Then there is the problem with reading someone so full of himself. Go read that again and note how much he refers to himself. I gave up reading him years ago. His little anti-self owner-ship word magic wasn't impressive then either, and trudging through paragraph after paragraph of narcissism for such a dubious pay off makes no sense.
August, your charge may or may not be correct, but... This was a *autobiographical* piece! It's really not very odd to mention oneself a bit in a work of autobiography, is it?
"His little anti-self owner-ship word magic wasn't impressive then either..."
Word magic? He provides long, substantive arguments for the emptiness of the concept. But I suppose it is easier to call this "word magic" if it helps maintain those beliefs!
This is the same Feser, autobiographical or not. At one time he just kept arguing with this same guy over and over again- and the argument seemed to be about Feser, not whatever the original subject was. The simple thing to do is point out Rothbard is wrong and any sort of property right to self must be serious enough to merit being able to get out of the womb alive. In other words, parents are the actors. It is a bad magic trick to focus on the property right when the act is the issue. A kidnapper cannot claim it just to let his victim die just because his victim happens to be on his property- the victim's self-ownership trumps all this other silliness. I suspect this is what Rothbard gets for trying to lie strategically; he never attracted any feminists and Feser's arguments likely serve the purgatorial function well.
I don't know what to think of self-ownership anymore, but this seems like too simplistic of an argument to be a good one, like arguments for self-ownership that cite the use of possessive words when speaking about one's body.
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...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
I've read about 3/4 of it, but my tiny brain has to think more about the implications. I will say, however, that your comment on the page is spot on.
ReplyDeleteThen there is the problem with reading someone so full of himself. Go read that again and note how much he refers to himself.
ReplyDeleteI gave up reading him years ago. His little anti-self owner-ship word magic wasn't impressive then either, and trudging through paragraph after paragraph of narcissism for such a dubious pay off makes no sense.
August, your charge may or may not be correct, but...
DeleteThis was a *autobiographical* piece! It's really not very odd to mention oneself a bit in a work of autobiography, is it?
"His little anti-self owner-ship word magic wasn't impressive then either..."
Word magic? He provides long, substantive arguments for the emptiness of the concept. But I suppose it is easier to call this "word magic" if it helps maintain those beliefs!
This is the same Feser, autobiographical or not. At one time he just kept arguing with this same guy over and over again- and the argument seemed to be about Feser, not whatever the original subject was.
ReplyDeleteThe simple thing to do is point out Rothbard is wrong and any sort of property right to self must be serious enough to merit being able to get out of the womb alive. In other words, parents are the actors. It is a bad magic trick to focus on the property right when the act is the issue. A kidnapper cannot claim it just to let his victim die just because his victim happens to be on his property- the victim's self-ownership trumps all this other silliness. I suspect this is what Rothbard gets for trying to lie strategically; he never attracted any feminists and Feser's arguments likely serve the purgatorial function well.
"he never attracted any feminists"
DeleteWell, there was Wendy McElroy. :-)
I don't know what to think of self-ownership anymore, but this seems like too simplistic of an argument to be a good one, like arguments for self-ownership that cite the use of possessive words when speaking about one's body.
ReplyDelete