Friday, 3 February 2012

Syllogism

Me to Linda Morgan in the comments thread here. I owe the argument to commenter "IanB", formerly of Samizdata...
  • Major premise: violations of the non-aggression principle must be justified by appeal to value.
  • Minor premise: no value can be objectively shown (in the strictest sense*) to be preferable to another.
  • Conclusion: there can thus be no objective grounds for violating the non-aggression principle.
*Hume’s "is-ought gap", which is to say an “ought” statement cannot be directly deduced from an “is” statement without an intermediary “ought” statement.

Update: I've since made a technical correction to the major premise. See comments.
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5 comments:

  1. blobOfNeurons3 February 2012 at 13:36

    Technically, I think the conclusion is overly general. By your premises stated here alone, it should be something like "there can thus be no objective grounds for violating the non-aggression principle by imposing one's values upon another."

    Your major premise only stated a single way to violate the NAP but it didn't say if it was the only way.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike Fagan3 February 2012 at 15:03

    Yes, I'll have to concede that, although a better criticism would be that the major premise is tautological in that "imposition" necessarily implies the iniation of force denoted by the term "aggression".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mike Fagan3 February 2012 at 15:10

    Try again...

    Major premise: violations of the non-aggression principle must be justified by appeal to value.

    Minor premise: no value can be objectively shown (in the strictest sense) to be preferable to another.

    Conclusion: there can thus be no objective justification for violating the non-aggression principle.

    ... how's that?

    ReplyDelete
  4. blobOfNeurons5 February 2012 at 18:17

    Well it looks good, but I'm personally a little uneasy about the words "violating the NAP". That carries the suggestion that one knows exactly what is and is not a violation.

    Consider the different but related (not yet developed) conclusion: "There is no way to objectively determine whether an action violates the NAP."

    Or similarly, "There is no way to objectively determine what constitutes aggression."

    Or really just "Aggression is not well-defined."

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mike Fagan5 February 2012 at 20:36

    That carries the suggestion that one knows exactly what is and is not a violation."

    Generally speaking, yes. Consider the "natural" crimes, the crimes that are recognized almost universally under all forms of governance: murder, rape, arson, kidnap, theft, fraud... these are all crimes of aggression against either person or property.

    The "ambiguous" cases, things like "verbal" or "symbolic" aggression (e.g. bullying) do not, in my opinion, highlight a definitional problem with aggression. They indicate the limits of the NAP, which we must remember is a principle governing the use of retaliatory force. Just as there are non-physical ways of "aggressing against" (I prefer the term "annoying") a person, there are also non-physical ways of retaliating. This is important because (a) I want to know who the bad people are, which means they must have freedom of speech and must not be suppressed, and (b) I want to be free to argue against them, ban them from my property and/or humiliate them in retaliation for being shits.

    The other thing which I think should be kept in mind is that in all cases of aggression (or annoyance), there can be no fixed weight of value. If a homeless man commits fraud against me by asking for some spare change for the bus (and then spends it on cigarettes) is it a violation of the NAP? Yep. Am I likely to do anything about it? Probably not. Somebody else might react differently if it happened to them (e.g. scolding him), but that is their decision to make. Values do not exist without a valuer.

    "Aggression is not well-defined."

    No, the purpose of the NAP is not well understood.

    ReplyDelete

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