LIBERTARIAN:
I thank you for your perceptive comments.
Do I take it that you dissent from the Erich Fromm view that many, perhaps most, persons don’t much care for the terrors and responsibilities of personal choice-making on the grand scale?
How do you analyze the personal freedom to renounce one’s personal freedom? Not just making a cute but pointless paradox: there is (what might be construed as) good evidence that a great many mortal humans prefer a paternalistic sort of society–a great big extended family–to one in which their individual overt choices determine-without-appeal which (if any) of their desired "freedom-to"s they actually attain.
I suppose it boils down to the question of whether society in a fully libertarian mode is compatible with the species that we are.
I agree that I want to live in a society that is free from coercion. I would also say I want to live in a society in which people have the maximum freedom possible.
But do we want to structure society so that all members are equally free?
For what good is it to say to a group of people, “you are all free to climb that hill!” if many of the people don’t have legs?
What good is it to say to people you are free to compete in the market and accumulate wealth, but some of the people are raised on a $1 million education in a Beverly hills public school and the other is raised on a $100 public education in Harlem?
What good is it to say two people are both free to live as they please, except one is going to die because he has substandard health care and the other has top notch private insurance? You can’t be free if you are dead right?
What good is it to say we are all free to help change the laws that govern our country…when the truth is you cannot change the laws unless you either have tons of money or can convince those few people with tons of money to help you?
We all want to be free, but freedom is linked with power. If some people in a room have guns and others have knives and others have nothing but their bare hands, is it meaningful to say they are all free to compete with each other equally?
This is why I phrase the goal of my ideology in the form of opportunity. I want to live in a society in which all members have an equally free opportunity for success. If power is distributed too unevenly, then abuse of power (coercion) is inevitable.
There is definitely a balance that must be found between individual freedom…and the mechanism’s society uses to limit the possibility of abuse of power.
A few have commented on this veiw as their own. I don’t see how this is a valid estimation of how to answer this question.
If a given utopia is the destruction of life, then how exactly does it ‘go on’? I believe the point is to avoid self-referrential traps when stating an opinion, othwise it appears that the denial system is being appeased, and smacks of dishonesty and impropriety, maybe even an alterior motive of self-referrential security at the expense of multitudes of others.
Since many seem to be arguing that eliminating this type of circular self-referrential might is not desirable, it really just begs the question IMO, and doesn’t add substantive content.
On the topic of happiness…
There is a standardized solution to this veiw that discards happiness as the sole criteria, or maybe even a criteria at all.
Is it ok for anyone to do what anyone wants, just so long as they’re happy while doing it and having it done to them? Does the word ‘pharmacology’ mean anything to you? To suggest that happiness is meaningfulness itself, is to create a situation where lack of meaning is being judged not as a result of content, but by that content having a superimposed state of mania. If mania is not superimposed to the state, then the state is not meaningful.
I think that it’s well known that any observable behavior can be superimposed with mania, given the correct chemical reaction.
I think that most would diverge from ‘happiness’ to contentment or security as the ethical universal if their logic works like this and they are backed into an additional corner from the happiness critisism.
I still find the ideas of contentment and/or security to be woefully inadequate as THEE irreducable ethical ideal. There are multiple self-referrential problems arising from these concepts as well.
The people with knives and their bare hands need to get a good education and learn how to do well in a job interview. Ah, or something. I’m not sure that’s the best analogy. Power is, by definition, the opposite of freedom. Paradoxically, I agree, sometimes it’s necessary to use power to gain or preserve freedom. Power isn’t subsumed within violence, as there are many kinds of power. Information obvously being one great example.
I’m not sure how you got the Fromm comment out of what I said, but my main point was that all the goals you enumerated are natural consequences of a society in which government enforces noncoercion. With respect to a man renouncing his personal freedom, that is exactly what he does when he coerces: by means of his own usurpation, he yields his rights to the person whom he has coerced. Still, a man may peacefully yield his rights as well in any number of ways. For example, he may give away all his property and then give himself voluntarily over to another man as a slave. He is basically declaring that he is no longer a rights-bearing entity, and that his body and mind are now the property of some other man.
With respect to compatibility, if man is a rights-bearing entity, then libertarianism is the sole political context that is compatible with man as a species. But if man is not a rights-bearing entity, then libertarianism is wholly incompatible with the species of man.
Finally, as an aside, regarding the notion floating about of a goal-less worldview, only the anarchists, as far as I know, have satisfactorily argued in favor of unbounded laissez-faire. Frankly, when the authoritarians begin offering such a view, it is just a bit remarkable and, well, spooky.
Sorry to jerk you back to the beginning of the thread, ready, but I’ve been a little tardy in responding.
Your premise, I believe, reveals an error that lies at the heart of all too many failed experiments at social engineering–namely, that a Constitutional Convention, and the government that it will create, are the appropriate tools for determining the “fundamental structure of society”. Rather than looking at society through such a top-down lens, may I suggest a bottom-up view in which we create our own society through free interaction and trade with others, and government limits itself to preserving order and preventing us from harming or defrauding each other.
No, not quite. I’m not sure it’s possible for every person to have an equal opportunity to achieve happiness. Some people are born with greater physical or mental endowments than others, some are born into dysfunctional families, and, as you pointed out earlier in the thread, some are born into wealth and some into poverty. To try to make everybody’s opportunity equal is a recipe for disaster, because some authority (the government) will have to take from those with “too great” an opportunity and give to those with “not enough”, and this leads to friction, coercion, evasion, and abuse of power.
I guess I’d just say that I’d like everybody to have an opportunity to live a happy life, and I believe my ideology would promote that.
