u/RyanBleazard

Many libertarians argue that if we ever succeed in establishing a rights-respecting, constitutionally limited government, our next step should be to destroy it. They claim this would unleash "market competition" amongst "private defence agencies" that will protect individual rights better than any government has or could.

In this video, I argue that libertarian anarchism does not lead to anything like free market capitalism at all: it means and has to mean the rule of brute force. On my view, anarchists do not seek to subordinate might to right but to subordinate right to public auction. Their theory defaults to legitimising vigilantes who would unleash force unilaterally against other citizens. The threat of force is force, and the police of a rights-respecting state must regard "competitors" (other force-wielders) as threats. Government as such is neither an unnecessary evil nor a necessary evil, but a positive good.

Most of Dave's video was factually incorrect. He repeatedly cites the same organisations in his videos, but the concern with "human rights" by these organisations is not actually about individual rights to life, liberty and property at all. At best, they tend to regard the state of Israel and Hamas as equal violators of human rights, despite the fact that Israel respects the rights of gays, while Hamas kills gays, and despite Israel respecting the rights of Israeli Arabs, while Hamas kills (or takes hostage) all the ethnic Jews it can get its hands on.

The claims of “genocide” and "apartheid" were themselves wildly unjust. What is the ethnicity that Israel is targeting for destruction? 21% of Israeli citizens are Arab. They are in elected office in Israel, and have equal protection of their rights under Israeli governance, to that of Jewish citizens. Radical Islamists are not an ethnicity or genetic category. The Muslim Palestinians and their elected government, Hamas, seek the destruction of Israel because it is populated by Jews. They are religious fanatics and racists, who want their tribe to dominate the region.

As a state, Israel is not ideal, but it utterly pales in comparison to what the Palestinians and their elected government want to do there. Israel is currently the freest and most civilised state in the Middle East (most rights-respecting), including for Arabs. By contrast, most Jews and other minorities would be dead or subjugated in the authoritarian Islamic state that the Palestinians want (as polls show).

The fact that Dave leaves out any discussion of this and Hamas' goals from his videos demonstrates his ideological commitment, not a commitment to the truth. Moreover, he inflated the number of deaths in Gaza into the 200K range, which is 4x the accepted number. He promotes Oct 7 rape denial. He calls Israelis “psychopathic murderers“, and has stated that Mossad was involved in 9/11 which lands him squarely in the territory of degenerate antisemitic conspiracy theories.

u/MarvinBEdwards01 As I've understood your position, determinism entails there being one actual future rather than one possible future.

Something I find difficult to grasp my head around, though, is what this is supposed to mean in contrast with causal indeterminism, where it seems there would have to be more than one actual future. But surely that cannot be right: even if the same prior conditions could lead to different outcomes, there would still only ever be one actual future (one outcome that actually occurs) just as there is under deterministic causality.

For example, if I flip a coin in an indeterministic universe, the outcome is unpredictable but it would not be a superposition of two actual outcomes. The coin will not actually be both heads and tails at the same time. One future will become actual.

So, in your view is the relation between the two with respect to actual futures dichotomous, i.e. determinism entailing just one actual future, and indeterminism entailing the opposite: more than one? If not, how would you approach this?

The only way I see out of this, is to resort to use of the word “possibility“. With the coin flip example, both heads and tails are “possible futures”, so we avoid saying there are more than one “actual futures”. But using the words this way poses the problem of determinism entailing only one possibility.

Although Ayn Rand defended free will, she rejected deterministic causality. However, as I will argue, free will is a deterministic event, and it was paradoxical for Ayn Rand and her intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, to insist upon freedom from deterministic causation.

Determinism is logically derived from the presumption of perfectly reliable cause and effect. Determinism notes that each cause is itself an effect of prior causes, such that a chain of causation can, at least in theory, be traced back to any prior point in history. If every event is reliably caused by prior events, and these prior events were themselves reliably caused by earlier events, then every event is “causally necessary" from any prior point in time.

That might sound ominous, but what does it really mean? Well, not a whole lot. To say that something is “causally necessary” means nothing more than that it came about by normal cause and effect -- something that we are all familiar with and that we all take for granted.

In fact, all of our abilities, to do anything at all, require reliable cause and effect. To put it simply, without reliable cause and effect, we could not reliably cause any effect. We would have no freedom to do anything at all. Also, without deterministic causation, we could no longer predict the outcomes of our actions, and we would no longer have any control over what we will do.

Thus, "freedom from causal necessity" is an irrational notion. One cannot be "free" from that which freedom itself requires. And because it is irrational, it may not be used as the definition of anything. Yet this irrational definition of free will is the one that is used in the philosophical debate.

So, What's The Fuss About?

There is no conflict between the notions that your choices were causally necessary from any prior point in time (determinism) and that your were free to decide for yourself what you will do (free will). However, these concepts have come to appear contradictory due to a logic error called the “reification fallacy“, and a series of false implications that determinism has accumulated throughout its history.

The first error, the reification fallacy, happens when we mistakenly treat the concept of “reliable cause and effect” and the "laws of nature" as if they were external forces controlling our choices, rather than descriptive comments, as if it were not actually us, simply being us and doing what we do. It is a failure to recognise that determinism is neither an external object nor a force. It's simply a comment, an assertion that the behaviours of the objects and forces in the universe are reliable, and thus theoretically understandable and potentially predictable. The "laws of nature" are a metaphor for the reliability of causation. They too are descriptive, not causative, of what we will do.

 In the SEP article on “Causal Determinism”, in section “2.4 Laws of Nature”, Carl Hoefer describes it this way:

>“In the physical sciences, the assumption that there are fundamental, exceptionless laws of nature, and that they have some strong sort of modal force, usually goes unquestioned. Indeed, talk of laws “governing” and so on is so commonplace that it takes an effort of will to see it as metaphorical.”

The second problem is identical to the way in which philosophers have often equated "altruism" with kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. Notice that as Ayn Rand pointed out, these are not primaries, but secondary implications that have been wrongly attached to the concept. But when philosophers (including Ayn Rand) say that determinism means we have no control over our actions, that we "couldn't have done otherwise", or "the absence of free will", they are engaging in the same error of conflating a primary (determinism) with secondary consequences that happen to be incorrect.

For example, there's this flaw in one of the common implications attributed to determinism. Normally, deterministic causal necessity would simply assert "you would not have done otherwise", and no one would experience cognitive dissonance. But the more typical assertion that, under a deterministic universe, "you could not have done otherwise", is not using the literal meaning of "could". It is being used in a figurative way that suggests a disability on your part, as if you somehow lost the ability to act differently in a particular situation.

The "logic" behind this odd claim is that, because you wouldn't have done otherwise, it was AS IF you couldn't have. It is tantamount to saying "because you won't do X, it is AS IF you can't do X". Both of these are figurative statements which cannot be factually justified, not even by the fact of universal causal necessity. The "as if" flags them as figurative, but when the "as if" is missing we might take the figurative statements literally, and then we have to do a reality check to confirm they are figurative.

Altruism is the doctrine that advocates self-sacrifice in the name of helping others as morality. A "sacrifice" is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, under the premise of altruism, helping a stranger or an enemy is more virtuous -- because it is less selfish -- than helping those you love.

Altruism was coined by Auguste Comte, who explicitly coined it to mean living for others, the antipode to self-interest. It was later secularised from Christianity and woven into the political ideologies of Fascism, Socialism and Communism as well as mainstream ethical doctrines like Utilitarianism and Kantian deontology. Adherents to these doctrines ignore or evade the fact that the good is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone - neither of yourself to others (altruism) nor of others to yourself (parasitism).

Because most people are unfamiliar with the history, altruism is commonly confused as some sort of requirement for "good will" or "kindness". But even without an explicit understanding of philosophy, people have absorbed the premise through cultural osmosis. This belief that sacrifices are virtuous if not duteous can be seen in everyday attitudes toward family, politics, and complete strangers, where individuals are owed unearned values simply because they exist or because they hold a certain status.

You cannot follow Objectivism online without repeatedly encountering the accusation that Ayn Rand was a hypocrite for accepting Social Security benefits, since she opposed the welfare state in all its forms.

However, Rand claimed socialist benefits not because she was contradicting her own philosophy, but as recompense for taxes taken from her.

Government is force. People are not immoral for having to rely on a law more than others when they are forced into it. Although one may despise the deep seeded evil of the scheme, they can still try to get restitution for the money robbed from them by the government to support it.

In John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged:

>There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist... Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence.

I believe Rand was incorrect here in presenting the fundamental alternative between existence and nonexistence as exclusive to living organisms. Non-living entities also have conditional forms of existence. A star, for example, is an organised process sustained by certain physical processes, such as nuclear fusion and gravitational equilibrium. Its continued existence as a star depends upon the continuation of these processes; otherwise, like life, the star ceases to exist, although the matter remains.

This alternative as such applies to any entity, insofar as its continued identity depends upon particular physical processes, arrangements, or conditions.

Apparently, Ayn Rand stated in 1962:

>But to the hypothetical question, “What would I advocate if my advice were immediately put into effect?,” I’d answer: Start decontrolling the economy as fast as rational economic considerations permit. I speak of “rational economic considerations” because today, every part of the population is dependent on government controls. Most professions have to function under controls, and their activities are calculated on that basis. So if anyone were to repeal all controls overnight, by legislative fiat, that would be a disastrous, arbitrary, dictatorial action. What a free country needs is to give all the people concerned sufficient notice to readjust and reorganize their economic activities…. Any sudden changes could create disastrous dislocations, and so we should decontrol gradually.

If I understand this correctly, it would be dictatorial and problematic if economic freedom was implemented too quickly rather than gradually, as society would be unable to adjust and stabilise to such rapid, sudden changes in policy such as deregulation. For example, I imagine this applies to social security, where the livelihoods of many have become dependent on it and so the programme may have to be phased out with time, perhaps over some decades.

Democracy in its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule, where the populace can vote to have the state do anything at all. Given an understanding of individual rights and why they are inalienable, one should see clearly why unlimited majority rule is inimical to human well-being. The proper purpose of government (a monopoly on force) is not rule by the people, but the protection of rights. If there is no constitution to limit what government can do, politicians can infringe upon individual rights and thereby defy its fundamental purpose.

For instance, without a framework of constitutional limits, the majority could legally execute or exterminate any minority it chose. The classic example is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally because the majority didn't like what he was saying although he had initiated no force and had violated no one's rights.

In a proper governmental system - a constitutional republic restricted to protecting individual rights - majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel by balloted election. But they have no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of people's rights.