About
Content
Store
Forum

Rebirth of Reason
War
People
Archives
Objectivism

Post to this threadMark all messages in this thread as readMark all messages in this thread as unreadBack one pagePage 0Page 1


Post 20

Monday, June 16, 2008 - 7:22amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit

 

It was hard to figure out definitely what Prof. Machan was referring to in #15. I think I have it. He was referring to my #11. Two of the posts at OL to which I linked the reader in RoR #11 were to an OL thread in which I discussed an essay of Roderick Long’s pertaining to the distinction between positive and negative rights. If one slides around in that OL thread, one will find a third post I had given those readers. That is a link to an article on rights theory in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and surely that is what Tibor is referring to.

 

Authors in that encyclopedia may have yet to publicly notice valuable ideas from Tibor Machan. I have not forgotten him,

 

Foundations

 

Land Jurisdiction

 

Libertarianism

 

Choice to Live

 

and will not forget him should he die before me. I do not forget any of you or your ideas.

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 6/16, 7:40am)


Post 21

Monday, June 16, 2008 - 9:57amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Ed,

I wasn’t really asking that I be exempt from judgment, and you seem to take this a little bit more personally than I do. I think your analysis of my post is quite astute and fair, though. While I am aware of groups calling themselves Marxist that believe in purely voluntary cooperation, I can't say that I'm familiar enough with the current culture and evolving philosophy to say anything about what MOST of them believe. At the same time, you can’t really call it the same thing – a straw man – given the context.

Your rebuke is well-taken and deserved. I would not be so presumptuous as to think that I understand everyone’s beliefs. I know that I have inadvertently misrepresented Objectivism on several occasions. I appreciate the instances where this has been made clear to me, and believe that any intellectually honest person would feel the same.

Would you think me wise to ignore such oversights in the future? You seem to feel the same about misrepresentation, so surely you can understand my concern in regards to this discussion.

Post 22

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - 5:08amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Joseph,

You're correct that I come-off emotionally-charged when it comes to ideas. You ask:

Would you think me wise to ignore such oversights in the future? You seem to feel the same about misrepresentation, so surely you can understand my concern in regards to this discussion.
No, but my point about your method is missed by that question. Yes, I care about misrepresentation. As I said, I argued for the explicit representation of a rival's view in my first article. Two points are salient:

(1) whether the scope of volition even allows for the voluntary forfeiture of any human rights
(2) and whether socialism -- in practice -- is ever completely voluntary (as it must be, for your point to retain relevance)

The latter is dealt with in the quote below:

When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.

No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale.

Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.
Any "public" policy that, in practice, requires "thugs" isn't voluntary.

Ed

Sanction: 4, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 4, No Sanction: 0
Post 23

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - 9:34amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
The founders may have been a diverse lot but the Declaration of Independence contains pretty precise terms and ideas and those are what matter in this discussion.

Post 24

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - 9:40amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Stephen, you have been a loyal reader of my stuff, never doubted that. And you even come to some of my presentations, such as the recent debate at the APA Central in Chicago.  I was lamenting that those piece to which you sent us make no mention of my very well published and informative paper on human rights theory.  But then one way to render some ideas irrelevant is to ignore discussions of them, especially by disagreeable folks like me.  Oh, star gazing, a common vice of philosophical scholarship.

Post 25

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - 11:36amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Concerning the voluntary collectivist discussion:

Four years ago, I met a professional cellist near Kalispell, WA. He informed me that the half-dozen-or-so people he lived with had all made an agreement.  They contributed all their earnings to a community pool and, using a contract in combination with a democratic process, distributed the wealth in the interest of their "common good".

He being a little shy of money for the last few months was taken care of by his collective.  This made him feel guilty that he had turned a few wedding gigs down.  Apparently, professional musicians aren't treated with much respect at these gigs, to his annoyance.

The community panel could make decisions like whether to kick you out, allow someone to join, decide that you don't eat as much as you did last month, etc.  Extending my memory into the foggier details, he said that the contract allowed that certain private belongings were not to be considered public.

Anyways.  Completely voluntary but almost entirely collectivist-inspired.  The individual "existed" and had volition and relative importance, and probably took care of people he wanted to take care of.. most of the time.  But the "distribution of wealth" premise kicks this way out of the Capitalism bubble.

I never knew what to call this.  Socialism is tied with force.  Is this the type of pure "marxism" Joe F. is trying to get at?  What to call this (other than a mess of contradictions)?


Post 26

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - 2:13pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
"Completely voluntary but almost entirely collectivist-inspired...." When a bunch of like minded folks set out to do something together and pool their resources, that's not collectivism but cooperation.  Corporations, orchestras, jazz bands, and a host of other groups with such people (the Rotary Club, you name it), are highly individualistic because one may join once mutually agreeable terms are struck and one may leave (has, what economists call, the exit option).

Post 27

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - 4:52pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Of course.  Should have thought that through myself.  Thank you.

So bringing this back to Joe F's original post:
Various communes and collectives are not necessarily collectivist, and could even be good.  And those that talk of non-coercive communism or voluntary-marxism are conflating the terms liberally.  But positive liberty, being (as far as I can tell) indistinguishable from positive rights, necessitates a collective justification (i.e. an individual is only valuable if he contributes to the whole).

Hmm.


Post 28

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 - 8:27pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
I very much appreciate your attention to my work. My point was merely that some of those pieces in the Stanford on line encyclopedia are irksome because they take no account of work I did in perfectly respectable mainstream philosophy journals, like those in the American Philosophical Quarterly “Some Recent Work in Human Rights Theory,” Vol. 17 (1980), 103-115; “A Reconsideration of Natural Rights Theory,” Vol. 19 (1982),  61-72, never mind all the stuff from The Personalist, Journal of Value Inquiry, and other mainstream journals (so called because they aren't connected with organizations with an admitted agenda).

Post to this threadBack one pagePage 0Page 1


User ID Password or create a free account.