Ideas Matter

The Tale of the Slave

As a fan of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), I was delighted to come across this "Tale of the Slave" video presentation. Here's the original text, so you can follow along. It's a terrific thought experiment.

Liberty v. Security: A TSA Trade-off?

When it comes to the TSA, we're getting a whole lot of intrusiveness, hassle and invasion of privacy for very little security. In the above video, James Otteson is absolutely dead on, which is to say the government has gone too far.

Conservatives: Reasons to be a Libertarian

There's a famous dictum: You can't legislate morality. I don't know where this dictum came from, but if you believe it, you can easily be both conservative and libertarian.

I used to work with three mormon libertarians.  At first, I thought this was pretty odd. They told me they didn't drink alchohol, much less coffee. And what's interesting, these libertarians not only never drank Coke, they had no time for the idea that the government should enforce their moral precepts. In fact, they thought adherence to their precepts required people actually making the choice to be moral. If someone has to threaten to put you in jail to keep you from sinning or from doing the right thing, they thought you weren't really being good at all. I see now they were right.

Are roads fit for people?

 

Martin Cassini is one of the more outspoken critics of traffic controls in Europe.  His argument against traffic signals is based on replacing the system of priority with one of equality – priority meaning the engineered system most cities currently use.  By dictating traffic with lights, common sense and cooperation are removed from driving, often encouraging higher speeds and less focus on one’s surroundings.  When you’re coming up on a green light that you think may change soon, where is your attention focused?  What is your physical reaction to those expectations?  My focus is typically on the light with the reaction being to step on the gas so I don’t miss the light. 

A Libertarian's Nightmare

Are you free? The answer, from the perspective of the determinist, is no. For political libertarians this answer is troubling to the very core. After all, suppose we work, struggle and finally achieve something comfortably close to our ideal of putting a non-harm principle into practice. But then we discover we're trapped in the grooves of the physical universe -- with every action, moment by moment, determined by antecedent events determined by physical laws. This is unsettling to say the least. If we truly had freedom from man's domination over man, we'd like to think we can make real choices -- to carve out our own destiny, to be the captains of our own lives. 

Some people have sought succor in the idea of a probabilistic universe. That is, if -- at the level of the very small -- things seem to be fundamentally non-deterministic, maybe that extends to higher levels of description like brains, brain-states and decision-making. But even if that were true, it's hard to think of free will as being more akin to a game in Vegas than a self-directed consciousness. 

Still, Dennett says we have elbow room. And we do. I try not to linger on the apparent contradictions of political struggle determinism seems to imply. We're going to do what we're going to do. There is that "epistemic horizon" we can't traverse. There is that sense that while we're on a ride not of our making, we should see where it goes. All the action and passion is still there for us to live, breath and feel. That's a thinned down liberty. But we'd do well to take what we're given. In other words, while the choice to be despondent is not really a choice, we at least have the illusion of choice--one we cannot escape. So let's embrace it and move forward with eyes wide open, continuing all the while to struggle for freedom from other men (as we were born to do).