Johnny Skeptic

I am new to this forum. I normally debate that the BC&H forum and the GRD forum. I haven't read many of the posts in this thread. I would like to know who opposes homosexuality and why.

trendkill

It's not about intolerance. It's about fear.

You go to great lengths to avoid it. Sounds like phobia to me. You can call it disgust or aversion if it makes you feel better, but...some people have a phobia regarding snakes. They find even harmless snakes disgusting and are highly averse to them, enough so that they go to great lengths to avoid them. I don't see the big difference.

I don't know. And I don't see the relevance either way.

epepke

Well, I say that there is no central thesis. It's a bunch of quotes, and a bunch of bald assertions, and the rest is stupid. For example:

Well, I am, because I know what the word "city" means. Civilization is a means of ennabling large numbers of creatures to share a small amount of land. 150 bonobos on a square mile of land isn't civilization. A million humans on a square mile of land is civilization. A million bonobos on a square mile of land would be civilization, but wait--bonobos don't actually do that, do they?

Bomb#20

If you mean the Puritans on the Mayflower, that's America's self-congratulatory origin myth. They didn't really come to America to escape religious persecution. When they left England to escape religious persecution, they went to the Netherlands. Later on they left the Netherlands to escape religious toleration. The "freedom" they wanted was the freedom to enforce their own brand of religious conformity.

Bomb#20

Hmm. I don't see anywhere he's implying the sacredness with which he holds this protected sphere is prior to morality. It just is his morality -- he's making a moral judgment that moral beliefs come in two categories, coercion-appropriate and coercion-inappropriate. Also, keep in mind his book came out in 1960, which was before the big rise in the popularity of moral relativism. I can't see any reason he would have wanted to conceal the fact that his ideas have a moral foundation, when that fact wouldn't have been generally perceived as a defect. So I don't see anything disingenuous about it. It just looks to me like vanilla natural rights theory. YMMV.

Jinksy

I don't think we're going to agree on this. It seems pretty clear to me. Hayek spends most of the essay conflating political positions into 'conservatism', 'liberalism' and 'socialism'. He doesn't give any indication he recognises anything besides those categories (he classes the Nazis as socialist). Then he says, 'I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.'

If you interpret that as simply saying 'what makes liberalism a unique philosophy is that it is based on natural rights', it looks very weird:

a) It strongly changes the emphasis, which in his phrase is on the absence of moral compulsion.
b) Natural rights was hardly the definitive ethical philosophy in 1960; Hayek could hardly assume all his readers would believe in such things - and yet the way he passes off 'the protected sphere' in a subordinate clause makes it sound to me as though we're expected to take the idea that person and property is/should be protected as axiomatic.
c) The following sentence is 'This may also explain why it seems to be so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal.' That really doesn't make sense unless you suppose he's saying the liberalism is uniquely amoral, since 'conservatism' and 'socialism' have very different moral bases; if he's simply saying 'liberalism is unique in being based on natural rights theory', there's no reason to suppose anyone should find it harder to move to than any other ethical theory.
d) Hayek writes like a pompous oversimplifying twit through the rest of the essay, so I don't see any reason to grant him the benefit of the doubt here.

ninewands

I'm not sure what you mean by "anarcho-capitalism," but according to the definition used by economists, pure laissez-faire capitalism is most assuredly amoral. It is defined as a politico-economic system that encourages the transaction of ANY exchange (including drug deals, prostitution, slave sales, bribery, etc.) as long as it increases utility and the efficient allocation of resources within the economy.

What you call "anarcho-capitalism" (from the conjunction of the meanings of your chosen words) sounds like what we, in fact, have in the United States at the present time, i.e., "anything goes, as long as it increases the transactor's personal utility regardless of whether it leads to inefficient allocation of resources, provided that, if the transaction is illegal, you don't get caught, or if caught, you are able to "spin" the facts and control the damage." Determining whether this system is amoral or not is an exercise left to the reader.

Bomb#20

Which probably means "socialism" is a lousy name for that category; but naziism and socialism go in the same category because the attributes they share happen to be ones Hayek cared a lot about and thus chose to use for his categorization. You can categorize things by any attributes you please.

That's not what I meant to suggest. Socialism, conservatism and liberalism are all compatible with natural rights theory; they'd just have different opinions about what the rights are. It looks to me like what Hayek's claiming is that liberalism's understanding of freedom is uniquely "bigger" than the others. Every theory is pro-freedom as long as people choose to use their freedom to do things the theory approves of -- that's a cheap and easy kind of freedom to believe in. The rubber hits the road when people choose to do things the theory doesn't approve of. As Hayek sees it, socialism and conservatism are against the freedom to do things they consider immoral, while liberalism recognizes a whole class of immoral actions that it accepts that you have the right to do.

It's absence of moral compulsion from that class of actions, I think.

Do you know what audience the essay was intended for? It looks to me like it was especially designed to persuade American conservatives to become liberals. American conservatives would generally take protection of life, liberty and property as axiomatic, because they're the basis of our traditional laws.

It has to be uniquely something, but I don't understand why you think that something has to be amorality. I think his point is that ex-socialists become conservative easily because they're used to coercing people to act however they approve, and they can change what they approve of without changing their coercive habits.

:notworthy
That, I can't help him with. And it's as a good a reason not to read his book as any I can think of.

Jinksy

Neither am I. I didn't invent the concept, and I'm not keen on it myself.

That's just a description of its (typical) concerns; how do they make it more or less amoral than any other political system?

Perhaps, but that would be privy to exactly the same criticisms; he's assuming the validity of the libertarian 'freedom from' natural rights system over the more stringent ones. Left-leaning natural rights advocates would see 'the protected sphere' as including welfare programs.

Then Hayek presumably hasn't heard of the 'socialist' tenet of 'freedom of speech'. It seems to boil down to him perceiving two strata of morality - one which dictates things we 'should' do, one which simply shows what it would be kinda nice for us to do (which, thinking about it, is what you already said). But in assuming the validity of his version of natural rights, he fails to acknowledge that in competing ethical systems (including alternative natural rights systems), the suggestions of his second stratum are given the same or equivalent weight as he gives the dictates of his first. And some of the dictates of his first are relegated to the equivalent of his second... or not considered important at all.

No. I originally read the essay because a minarchist friend of mine said it had had a strong influence on him, so I didn't pay much attention to historical context.

But he's happy to coerce people himself, he just skirts around ever actually saying as much. He says,

But oddly enough, he never addresses how such limitation will be/should be enforced if the 'democratic' government decides to exceed the limits Hayek wants it to have. I'd say that's an intractable problem for the whole concept of non-coercive politics, but that doesn't prevent Hayek's failure to acknowledge it from being (IMO) disingenuous.

Doesn't sound like we have any substantial disagreement about him, then Have you read the book, out of curiousity?

Bomb#20

Can you produce any evidence that that's the definition used by economists? Like citing a source, for instance? Or did you just make it up on the fly in order to be abusive? LFC doesn't encourage anything -- people transact or not as they see fit. It allows utility-decreasing inefficient exchanges, as long as they're voluntary and not fraudulent. It doesn't allow either bribery or slavery. (And for what it's worth, those aren't even efficient resource allocation.)

Um, since "anything goes if you can get away with it" is necessarily what every society has, all the time, it seems you're just engaging in content-free America-bashing. Anarcho-capitalism is obviously not what the U.S. has, since people get prosecuted for prostitution, for drug deals, even for legally smoking their own pot that they legally grew in their own backyards in accordance with legal doctors' advice. If you want to beat up on America, and/or capitalism, and/or anarchism, find something real to criticize them for.