes in the third world. And despite the fact that we’re all supposed to be dead by now, he still has his believers even today.
But if you really, really, really have to take it seriously, Lomborg’s analysis is probably what you ought to start with.
Also look at the NIPCC report at:
http://www.nipccreport.org/
880-page book challenging the scientific basis of concerns that global warming
Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso and 35 contributors and reviewers present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the IPCC
The authors cite thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books that were ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific research that became available after the IPCC’s self-imposed deadline of May 2006.
I enjoy reading this site to keep up with what’s going on in Britian and the EU. My favorite science site on the Internet is http://www.wattsupwiththat.com
That site is constantly impressing me with its detailed information regarding Climate Change.
I know it seems I am just pushing traffic for this site, but that’s not my motivation.
My personal background is that one my professors in college was on the team that installed the temperature gauges throughout the US back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. He always said, “We may be burning up and headed straight for hell, but our data is so bad it shouldn’t be used to tell us a damn thing about the temperature.”
That was back in the late 80’s before AGW was so popular.
Anthony Watts started another website called http://www.surfacestations.org that documents the problems with the equipment. As an American, I can only say that it is embarassing that we have some of this equipment setup on rooftops, beside A/C heat exchanges, sewage systems and actual BBQ grills in peoples backyards.
Mr. Watts has the actual pictures to support that statement.
He has also looked at the data and documented temperature increases in the data when a station was moved from a nice field to the top of a fire department. This has happened so often it is just amazing.
“What sceptics are less eager to discuss is what they would actually do in the hypothetical case where the science is sound and the prognosis dire, and we need to address that question too, IMV.”
The flaw in that sentence is the word “dire”. To my knowledge none of the forecasts of the (relatively “mainstream”, if that is an appropriate word) AGW believers rise to the level of what I would consider “dire”. Relatively minor changes in sea level, overall temperature increase, less polar ice, etc. Big deal. Sure, they claim some places will dry out and others will get wetter, but so what? That’s nothing we can’t manage through. Not only is it a waste of time to develop doomsday scenario contingency plans to mollify the even-more-looney crackpot fringe, doing so dignifies their lunacy. They need to be ignored, not coddled.
Laird,
I think it might be true to say that of AGW-believing scientists, but not so much for AGW-believers in general.
In fact, I’m fully expecting to face extreme annoyance in about ten years time, when all the scientists tell us that it was all blown out of proportion by the media, and that scientists in the main never actually predicted disasters at all.
But as for mainstream believers, I believe some fairly prominent schools of prediction state that only tall mountains in Antarctica will be inhabitable by 2100, and the few survivors in 2040 will all be cannibals. I’m looking forward to it.
With all due respects, everyone seems to be skating around my point, which is that of addressing what the response should be to a manmade catastrophic environmental challenge. I don’t believe in AGW, or at least that if CO2 has any effect that it is very minor. But what if I and other sceptics are wrong? What do we do if it is truly catastrophic, or some other similar as yet unknown problem is discovered which is? Arguments about whether the IPCC are wrong, the Greens are commie nutballs, or “it’s not as big a problem as they say” i.e. Lomborg don’t address this issue. They are all varying degrees of “there is no problem so we need no answer”.
But if CO2 release or some other anthropogenic agent were due to cause an 800 foot rise in sea level and the entire globe except the South Pole to become inhabitable, what do we do then? How do we address this problem in our philosophy?
Ian,
Well, fairly obviously in that case we’d all move to the South Pole. 🙂
But like all such hypothetical problems, the best answer is to face that problem when it happens. Because I can spin disaster stories endlessly. What if we were invaded by vampire moths? What if cornflakes suddenly became deadly poisonous? What if we’re hit by an asteroid, or invaded by aliens, or the Earth falls out of its orbit and into the sun?
Answers are demanded! And then the very fact that we have taken the possibility seriously can be used to show that we we take the possibility seriously, and that our scepticism is unsure of itself.
We have been here before, again and again and again. We’re running out of resources, ruining the planet, heading for inevitable oblivion unless we hand over absolute power to the elect, who will be able to save us only with great sacrifice. Every time, millions believe them, and populist politicians dither about what to do. Then it all fails to come true and they just start over with something else. Again and again.
We never seem to learn.
In my view, the correct response to any such apocalyptic eschatology is to laugh. Otherwise we’ll waste our entire lives on planning what to do when the sky falls in, instead of getting on with it.
And should the giant vampire moths ever actually turn up, to invest heavily in garlic mothballs at that point.
Ian,
There is also a very real danger of a really big meteorite hitting earth. There is universal consensus that it is going to happen, maybe in a couple of decades, maybe in a couple of million years. It happened before. It will be catastrophic. What need we, libertarians (or human beings), do about it?
Same as with AGW. Not much. There isn’t a lot that can be done. Shooting yourself in the foot isn’t what we need to do.
Ian B. No worries, no one can do anything about it.
We can make artifical islands and crave artificial Mountains, try to live at 3K and try to find where is the big heat in Atmosphere…
Which is incidentaly another good point to show the bad science behind Global Warming and “Greenhouse” Gases…
With increased Co2, we also have increased plant growth which means increased absorption.
Has anyone even defined what a good level of Co2 is? If so I haven’t heard about it.
Is 11 degrees not massive? This is part of one of their scenarios. However, the last 2 reports the IPCC has released they have had to drop their predictions of temperature increase by 20%. My solution is to let them issue atleast 2 more reports and we will be very close to “normal”.
The IPCC uses words like “unprecedented” when describing warming and statements like this:
And things like this:
“More intense and longer droughts”
“increase of intense tropical cyclone”
“Increased incidence of extreme high sea level”
Those statements are kind of threatening.
And so is this from the IPCC report:
Of course, this statement has been proven wrong already:
But the reality is that our “reactions” to this problem are not being defined by the IPCC. They are being defined by people who are claiming exactly what you say the IPCC is not claiming and they are using the IPCC report to do so.
Ian, I’ll repeat the last two points I made earler.
Sixth, free up the people of the world to adapt and innovate in the face of climate change. I probably have no need on the blog to enumerate the ways this can be done, but here’s a hint: State imposed ‘solutions’ and robbing the rich to enslave the poor don’t work.
Finally, return to growing civilization rather than tearing it down, so that our children and their children have the wealth and knowledge to cope with change.
If we return to building civilization instead of tearing it down we will bequeath to our children a wealthier world in which they will have the resources to at least mitigate any disaster. For instance they will have the resources to ship some small part of the population off earth and to, I dunno, install giant space mirrors to cool the place down, (or heat it up if it gets colder, which, going by history is the likelier bet).
Ration energy and they will die cold and ignorant and cursing our name.
Tim Lambert
I read through your critique of the book and while your take might be largely true, I was interested in these points of yours:
p382 claims hockey stick is a fabrication
p199 claims malaria is common in cold climates. No cite!
p198 claims polar bear numbers are increasing
p198 claims Arctic sea ice is expanding
It’s one thing to draw up an extensive list of what the fellow claims, but it’s another to say these claims are wrong.
The hockey stick may not have been totally debunked but it has been criticized to the point of unreliability. Mann’s refusal to release his underlying data makes it all the more suspect.
Canada has 2/3 of the world’s polar bears and populations are increasing, according to government biologists.
Malaria was common in cold climes. Early residents of Washington DC, including Washington himself, were afflicted with malaria.
Arctic sea ice is expanding to the extent that it is now at or near the 20 year mean.
Now, if there is increasing skepticism about AGW it is because many of the ‘facts’ have not been nailed down, even as the proponents insist they have been.
I know that Britain’s winter was a return to cold years of yesterday, but how is your summer shaping up? Is the average hotter or colder compared to last year?
I echo the cheerleader for Anthony watts. His blog…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/ is at the cutting edge of the debate, and has been voted Best Science Blog for the last 2 years.
Ian Plimer (OZ) is matched by Ian Wishart (NZ) whose AGW sceptical book book AirCon has been on the top of our best seller lists for the last 3 weeks.
What the green/left won’t acknowledge is the failure of the climate models…if CO2 is increasing, the models say we should be warming. We are not.
Please don’t ignore also the quote from Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment programme, who is on record as saying…“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
“what do we do then? How do we address this problem in our philosophy?”
Isn’t it interesting. 27 comments — a very few True Believers; rather a lot of thoughtful individuals who can explain quite clearly why the concept of Anthropogenic Global Warming is unmitigated codswallop; and one Libertarian.
Yet not a single mention from any side about nuclear power. Even though it is the only large-scale post-fossil energy technology available to us today. Even though nuclear power is a two-fer — deal with alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming and rather more likely Peak Oil in one step.
What do we do in our philosophy, Ian?
We tear down the regulations that have stymied the building of many more nuclear power plants.
We eliminate Departments of Energy and their ilk, and replace them with a giant X-Prize award of billions (your choice of currency) to the first three entrepreneurs who deliver industrial-scale 24/7 power from non-nuclear post-fossil sources cheaper than fossils (without subsidy).
And we go back to letting school-children learn about real science, such as the Carbon Cycle.
Do you have a source for that Ayrdale?
I notice we haven’t had so much as a squeak out of Tim Lambert yet…
Ian B – yes I know. I agree with Kevin B and Laird.
Of course. Nuclear power. We can lift the 30 year old ban on nuclear power imposed by the Luddites.
Then, Dr. Hansen, chief alarmist, has a remarkably sensible proposal: impose a carbon tax, and return the revenue on a equal per capita rate to the people.
I have another variant proposal: impose a carbon tax, use the revenue to reduce (or abolish) the income tax.
These two proposals will do little toward reducing carbon emissions, but would amount to “doing something” that wasn’t extremely harmful.
Nonsense on a stick. If the problem is too much carbon dioxide, plant trees to metabolize it – mangroves around the coasts, hardy flora in the deserts. Recently geneticists made goldfish which glowed in the dark. They can make grass for arid climes.
We’ll never make carbon dioxide emissions go to zero without reverting to rationing and hair-shirt idiocy. But I’m not buying – for one carbon-indulgence offset minute – the supposition that if we are changing the climate (which I doubt) one way, we can’t change it back another way without depopulating/returning to primitivism.
By the way, fun fact: the surface area of the full moon is just a little larger than the surface area of South America, itself just 4% of the world’s surface. The moon is 380,000 km away from Earth. Earth is a big, big place.
Just in the US, an advanced nation by any standard, less than 10% of land is developed (including farmland as “developed” land). I’ll see your every factory and every gas-guzzling hippy-killing Humvee on the planet and raise you capitalist-bred wonder plants around McMansions in the Sahara, and I’ll bet your ass that any solution involving technology done in a free and open market system will be more rational, more moral, and more successful than any quasi-Stalinist collective, Ian B, that you can dream up as a fig leaf to stand on the same ground as the Greenists.
And my last was addressing specifically this part of Ian B’s thesis:
And especially this:
There is no equivalence between the two, not even in function. Governments run patronage, markets run for wealth. But only one can deliver thriving metropolises in the desert, such as in Arizona, and only one can strangle progress and give us a Siberia. I’d rather ‘suffer’ in an air-conditioned Starbucks in Phoenix than volunteer for hard labor in Omsk.
Nonsense on a stick. Once the carbon’s in the biosphere, it’s in the biosphere. You can’t make it disappear. More carbon will be absorbed… and more carbon will be “emitted” too by rotting plant matter (fallen leaves, dead trees, etc). Unless you intend to grow a tree then encase it in concrete, resequestering the carbon, you’ve achieved nothing.
I’m amused that you accuse me of “a fig leaf to stand on teh same ground as the greenists”, heh. I’m madly opposed to the AGW hypothesis, I think it’s bollocks. But what I asked was, if it is true, what would you do? The hypothesis is that there is positive feedback in the climate system- that relatively small changes made by us (the general mass of humanity) will produce larger changes in the climate.
Furthermore (according to the AGWH) there is the equivalent of the problems highlighted by public choice economics- the causes are diffuse whereas the effects are concentrated. That is, everyone on the planet causes the global warming, while the effects will be concentrated on specific people. For instance, a person may lose their land due to sea level rise. In a libertarian philosophy, his property rights have been violated by the action of the mass of the people. How is he to be compensated? Who does he take to court?
Feel free to rave at me as a commie, it’s been a long time since anyone called me that. But notably, only Alice so far has actually addressed the question in a meaningful way with actual policy suggestions.
So come on then, my property rights have been violated due to sea level inundating my hotel and the tropical island my business is located on being turned into a scorching desert, by the diffuse actions of other bastards who didn’t care about damage to my property. After you’ve raved at me for being a Stalinist, who’s going to compensate me, and how?
I don’t want to live in your thriving metropolis in the desert, I want to live on my land which is now under fifty feet of ocean thanks to the deliberate behaviour of yourself and the rest of humanity. You seem to have cost me a great deal of money. What compensatory system would you propose? More significantly, if you believe in property rights, what right do you have to destroy my property in the first place and force me to go and live in Megacity One? Hmm?
Perhaps there is globel warming – and perhaps it is caused by C02 emissions. However, the establishement are very casual with their arguments.
For example, in the Australian context the great drought in New South Wales was blamed on “man made climate change” – and then New South Wales flooded and there was no apology for the previous “argument”.
Also there is the James Lovelock (the founder of the British environmental movement in modern times) test.
He asks the “man made climate change” people a question “are you in favour of nuclear power?”
If the reply is not a strong “yes” he knows they are just striking a radical pose (for political or social reasons) and do not really care about C02 emissions (because windmills and solar power are not going to make any difference).
Mike, evidence for a cooling planet at…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/05/uah-global-temperature-anomaly-for-may-down-again-near-zero/
and…
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/little-ice-age-ii-sequel
Mike, re planetary cooling; this is worth a look too…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/wid/18298287/
“With all due respects, everyone seems to be skating around my point, which is that of addressing what the response should be to a manmade catastrophic environmental challenge. I don’t believe in AGW, or at least that if CO2 has any effect that it is very minor. But what if I and other sceptics are wrong? What do we do if it is truly catastrophic, or some other similar as yet unknown problem is discovered which is?… How do we address this problem in our philosophy?”
I’m sorry Ian all I can think of is some sort of C02 tax the funds from which would be used to compensate those whose property is destroyed by AGW.
Of course the problem with that ‘solution’ is that, as I said earlier, it would seem to require some form of World State to administer it – and then you’d have created a whole series of naturally self-perpetuating institutions and beurocracies with an interest in ensuring the problem (be it AGW or another) neither reduces nor disappears but continues indefinitely (or morphs into something worse).
Alternatively, as Kevin B and Laird point out, the best option is probably to do nothing. What would you rather accept: the lost value of your hotel sinking due to the rest of us carbon monsters, or the lost value of personal liberty associated with being under the yoke of some World State?
And lets make no bones about it – they would effectively own each one of us, as our individual States do now by stealing our individual (and collective) productivity then disposing of this without the slightest reference to our values as separate individuals.
Sometimes you just have to say ‘sod it’ and move on.
There is also of course the natual willingness of good people to help others – which does not require any State. Were I to know of you losing your hypothetical island beneath the waves, I’d help you lift away what you could on my hypothetical Type 45 destroyer.
Ian, we all damage each other’s properties (including bodies) by merely existing, i.e. breathing, occupying space, etc. Our economic activities are just an extension of our existence.
Thanks Ayrdale. What might Tim Lambert think of that I wonder…
IanB – Patrick Crozier seems to think it would be possible to award compensation by means of a world-wide court system institutionally seperated from a world-wide beurocracy responsible for administrating a world wide CO2 tax.
Of course for that separation to be achieved, the hypothetical non-existence of politicans would be needed…. and how happy I’d be to contribute to that. Yet there must surely be other ways to think through this…
Just idly musing here, it just crossed my mind that this might be one application for Mark Wadsworth’s land value tax (something I’m not normally a fan of). Land values rising due to a good location viz climate change (tundra becoming temperate, etc) could be taxed to compensate those whose land is turning into seabed and desert…
I’m not sure what that means. Our planet is not a closed system.
We haven’t even been able to determine how the earth produce’s oil yet. We call it a fossil fuel, but that point is highly debated.
Personally, I think there is some truth to man-made global warming. It’s just irrelvant compared to natural forces.
I want to live on my land which was taken because of the deliberate behavior of humanity, too. I think a castle in Scotland would be fair compensation for the English moving my family to N. Ireland and then America.
Granted now that I think about it, maybe they did my family a favor and I should compensate them instead.
I ordered Plimer’s book a few weeks back and it has still not arrived. I think it is in its 4th or 5th print run – it is selling like hot cakes here in Aus.
He did a good radio interview on the ABC in April – available here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2009/2550682.htm
Two popular Australian bloggers that are tearing into the global warming crowd are Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair. Both regularly post about what a nonsense it is, and they draw a huge and largely enthusiastic response.
Jennifer Marohasy runs a very science based blog that puts the boot in as well.
Tim Lambert has been described variously as a “lefty” and “global warming alarmist”. I’d take his quibbles with Plimer with a dose of salt.
http://rwdb.blogspot.com/2008/05/john-quiggins-favourite-unreliable.html
“But what I asked was, if it is true, what would you do?”
We would die. Shit happens. Deal with it.
So, first things first, Ian, I agree with you more often than not – you and JP and a few others are the main reason I visit this site daily, when I can. I am not calling you a Stalinist. On the other hand, on the account of collectivization and rationing, there is almost no other term fitting – there is nothing at all good to say about it.
But onward:
Whoa, buddy, slow down there. This here is a residential neighborhood and you’re doing 90 in a 30mph zone. No one, except Gore on crazy pills, claims that over the next 100 years we’ll get more than a fraction of a degree increase in temperature and more than a few feet of rise, in which case you would have had to have built your home/resort/whatever 45 ft below sea level to begin with.
The only proper reply then would be to point and laugh, ‘Ha ha, stupid. Hey, everyone, look at the stupid. Stupid guy building his home 45 ft below sea level on the coast,” and then throw things at you. Really, there are more important things to worry about than the plight of millionaires in the Bikini islands (or the Dutch) in a 1000 years.
But if we are going to go from absurdities, let’s have at it: 50 feet rise in sea level in, say, fifty years. Let’s say that John Connor sends a Hippy Terminator back through time and we know for a fact that this will happen.
First, I assume that your home is not currently 50 ft underwater. Further, I assume that you are not typing with a scuba tank. Moreover, I assume that you also use electricity, drive cars, smoke the occasional cigar and breath oxygen.
In which case, you are asking me to compensate you for something which has not yet happened, which has not damaged you in the least, for a situation you have chosen and rather handsomely profit by at the current moment (homes on the water front being more valuable than other places in the interior).
The only possible answer to that question is: you are not damaged, you do not need to be made whole.
What gives you the right to demand from me any compensation whatsoever for an injury you have not suffered?
If you believe in liberty, what right do you have to any compensation from me or restriction on my freedom, my business, my life and happiness for something that has not yet happened and may not happen to you. It is your property. If you live in a city that is declining into poverty and crime, such as Detroit which is losing its industry to overseas competitors, nobody is required to subsidize your home values or keep you on a stipend or mow your lawn for you on the weekends. If your city is declining into the sea, I wish you well, but not too well, my friend. Leave.
Ah, yes, sequestration. BS. Even though the total carbon is constant in the biosphere, you can certainly change the differential rates of accumulation in one place or another. Plant a forest in the Sahara (which was once green, and we’re being ridiculous anyways with the “50 in 50”) which lasts half a millenium, and you won’t have to worry about carbon for a long, long, long time. It’ll still get out, of course, but you don’t have to bury trees mafiaso-style in bridge pylons to do it.
Any action that is taken to reduce human produced carbon dioxide to reduce global warming or influence climate is a mistake that puts freedom and prosperity at risk.
The Solar Grand Maximum that went on for about 70 years appears to have ended. The 30 year or so Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) uptrend that combined with the Solar Grand Maximum to produce the late-20th-century temperature run up has started its 30 year downtrend. The PDO downtrend combined with the quiet sun is resulting in continued planet cooling. (The cooling will be slow because of the huge thermal capacitance of the oceans) The sun has not been this quiet this long since 1913. Sunspot changes appear to be a catalyst for cloud changes and therefore have much greater influence than total solar irradiance (TSI).
Since 2000, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased 18.4% of the increase from 1800 to 2000. According to the average of the five reporting agencies, the trend of average global temperatures since 1998 shows no increase and from 2002 through 2008 the trend shows a DECREASE of 1.8°C/century. This separation (there have been many others) corroborates the lack of connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide increase and average global temperature.
Many Climate Scientists appear to be completely unaware of some relevant science and understand other relevant science poorly (it’s not in their curriculum). The missing science, using paleo temperature data, proves that added atmospheric carbon dioxide has no significant influence on average global temperature. See the pdfs linked from http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true for the proof, to identify the missing science and to see the cause of the temperature run-up in the late 20th century. It is significant that Climate Scientists have adopted the word ‘feedback’ but use it completely differently than had been successfully applied for decades by engineers.
As the atmospheric carbon dioxide level continues to increase and the average global temperature doesn’t it is becoming more and more apparent that many climate scientists have made an egregious mistake and a whole lot of people have been misled.
Anybody relying on Tim Lambert for anything is making a big mistake. He’s a dyed in the wool collectivist and AGW suits his political purposes. Bs artist. Makes stuff up to make his point. Don’t know what he’s doing here.
There’s a new book coming out – “The Climate Caper” by one Garth Paltridge and the Lamberts of this world are going to have a lot of difficulty dealing with him as he’s exceptionally well qualified to write on the topic, as is Ian Plimer of course and others like Bob Carter.
Official science is going to take a big hit over the AGW scam which is a pity but probably deserved.
Look closely and you’ll see there’s nothing very dramatic occuring in Earth’s climate that hasn’t happened before. Prophesies of disaster devolve into abstruse statistical discussions in trying to pull a small, maybe non existent signal out of noise and the results you get seem to depend on the statistical techniques used. Move on, nothing to see here.
Vercingetorix, I think it was pretty clear from my post that I was discussing a situation in which catastrophic climate change does occur. That is, rather than demanding restitution for some future event, asking what restitution would be suitable if climate change does occur. So you’ve sidestepped my question, rather than answer it.
Ian B — I appreciate the point you are trying to discuss, but it seems that you are one short step from recommending giving the Al Gore’s of this world life & death power over every individual in order to make the world a better place.
But if the likes of Gore do succeed in making this world a better place for some (i.e, the Gores), they will make it worse for others. The old-fashioned constable who helped the tipsy young woman get home safely was making her world better, but signficantly degrading the world that the violent rapist wanted to occupy.
The simple answer to your hypothetical (given that we all understand that alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming is scientifically-indefensible nonsense) — other people have a responsibility to make good your situation only if you yourself have never contributed to the damage which you have suffered. If you have produced CO2 (for example by breathing) then you are responsible for the damage you brought upon yourself, and you should look only to yourself for restitution.
Then, Ian, I don’t know what to tell you, as no catastrophe has occurred. This was not clear at all from your postings: you are discussing a potential (catastrophic) disaster as if it has already occurred, which it hasn’t because, ahem, it is a potential disaster.
It seems sensible that we don’t quarantine every community because of possible (or inevitable) epidemics before there is an epidemic, as it is sensible to not jail everyone because of inevitable murder, assault, rape, robbery and manslaughter within the community, as it is sensible to not declare worldwide war on every other nation because of inevitable future conflicts.
This isn’t exactly the most terrible challenge to property rights I have ever run across. If I wrong you, you can sue me or put in a class action suit against the government(s) that harmed you, maybe even with a cease-and-desist order, IF you can prove fault. Bangladesh and the Netherlands can take the US and China to whatever court has jurisdiction in 100 years. If it is a reasonable judgment, those governments might actually pay. If they don’t pay, there is always sanctions, and if the harm is grotesque enough, war. That’s how it has always been done.
There are pre-existing methods of redress for harm, no serfdom required at the front end.
You still haven’t answered my question to you: what gives you the right to seek restitution from me and infringe on my freedoms for potential damages you may or may not suffer which may or may not be even the slightest bit my fault, but even if it is my fault, it is spread through generations and billions of other people (and livestock for christsakes)? And also with that big glowing incandescent bulb in the sky we like to call the “Sun”. And which you also bear as much culpability for as I do, because you breathe, eat, drive or ride mass transit, live in heated or air-conditioned buildings, use energy and have children.
How is this even, in your mind, a valid argument? No harm done, therefore everyone must submit to the regulators?
Again, neither I nor anybody else is forced to care for your property, both in the empathetic and the custodial sense of the word. If you own something, you must provide the maintenance and upgrades for it yourself, by definition of private property ownership. If you build in a flood plain or tornado/hurricane/earthquake/volcano zone, it is a bit rich to require everyone else to subsidize your awful judgment and worse precautions.
Anyways, that’s my 2 cents. As far as my 1/20 billionth share in global warming, I think I’ve overpaid. I’m a nice guy like that. 🙂
Alice-
Nobody “produces” CO2 as I said in an earlier comment. Once it’s in the biosphere, it’s being cycled, not created. So the harm is done by introducing new carbon into the environment. In this hypothetical of course. Like I said, I don’t believe in AGW. I’m just interested in what everyone would do if it were true, which is at least conceivable.
Vercingetorix-
I’m not asking for restitution for that. I’ve set the parameters of the thought experiment; we take as true for the sake of this discussion that the AGW hypothesis is correct. Adding more carbon to the environment will warm the planet and create massive changes of climate all over the Earth. I’m asking, when that happens (as we are presuming it does), what is the libertarian basis on which to judge compensation?
You see, in that scenario, then people have deliberately, with malice aforethought, destroyed property, as in my example of the hotel. It is not accidental damage (which in law may require compensation anyway). Nor is it a random “Act Of God” damage like an unpredictable epidemic or earthquake or meteorite strike. It is damage which has been deliberately and knowingly done by others. They have done this damage, deliberately, by adding carbon to the environment, in full knowledge that it will cause massive property damage to others (and perhaps to themselves, but that is not our concern, as they are free to damage their own property of course).
Most libertarians agree that a person who has their property damaged by another has a natural right to compensation (indeed, the Rothbardian world is one apparently of constant tort). Do they lose that right to compensation if the damage is done by the mass of the people, rather than somebody specific?
Ian:
They have done this (yet hypothetical) damage by simply being alive. In any case, to try and answer your question: the only libertarian solution to this problem that I can see is indeed tort. Now good luck suing the rest of humanity for being alive.
“If it is true what would you do?”.
Get rid of the regulations that hold back nuclear power and DO NOT improve safety. And abolish Capital Gains Tax a tax which undermines investment in new technology.
But I would do those things anyway.
BTW:
I disagree that there is such a thing as a ‘natural right’, as rights only have meaning within a human social context. The ‘right to compensation’ is actually ‘an agreement to compensate’, brought about by the recognition that without such an agreement (and the will to actually honor it) humanity will cease to exist. There is no way this agreement can cover a hypothetical such as yours without defeating the purpose of maintaining the existence of humanity.
So what we seem to be consensusing here is that if the mob decide to violate some individual’s property rights, that is acceptable/preferable? I thought we libertarians disapproved of that kind of thing?
Are you addressing me Ian? I never said such a thing is desirable/preferable.
“So what we seem to be consensusing here is that if the mob decide to violate some individual’s property rights, that is acceptable/preferable?”
No – you completely dropped the AGWH context.
“Do they lose that right to compensation if the damage is done by the mass of the people, rather than somebody specific?”
This question has already been answered more than once.
“I disagree that there is such a thing as a ‘natural right’, as rights only have meaning within a human social context. “
I couldn’t disagree more Alice. You can have your ‘agreement to compensation’ without having to reject natural rights.
In some god awful future (?) in which property rights were no longer recognized, would you still have a valid complaint against theft?
Sorry – Alisa!
As Patrick says, Steve Fielding does at present have considerable power. The two houses of the Australian parliament have (for virtually all purposes) equal power, although convention is that a government is formed by the party holding the confidence of the House of Representatives (the lower house). No legislation at all can be passed without the approval of both houses (with one exception if an election is called over specific legislation and a government then gets re-elected – legislation has been enacted this way once in the 108 years of the Australian constitution).
Although the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has a comfortable majority in the lower house, it has a weak position in the upper house (the Senate), due to senators having longer and non-concurrent terms with members of the lower house. 39 votes are required to pass legislation. The ALP has 32 senators. The opposition parties have 37, the Greens have 5, and the remaining two are Mr Fielding and a somewhat populist anti-gambling campaigner from Adelaide named Nick Xenophon.
Thus to pass any legislation at all, the government either needs the support of the opposition parties (who vote as a block, always and without fail) or the simultaneous support of the Greens, Mr Fielding and Mr Xenophon.
It is highly questionable whether the ALP government at its heart cares very much about things like “climate change” – it cares far more about power. However, many of its supporters and significant amounts of the media are of the extreme loony green fringe, so it says what these people want to hear. My hunch is the government probably likes having an obstacle in the senate to extremism on this point. Of course, Mr Fielding will be crucified for this by the media. I hope he has flame proof clothes.
One more thing. There is another Australian politician mentioned in the (Sydney) Telegraph article that Brian links to, and that is Penny Wong, who is amongst other things the Australian Minister for Climate Change.
Prior to the last election, the ALP recruited former Midnight Oil lead singer and long time hard left environmental activist Peter Garrett to stand for parliament, with the promise that he would be Minister for the Environment in a Labor government. (Garrett was almost elected to the senate previously for the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1987). This was because he is a relatively glamorous figure in the media and because there was a hope that this would persuade the “environmentally minded” voters (of who there are many in Australia) to vote Labor instead of for the Greens. Once the ALP was elected, Garrett was indeed appointed Environment Minister, and Penny Wong was appointed Minister for Climate Change and Water, and Garrett was told by his part to shut up whenever he tried to say anything on Climate Change. Wong is a member of cabinet. Garrett isn’t. Wong is a very hard line ALP former student politician powerbroker type. (She is also Hakka Chinese, female, and gay, so quite an interesting figure). The point is that the ALP deliberately avoided giving responsibility for action on climate change to anyone ideological. She was also given that other environmental job that actually matters, which is management of Australia’s water resources, which have been horribly mismanaged over the last 200 years, and market solutions of a sort are probably important there.
The point in all this is that the ALP appointed someone who is very tough and very loyal but probably not especially ideological in the “climate change” role. I think their sense is that this role is politically difficult more than a role requiring vast actual action.
Mike:
Please define ‘valid’. If these rights were no longer recognized by anyone but myself, then I could as well complain to the wall. And I probably don’t need to tell you that even as things have been since the inception of humanity there are plenty of people who do not recognize the property rights of others. Sometimes a complain against them can remedy the problem, but sometimes you have no choice but to shoot the bastards – which you could also do in that god awful future you described. Of course sometimes you just can’t shoot them all, which has also been true since forever.
BTW, Ian (and I) haven’t really dropped the subject of AGW, since it is only a special case of the larger issue of property rights.
Forget about AGW. By burning fuel we emit also soot and other harmful substances into the air. This is a solid fact (unlike AGW).
You could claim that the air in your house or garden, the air you breathe, has been polluted and you should be compensated for possible health risks.
The problem has been solved by regulatory government bodies – I can imagine no other solution. Polluters are required to install scrubbers or converters, or whatever is possible, to clean up the air, while we all accept certain levels of pollution, since the activity producing it (like driving cars) is too beneficial, relative to the risks, to be stopped altogether.
The framing of the AGW problem (the hypothetical AGW problem) in terms of property rights is very lame. It is exactly analogous to the pollution problem which isn’t a private property issue at all.
Jacob, I happen to think that pollution can be also treated as a property rights issue.
In any case, becoming ill because you cannot avoid breathing polluted air is different from losing beachfront property (the ‘beachfront’ part being entirely avoidable).
Let me try and pin down Ian’s hypothesis again and see if we can answer his original question.
As far as I can tell, and Ian will correct me if I’m wrong, the hypothesis goes like this:
Assume the wildest predictions of the AGW alarmists are true and are demonstrably, and scientifically indisputably, the fault of greenhouse gases produced by man’s energy intensive civilisation. What then do we do now to stop the rise in those greenhouse gases and prevent the harm to Ian’s hypothetical beachside property, (amongst other things).
The secondary question seems to have devolved into what remedy does Ian have if we fail to take adequate steps and his property ends up under fifty feet of water.
The answer to the second part of the question is fairly obvious. As the rising waters begin to lap at his house, he packs up his things, locks the door, waves goodbye to his dream home and picks up the phone and calls his insurer and his lawyer. Who does he sue? My advice would be to sue those with the deepest pockets. Maybe the energy companies for not switching to nuclear power in time, (let them sue the greens who prevented them from doing so), or the various governments who failed to meet their self imposed targets or adopted silly policies like cap’n’trade and banning light bulbs, or maybe those who own the tundra that has turned into prime farm land.
The original part of the question is much more difficult to answer. My own view is that if the hypothesis is correct then there is nothing we can do, but Ian originally proposed rationing fossil fuel extraction. This has a superficial advantage over the current policies in that it might actually lead to a reduction in energy use rather than a redistrubution of wealth. (In the words of I forget who describing international charity; “from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries “, with healthy ‘commisions’ extracted along the way).
The obvious disadvantage to the proposal is that it is massively statist, and international government type statist as well. It also couldn’t work. The governments of the world have signally failed to get the useless Kyoto treaty ratified, let alone adhered to, and that piece of nonsense is all about wealth redistribution. Even in the face of irrefutable evidence of approaching doom, I have no faith in the national or international institutions to take the steps necessary. Oh, the western governments would try and bludgeon the peasants into submission, but by the time they manged to shut down their own wells and mines, let alone the Saudi or Venezualan or Russian or Chinese facilities, it would be too little, too late.
Two additions to my previous comment, which is far too long anyway. Sorry about that guys.
The first is that I do not believe in the ridiculous hypothesis and that fact almost certainly colours my views.
The second concerns nuclear power. If we in the UK began building a dozen new gigawatt nuclear power stations now, (and impose draconian short cuts on the current planning laws), they might be finished in time to take over from the current base load generators that are reaching the end of their useful lives, so if we are to increase the load by having electric cars and space heating and cooking we will need a dozen more. The same is true in North America and most of the rest of the world. No, if we are to solve this hypothetical problem without tearing down, (continuing to tear down?) our civilisation and causing the death of billions, it will take a new solution, (fission or such), to appear, and whilst we continue to pour taxpayer’s funds into non-solutions like wind, solar and biofuels, the incentives to develop those new solutions are reduced.
I have faith in the innovative and adaptive capabilities of our species to come up with solutions to the real crises which lie in our future. I have less faith in our current political classes to get out of the way and let us do so.
Alisa: I hadn’t meant that Ian (or yourself) had dropped the subject of AGW, but rather that Ian summarized the views of others in an abstraction without reference to the AGW context. The problem with that is that it was an attempt to show contradiction by ignoring context.
“If these rights were no longer recognized by anyone but myself, then I could as well complain to the wall….but sometimes you have no choice but to shoot the bastards – which you could also do in that god awful future you described.”
And you say you don’t believe in natural rights? I’m sorry Alisa, but from that insistence to shoot someone who does something to you that only you think is wrong and everyone else thinks is OK, it rather does look like you hold an implicit notion of natural rights rather than ‘social contract rights’.
Kevin B – thread winner I say, except for this:
“I have faith in the innovative and adaptive capabilities of our species to come up with solutions to the real crises which lie in our future. I have less faith in our current political classes to get out of the way and let us do so.”
Your second article of faith contradicts your first.
Alisa,
People who don’t own property – do they have a right to breathe ?
Seems the air is best described a a commons – which is the exact opposite of property. A property shared by all is no property.
Same with oceans and about 90% of land.
Fair cop mike, but I shall defend myself with the great Heinlein quote on bad luck(scroll to the bottom).
Sometimes I do fear that Western Civilisation is on its way out, possibly leading to another dark age, (perhaps eerily coinciding with what some are already calling the ‘Gore Pessimum’). But I do have faith that our species will eventually produce a new civ that will return to science and innovation as the way out of poverty and misery.
No. That question has already been settled. If everyone in the world conspired against you and harmed you, everyone in the world owes you restitution, if there is a provable fault.
Keep in mind that: the catastrophic scenario is pure fantasy; the plaintive is as much at fault as any defendant; no damage has been done yet; that no damage will be done in the immediate future; that the parties most culpable will be long dead by the time the most ‘catastrophic’ scenario rolls around; and lastly, that all the defendants are also plaintiffs as well and could counter suit you.
As for your hotel scenario, it is an extraordinarily bad one. Yes, it is by the ocean and yes, it has gone under. But if carbon is to blame for the damage, then every single guest – who flew in from around the world, who eat and drink and dance the night away in air conditioned rooms and heated pools, and drive around the city in taxis or rental cars – is culpable and so is your business itself for its own destruction.
It is not a situation where I threw a party and burned down your house next door. You threw the party and burned it down yourself. If everybody is at fault, no one is at fault.
It is indeed preferable to throwing billions into manacles to protect someone’s investment property.
But I reject the premise as horribly flawed. There is no malice – people are living their lives, little aforethought – I have never thought about Ian’s hotel, no ironclad guarantee of future damage of any sort and no present harm – climate science is not clockwork and there are many variables, and no “mob” unless you’re wearing a toga over there, posting from the marble of the Roman Senate in which case everyone else is a mob.
Furthermore your property rights hardly include a clause due to climatic change. Rain, sleet, snow, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, meteors, sinkholes, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildlife, rats, roaches, so on, these are all your problems.
Ian,
I think it would help your hypothetical enormously if you were to separate it entirely from the AGW question, and simply talk about an unspecified disaster brought about by joint action in pursuit of individual profit.
Once you abstract away the context, it comes to look very much like the ‘tragedy of the commons’. The commoners graze too many cattle on the common land, it damages the land, produces less, and everybody starves.
Would you agree that that’s close enough to what you’re thinking?
If so, tTotC has been a standard challenge to free market thinking for decades, and an argument for more regulation. But the free market responses are just as well known, and I shouldn’t need to repeat them here.
There is a separate question about doing this in the face of highly uncertain costs, too. But the market is pretty good at trading on uncertainty about the future too. A combination of the two should give you your answer.
Like I said, the last time this was tried it was overpopulation. So do you regulate/license reproduction by law, or pay people to be sterilised, or tax children? Since we happen to know the eventual outcome of that one, it’s a good one to try your hypothetical arguments out on. What do you think?
“So come on then, my property rights have been violated due to sea level inundating my hotel and the tropical island my business is located on being turned into a scorching desert, by the diffuse actions of other bastards who didn’t care about damage to my property. After you’ve raved at me for being a Stalinist, who’s going to compensate me, and how?”
Really? That means those that profit from it will pay the “bastards”? A new tropical island formed should be considered a service?
Jacob: all humans own some property, the most basic one being our bodies.
Mike, my shooting the bastards has nothing to do with rights, it has to do with me wanting to live without being harmed, rights or lack of them be damned.
If memory serves, Rothbard etc declared the atmosphere to be superabundant– an effectively infinite resource which is neither a commons nor subject to property rights. The challenge of AGW (if real) would be that the atmosphere is not superabundant, and subject to the Tragedy Of The Commons. Libertarians normally answer the TOTC by suggesting property rights- if you don’t want the tragedy, don’t have a commons. We can apply this to virtually everything- property rights could be extended over all the oceans if we so desired. And if somebody pollutes your section of ocean you can sue them.
In practical terms, sueing them would be possible because significant ocean pollution sources tend to be concentrated- discharge from factories, or from a sewage outlet (owned by a private company or the state) or a nuclear power station, and so on. But the atmosphere doesn’t seem to be amenable to this approach, especially if the thing damaging it is not being emitted by concentrated sources, but by everyone- though one could argue that the owners of the atmospheric property blocks could have a class action suit against major net carbon emitters, e.g. power stations. Which in fact seems to be the way things are heading, except the sueing will be done by states rather than private individuals.
The interesting thing for me here is that the libertarian argument is being developed that, no matter how serious the problem, nothing can or should be done about it. Suppose, for teh sake of the discussion, that there were no doubt- absolutely certain science- that continued introduction of carbon to the environment would lead, within 100 years, to the planet being rendered entirely uninhabitable- all life on Earth would die. Do we still say that nothing can be done?
“Suppose, for teh sake of the discussion, that there were no doubt- absolutely certain science- that continued introduction of carbon to the environment would lead, within 100 years, to the planet being rendered entirely uninhabitable- all life on Earth would die. Do we still say that nothing can be done?”
Since we all agree that alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming is an evil scam, let’s pick another example — something that is infinitely more plausible.
Let’s imagine that the Chinese Space Agency announces their high-tech satellites have detected a large comet which will collide with the Earth in 100 years & 3 days. Ten times bigger than the object which brought the Mesozoic to an end and wiped out 90% of species on the planet. This is the big one, the end. Your beachfront hotel, Ian, is about to be history. Now, what do libertarians do?
There is no one to sue. No strongly worded memo from the international community can head off certain annihilation. No tax & spend policy can make it right. No minarchist formulation can avoid the coming disaster.
I would hope that libertarians would set a good example by spending the last hundred years living their lives, treating each other with respect, marrying & having children, enjoying life. And at the end of the 100 years & 3 days, I would hope they would meet their end with quiet dignity, and a pride in all that the human race achieved in the limited time that the Universe allots to any species.
Now, what were you saying about nonsensical alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming?
I beg to differ. This is exactly the sort of thing a minarchist state would be ideal for… a *genuine* collective threat that can be focused on without the crap and clutter of a regulatory welfare state to get in the way.
“Mike, my shooting the bastards has nothing to do with rights, it has to do with me wanting to live without being harmed, rights or lack of them be damned.”
It has everything to do with your rights Alisa (and not ‘harm’). Your natural right of property is a consequence of your (and everyone else’s) nature as a human being. Without the right to property, social life as a human being becomes impossible. Natural exist regardless of whether others recognize them or not and that is why you would shoot people who do not recognize those rights and try to steal your property or worse.
Alice, the problem with your comet example is that it isn’t anthropogenic. It’s an “act of god”.
You can be exasperating, Ian. We go from needing sandbags levies to waterworld to Armageddon. But fair enough. If we’re going to go crazy, why start out at 100 years? This is the internet age, baby! Let’s go for a 100 minutes! Why don’t we just nuke the whole planet, who’s for and against? Talk amongst yourselves.
I say “No. Let’s not blow up the planet.”
Then again, we’re also not talking about giving up Diet Pepsi for Lent here. If we gave up coal, gasoline, and diesel cold-turkey, we’d lose instantly somewhere between 90-95% of our worldwide energy base. We’d also give up every rocket, every jet fighter, every tank, every truck and car, motorcycle and jet-ski, every commercial ship, and most railways. We’d lose every service of civilization from food distribution to medical care to mining, farming and construction, industry and defense. No more satellites, no more trade, no more sanitation, no more paper-mills polluting the atmosphere and denuding our vital forests, no more books and no more internet either because there are no more computers, no more nuthin’,…and there really isn’t any substitute for fossil fuel or other chemical fuels for air and space travel, not even nuclear power. Even by switching to something else, we’re screwed.
We’d definitively kill billions of people by completely ceasing all fossil fuel activities. We’d probably also have to exterminate buffalo and cows (methane is a ‘strong’ greenhouse gas): Good luck getting that by in India.
Also, everyone would have to quit fossil fuels at the same time. If even just one tinpot dictator kept his army – say North Korea – they would rule the world. Why? Because they have jet fighters and we have hang-gliders, that’s why! They’d have tanks and artillery and machine guns, but we wouldn’t, because our industrial base is gone. Every watt of power from our solar or wind farms is going to EKGs in the few hospitals we have left or moving grain around or something else mundane but vital.
In which case, you’d need to have – to get the entire world off fossil fuels at once and for all time to avoid Armageddon – a world-wide tyrannical authority completely content with starving hundreds of millions of people, exterminating any opposition, and destroying any rebel power. Also, you’d need forced sterilization, euthanasia, prisons for political prisoners if not full on death camps, and probably alot worse – can’t have overpopulation and dissent now, can you? Not with the fate of the world in your hands.
Even here, in the strongest case you can make for AGW – it is absolutely certain that we will utterly annihilate the world almost within our lifetimes – I would have to shrug it off because there isn’t any other alternative. If our present output of CO2 is enough to obliterate the world, you can’t go halfway and obliterate just half of the world, now, can you? It’s going to be all or nothing, and if we’re doomed anyways, might as well enjoy ourselves while it lasts.
“Alice, the problem with your comet example is that it isn’t anthropogenic.”
Exactly! That is a feature, not a bug. If we are in agreement about how libertarians should react to an Act of God, then what is wrong with applying the same response to your hypothetical impossible-to-avoid Act of Human Kind?
This seems to boil down to a matter of belief, Mike, just like religion. You may believe that you have natural rights, and so you would shoot them based on that. I don’t believe in natural rights, and so I would shoot them based on my desire to live unharmed, just as I would shoot a lion about to attack me, or just as I would seek shelter from an approaching tornado. My main point is that, unlike religion, this particular belief or lack of it becomes meaningless without someone there other than the believer/non-believer to recognize or dispute it. Neither the lion nor the tornado are such persons, and for that matter neither are our hypothetical burglars, AKA The Bastards.
By the way, Ian, your “beach front hotel” was actually built by King Herod – that is – the magnificent city of Caesarea in the kingdom of Judea (Israel), about the year 20 BC.
A part of that city and it’s harbor lie now under 15 feet of sea water. The same happened to the ancient harbor of Alexandria in Egypt.
Whom does Herod sue ?
Alisa:
“my desire to live unharmed” and “natural rights” are the same thing.
Speaking of meteorites – here they are!
“This seems to boil down to a matter of belief, Mike, just like religion. “
No it doesn’t, Alisa. A belief is a proposition held without certainty, but natural rights are a logical derivation of the nature of man – as certain as 4 + 7 + 13 = 24. Natural rights are not airy-fairy flights of fancy that one can choose to ‘believe’ or ‘not believe’, they are logical derivations from primary facts. It’s like saying you don’t believe in arithmetic.
“My main point is that, unlike religion, this particular belief or lack of it becomes meaningless without someone there other than the believer/non-believer to recognize or dispute it.”
That has nothing to do with natural rights as opposed to ‘social contract’ rights. Specifically it does not prove that rights are therefore ‘socially constructed’ and culturally relative. Natural rights are universal across time and space – and this is not a belief akin to My Loving Friend Who Lives In The Sky.
“I don’t believe in natural rights, and so I would shoot them based on my desire to live unharmed, just as I would shoot a lion about to attack me, or just as I would seek shelter from an approaching tornado.”
Of course for a Robinson Crusoe to insist on his natural rights in a discussion with a wild animal or force of nature is lunacy. But I have not argued that point. Natural rights exist regardless of whether other people recognize them or not. Questions of natural rights (in fact, all morality) can only arise in intercourse between rational persons. Rationality is to us what the spider’s web is to the spider – our distinctive means of survival. Monsters don’t qualify for any dispute over natural rights as they are people who have murdered their own nature as rational people.
“Suppose, for teh sake of the discussion, that there were no doubt- absolutely certain science- that continued introduction of carbon to the environment would lead, within 100 years, to the planet being rendered entirely uninhabitable- all life on Earth would die. Do we still say that nothing can be done?”
Suppose for the sake of discussion that there was no-doubt, absolute certain science that continued population expansion would lead, within 40 years, to the Earth being rendered uninhabitable to civilisation? That was the actual case 50 years ago. It was regarded as unarguable that population expanded geometrically, resources linearly (or were constant), and the two would therefore collide with absolute mathematical inevitability. Your hypothetical has already happened.
The problem is that with science we could never be certain. Suppose Ehrlich had been right after all? For all most people knew, he might have been. But in science there are always unknowns, there is always doubt, and what we think is absolute cast-iron science often turns out to be wrong. So even if it was true, and even if science was telling us it was true, we still couldn’t be certain.
As with all high-stakes decisions in the face of uncertainty, the best time to make it is at the last possible moment you can make it, when you have the most information. Until then, it’s sensible to gather the resources to enable you to jump either way, but not to commit yourself. Because if you commit yourself to reducing the population by force (“…We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparent brutal and heartless decisions…“), and then the science changes its mind, as it often does, you’re subsequently going to be Mr Unpopular, to say the least.
As it happens, the politicians dithered for a bit and then chickened out. Which is why we’re all still here.
Remember, there are costs and dangers going both ways. There is also solid science to say that if we stop emitting carbon as suddenly as some demand, billions will die in poverty. (“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Maurice Strong, founder of the IPCC.) So if everybody goes Green, and billions of lives are wrecked as a result, who will pay for that? Who do we sue? Because that would be a man-made global disaster too.
Mike:
Certainty on who’s part?
These facts being?
Don’t you see the contradiction between these two statements?
The person holding the belief, of course. There is no such thing as a ‘certain belief’ – if a proposition is certainly true, it is no longer a belief but a fact. Natural rights are certain and therefore there is no question of ‘believing’ them or not. It’s like saying you ‘believe’ the sum 2+2=4 is not true.
“These facts being?”
Those pertaining to the distinctive nature of man – that man is essentially a rational animal. Our minds are distinguished from those of animals by their ability to organize the data of experience into conceptual form. Conceptual knowledge enables us to survive in spite of the limitations of our bodies. But each human mind is individual and it cannot be made to work except upon the initiation of thought by the individual herself. The conceptual reason of the human mind must be allowed the freedom to be applied to the objects of the environment – through the human body – if the person is to survive. Natural rights are of an individualist character, because the human mind is too as a consequence of being rooted in an individual body.
“Don’t you see the contradiction between these two statements?”
There is no contradiction – look, if there is a society of people, then each person in that society has natural rights (for example to property), except for the monsters. That existence of natural rights is true even if everyone in that society does not agree that it is true. They have simply erred in their reasoning.
If there are is only a Robinson Crusoe on his island, you are right that there is no social context in which his rights would have meaning – it is useless to argue with wild animals and trees and so on. But Robinson Crusoe’s island could become populated by other people in which case his natural rights once more become relevant. But his rights do not exist because other people agree. They exist as a consequence of what he is – and what other people are. Rational animals.
Jacob
Courts recognised common law property rights regarding water and air for centuries.
Only in the 19th century did courts start accepting “public interest” or “general welfare” arguments that allowed the pollution of air or water that traditionally had been regarded under property rights.
See the judge Wensleydale case that Michael Oakeshott used to attack so much.
Mr Jennings.
A Hakka Chinese minister.
I seem to remember that the Hakka were one of the ethnic groups in old China that did not practice foot binding for women.
I think the story is that they were forced to migrate at one time and so became less bound to traditional customs than other Chinese – and that their culture stayed more open to reasoning and doubt.
Certainly that openess to the doubting (doubt, not general rejection) of tradition (which became a tradition of the Hakka) sometimes led some Hakka to evil paths (such as the Hakka who became Communists) – but it is generally a good thing.
Hayek was right in holding that traditional practices often contain wisdom that can not be expressed in words or fully rationalized. But he was also right in holding that no practice or custom should be beyond question – and that such practices and customs should not be forced on people.
This explains why freedom is necessary to human survival, but this does not explain why humans have the right to survival itself. BTW, do animals have a similar right to survive? Or do they not, because they are not rational beings? What then of harmlessly irrational humans? Or the harmful ones, for that matter? What makes you think that the monsters among us are necessarily irrational?
My point being, of course, that rationality as a precondition for natural rights strikes me as strange.
Alisa,
The claim that humans are rational strikes me as strange, especially seeing arguments like that one.
“This explains why freedom is necessary to human survival, but this does not explain why humans have the right to survival itself.”
Survival is the ultimate – it is ontologically prior to rights and there is no need to cast survival as a right. There is no ‘right to survival’ per se, there are only the rights not to have one’s person and property destroyed or disposed of by other people against one’s will. Such rights are a two-way street and of course can be forfeited. But it makes no sense to speak of a general ‘right to survival’ which other people could prosecute on my behalf after I was killed by a great white shark while swimming off the east coast, say.
“BTW, do animals have a similar right to survive? Or do they not, because they are not rational beings?”
I’ve already answered the point about a general ‘right to survive’ but if we replace that with a right not to have one’s life or property disposed of by others, then generally speaking no, animals don’t have such rights, although there may perhaps be some ever so slight borderline cases in which the problem is our lack of knowledge about a certain animal. But the general fact that animals don’t have natural rights doesn’t mean cruelty to animals is OK – I think it’s a very serious wrong and a warning sign to other people too. Serial killers often start out by murdering pets for example.
“What then of harmlessly irrational humans?”
What of them? I am one myself sometimes, and I daresay so are you on occasion. Rationality is not an automatic response to events. One must choose to think rationally. Some of us are less practiced at it than others and sometimes any one of us simply can’t be bothered. There is also the physical limitation of sleep.
If, on the other hand, you are talking about the mentally handicapped, then say so. I think it’s fair to say that many of them can still function more or less like the rest of us – there are others of course, whose handicap may be much more extreme. These latter cannot be accorded natural rights, since they are by definition not fully human. They can perhaps be cared for by their families as a special kind of property.
“Or the harmful ones, for that matter?”
Harmful to whom and/or whose values? Assuming you mean wanton sociopaths, rapists, serial killers, the Clintons etc – fuck them.
“What makes you think that the monsters among us are necessarily irrational?”
Because they forfeit their own rights by, for example, murdering (or ordering the murders of) other people, or wantonly stealing or destroying the property of others. They are ethically extremely irrational, which presupposes a more or less severe dismemberment of their conceptual faculties. A monster is basically a fool at horrific extremes.
“…rationality as a precondition for natural rights strikes me as strange.”
It strikes me as a perfectly sweet note.
“The claim that humans are rational strikes me as strange, especially seeing arguments like that one.”
Whose argument? Hers or mine?
Yours.
But it strikes me as odd anyway. ‘Rationality’ is a thin veneer that has had to be patiently invented over the past few centuries, takes people a long time to learn how to do correctly in schools and universities, and which the sheer pervasiveness and persistence of logical fallacies in debate shows that it is far from being natural to humans.
They were very keen on the ‘rationality’ argument back in the 18th century, as a way to distinguish mankind as the pinnacle of creation. However, the more we learn about the way people’s minds work, the less ‘rational’ it looks. There’s nothing wrong with being human, of course. But it’s impossible to logically persuade some humans of that.
Mike, I’ll just pick one point that seems logically problematic from where I am (there are others):
.
You submit that the monsters have no natural rights because they are irrational. I ask what makes you think that they are necessarily irrational. Your response is that they are irrational because they forfeit their natural rights. My point was that the monsters can be just as rational in their monstrosity as the rest of us (I am tip-toeing around the proverbial Godwin here, obviously).
BTW and for the sake of clarity: I see the right to property and freedom as extensions of the most basic right of all, which is the right to life, to which I also referred above as the right to survival.
Rationality is not automatic. People are often stupid. But people are also capable of rationality, and have been since… more than a couple of centuries mate. I covered that ‘but people are stupid’ base already.
I find the opposite proposition, that people are naturally irrational and that irrationality is our distinctive feature, well… irrational.
Indeed Pa. Humans are certainly special in that we have the capability to be rational, but defining us as rational per se is wishful thinking at best.
Mike, you hit “post” before I did:-)
It’s not that irrationality is our distinctive feature, but neither is rationality. The capability to be rational is, however. (I don’t think that there is a material disagreement between you and me on this point).
People have been capable of flying to the moon for at least 400,000 years. People then were genetically much the same as people now. But much of that capability is cultural, and carefully constructed.
When Aristotle first wrote on logic, it was a major discovery. Nobody said “but that’s obvious, we all knew that.” People didn’t – and in many cases still don’t. And of course the discoveries have continued since. A lot of our understanding of rational methods of thought dates from the Enlightenment. (e.g. Locke.) Our understanding of the foundations of logic only dates from the early 20th century.
And being cultural and not at all universal, I would be uncomfortable with the idea that, for example, people who didn’t have at least a degree in maths/science were to have lesser rights. Because if rights somehow derive from rationality (and I see no reason at all why they should, by the way) then we would only have full rights when we choose to be (and are trained to be) fully rational.
“My point was that the monsters can be just as rational in their monstrosity as the rest of us.”
Well yes they may rationally devise efficient methods of mass extermination. Scale those specific actions up to the larger ends at which they aim, and there is the irrationality.
“You submit that the monsters have no natural rights because they are irrational. I ask what makes you think that they are necessarily irrational. Your response is that they are irrational because they forfeit their natural rights.”
The circularity is only apparent. Forfeiture of one’s rights is one example of acting irrationally. That is not to say that all irrational action is evil. The scale of the actions and their intended ends must be considered. Making a spelling mistake in a letter may be irrational but it is not evil. The Wests’ murder of young girls was evil because of the horrible scale of the ends of their actions and the extreme irrationality that that implies, both in the choice of those ends per se and in the fact that fulfilling them resulted in the natural forfeiture of their own rights.
“I see the right to property and freedom as extensions of the most basic right of all, which is the right to life.”
Why? You apparently do not agree that rights are a consequence of human nature. So are they bestowed by a deity, perhaps?
But the point you made (perhaps implicitly) was that all evil actions are irrational, with which I disagree. “The circularity is apparent” is an understatement, BTW:-)
Because, as I pointed out at the beginning of this discussion, I don’t deny the existence of rights as such, only their being ‘natural’; they are bestowed by our fellow humans, as I have also pointed out at that time. In fact, these are the only two points that I did intend to make.
“You apparently do not agree that rights are a consequence of human nature. So are they bestowed by a deity, perhaps?”
‘Rights’ are an instinct, like language or emotion. Other animals have their own versions, but human rights are generally confined to human society because that’s what they’re ‘meant’ to regulate. (If I may anthropomorphise the ‘intentions’ of evolution by natural selection for a moment.) They enable us to live together in complex societies, in much the same way that language enables us to plan and work together.
It has nothing to do with rationality. And the right to life is like any other right, and indeed is also conditional in most cultures. Rights are a consequence of human nature – but directly, not as an indirect consequence of any special subsidiary property of it. We have rights because it is built into our minds to have them. It’s just the way we are.
“Humans are certainly special in that we have the capability to be rational, but defining us as rational per se is wishful thinking at best.”
That’s what you’re saying now, but not what I said.
Rationality is the element that distinguishes us from other creatures. Nothing about that however, implies that people are always rational all the time, and I never so much as hinted at that, or claimed that only that could be the basis of natural rights.
“And being cultural and not at all universal, I would be uncomfortable with the idea that, for example, people who didn’t have at least a degree in maths/science were to have lesser rights.”
None of that follows from my argument. To get to that from my statement ‘that man is essentially a rational animal’ is to drop the context in which I had used the term ‘rationality’.
Rationality as in capable of conceptual apprehension of the world and thus different from other animals – not rational as in ‘has a degree in maths or science’ and thus different from say, an art graduate.
“People have been capable of flying to the moon for at least 400,000 years.”
So what? Nothing about what you said invalidates the basic capability for acting rationally that has been present in humanity all along. Yes the ends of action that may be rationally chosen are constrained by culture, geography, technology and so on, but so what? Was a medieval doctor a less rational person than a modern GP simply because the discoveries of Jenner, Pasteur and Fleming were not yet available to him? Of course not.
Other animals are capable of a conceptual comprehension of the world. Human capabilities are orders or magnitude greater in degree, but not in kind.
I agree it doesn’t follow from your argument, but I’m a bit stuck there because I have no idea what your argument actually was. It appeared to be a sequence of unrelated and mutually contradictory statements, none of which led to the conclusion you were claiming. But evidently different people have different conceptions of ‘rationality’.
“But the point you made (perhaps implicitly) was that all evil actions are irrational, with which I disagree.”
All evil actions are irrational. If they were somehow unavoidable, then the chances are they weren’t evil.
“I don’t deny the existence of rights as such, only their being ‘natural’; they are bestowed by our fellow humans”
No they aren’t. I have a right to refuse to pay tax for example, even if everyone else thinks I don’t.
“‘Rights’ are an instinct, like language or emotion.”
No they aren’t. They are a conceptual integration of what is required by nature to live the life of a human being in a social context.
“They enable us to live together in complex societies, in much the same way that language enables us to plan and work together.”
Agreed.
“It has nothing to do with rationality.”
It has everything to do with rationality.
“Rights are a consequence of human nature – but directly, not as an indirect consequence of any special subsidiary property of it.”
You forfeit your rights not merely by virtue of some arbitrarily chosen irrational action – as in a spelling mistake or something, but as a consequence of acting on irrationally chosen ends that you know either certainly will or possibly could involve actions (e.g. murder) that violate the rights of others.
The capacity to reject such ends or refrain from acting toward them and to select other ends and act toward those is a capacity for rationality as applied to ethics – and it is this from which natural rights are derived.
“I don’t deny the existence of rights as such, only their being ‘natural’; they are bestowed by our fellow humans.”
If that were true, Alisa, then the natural corollary would be that “our fellow humans” could decide to “un-bestow” those rights. I don’t accept that. If rights aren’t “natural” (or, for the religiously inclined, bestowed by a creator) then they aren’t “rights” at all but merely “privileges”. If I don’t have a “right” to “life, liberty and property” vis a vis other humans, then I have no rights at all. “Rights” are either an inherent feature of being human (i.e., “natural”) or they don’t exist.
I don’t disagree with you that “rights” as we are discussing them are meaningful only within a social construct. For example, I “own” my property with respect to other humans. However, the squirrels, birds and other wildlife also occupying the same geography (many of whom are quite territorial) no doubt properly view some portion of that land as their “property”, and that view seems largely respected by others of their species. So “property rights” is a meaningless concept inter-species. And, as you have already observed, a hungry lion is not violating my “rights” if it kills and eats me. A human trying to kill me would be violating my inherent (“natural”) right to life, however, and the same would be true if he were to steal my justly-acquired property.
Pa, you are conflating the concept of “rational” with “formal logic”. The two are by no means the same, and you are not helping to advance the debate by inserting that confusion.
I think Mike has the better argument here.
Cheers, Laird. I’ll look for replies (if there are any) in the morning. My girlfriend is about to violate my natural rights if I’m not careful…
OK, I’ll try a different tack.
Territorial animals behave as if they own land, food, or other objects. They have a clear conceptualisation of stuff being ‘mine’ and can become aggressive if you intrude on it, and act guilty and contrite if they are caught intruding on things where they know they are not supposed to go. Normally, they will respect one another’s territory, even when the distinctions between them are purely mental constructs with no objective reality. This behaviour is functionally identical to property rights, and yet, you would claim they are not ‘rational’ in whatever sense it is you mean the word.
So how, in your conception of things, does territoriality arise without rationality?
Laird,
Then perhaps you could explain to me what Mike’s argument is? Because I don’t get it.
By ‘rational’, I meant using valid reasoning. It doesn’t have to be formal. Mike seems to be talking about ‘abstract conceptualisation’ which is also different. What’s your definition?
Laird: of course they can un-bestow them, and indeed they quite often do. I don’t accept that either, but not because I think that I have an inherent right to live (all other basic rights being this one right’s extension), but simply because I much prefer living to non-living. That part is in fact inherent to our nature, but it is not exclusively human, as you well know.
As to the rationality, however defined, Mike was the one who brought it up in the first place, and I still think that it is irrelevant to this discussion.
I think you put too much stock into belief and too little into the governing rules of human intercourse. We can certainly observe human beings at work and in life and we can pretty fairly predict things about societies of different constitutions: communist societies starve, capitalist societies are rich, tribal societies war, etc.
There are no beliefs necessary and not a single person anywhere within that society has to be at all rational.
Precisely. Rationality is not in the character of men or the mass of men (I diverge strongly with mike here who first made that conflation, I think), and humans create fantasy worlds with pen and paper, not with their bread and butter: we follow laws, like it or not, like water follows gravity, and we break ourselves before we break them.
Strikes me right. It was a discovery, not an invention. Social contract rights are an invention. They did not exist before mankind, they do not have any deep impact on mankind besides the topical and temporal.
I’d hope I’m clear on this. Communism is not especially cursed by the gods; that is not why it fails. It fails because it goes against human nature and wisdom. Those are the laws I refer to.
Natural rights are a subset of these natural laws. To get there, we’d have to get into asking deep questions such as “what is the ideal life?”, “what is the chief virtue?”, “what is the ideal society?”, and so on, which I’m afraid I do not have answers to… I can not enumerate which natural rights we have, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, I can defend natural rights because if there are laws governing us (regardless of our inventions, analogous to air pressure and gravity which govern flight), there exist ideal conditions of human society (which I can’t define, sorry) and variables which define the ideal (which I don’t know, sorry again). But if there exist laws governing men, and ideal conditions of those laws with variables/virtues describing them, there will also be ideal conditions set upon the behavior of the constituent parts – men – of this society. As the character of human interaction is both gift and reception, in this ideal case, we have both obligations (duty) and grants (rights) if we are to act in accord with nature (or the divine or the “Divine”, the Tao, etc).
Simply because we do not live in an ideal world and simply because we do not receive our full allotment of rights (or pay our full dues in obligations, for that matter), it does not mean that rights and duties are invented things, no more than friction on a wing blurs the motive force of a jet engine or lift denies (in perpetuity) gravity. We cannot go to a natural court of last resort of squirrels, fawns and angels if our natural rights have been violated, true, just as we cannot belly up to a natural buffet of last resort if we are starving, but that does not mean that our human nature is not harmed by either starvation or deprivation of those fundamental rights.
Is a properly excellent observation and retort to the wild suggestion that volcanoes and tigers have to respect human laws, whether natural or contrived.
Vercingetorix,
“Precisely.”
Precisely what? That I’m conflating “rational” with “formal logic”? That they’re not the same? That I’m not advancing the debate by inserting that confusion? Or all three?
“we follow laws, like it or not, like water follows gravity,”
I assume you’re not talking about Parliamentary laws here.
“there exist ideal conditions of human society […] and variables which define the ideal”
Is there only one such state? Or could there be several, equally good?
This sounds like Utilitarianism. Is that what you mean?
“Simply because we do not live in an ideal world and simply because we do not receive our full allotment of rights […], it does not mean that rights and duties are invented things,”
Possibly not. But what sort of thing are they then, if nobody knows what they are or actually implements them? And what are these other things, that everybody else has been calling “rights” all this time, fighting wars over, writing constitutions defining, trying to implement in practice?
Are verbs and nouns “invented things”? Because while different languages have different vocabularies of them, every language has verbs and nouns. Are they necessitated by the nature of communication itself, or are they built in to the way our brains work, or is it an amazingly lucky combination of coincidence and convention as different peoples exchange words?
And is there a “true” language, an ideal language? One perfect for communication, so that we can say in an absolute sense that we get the words wrong? Even though nobody speaks or understands it, that in some sense the perfect language nevertheless exists?
Or are languages mere social contracts and conventions, that people can define and redefine as they choose?
If you can persuade me of the case for natural languages, I could better understand your case for rights and morals.
But that can and do all of the time. That is why there have been, are and will be wars.
Please don’t equate the fact that rights are bestowed by others to mean that other’s values provide the moral basis for those rights. It simply means that those particular others (for whatever reasons of their own) have agreed to respect what we call our ‘rights’. They may honor them because we have guns or because they are Amish or because they find a reciprocal value in honoring them.
To clarify this point further, claiming an act one cannot exercise is a right because it should be a right is quite accurately wishful thinking. Invariably this wished for right is grounded on arguments invested with value judgments that must be accepted by the listener in order for the right to make sense. Rational people can hold differing values. I know a great many people who would willingly die for whatever their particular ‘Borg’ is. Short of pure nihilism, this is not necessarily irrational. Many of us here probably have values we would die to uphold and yet others of us here will think that irrational. If we cannot even agree on some very key values here on Samizdata, any ‘natural rights’ based system is doomed to resort to compelling others to adopt it. We have circled back to the brute force we left at the beginning of the argument. And before anybody dare say “but most people will agree that . . . “, rational conclusions adopted democratically are not ‘rational’, they are democratic.
I see countless paragraphs in this thread full of sentences containing “we” in arguments alleging to be in support of individual rights. Or worse yet, presumptions or projections of agreement without even acknowledging that a value judgment has been made. For example:
Survival of the individual, its genes, its mental/moral legacy or its species? Rational arguments can be made for all four (and more). Isn’t a parent giving their life for their child the text book example? “I’ve lived long my son/daughter, you are young and have small children. You take the last parachute. Take good care of my grandchildren.”
Any argument in support of the rights of an individual within a society that relies on mutual agreement on values of ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘moral’, ‘immoral’, ‘successful’, ‘failure’, ‘natural’, ‘unnatural’ & cetera ad infinitum is (by this very ‘reason’ that is so much discussed here) predicated on collective values, forcibly imposed.
A social contract argument contains none of these weaknesses. Rational people (and maybe a few irrational ones) choose values and enter into a social contract with others to respect those values. It doesn’t mean they personally hold them, quite likely they do not hold all of them. But it does mean that they will respect them and live in reciprocal peace with the others.
“This behaviour is functionally identical to property rights, and yet, you would claim they are not ‘rational’ in whatever sense it is you mean the word….So how, in your conception of things, does territoriality arise without rationality?”
Territorial behaviour in animals results from instinct, and while there may be some instinct behind a human being’s defence of property, there is also conceptual rationality. Unlike animals we have other methods available to us than the mere resort to threat of force. That is possible because of our capacity for (conceptual) rationality. Isn’t that obvious?
“Simply because we do not live in an ideal world and simply because we do not receive our full allotment of rights (or pay our full dues in obligations, for that matter), it does not mean that rights and duties are invented things, no more than friction on a wing blurs the motive force of a jet engine or lift denies (in perpetuity) gravity. We cannot go to a natural court of last resort of squirrels, fawns and angels if our natural rights have been violated, true, just as we cannot belly up to a natural buffet of last resort if we are starving, but that does not mean that our human nature is not harmed by either starvation or deprivation of those fundamental rights.”
Agreed.
“But [they] can and do all of the time. That is why there have been, are and will be wars.”
So what? That does not prove the non-existence of natural rights.
“Please don’t equate the fact that rights are bestowed by others to mean that other’s values provide the moral basis for those rights. It simply means that those particular others (for whatever reasons of their own) have agreed to respect what we call our ‘rights’.”
I understand this point, Midwesterner, but I do wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘bestow’. ‘Agree’ avoids the image of rights as some sort of gift or privilege. Others may respect or infringe upon my natural rights, but such behaviour has nothing to do with the existence of natural rights.
“If we cannot even agree on some very key values here on Samizdata, any ‘natural rights’ based system is doomed to resort to compelling others to adopt it.”
All ‘systems’ of rights are social contract systems – even those that may aim at being based on natural rights. Disagreements are a natural result of our infallibility, on the one hand, and depravity on the other hand. None of that means natural rights do not exist.
I have dragged Alisa around on this for long enough without any progress. The charitable conclusion is that I’ve done a lousy job of explaining natural rights, and I’ll quite willingly admit that my exposition was not always perfect. You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
Indeed, Mike.
Pa, I’m not sure where you’re coming up with Utilitarianism there.
And just because I don’t know them [the essential and fundamental truths] doesn’t mean they are unknowable; I can proudly assert my well-fortified ignorance of many things, from the precise operation of my computer to making a scrumptious bowl of Mongolian beef. Maybe I could retreat to a cave somewhere in the Himalayas and return in forty years with “The Truth”. Maybe. But lack of interest and curiousity being what it may be, I’m not going to be doing that any time soon.
Of course, they’re invented things. Language itself is imitation; at a concrete level, “car” is no more vital than “machina” in Russian or “voiture” in French to describing a, well, car. You can go up in abstraction: functional words to describe actions such as “dancing” or “singing” and abstract words such as “liberty” and “rights” and “love.”
Words are imitations of things. The fact that certain things (nouns, verbs) are necessary is perfectly consistent with my point that in all manner of human intercourse, there are also things which are necessary and integral.
That’s it in a nut-shell. Hey, I’m not an anarchist. You cannot slaughter people, enslave people, torture people, etc without it being morally wrong, regardless of the more-ways and the imprimatur of the parliament. I am not a pacifist or a criminal-rehabilitation enthusiast. I’m not saying that you cannot kill in battle, execute criminals, or imprison them. I’m saying natural law overrides socially-contrived law.
Sure, why not, in the same sense that there is an ideal man, a perfect sphere, and an ideal jello pudding pop? There are, after all, those rare and wonderful instances of perfect moments, are there not? Someone says “I love you” in just the right way that it impacts you tremendously, that sort of thing.
Nobody is going to say, “Sweetie, wait here!” and then drop a 26-volume Oxford dictionary with grammar texts on her like a cartoon piano on Wile E Coyote. That’s not a perfect language. Language is a tool of communication and communication need not be linguistic: sometimes a wild haymaker is more eloquent than a lawyer’s brief.
Same with social contracts, which are plainly subsequent to what is the natural state or relatively trivial refinements thereupon. You cannot legislate against nature, such as “All boys, before their eighth year of life, shall conceive and bear a child, upon pain of death.” This ridiculous law will fail. Same with “All wives and children will be held in common” or “All property will be abolished and ownership held by the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and “All dogs and cats shall live in perfect peace together.” All failures, because they oppose [human, except for the last] nature.
“Indeed, Mike.”
Although I am loathe to appeal to authority, it’s entirely likely you’ll find the exposition of Locke, Paine and Rand clearer than my keyboard knockouts, if not even persuasive.
“Words are imitations of things.”
Eh? They are concrete symbols by which we apprehend concepts with our senses. I don’t understand the sense in which you claim words ‘imitate’ reality. How does the sound or visual symbol ‘cat’ imitate the animal we label with that name?
Vercingetorix,
Because Utilitarianism speaks of an ideal society, where ‘ideal’ is measured by people’s satisfaction or happiness.
Of course, different people have different conceptions of the ‘ideal’ society. For some, an ordered society where slaves know their place, God’s morality is strictly conformed to, and the best thing in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women would be the ‘ideal’. Who can say?
When I talked about nouns and verbs, I didn’t mean specific examples of nouns and verbs, I meant the general categories; the high level structures. French, Russian and English may use different nouns for ‘car’, but they all have nouns. My argument is that different cultures may grant different specific rights, but all cultures have the general concept of rights. Every culture has some concept of property law, for example.
And in continued analogy with language, the difference between what you are calling natural law and socially-contrived law is like the difference between the language people actually speak, and the language that grammarians and the writers of style guides tell us we should speak. That you shouldn’t split infinitives has never been a real rule of English language, it’s an unnatural restriction put in place by people who didn’t understand how the language really worked.
But this natural English is also socially developed. The language legislators are supposed to write their rules to reflect it. And natural English evolves, so the legislators must keep up, not try to keep society frozen in traditional perfection. (Or change it as they choose, like Roosevelt’s 1906 attempt to legislate spelling.) Natural language overrides legislated language, but both are in different ways socially contrived.
You say “You cannot slaughter people, enslave people, torture people, etc without it being morally wrong…” How do you know? That is how our morals work today, but in other times people thought you could. (e.g. Numbers 31:1-18.) If there is an ideal law distinct from whatever people might think it is, who is to say it isn’t distinct from what we think it is, too? Maybe it is wrong to kill in battle, execute or imprison criminals (criminals against which law?), or maybe it is good and proper to slaughter and enslave.
You see, we have a fundamental problem. We think morality ought to be absolute and true for all time, and yet we observe our actual morals (and separately our laws) mutate and evolve and diverge. Theory and observation conflict.
There have been many attempts to resolve this difficulty. Religions try to hitch their horses to the mountain, and stop morals changing. You have declared the mountain unknown (if not unknowable) and that none of the morals we observe are real (although you did somehow manage to figure out what the graven tablets said on slaughter/slavery/etc.). Moral relativists say there is no absolute morality and all the observed ones are equally good. Most people declare their own morality to be the one, true, and only, and that all the others were simply wrong. Or if they are more subtle, that their own is a better approximation to the true morality.
The stereotypical English tourist has much the same problem when he goes abroad – which he solves by shouting very slowly in English. Why do foreigners gabble like that? Surely it makes it harder for them to mentally translate everything they think into another language? Maybe that’s why the English are so much better than everyone else.
He has lived his whole life with English as a universal constant. To suddenly discover all these other languages comes as a shock, and especially to hear the French say their language is just as good! And then the Americans, Indians, and Australians have their own versions of English, in which they get some of the words wrong. And their spelling is atrocious! What’s going on?
Somebody once designed the perfect language, and called it Esperanto. It had only one flaw – a bit of a biggie really – which is that nobody spoke it. It was of little use for communication. The function of language is to enable people to share their minds, to plan and work together cooperatively. The function of rights and morals is to enable people to share their way of living, to live together in complex societies. Languages nobody can communicate with are hardly languages. People have tried to design the moral equivalents of Esperanto, and they have all suffered the same fate. Rights that nobody knows or uses do not function as rights.
So does that mean the moral relativists were right after all? No! Definitely not! They make two errors. The first is in declaring all morals equally ‘good’, they make a value judgement, which is something that can only validly be done within the context of a single moral system. You cannot say it is right or acceptable that there be many different moral systems, only observe that there are. You cannot say that someone acting in accordance with their own moral system is right to act that way as defined in yours. And secondly, they subscribe to and embrace what is the fear of all moral people when they see the morals of society changing, of thinking all is arbitrary and free for individual choice. Morals are no more arbitrary than language. Start speaking your own personal language, and you will soon run into difficulties with your neighbours.
Having morals is a human instinct, built-in to the way our brains work. Rights and morals are not arbitrary, they’re not freely choosable, they cannot be legislated or imposed, but they cannot be frozen. Other moral systems exist – and there is a symmetry between them – but the others are never ‘right’ and they don’t mix. And they do all share some common structural features, necessary for their function, that are as near as you’re going to get to a ‘Natural Law’.
Utilitarianism is wrong on two levels:
Firstly it just mistaken – good and evil are not the same as pleasure and pain.
For example, rape is not wrong because the pain of the victim is greater than the pleasure of the rapist (or rapists) and it would make no difference if the pleasure of the rapist was greater than the pain of the victim. Rape would still be wrong.
Trying to define good and evil (right and wrong) in terms of pleause and pain is a category mistake.
However, utilitarianism is also wrong in terms of consquences – and that should really interest utilitarians (at least “rule utilitarians” who are interested in concequences).
For example, Ludwig Von Mises repeatedly claimed (for example in “Human Action”) that slave labour could never compete with free labour.
Mises’ claim is simply false – as many historical examples (such as the fate of British plantations in the West Indies in competition with those in the American South after the ending of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830’s) show.
As Gary North (and many others) have pointed out – slave labour often out competes free labour. Certainly per capita incomes may be lower (if one includes the per capita incomes of the slavesm – although even this is not certain) – but that was not the claim of Mises. He claimed (over and over again) that enterprises that used slave labour would always be outcompeted by those that used free labour – which is not just false, it is wildly false.
Mises even claimed that “universally” classical writers (those of Greece and Rome) agreed with his claim – whereas I can not think of a single one who did agree. On the contrary, all the classical writers I can think of agreed (for example) that the slave tilled estates of the late Roman Republic drove many free farmers into bankruptacy (rather than the other way round).
So why these wild flights of fantasy from Ludwig Von Mise? A man, I stress to add, I greatly admire.
Simple enough – Mises was a utilitarian (although of the rule, rather than the even more false, act utilitarian type).
He could not say “slavery is evil – and, therefore, must be forbidden” – because to do so would be to go into the forbidden realm of “metaphysics” the “nonsense” of natural law.
Yet Mises did not want to support slavery either (because, as much as he tried to hide it from others and even from himself, he was a deeply moral and honourable man) – hense all the nonsense about how slave labour enterprises would be out competed by free labour enterprises.
Of course if an enterprise is state owned it will not be efficient economically – but a slave labour enterprise need not be state owned.
A glance at American history shows the absurdity of the position.
If Mises had been correct the Southern slave owerns would have had to pass statutes forbidding people using free labour in competition with them (they never had any such need – and even though they kept their land after the Civil War, the ending of slavery broke their fortunes that did not recover till modern times) – and the Western States (such as Kansas) would have had no need to oppose the introduction of slaves to be used competing with free labour (which is totally against the reality of the situation).
For those who forbid the use of historical examples in the discussion of economics (which is rather more strict than Mises was himself) I can do all the above a priori if people want me to.
Of course. like Salmon P. Chase, I do not like talking in terms of “forbidding slavery” – as to me slavery is in its self a series of crimes, whether the state accepts them as crimes or not (false imprisonment, assault and so on).
But that is even more “metaphysical” “natural law” stuff – and therefore forbidden by the doctrines that Mises and other utilitarians follow.
As should be (but sadly is not) obvious the claimed “happyness” of the slaves is not relevant to the question as to the lawfulness of slavery – which is based on whether or not it is violation of the nonaggression principle (not on the “happyness” of anyone).
On “happyness” generally there is no way to tell whether (for example) the happyness of the rapist is greater than or lesser than the unhappyness of the victim – nor is this of interest in terms of moral principle.
Just as the claim that northern factory workers were more unhappy than southern slaves was simply “beside the point” of no relevance to the issue.
The whole confusion between “good as in pleasure” and “good as in moral” seems to come from the use of the word “good” in two different ways (a similar confusion can be found in the use of the word “liberal” to mean both “supporter of liberty” and “broad, generious” – definitions that are not just different but often opposite in political meaning)
Perhaps the use of the word “right” can deal with the matter.
For those interested in the topic I suggest the dicussions of Sir William David Ross and Harold Prichard.
For example, rape may be “good” if one is using the word “good” to mean “gives pleasure” – but rape is not “right”.
Because “C-A-T” is not an eight-lb calico furry feline that likes to play with yarn and hunt mice? And so “cat” recalls an imitation of a real cat, in the same same sense Aristotle said that plays imitate the actions of real people: it recalls only certain salient features of reality, and is only a thing insofar as imitations are themselves things.
Here, I don’t want to get bogged down in semiotics and epistemology and all that nonsense. I’m a simple soldier who reads. If I wanted to become a linguist or a philosopher, I would apply for a teaching position somewhere. It seems to me completely incontrovertible that words and the things they describe are different. If I told my sweetheart my love for her was like a rose, I could mean that she is sweet and beautiful or I could mean that she has thorns which bite if I grab too tight and our passion is destined to last only a single season before it dies. The words themselves are different from the emotion expressed and felt and understood at the other end.
Pa, the language kick you’re on, it’s a very, very poor choice of example. You said it yourself, in other words: certain things are static, such as nouns and verbs, but all the rest can change.
All the rest MUST change, even in an idealized society – which I mean in more of a Platonic sense of a divine form and was riffing more or less off of a Boyle’s ideal gas or a theoretical perfect heat engine, not in the Utilitarian vein – because people are born and people die, leave, mature, and retire and the community grows and learns and becomes more advanced and sometimes reverts into place. A just society in 1400 will be different than a just society in 400 BC or 4000 AD, just as virtuous people are different instead of a series of clones, even though the principals of justice and virtue are immutable.
To believe in natural law, you don’t have to believe in one rigid coda for all time and all places. I hate to break it to you but when you and I die, the universe will basically shrug and carry on (if it notices at all, which I doubt). If your death is basically inconsequential, the minutest details of your life are not going to be more consequential. I highly doubt that natural law says much about stillicide (the damage of one property due to runoff from another) or insurance law or the proper use of the King’s English, or anything else so trivial and quotidian. You have great freedom to act and be different, no conformity to a theoretical is necessary.
On the other hand, it is not a free-for-all. You don’t get to eat babies a la Swift or go kill-crazy like Harkonnens and still be called “Just” and “Moral”, no matter how screwed up your society is. This reinforces my argument, not refutes it:
“Here, I don’t want to get bogged down in semiotics and epistemology and all that nonsense. I’m a simple soldier who reads.”
Look man, go and ‘here’ yourself. It was a straightforward question brought on by your choice of words. And only a fool would dismiss epistemology as nonsense.
“It seems to me completely incontrovertible that words and the things they describe are different.”
I didn’t make any contest about that. Your use of the term ‘imitate’, rather than say ‘symbolize’ was weird and unnecessary (and it doesn’t matter that Aristotle used that term) – that was all.
Paul,
The rape example is probably too complex to treat properly, so I’ll only deal with it briefly. Utilitarians like Mill do cover this point, and it is not so simple-minded as a simple balance of the criminal’s and victim’s pleasure/pain. (Mill has that wonderfully Victorian style of elaborately worded and punctiliously polite contempt for anyone so foolish as to imagine Utilitarianism actually said such a thing.) Roughly speaking, Utilitarianism treats with the good of the whole of society, not just the protagonists, and universally respecting the rights and liberties of the individual is weighted far more heavily in the scales of Utility than the facts of any particular case, as it affects the general happiness of all society. The rapist would suffer too from living in a lawless society. The rest of society would suffer with sympathy for the victim, and fear of the rapist. And so on. Mill goes on at some length about it.
I suspect that answer will not satisfy any better, and maybe even worse. I suspect the sentiment the complaint seeks to convey is that it is wrong because “it just is!” A strong enough emotional response substitutes for a great deal of philosophy.
It is, of course, not a rule universally held. “What your right hand possesses…” and so on.
On slavery, I don’t know the von Mises passages in question, but I suspect what he might have meant is that slavery could not compete in a free market. Slave-owing societies carry a heavy burden of enforcement. The escaped slaves act, slave patrols, law enforcement costs, the continual effort needed by everybody to keep slaves suppressed and fearful, etc. are a burden enforced by the state.
An analogous situation, that might make the situation clearer, is that of taxes. Taxes are also the forced appropriation of labour. It is quite clear that entities that rely on tax-funding do very well financially, can often undercut and out-compete purely private enterprises, and those at the top of it get very rich. It is at the same time usually horribly inefficient, and would never survive against private enterprise in a free market. ~It’s the whole big government thing.
For society as a whole, tax/slavery is expensive. For tax/slave-owners individually, it is enormously profitable. And of course Utilitarianism would put the interests of both society and the slaves in this over the interests of the few slave-owners.
Vercingetorix,
I’m not exactly sure what you’re disagreeing with. Is your objection that if the analogy were valid, all of morality would eventually change?
If so, that’s the point. It all does change. There have been cannibal societies. There have been societies where berserkers were respected. And as I’ve just reminded Paul, there are societies where slavery and rape are approved of. And I don’t believe it was all a guilty self-justification; they really believed that.
When you go to a foreign land, they are not just pretending, they really don’t speak English.
No matter how insistent you are that everyone must do.
There is more fixed about language than just verbs and nouns, and there is a lot of morality that is in common too. I will agree that is grossly simplified. But I’ve thought about the analogy a lot and it is, I believe, how morality is observed to behave.
Whether it is how morality ought to behave in theory is, of course, another matter.
P A,
To carry the language analogy farther, language adopts to the values and purposes of those using it. On a simplistic level, Swahili and Malay probably are incapable of communicating the character of sea ice with out a great deal of analogizing. On the other hand, hunt walrus with Eskimo and you find their language well suited.
Even mathematics is a language that is very poorly suited to ordering food in a restaurant, but try modeling fluid dynamics without it.
So it is with morality and the rights that one derives from their morality. It reflects the values and self-perceptions of the holder. If one has (as I do) an individualist’s aspiration I will find certain rights to be ‘natural’ rights. But if I were to have a collectivist’s aspiration (incomprehensible to most of us but I know many who genuinely do) one would see entirely different rights as ‘natural’.
We, the individualists and the collectivists, due to the antithesis of our aspirations, must see each other’s values as evil. This is rational on both parts because unchecked, we would each eliminate the other. Multi-culturalism is evil to both value systems as it denies legitimacy to value systems entirely. Multiculturalism goes hand-in-glove with a nihilist’s belief that everything is futile, without purpose or meaning.
mike, I play hard-ball sometimes and it seems I offended you, when I meant to offend but also humor you. I am sorry for that. It was a legitimate question. Again, no malice intended (abrasiveness, well, yes). Still interwebby friends?
Pa, I am also a fan of languages, having lived in foreign countries much of my life. My main beef with using language as an example is that it is too inexact to be informative. You are comparing two abstracts to each other, like saying “Love is rather like Freedom, my dear boy!” I’m sure it is, in some ways, and not at all like it in other ways. In my metaphor above, you are pricking on the thorns of the rose while I’m enjoying the fragrance.
If you will indulge me a little, Pa, this is what irks me about that particular metaphor: every metaphor has 4 parts, a thing and whatever thing it is contrasted with, and the aspect of the thing under discussion and the aspect of the thing to be contrasted. So “Love” and a “rose”, the beauty of the sensation and the beauty of the bloom, as it were. In your turn, you compare language to morality (as any discussion of rights must necessarily go to heart), by means of the wonderful variety in idiom and grammar of the one and the bewildering complexity of the other.
I will give you this: The metaphor is rather sound when it comes to describing contractual rights, say, between men or men and their sovereign. But it does not and cannot describe what I mean by ‘natural rights’.
I do not deny contractual or social rights. I hope I have made that clear. I’m sure that the universe is fairly oblivious to wide arrangements of human beings in many, many spheres. Do what you will, how you will, with what you can.
But there is a portion of morality which cannot be crassly renegotiated based on belief, no matter how fervently held. If language is to contractual rights, then objective reality is to natural rights. One is symbolic and subjective, transient and passing, while the other is unyielding, arising anew like the core of a tree while all the old constitutions of men grow black and stale and die.
My metaphor is this: As physics is to the natural world a set of guiding principles, natural rights are to the world of men. After all, mankind has limits to what it can do without ingenuity; we cannot sprout wings and fly any more than we can eat rocks or men can bear babies or women can drive. If there are bounds on flesh, there will be bounds on behavior. Those raw functions, however fed with numbers and varied their outputs are what I term ‘natural law’.
I will take my leave, Pa et al. It has been a wonderful discussion. I have enjoyed myself thoroughly. I will, as always, be lurking hereabouts for another go.
An inciteful comment can be found in ‘Libertarian International’, where an American farmer is looking at how his plants haven’t shown any signs of climate change- no change in growing seasons, etc.- as an indication that he doesn’t need to change his farming habits- and that AGW is in deep trouble!
And how about we use the term ‘Greenatics’ to describe those environmental fanatics (Like Earth Liberation Front, who sent a threatening letter, with promises of violence, to a power plant boss in Victoria.)? A real Green fanatic, hence Greenatic.
Vercingetorix,
Ah! I see! You are right. It does not describe ‘natural rights’. There’s probably a good reason for that…
🙂
Nuke Gray!
Well done for dragging things back on to topic!
I think the usual term for that is “eco-terrorist”. Using the fear of atrocities to apply pressure for political change is one definition of terrorism. I don’t know why, but it reminds me of the Will Ferrell “Green Team” video.
More seriously, there have been a number of figures in the Green movement calling for things like prosecutions and future persecution of “climate criminals”. The “some sort of climate Nuremberg” comment is a few years old, and caused a bit of a bad-PR storm that caused them to back off a bit, but others have been slowly edging back towards the same sort of sentiment. There are those proposing to use the establishment, and those who propose working outside the law. It is the convergence of the two you have to worry about.
“When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes to anti-apartheid to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation. Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in Government to say but I think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.”
The government asking the people to demand action from the government? Whatever could that mean?
Pa Annoyed.
Switching from act to rule utilitarianism misses the point.
Good and evil (in the sense of right and wrong) are not about pleasure and pain (happyness). It is a category mistake.
As for J.S. Mill – he wonders off into “higher and lower pleasures” but that need not detain us.
Trying to calculate whether or not rape is wrong (in the sense of a violation) or slavery is wrong by talking about happyness (either for the individual or society in general) is an error – period.
Justice is the nonaggression principle (to not violate the body or goods of another) – to violate the nonaggression principle is a crime (it is the true definition of a crime).
Violating the nonaggression principle may or may not have bad economic effects, and rich people may generally be “more happy” than poor people. But all of this stuff has nothing to do with whether an action is wrong (in the sense of violating justice) and is to be punished.
Paul,
Why is violating the non-aggression principle wrong, or a crime?
And how do you know? How was this determined?
Vercingetorix: I am all hope that you knew that I am still lurking:-P
Pa Annoyed-
Not quite true- Greenatic is a broader term, including those who advocate violence and terrorism- ecoTerrorists are those who actually do what they talk about. a Greenatic could just be the bore at the party, to whom ‘technology’ is always a four-letter word.
Pa Annoyed.
Any question that starts “and why is aggression wrong” (or something like that) is in error.
Basic moral principles (such as justice) do not have “foundations” in the sense of “this is just a cover for something else – such as happyness”.
The basic moral principles are the foundation – they are not “really” a cover for something else.
If a human being (i.e. a reasoning agent – which is the definition of a “being” and is why such a thing is different from a flesh robot who has no choice over their actions) says “I deny rape and murder are evil” they are just wrong – one does not “argue” with them or “explain” for the self evident can not be “explained” in this sense (one as well try arguing with someone who says “I have no free will” – which is the same as saying “I” “do not exist” a denial of the subject “the I” object distinction a person can not correctly argue that he is not an agent as to do so is to deny that he is a person).
And if the being (the reasoning agent – the “I”) goes beyond the theoretical level of denying that aggression is a violation (thus denying basic language) and goes around raping and murdering one still does not “explain” to him that justice is “really” a cover for the “happyness of society” (or whatever).
One punishes him. His denial of knowlege that rape and murder are violations (i.e. that violations are violations – a self evident matter) is a lie – and deserves no respect whatever.
If you interested in these matters I suggest having a look at the Common Sense tradition from Thomas Reid and others up to Sir William David Ross and Harold Prichard in the last century.
Actually I have a likeing for Ralph Cudworth also – and you will find that 17th century English is not nearly so alien as might be supposed (at least on basic principles for which the century is not relevant – time and place being effecting how one tries to apply principles, translate the principle of nonviolation justice into the details of law, not the principles themselves).
Nuke,
I understand. Although as portmanteau’s go, it’s meaning doesn’t stand out to me as obvious. Is it green fanatic or green lunatic or green automatic or green attic or what?
Eco-maniac might work better. But as a rule, name-calling reflects badly on the name-caller. If it’s useful to describe a particular political or philosophical position, then fine, but in that case you usually need a more specific word – the Green worldview contains many different aspects, and it’s always worthwhile (and more impressive) to find just the right word.
I quite like Eco-Taliban to describe the more fundamentalist wing of the green movement.
Whilst, (almost), everyone agrees that keeping our environment clean is a good thing, the Taliban wing of the environmentalists want to rule as the high priests and subsume the whole of human society to their religion, as well as to impose their version of sharia onto the world.
They are also ready to use terror tactics to get their way, while keeping their distance from the actual terrorists and are pretty good at PR and at infiltrating the institutions of society in order to achieve their aims.
All we need to find out now is who’s supplying their equivalent to the Saudi money that finances the muslim Taliban in general and the Wahabists in particular.
Paul,
“…for the self evident can not be “explained”…”
Ah. As I suggested above, the “it just is!” school.
It’s self-evident to you, but then other people find all sorts of other things “self-evident” that I’m sure you would disagree with. People finding things “self-evident” doesn’t mean they’re true. What it comes down to is that it is something that you believe, cannot conceive of as being otherwise, and yet cannot articulate your reasons for thinking it.
It’s like the way an ungrammatical sentence “feels wrong” to a native language speaker, even if they cannot name or explain the complex grammatical rules that it violates. The rules are picked up from society as a child and internalised at a subconscious level. The reasons that the sentence is wrong are not available to introspection. All you get is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ output.
The aforementioned complex rules of grammar are reverse-engineered from looking at this output, not the other way round. Nobody has to formally teach 3-year-olds how to use gerunds.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t something acquired, or that cannot be other than it is. We learn our society’s morality instinctively, like we learn its language. Even in a single society, there are different ‘moral dialects’ and jargons, and other times and other societies have been very different.
I see Utilitarianism as something akin to looking at those tables of regular verbs and saying the reason verbs are regular is so that we only have to learn one stem and can deduce all the rest – it is a memory and labour saving device. You can answer that this is not so, nobody thinks about ‘saving labour’ when they choose to use the regular form of a verb, it is just self-evidently the right or wrong word to use.
It is. And of course in this case irregular verbs prove it. But the utility of labour saving is another way of looking at it that can sometimes be useful.
Many important things are “it just is” Pa Annoyed – and this does NOT mean that they are relative (“self evident to you Paul”). The following come in various parts of knowledge, but are all important – not “only” tautologies (or whatever).
1 plus 1 = 2 – there is no sensible “why” here.
Next example.
A is A (the law of idenity) – again there is no “because” – and it is NOT “relative” or “a matter of opinion”. And the law of idenity is very important.
Next example.
For example, if someone says “I am not an agent” in the sense of saying “I do not have agency” (free will – not in the sense that he is not an agent of the CIA or whatever) the person is being absurd.
Because if he has no agency there is no “I” (the reasoning agent – the human being) in short the person is really saying “I do not exist” (“I am not a person – there is no I here”. This is not a valid “matter of opinion”.
“rape is moral” or “murder is moral” are not valid opinions either – and not because one can prove that “happyness” (or whatever) is reduced by such activities.
The violater who says “I do not believe my violation is wrong” (the same thing as saying “I do not think violating people is violating them”) has no more standing than someone says “A is not A” or “1 plus 1 is 6”.
Whether such a person is insane or is lying, is another matter – and not one that greatly interests me (although I think true madness is greatly overstressed – the vast majority of the “mad” know what they did was evil and choose to do it, they just hoped they would not get caught).
Turning to other matters:
As for the Greens.
As I am fond of pointing out – there is a simple test for such folk.
If someone says “I am fearful about the effects of CO2 emissions” one uses the Lovelock test (after James “Gaia man” Lovelock – the founder of the modern environmentalist movement).
One says “so you are in favour of nuclear power then” – if the reply is “no” (or words to that effect) then one is dealing with an “ecofreak” (or whatever) – not someone who one should be spending time with.
I wrote a long reply to Pa Annoyed, but it has not appeared.
I will not write it all out again.
However, I will point out that basic moral principles (such as justice) have nothing to do with any paticular languge, or “our society” or other such. Nor are they relative as in a “matter of opinion”.
Paul, these moral principles are still social conventions. The fact that, unlike language, some of them are universal to all humans (such as “murder, rape, stealing etc. are wrong” does not change the fact that they are social conventions, which is another way of saying that they are agreements between most people not to kill or rape each other.
Paul,
All you have done here is to put up another list of things you believe in but can’t articulate a reason for. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason, or that things couldn’t conceivably be any other way, or that other people would necessarily see it the same way. In fact, I was initially going to reply with a long post of abstruse maths/logic about how you could do exactly that, but I decided that fun as that might be, it was missing the point.
Even if there were no alternative number systems in which 1+1=6 was true, that still doesn’t imply that morals work the same way. There’s nothing in your argument that would be any different if I substituted some other statement of which a person was absolutely certain, for no reason they could explain. And they can just as easily dismiss anyone who disagreed as either mad or a liar. They often do.
As a mathematician, it is part of my job to bend my mind around different viewpoints and question the obvious. If the standard way of looking at the question doesn’t work, often looking at it a different way can make it suddenly very easy. It may be that I’m so used to shifting into different mental frameworks that I’m underestimating how hard it is for people not trained to it.
But I’m clearly not getting anywhere – not in the teeth of “it just is!” arguments – so I think I’ll leave it there. It was an enjoyable debate.
532 yields a Keprekar’s constant.
In base six.
1+1=10
In binary.
My point is that rules that appear to be laws if you stipulate certain parameters (like base ten) can become nonsense if you stipulate different parameters.
There are natural laws for an individualist – somebody who rejects collective identity. But they are not the same as the natural laws for a collectivist, somebody who rejects individual identity.
It is absolutely, positively not an ‘accident’, ‘abuse’ or ‘mistake’ that the greatest collectivists of the 20th century were genocidal killers of whole demographics of their intended collective’s populations. They were performing the immune function of a collective organism and killing cellular units (which is how a thorough collectivist views individual people) that could not be reliably assimilated into the intended collective organism.
I predict that all determined collectivist projects will through whatever means eliminate as many of the anticipated unassimilables as rapidly as they can. It may be through a created famine followed by redistributing food to supporting demographics. It could be through traditional death camps. It could be through disarming the rejected and arming the supporting demographics. It could be through gaining control of health care and rationing it out to supporting demographics.
But always keep in mind. What symptoms we see as a sign of a collectivist system’s failure are in fact evidence of its success. The hurt will always fall hardest on the least assimilable demographic.
Mid,
An easy example: suppose you think of a quarter-turn (the transformation that results from a 90-degree clockwise rotation) as a class of ‘thing’, subject to being counted.
One quarter-turn plus one quarter-turn gives the same transformation as six quarter-turns. So when counting quarter-turns, it is appropriate to use a type of number in which 1+1=6.
This sort of number system is sometimes called ‘clock arithmetic’, after the special case of counting one-twelfth-turns on a clock face. It’s mathematically very important and is commonly used in practical applications.
Perhaps a better one: It is ‘natural law’ that the three corners of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. One could never have for example, a triangle with three 90 degree corners. Except one could. The 180 requirement only works if the underlying assumption is that the triangle is drawn on a flat plane. If you recognized that the ‘other guys’ are cartographers drawing on a globe, then 3×90 degree triangles become common.
Many of us have yet to accept that the collectivists are not living in the same world, measuring by the same standards of success, pursuing the same outcome that we are. They are not dangerously destructive. They are dangerously constructive of something we abhor, something that has no place for us in it.
Good example, Mid.
Any rule either has a reason for it, or isn’t necessarily so.
Proof: Suppose you assert the opposite of the given rule. Does this cause any problems or contradictions? If so, this constitutes a reason for the rule. It must be so, because otherwise it contradicts some consequence of the remainder of the system. It has a reason for it.
If no contradictions result, then you can safely assert the opposite of the given rule as something that isn’t ‘impossible’, and therefore that could conceivably happen. If there’s no specific reason for it, then it ain’t necessarily so. QED.
If you strip out every statement that is a consequence of the remaining rules, you are left with a minimal set for which every rule can be individually replaced by its opposite to give another possibility. Another complete conceptual system with its own theorems and consequences.
The geometry on a sphere (with careful interpretation) obeys all of Euclid’s axioms apart from one, which has been switched around. It therefore provides an entire new geometry, with its own rules and principles.