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...
It struck me that subjectivism, at least of the moral kind, doesn't really make any sense: to call it subjective feels like it can't be called morality. Likewise, I realized thatit seems if morality didn't exist, then words like "permissible" and "impermissible" would be meaningless.
ReplyDeleteSamson,
ReplyDeleteSubjectivism can be really tricky to understand. I don't think that "to call [morality] subjective feels like it can't be called morality.... [it] seems as if morality doesn't exist." Subjectivism actually doesn't imply that morality doesn't exist, nor does it even hint that it doesn't. Subjectivism is a meta-ethical theory (that is, it deals with the nature of "what 'good' is" rather than "is this thing 'good'?"). Subjectivism does state that morality exists - it is just that what constitutes the goodness or badness of something is subjective, not objective. Michael Huemer, in his extraordinary book "Ethical Intuitionism", uses sexiness as a good example of the point trying to be made here; what each individual finds to be sexy is dependent on the psychological responses that they give towards the girl in question. You might think that large women are sexy, but I could easily respond "I don't; they are lacking in the symmetry that I find in female athletes." We are both experiencing the psychological attraction that is described by the term "sexiness", it is just that because this "sexiness" is dependent on our psychological - or, subjective - responses, it cannot be objective. For something to be objective, it seems as though it must not be dependent on the subjective preferences or psychological response that something has towards it. Idealists, of course, would likely rephrase this (here is looking at you, Gene, to give a suggestion or correction) as "what it means for something to be objective is not that it is wholly outside the realm of experience and perception; it is just that these experiences and perceptions are more (or, even, completely) accessible to others despite their intentions or inclinations."
Hope that this helps.