In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
They would counter (assuming some kind of nihilism), "because the truth can only be approximated."
ReplyDeleteSeraphim Rose's "Nihilism" has a rather interesting account of the general nihilist phenomena (of which this "secular humnanism" is a species) that you might like, Gene. I wonder if you've read it.
This statement should not be taken to its extreme since it (in my view) obviously is an oversimplification. Just like "Never say never". It carries the "truth" that in most cases you will be right in following its conclusion.
ReplyDeleteThough if you are strict you will notice that the statement cannot be used even on itself since it contradicts itself.
Like "Never say never" is a contradiction in terms, also the statement about denouncing people who proclaim to have found truth is just the same: A truth uttered by someone who himself thinks to have found truth. Therefore it should be ignored if you wanted to follow its conclusion...
Do you think that such statements are useless therefore? Or can they be understood just as some kind of rule of thumb, that when in doubt it is good to follow?
I think these statements should rather start with "Mostly". Yet I know that this would take out a lot of their ability to get attention through sounding absolute. So I think basically it is just a rhetorical trick to get people thinking...
Did my comment from yesterday not get through?
ReplyDelete