According to Aristotle in his prior publication, Nicomachean Ethics, happiness in lifestyle far surpasses the simple explanation of a contented emotion, but however, rely much more on success and fulfillment in the political world, thus necessitating involvement governmental affairs to the happiness of every free man. In modern society, most would consider happiness as coming from physical pleasure or honor, but as Aristotle insists, this is only due to an imperfect view of the good life. Predominantly, the concept of Greek happiness, which a flourishing life entails, is a much more public matter than how it is viewed by twentieth century philosophers. In ancient times more so than now, a Greek individual’s identity was extremely closely linked to the city-state to which he belonged to; thus, happiness was closely connected to the success and fulfillment achieved during public service. Moreover, happiness was not viewed as an emotion in the private sector, but more importantly a reflection of a person’s position within a city-state. Additionally, Nicomachean Ethics discusses the belief that because everything in nature exists for a specific purpose, the end goal of human existence (the specific purpose of human life) is happiness. Aristotle acknowledges a contrast between the means of attainment and the ends, ultimately happiness, of attainment. He states that men pursue happiness and rational activity for the sake of enjoyment, where as they will seek out wealth and health simply because they feel these acquisitions will bring them happiness. He will go on later to define this determination by stating, “…there are three groups – external good [wealth, reputation] , goods of the body [health, sensual pleasure], and goods of the soul [wisdom, virtue] – surely no one would raise a dispute and say that not all of them need be possessed by those who are blessedly happy.” (191). However, Aristotle places more importance upon the goods of the soul, since they are the ends themselves and the former types of good are the means at which acquiring the latter. Following up on this idea, Politics examines how to best secure these ends of happiness for the citizens of a city-state, which predominantly involved political activity, beginning with the construction of a community.

To begin the quest for obtaining a flourishing life, one first established a community in which to become actively involved, known in ancient Greek terminology as a poleis or city-state. The interests of the city-state and its citizens were one and the same, both to attain happiness in affairs, and therefore, conflict between individual liberties and the laws of the city did not often occur. As Aristotle expresses in his opening statements, “every community is established for the sake of some good (for everyone performs every action for the sake of what he takes to be good).” (1), and as our author views it, one cannot lead a happy life without community engagement, as an individual will not fully realize the nature of their political being separated from the city-state. In asserting that man fails to fulfill his ultimate purpose when he disconnects from the state, Aristotle argues that life has no value outside the walls of a city-state.

The formation of a community is a natural phenomenon based on the principles of rational speech, reproduction, education, and religion. Once human beings were able to develop a language, they had a strong desire to interact with one another, and thus social groups and later political entities were founded. These assertions are echoed by Aristotle in saying, “Those who cannot exist without each other necessarily form a couple as [1] female and male do for the sake of procreation, [2] as a natural ruler and what is naturally ruled for the sake of survival.” (2). An organized system of reproduction to best ensure the success of offspring needed to be devised in this ancient Greek society, as Aristotle constructs, determining that women should not be married until they are eighteen years of age and men should not be wed to these women until they have reached their thirty-sixth birthday. In modern times, a marriage license is required to surpass the problems that ancient Greek citizens had to enact laws to overcome, such as the marriage between cousins and a proper age to marry. Education, and even determining what subjects should be taught, also needed to be a collective endeavor. He believed that the city’s educational system will largely forecast the character of its future citizens and therefore asserts that it is preferable to enroll children in public education over private tutoring. A fundamental aspect of the state governments of the United States is just the topic, and overall, to every society, education is determined to be a very crucial political concern. Men also need leisurely activities, such as sports and music, to live to the fullest, and thus, for the sake of a flourishing life, it is ideal for humans to live in groups with common interests. As Aristotle puts it, “For it is by seeking happiness in different ways and by different means that individual groups of people create different ways of life and different constitutions.” (204). In the creation of a city-state, Aristotle comments that all citizens should know each other and that the population should be “surveyable”, to reinforce the common aims of the community. Standardized religious practices and the public construction of temples in the worship of Gods were also public domain, as it would be nearly impossible for every citizen to have access to the proper altars and temples without publicly funded religious sites. In all these social aspects of life, reproduction, leisure activities, education, and religion, a functioning government must be held responsible and therefore, a community was formed to distribute money and duties across its populace.

Before an individual can become active in a political life, and thus achieve the all-important definition of happiness as described by the Greeks, one first must determine who should be given access to the government in terms of a social hierarchy. When deciding who should take part in political affairs, the author clearly separates the people who are necessary to the city, including slaves, and those who are essential members of the city. Aristotle is not concerned with giving every individual the access to the operations of the government because he does not consider their input to be valuable, rationale for excluding slaves. Slaves, he insists, are like property, and therefore, cannot comprise a city. He cites a fundamental difference in slaves and freemen in governmental affairs in saying, “For ruling and being ruled are not only necessary, they are also beneficial, and some things are distinguished right from birth, some suited to rule and others to being ruled.” (7). Only freeborn citizens have the capacity to become leaders because only they would have the time to pursue education and leisure activities, and thus be well rounded and knowledgeable for government involvement. Our political theorist also makes distinctions along the lines of origin and age in stating, “Nor is a citizen a citizen through residing in a place, for resident aliens and slaves share the dwelling place of him…like minors who are too young to be enrolled in the citizen list or old people who have been excused from their civic duties, they must be said to be citizens of a sort, but not unqualified citizens.” (65). Similar are the requirements in the United States to either naturalized if not born in this country and to eighteen years of age to participate in elections. By setting parameters for which individuals can participate in politics, Aristotle attempts to preserve what he believes a qualified social ranking of free men.

Aristotle concludes that the goal of the community as a whole is to achieve as much unity as feasibly possible, and thereby, protecting the interests of all citizens; however, Aristotle maintains that different people must make different contributions, fulfill different roles, and fit into distinct social classes to ensure that the city-state will be self-sufficient. Class division is important in maintaining a proper social order, but there seems to be a place for each free class in government participation, whether it be through leadership or simply voicing an opinion. Certain of this principle, he states, “A city-state is excellent, however, because the citizens who participate in the constitution are excellent; and in our city-state all the citizens participate in the constitution.” (213). Aristotle suggests that the middle class is most vested in the success of a political entity in stressing that it is the least susceptible to factionalism, self-interest, and hatred of other classes. Both the rich and the poor, on the other hand, are more likely to conceive of justice and equality selfishly. He declares that a population of farmers would make for the best democracy, as they must work hard and are well spread apart, preventing the group as a whole from spending too much time involved with governmental affairs. Alternatively, he proposes that the population least conducive to democracy would be made up of mechanics, shopkeepers, and laborers because they are crowded within the inner city, and therefore could take an active role in politics leading to mob rule and violent overthrows. By involving all classes in the political system, Aristotle nearly achieves the prospect of a flourishing life, centered upon happiness in political participation, for every group of natural-born free men.

Once the standards of citizenship have been determined, it is next necessary to determine how a government should be operated and maintained in order to maximize the number of individuals who can become involved. Aristotle suggests that a governing body must include all citizens and govern in the common interest, and that the laws be well constituted and directed toward the general good. Contrasting many political philosophers of his day, our author insists that a collective populace is wiser than an individual expert and an overall better judge as to whether people are being well-governed. In descriptions of each practical type of government, Aristotle concludes, “For tyranny is rule by one person for the benefit of the monarch, oligarchy is for the benefit of the rich, and democracy is for the benefit of the poor. But none is for their common profit.” (78). In an oligarchy, influential and high standing offices should be reserved for the wealthy, yet the poor should still be able to hold infer employment in the functioning of the government. Additionally, wealthy officers are obligated, in this system, to perform significant public service in order to hold office, thus deemed worthy of leadership by the poor. Civic government consists of three main elements: the deliberative, the executive, and the judicial. The deliberative elements involve public matters such as foreign policy, enacting laws, judicial cases in which a severe penalty is involved, and the appointment of public officials. The executive branch of Aristotle’s government holds public order and takes responsibility for governing and issuing commands. Finally, the judicial element passes rulings on matters of private and public interest. Aristotle recommends that the ruling party always be wary of lawlessness, never try to deceive the masses, treat everybody well and fairly, especially those outside the constitution, cultivate a state of emergency so that people will not attempt a revolt, prevent in-fighting between nobles, ensure that property qualification for office remains proportionate to the wealth of the city, be careful not to confer great promotions or significant withdrawals of honor too suddenly, be wary of a class that is on the rise, and give power to the opposing class or the middle class, prevent public office from becoming a source of profit, and offer special consideration to the rich in a democracy and to the poor in an oligarchy. In all aspects of the prescribed varieties of government that Aristotle examines, the focus and motive remain the same: to create a political entity that will best suit individual citizens for a flourishing life.

In relating the ideas posed by Aristotle to the modern definitions of government in the United States, many political issues and dilemmas come to mind that obstruct such a flourishing life. As Aristotle suggested, “Nowadays, however, because of the profits to be had from public funds and office, people want to be in office continuously, as if they were sick and would be cured by being in office.” (77). This has become increasingly so in the maturation of our nation as well, while congressmen and presidents fight to stay in office for as many terms as possible to ensure the push of their political agenda, often influenced by interested groups and top campaign contributors. Another problematic situation that the U.S. government has encountered since the birth of our nation is the decrease in individual participation in government. In ancient times, all citizens were required to contribute in some way to the government. Assemblies of citizens made decisions in governmental bodies that were similar to the law courts and city councils that few Americans take part in today. In ancient Greece, these lawmaking assemblies would rotate membership to ensure that every citizen could serve a term, however, the only institution which mirrors this rotation in modern day is jury duty. Without required participation in the government, many individuals in society wish to seek no part in it, and therefore, do not fulfill their civic duty or live in the criteria of happiness Aristotle maintains is essential.

Aristotle advocates a lifestyle involving political activism as a means of achieving a happy and flourishing life, by first detailing the necessity of establishing a community, defining a social hierarchy, and instituting a governing body in which every free man should take part. In arguing the need for politics in an individual’s well-being, he pronounces, “Some people think that ruling over one’s neighbors like a master involves one of the greatest injustices, and that rule of a statesman, though it involves no injustice, does involve impediment to one’s own well-being. Others think almost the opposite, they say that an active political life is the only one for a man, since the actions expressing each of the virtues are no more available to private individuals than to those engaged in communal affairs and politics (194). Political bodies make education, leisure, organized religion, and marriage possible, many of which compromised ancient issues reflected in modern dilemmas. Without politics, possible chaos and obviously a decreased level of interaction and social harmony would occur; therefore, it is in the best interest of the community and of the individual, to partake in government.

While we have yet to settle on any such picture, other intuitions can present us with a different picture. Israel Kirzner’s article, “Entrepreneurship, Entitlement, and Economic Justice” (1978) provides us with an excellent intuition as to how else these entitlements could come about, through appeal to the idea of value: the chief reason why we gain our entitlements to property is because we have created an economic value in it.

A theory based on this intuition is, at least, superficially consistent with some libertarian theories or at least some of their parts. In examining the views of those called “libertarians” (even those with an egalitarian bent), we could (albeit crudely) characterize two kinds of entitlements in those views: what we will call “directly earned” entitlements and “unearned” entitlements. The former refers to those entitlements dealing with the class of thing that the individual brings about through his own freely chosen actions, and, from the point he acquires it until the end of his life, may keep without others ever possibly holding a right to it against him (such as the product of his labor). The latter refers to entitlements dealing with everything else—those things which may justifiably be redistributed from the individual, whether it is the value of their natural talents, their natural resource holdings, etc.

The question, then, is what kinds of consequences accepting the intuition that value creation generates entitlements will have on these different kinds of entitlements. In the conclusion of Kirzner’s piece, we get a sense of his goal, which in some way will be similar to mine:

[There] does seem to be a certain plausibility in the notion of ownership through creativity. It is this plausibility which may help explain how so many observers of the market appear to find it consistent with economic justice in the face of the denunciations of the moralist critics of capitalism. This paper has explored the sources of this apparent plausibility, and has scrutinized its ability to serve as possible support for the morality of the market.[1]

My goal here is to demonstrate how value creation (or “creativity” as Kirzner calls it) can form a basis for destroying the distinction in entitlements to which I alluded, presumably in favor of the “directly earned” kind, or, at the very least, for forcing a commitment to one kind of entitlement in its fullness over the other. Failing that, creativity can at least form a stronger basis for whatever “directly earned” entitlements may exist at all in a given theory (such as a Steinerian one). For a variety of reasons, including Kirzner’s revised acceptance of the Nozickean proviso which introduces a host of new complexities, I will not attempt to “repair” Kirzner’s theory where it fails. Instead, I will only show how some of the intuitions he offers ought to be seriously considered and integrated into any theory of acquisition that prizes self-ownership (e.g., in the form of ownership of the products of one’s labor). Whether we accept some sort of “equal share” hypothesis or not should not, ultimately, affect whether the considerations about value creation put forth in this paper make a difference. On one hand, the considerations might provide some intuition in favor of “world ownership”—that persons literally hold exclusive right over a part of the world—a position which is too difficult to defend here; on the other, they simply help clarify the extent of certain entitlements, in as much as we believe that those certain entitlements are of the “directly earned.”

Value Creation

The basic principle behind value creation could be that for some given thing of economic value, the person who actualized that value has full property rights over that thing; it would not have “existed” save for that person’s actions that led to its actualization. But this is too strong, for we can only say that something might not have existed save for the actualizer. This naturally should prompt us to find an account for why the temporally first creator is so entitled. In other words, we must find and justify some “first-come, first-served” principle, a challenge which we will address later. Here, we will investigate Kirzner’s interpretation of value creation, regarding exactly what it is that we ‘own’:

In the conventional view (apparently shared by Nozick), once a unit of resource has been acquired, ownership has been established in it with respect to all its properties and powers, whether these have been known or imagined or not. In the view being now considered, on the other hand, those aspects of a thing which are unknown remain, so-to-speak, non-existent. Their discovery constitutes the discovery of a hitherto unknown, ‘non-existent,’ and hence un-owned dimension of the thing. An owner owns only those aspects of ‘his’ property of which he is aware.[2]

This will have some important implications when it comes to what we are justified in spatially controlling (where to spatially control something means to own something with respect to all its properties and powers, known and unknown). Nonetheless, the complexities of dealing with spatial control issues are the task of a separate odyssey. At least for now, we will accept this definition of ownership put forward here, with the intention of clarifying it.

A simple case of value creation is Kirzner’s example of an entrepreneur discovering a willingness of consumers to pay a price for oranges converted into juice ($12, with a $4 manufacturing cost) over the price of oranges alone ($5). From this, he draws the following intuition:

Up to the moment when the entrepreneur’s vision ‘saw’ the juice and marmalade which the oranges represent, oranges had value only for eating – a value which the market set at $5. The entrepreneur has discovered $3 additional value in the oranges. He may, then, be held to have ‘created’ this additional value in these oranges. It is as if the entrepreneur found orange juice and marmalade in nature, where no one had perceived their existence; he has ‘created’ the orange-resource that can provide juice and marmalade.[3]

This is fairly self-explanatory. A set of actions leads to the creation of a consumption opportunity which some consumers prefer to some of their old consumption habits, for which they are willing to pay extra. Of course, Kirzner does far more here than simply give us part of the case for why the entrepreneur is entitled to profit here; he also hints at an argument for the likeness of natural resources to the orange juice scenario.

Before turning to the more complex issue of natural resources, however, it would do us well to finish framing the importance of value creation in exchange. On one hand, if we argue successfully for original appropriation of, say, oranges, then perhaps any questions beyond it are moot, notwithstanding any complexities raised by Kirzner’s definition of ownership. This is because just original appropriation of something entails full property rights over it, which entails free disposal of it, and we are not bound by any sort of Lockean “no-waste” condition. With full property rights over oranges, we could just as easily turn them into juice and exchange them freely for a net benefit to ourselves as we could throw them off of a cliff in nihilistic spite while slowly dying of scurvy.

Nonetheless, some theories would posit that even from a starting point of full property rights, some (non-coercive, non-fraudulent) processes can occur that unjustly result in profit. A theory of value creation-based entitlements can show how no such processes are possible. Thus, even if we fail to properly demonstrate our case regarding natural resources, an understanding of value creation is both applicable and useful to the previously-mentioned “right-libertarian” components of libertarian theories—especially Steinerian ones—which still entail a level of free and voluntary exchange (and hence the potential for mutual gain in exchange, and thus profit). This ground has been well covered by Kirzner, so we need not pursue it further here.[4]

It is necessary to clarify how value creation generates entitlements, or perhaps more importantly, what value is. Our definition of value can only be manifested through human action: we gauge the value of something by how someone will act to attain it. An entrepreneur, through some process of discovery and/or innovation, comes to control some object. Someone else desires this object. The “value” to which the entrepreneur is entitled is only going to be what is voluntarily offered to him and accepted by him in order to relinquish his control over the object.

So clearly, we are not simply saying that having special knowledge of some potentially added economic value entitles one to that value, of course. That knowledge only justifies whatever profit might be had when entrepreneur A buys oranges from entrepreneur B, turns them into juice, and gains a profit over the cost of the oranges. Better said, we are only advancing the case that one is entitled to any rewards reaped from discovering and executing a means of further contributing to the satisfaction of their own and others’ preferences (whether it is by selling information to someone else or by using that information to sell oranges at a higher price). Entrepreneur B is not entitled to any more than is offered and he agrees he will accept in exchange for his oranges. Of course, this could include his partial (or even full) knowledge of the value of juicing and hence his price discrimination toward Entrepreneur A, to which he is just as entitled.

To further specify the nature of our claim, we exclude any considerations of division of labor, specialization, and so forth from this discussion altogether. In a world of perfect and symmetric information, these conditions, quite trivially, imply that the juicer (entrepreneur A) and the orange harvester (B) are entitled to their respective contributions of value. It is where there is an information asymmetry that we are still claiming that entrepreneur B is entitled to profits from juice, even where entrepreneur A, if he also possessed the same knowledge of juice, would profit similarly from it. The attainment of information is as much a feature of the world that bears a human cost as is anything else under consideration, labor included. This fact is the primary reason why someone is justified in profiting to any degree from asymmetric intellectual information.

Overall, given a framework of already existing property entitlements and voluntary exchange, we have good reasons to believe that additional entitlements generated from those exchanges is just. It is how we get to those “already-existing property entitlements” which will be the task of the next section.

Natural Resources

We are now led to the more serious possible implication: if we accept the intuition of value creation when it comes to things like the natural properties of oranges and consumer preferences, why distinguish between those things and other things that are more affixed parts of the world, like land, water, or coal? We credit the entrepreneur with discovering, and thus bringing into existence, the value of juice. Putting aside issues of whether someone else could have brought about the value of the juice, we give the entrepreneur some level of equity based on how he in particular brought about this particular juice at this particular time. Prior to the entrepreneur’s intervention, the “juice value” was inaccessible.

Taking a parallel case of an entrepreneur drilling into a mountainside and finding gold, we can easily see that a similar statement can be made about the gold: prior to the entrepreneur’s intervention, the value brought about by the gold was also inaccessible. So we at least see no distinction between kinds of value-creating activities—in both cases, some sacrifice was required on the part of the entrepreneur to bring about access to something valuable that was previously inaccessible. Note that this is a fact independent of whatever independently-established conclusions we have about natural resources and people’s entitlements to them. At the very least, we have established that there is a common element between creations of value through what label “natural resources” and creations of value elsewhere.

The issue here is, as always, why the first-comer to a pile of uranium or some other resource can lay absolute claim to it. If it were the case that if not for the entrepreneur, the resource would not have existed, then our answer is clearly that he is entitled. But for most things, we can only say that if not for the entrepreneur, the resource might not have existed. We can likewise read this issue “backwards” into natural resources, scientific discoveries, inventions, etc. If we have this problem with land, why don’t we have this problem with everything else? Our definition of value creation here certainly fights against the separation of land and natural resources from other possessions. Nonetheless, no matter how we treat the distinction, even by eliminating it, priority for first-comers to any possession must be justified. In the next section, I will advance the rights of first-comers by putting forward some considerations that must be addressed by any theory which prizes self-ownership.

The Rights of First Comers

Having begun to argue for why value creation makes us responsible for—and thus entitled to—the effective existence of certain things, we still must answer why one’s temporal location never confers some unjustifiable advantage in appropriation. Indeed, we can hold that an appropriation is just, even if someone at a later date could have come along and created an inferior, equal, or larger value which he no longer could do as a result of the first appropriation. Kirzner offers the following example in favor of a “first-come, first-served” (FCFS) principle or what he calls a “finders, keepers”[5] ethic:

Consider then the case (referred to only by implication, in Nozick’s discussion) of the un-held sole water hole in the desert (which everyone in a group of travelers knows about), which one of the travelers, by racing ahead of the others, succeeds in appropriating. For Nozick this case, involving as it does no discovery at all, clearly and unjustly violates the Lockean proviso: the other travelers who n the absence of appropriation by their fellow, would have all enjoyed some water without cost, are now forced to pay a price (even a ‘monopoly price’) for that same water. For us, however, this view is by no means the only one possible. We notice that the energetic traveler who appropriated all the water was not doing anything which (always ignoring of course, prohibitions resting on the Lockean proviso itself) [would have prevented the other travelers from racing ahead]. Assuming (for simplicity) that [if] all the travelers were of equal strength and speed there would have ensued a ‘gold-rush’ in which each would have, let us say, captured some water. As it happened, the other travelers did not bother to race for the water. May it not be that they were less alert, entrepreneurially, to the possibility that someone else might indeed appropriate all of the water than the energetic traveler? Should we not, then, say that the latter was the first to ‘discover’ the true market value of the unheld water? For the others the water was indeed known, but the worthwhileness of its appropriation was not known. (Perhaps they mistakenly thought there was more water available than could possibly be drunk; perhaps they mistakenly thought that no one would or could race across the desert at a faster speed than that at which they were traveling, or perhaps they gave the water no thought at all.) It does not seem obvious that these other travelers can claim that they were hurt by an action which they could themselves have easily taken, had they been as alert as the successful appropriator. What, one must ask, even under conditions involving the appropriation of known substances is so obviously acceptable about the Lockean proviso, as interpreted by Nozick?[6]

While it is certainly a useful and intuitive way to show how we might falsely identify some appropriation scenarios as being a product of mere arbitrary temporal advantage, this example fails to fully address the issue. On the face of it, there are two potential routes we can take here to vindicate a FCFS principle. To preserve the validity of this example as an answer, we must show that every single appropriation will always contain an element of some value creation of the sort shown in the given scenario, no matter how small. On the other hand, to keep the example as only a useful insight, but still advance the case for a FCFS principle overall, we must show that even an appropriation characterized by mere temporal advantage is still justified.

In large part, the full resolution of this discussion depends on whether we accept that an individual’s gains from unchosen natural circumstances are “undeserved”; or, at least, that someone’s luck-based disadvantage makes an appropriation made possible by that disadvantage unjustified. Rejecting this notion would constitute an answer of the second kind provided in the paragraph above. Here, I will move toward an answer of the first kind instead, in the same vein as Kirzner’s water-hole example. In as much as any theory takes “brute luck” into consideration, it also allows for the mutually exclusive category of the “earned.” The following considerations should help to further define the boundary between the consequences of brute luck and choice.

The Value Creation of Being First

Before concluding anything about permanent appropriation of a resource, we must examine what non-arbitrary differences always exist between a first-comer and those who come later. The insufficient counterfactual that drew us to investigate whether a FCFS principle could be justified—that if not for the appropriator, something only might not have existed—ignored a crucial element of that something: specifically, when that something would have existed. Indeed, time is not irrelevant to value; other things equal, a rational agent prefers some fixed payment now to the same fixed payment later (likely for reasons of certainty and maximization of choice sets). This implies that there is a component of value that first-comers provide, and provide uniquely. We can refine the counterfactual to then say, “if not for the appropriator, something would not have existed at the time it did.”

Being a first-comer does more than add a time-value to an appropriation, however. It also actualizes unknown elements of the resource in question, the brunt of which is borne by the first-comer. First-comers bear the burdens of their appropriations as well as the benefits. There is the simple example of risking direct personal harm, such as exploring a cave only to find an angry bear.  There is the broader possibility that the effort the first-comer spent to make an appropriation was not worthwhile. Furthermore, those who are not first in any process of discovery often have the option of learning from the mistakes and failures of those who were first, making their own forays more productive. What makes these revelations possible is an actualization of one outcome of many possible outcomes.

This point stands, whether we believe that everyone owns natural resources or not. Even someone exploring on behalf of humankind would be creating value that humankind would otherwise not have, but at his own expense. Even if he was first only by some arbitrary temporal circumstances, it does not change the fact that he is the one who has borne the costs of the appropriation. Thus, in at least enough cases worth considering, an individual’s temporal advantage is an individual’s value creation, and one that any for which any theory of appropriation must account.

The Endogeneity of “Starting Points”

Any notion of “temporal advantage” in its construction relies on the broader concept of a “starting point.” An arbitrary temporal advantage is going to be the product of some distribution of starting points, in which one person was, for example, closer to a resource and hence arrived at it sooner. If A starts 1 mile closer to some resource than B does but they are otherwise equal, and they both move toward it, A will be able to appropriate the resource and exclude B from it, a result which can be credited to A’s better starting point. One might argue that this represents some unearned advantage of A over B that can be justifiably adjusted or redistributed.

But we have failed to ask how A and B got to their respective “starting” locations. If A had decided to take a well-trodden path to a resource, but B decided to take a mountain pass in hopes that it would be faster, then we would not consider the 1 mile difference to be some sort of arbitrary advantage. It would seem that the goal of the above argument is to show that starting points are simply given, that is, exogenous, and hence morally arbitrary. At the core of this is that no decision on the agents’ part put them there. Indeed, a central component of libertarianism is ownership of one’s self and thus responsibility for one’s actions.

We can’t really say, though, that those “starting points” were unchosen (in one sense). In reality, any number of different actions on the part of the agents could have resulted in a significant difference of those starting points. As Kirzner argues in his water-hole example, perhaps the other parties were not as entrepreneurially alert to the resource as the appropriator, who situated himself more opportunely. Unless we have no qualms with making one person responsible for the erroneous or non-optimal actions of another (outside of a guardian-type relationship), then we can not consider the first-comer in an appropriation scenario unjustified in appropriating a resource.

By this logic, any cases of an agent’s “starting point” being determined by a choice among alternatives can not be validly considered a “starting point” with any moral weight. So what cases could be? It is safe to say that people do not appear independently of choice-making; that is, they are not exogenously given. This creates an ever-important moral relationship between parents and children. At best, we can define a starting point as a point exogenous to the decision-maker in question. For example, an agent’s birthplace is not chosen by the agent. However, it is not simply a brute fact of nature; it is the product of someone’s choices. So, it would make sense to explore the following avenue: if there are any qualms as to the harms to an agent caused by a particular starting point, any burden should be upon those who made the decisions to put that agent in that situation.

If we accept that having children is not something to which people are unconditionally entitled, but which they may do, and that having children also generates obligations for the parents, then complaints about a starting point like birthplace should always be directed toward parents. A poor family with five children can not validly claim circumstantial hardship (not, at least, without bending the boundaries of responsibility for one’s actions). It was their decision to take an action that would result in their having of five children.

Perhaps they were young and reckless, and made mistakes. Or, even, they made reasonable attempts at averting the situation by using birth control. But neither of these is a good reason as to why anyone outside this parent-child relationship, who made no decisions to create this situation, should have his freedom limited. Mistakes and unfortunate consequences of typically successful behavior still bear a clear relationship to one’s choices by definition. At the very least, if one says that children under some circumstances can be treated as exogenous and thus a basis for an entitlement, then he must also accept a variety of other unintentionally caused hardships as the basis for entitlements too.

The outsider, clearly, does not gain a duty from the choices of others. There certainly remains the question of “brute luck”: that, after tracing back history to the point before there were any moral decisions, some circumstances led to agent A’s relative situation being worse than agent B’s, though choices could alter the final outcomes. Still, it is seemingly impossible separate any circumstantial hardships from agent choice, and the power of those choices must be reflected before drawing a conclusion about luck. Even for seeming “acts of nature,” like natural disasters, one’s risk of being affected by them changes with a variety of decisions.

It seems that the axiom underlying the notion of arbitrary advantages is something like as follows: for some sort of situational disadvantage in appropriating something to make the advantaged appropriator unjustified in appropriation, it must be a factor independent of agent choice. So, then, the task of any “brute luck” entitlement framework is to find this exact handicap placed upon someone by circumstances, entirely separated from their choices. It must consider the range of possibilities across many different possible choices in sum, and determine whether one agent’s exogenous choice set’s “expected value” (for lack of a better concept) surpasses another.

Ultimately, a central point of the discussion here will remain unresolved: is person A justified in reaping the benefits of his unchosen advantage? If yes, then considerations of what is “directly earned” are a mere afterthought; if no, then we can not afford to ignore any advantages of his which are chosen.

[2] Ibid, pp. 202

[3] Ibid., pp. 202

[4] The first half of “Entrepreneurship, Entitlement, and Economic Justice” demonstrates how profit, even when there is error or asymmetric information (besides in cases of fraud), is always the result of just transfers in a voluntary exchange setting.

6 When describing the “finders, keepers” ethic, Kirzner makes it a point in a footnote to distinguish it from another ethic labeled “first-come, first-served” condemned by economist William Vickrey for being “of dubious equity.” I, too, would like to make such a distinction.

[6] Ibid. 1, pp. 208-209. Note that the bracketed clause in the center was meant to repair a grammatical anomaly in the original text.

In the section titled “Persons and bodies,” Steiner explores the issue of offspring rights, asking “how can we each own what we produce if we ourselves are others’ products?” Steiner whittles this question into what he calls “the paradox of universal self-ownership,” which he proposes to ameliorate via modification of the propositon, “All persons (originally) are the fruits of other persons’ labor.” He contends that reproduction occurs via a mixing of labor with natural resources in the form of “germ-line genetic information,” hence avoiding the contradiction with the proposition “all self-owners own the fruits of their labor” that generated the paradox in the first place. Thus, once children reach the age of majority, they become self-owners (all rights relating to their foetal and minority statuses are really legal powers and liberties held by adults).

Steiner turns to the question of the rights of the dead in “Persons and times.” Appealing to Hohfeldian jural relations—that rights and powers in one party are correlative to duties and liabilities in others—he argues that transfers of ownership involve an exchange of correlatives which is impossible with a testator. While a gifting process transfers rights and powers from the gifter to the receiver, and a restriction from the receiver to the gifter in turn, a testator incurs no such restriction. In other words, the transfer of ownership of property can only be performed by a living person. Thus, the dead have no rights and their property is rightfully treated like a natural resource. Steiner then connects his discussion of rights of the dead with rights of future persons: because having a right, according to Steiner, is to be in possession of the powers to waive or demand and enforce compliance with its correlative duty, a future person has no rights against present persons.

In the final section, “People and places,” Steiner underscores the meaninglessness of international boundaries with regard to persons’ original rights and the rights derived from them; they do not “suddenly evaporate” at arbitrarily drawn boundaries. National boundaries only demarcate group territorial holdings, so natural resource entitlement is global in scope. He also addresss the flaws in the ‘theory of magic dates,’ a problem faced by individual rights theorists like Locke who are anti-secession. He argues that there is no justification for a date prior to which rights-holders are empowered to jointly enter into agreements for the protection of their rights by an agency of their chosing, but after which those rights are truncated.

In the Epilogue, “Just Redistributions,” Steiner fleshes out his notions of redistribution, beginning with the process of redress as a mode of acquiring just titles to things, and how redress can be manifested through a global fund. Steiner generalizes that in a fully appropriated world, “each person’s original right to an equal portion of initially unowned things amounts to a right to an equal share of their total value.” Thus, “over-appropriated” persons owe a contribution of value to a global fund from their duties correlative to “under-appropriators’” original property rights. Another thesis advanced in the epilogue include that persons using “germ-line genetic information” must pay competitive rent on its value, as it is a natural resource; hence, adults with children with more valuable offspring (genetically speaking) must compensate those with offspring less so.

Locke’s Theory of Acquisition

Nozick’s goal in this section of AS&U is to, in his words, “introduce an additional bit of complexity into the structure of the entitlement theory.” To do this, he uses as a starting point Locke’s approach to justice in property acquisition—namely, that ownership of an object originates in one’s mixing of labor with that object. Nozick then proceeds to ask the standard gamut of questions calling attention to some difficulties in Locke’s theory of acquisition, like whether dumping a can of tomato juice in the ocean constitutes “mixing one’s labor” with the ocean. Essentially, the questions seek the strict boundary between what constitutes a mixing of labor sufficient for just acquisition and what does not. Under the Lockean notion of acquisition, it seems that one naïve interpretation would say that improving upon an object entails full ownership of the object. Of course, as Nozick points out, if the stock of improvable unowned objects is limited, this view is unfeasible. He uses the appropriation of a grain of sand as an example of one’s appropriation removing another’s liberty (as Hohfeld uses the word) to act on a previously unowned object, but intuitively suggests that this particular removal is not problematic. The central concern, he says, “is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others.”

Here, Nozick introduces a principle aimed at addressing that notion, which he terms “Locke’s proviso”: that an appropriation must leave ‘enough and as good left in common for others.’ One version of the proviso, if applied consistently, would make all past appropriations disallowed under Locke’s proviso once a single person’s situation were worsened by an appropriation. Nozick interjects that this argument actually depends on how stringently the proviso is interpreted. Further, he asks whether persons in a world where there are no more “accessible and useful unowned” objects are indeed worsened, citing numerous empirical considerations favoring private property vis-à-vis its satisfaction of the proviso. The difficulty of the argument, however, lies in answering the question “Lockean appropriation makes people no worse off than they would be how?” Nozick says answering this question lies beyond the scope of his work; he suggests that discovering the baseline could begin by estimating the general economic importance of original appropriation (say, by the percentage of income based on natural resources rather than human action). He closes with a note that these questions not only must be faced by advocates of private property; all theories of property (like collective property) must still, too, provide a theory of property rights legitimately originate.

The Proviso

Nozick starts off by assuming that any reasonable theory of justice must have some sort of proviso similar to a weak version of Locke’s. In short, if the position of others no longer at liberty to use an appropriated thing is worsened, a permanent bequeathable right to that thing can not be conferred by any valid process. The emphasis on the mode of worsening is important here, as the proviso does not encompass other modes of worsening, like worsening due to more limited opportunities to appropriate or “worsening” of one seller by another due to an appropriation leading to more market competition. Nozick also suggests that compensation of the appropriator to those whom he is worsening can satisfy the proviso.

Nozick then shifts the focus to justice in transfer, asserting that any theory of just acquisition must account for justice in transfer. Quite centrally, he posits, “If my appropriating all of a certain substance violates the Lockean proviso, then so does my appropriating some and purchasing all the rest from others who obtained it without otherwise violating the Lockean proviso.” Unlike the earlier argument in which the original appropriation violated the proviso as well as the appropriation which actually left a person worse off, it is only the combination of the original appropriation and the later transfers that is sufficient to violate the Lockean proviso.

Next, Nozick argues that one’s title to his holding includes the “historical shadow” of the proviso; namely, the title-holder may not transfer it into an agglomeration that violates the proviso, nor may he use it in a way that violates the proviso by making others worse than their baseline situation. Thus, one may not only not appropriate the only water hole in a desert and charge what he pleases, but he also may not charge what he pleases if it just so happens that circumstance destroys all other watering holes. Nozick briefly deviates for a moment to clarify that the owners’ rights are not eliminated in these cases, but simply “overridden to avoid some catastrophe” (not, however, in some ad hoc way, but internal to the given theory of property).

Delving into further exposition, Nozick asserts that someone owning the entire supply of something necessary for others to remain living does not always mean that appropriations leading up to this ownership left some people in a situation worse than the baseline. In service of this assertion, he cites the case of a medical researcher who finds an effective treatment for a disease but refuses to sell it except on his own terms; the researcher does not violate the proviso because he did not appropriate the chemical materials he used in a way that, through causing scarcity, violated the Lockean proviso. Ultimately, this demonstrates that the Lockean proviso is not an “end-state principle”; the structure of the situation that results is not relevant, but the nature of the actions taken to reach that result is. Following this, Nozick puts forward his belief that a free market system would not actually come into conflict with the Lockean proviso, making the “empirical historical” claim that people’s concern for the possibility of the proviso’s violation above other possibilities is only due to the effects of previous illegitimate state action, ending his exploration of the “complication in the entitlement theory introduced by the Lockean proviso.”

Nozick then moves on to address what he earlier labeled “the negative argument”: “the use of the claim that people don’t deserve their natural assets to rebut a possible counterargument to Rawls’ view. He has us consider the following counterargument to Rawls (“E”):

1. People deserve their natural assets.

2. If people deserve X, they deserve any Y that flows from X.

3. People’s holdings flow from their natural assets.

Therefore,

4. People deserve their holdings.

5. If people deserve something, then they ought to have it (and this overrides any presumption of equality there may be about that thing.)

Because Rawls would rebut this counterargument by denying the first premise, the connection between natural assets being morally arbitrary and the statement that distributive shares should not depend on natural assets is clearer. Here, Nozick attempts to show that the concept of “desert” needn’t be present in an argument of this sort for it to properly follow. He starts with a new counterargument, “F”:

1. If people have X, and their having X (whether or not they deserve to have it) does not violate anyone else’s (Lockean) right or entitlement to X, and Y flows from (arises out of, and so on) X by a process that does not itself violate anyone’s (Lockean) rights or entitlements, Then the person is entitled to Y.

2. People’s having the natural assets they do does not violate anyone else’s (Lockean) entitlements or rights.

The argument would then proceed to argue that people are entitled to the fruits of their labor and to what others voluntarily give or exchange with them. Nozick, quite succinctly, phrases his objection to holding equivalence between desert and entitlement:

It is not true, for example, that a person earns Y (a right to keep a painting he’s made, praise for writing a theory of Justice, and so on) only if he’s earned (or otherwise deserves) whatever he used (including natural assets) in the process of earning Y. Some of the things he uses he just may have, not illegitimately. It needn’t be that the foundations underlying desert are themselves deserved, all the way down.

Thus, since people can be described as entitled to their natural assets even if they can not be labeled as deserving of them, then an argument parallel to argument E with ‘are entitled to’ replacing ‘deserve’ throughout will be valid. Returning more explicitly to Rawls, Nozick then implies that Rawls’ argument is in a bind. Recognizing people’s entitlements to their natural assets could be necessary to avoid a strict application of the difference principle that would entail even stronger property rights than wealth-redistributive theories usually yield. Nozick cites Rawls’ counterargument that he avoids this dilemma, “because people in [Rawls'] original position rank the principle of liberty as lexicographically prior to the difference principle, applied not only to economic well-being but to health, length of life, and so on.” One of Nozick’s footnotes calls our attention to the discussion of collective assets later to further this objection.

Continuing, Nozick professes his inability to find a cogent argument to help support that variations in holdings caused by variations in natural assets ought to be eliminated or minimized. He connects the idea of the “moral arbitrariness” of natural assets to Rawls’ construction of the original position by pointing out that there must be an argument to “shape” the original position to exclude natural assets from the participants’ knowledge (i.e. there must be a justification for the veil of ignorance). Nozick argues that if a particular feature being arbitrary from a moral point of view is sufficient to fall under the veil of ignorance, then those behind the veil of ignorance should know nothing about themselves, because each of their features (like rationality, the ability to make choices, having a life span of more than three days, having a memory, ability to communicate) will be based on morally arbitrary facts (that the sperm and ovum that made them were genetically composed in a particular manner). However, Rawls’ construction of the original position has persons know some of these things.

At this point, Nozick stops to qualify his argument. He calls our attention to an ambiguity in the statement that “a fact is arbitrary from a moral point of view”: in one sense, it could mean that there is no moral reason why a fact ought to be; in another, it could mean that a fact is of no moral significance and has no moral consequences. Nozick states that rationality is not morally arbitrary in the second sense. Nonetheless, if rationality escapes exclusion for this reason, it now has a “partner in guilt”—natural assets—which must also escape exclusion for that reason. Thus, an entitlement theory similar to Rawls’ that holds that entitlements arise from or are at least dependent on such facts is called into question.

“Collective Assets”

Later in the book, Nozick aims to tackle Rawls’ seeming notion of “collective assets,” specifically referring to the idea that “everyone has some entitlement or claim on the totality of natural assets (viewed as a pool), with no one having differential claims.” He argues that a theory separating men from their talents, assets, abilities, and so on can only be adequate if one “presses very hard on the distinction between men [and those things],” noting that whether any conception of a coherent person remains when this distinction is made is an open question. Further, he states that talents and abilities are an asset to a free community, and are not part of a constant sum game, then asking whether extraction of more benefit is what justifies treating natural assets as a collective resources, leaving open the question of what justifies the extraction.

While the past century of feminism has brought forward proper recognition of the human equality of women, it has also brought with it an expansive baggage of mythology about the inherent characteristics of women, particularly in contrast to those of men. Trying my best not to create a straw man here, I’m going to summarize some elements of the mythology in question, initially held only by feminist thinkers on the fringe of social thought, but later trickling into popular culture: women are more gentle and caring than men; men are bloodthirsty, violent, possessive, etc. whereas women are not; women seek to always make everyone happy and prefer to cooperate, while men are selfish and competitive; and so forth. These beliefs are not restricted to radical feminists, but are often held to some degree in common social views on gender.

Fundamentally, each gender’s relationship to violence is the most important element of this mythology. The most basic and obvious evidence is often cited to demonstrate that women are just as capable of violence as men. In the most limited and conventional sense they certainly are: some have committed violent crimes, some have become soldiers who have fought on the front lines. It’s not only males who have committed the very direct acts of harming another human being. This isn’t an appealing answer to most forms of the feminine mythology, which can always respond by citing that men have a higher tendency to do so or that women only do those things because they are made man-like, generally finding some rationalization of the most basic evidence against their position.

And fairly enough, that basic evidence simply lacks nuance. Female violence goes beyond just what I described there, though: women have also been cooks, mechanics, and played other support roles for war machines. They have become police officers. They have become politicians! One needn’t shed blood immediately with his (or her) own hands to be violent, but naturally the same mythology that obscures and sanctions the violence of the state has also rendered women immune to the same criticism. Few people would reject the following principle: that not only is ordering and directing violence an act of violence, but complicity in violence is also to some degree a violent act by the complacent. Just because men have been biologically selected to physically act out the violence does not mean that the participants in the support system for those acts of violence are somehow above it. Indeed, female social circles appear plagued with conflict and generally the antithesis of cooperation. As the anecdotal evidence goes, women conspire against each other, betray trust, can generally behave in a passive-aggressive manner, etc. These are not violent acts per se, but still express a similar sociopathic character as male physical violence.

This leads to the greatest area in which females can contribute as much to the ills of the world as men; a place where sociopathic personalities can be expressed into life-long sociopathic tendencies in others. The strongest mythology in society relating to women is most certainly the mythology of motherhood. The pains of child labor are respected; child rearing is revered. While there is truth to those troubles of motherhood, they are frequently used to excuse the actions of mothers everywhere. Even mothers cite it themselves, as a trump card in any dispute: “I brought you into this world! I raised you! You came out of my vagina!” That suffering is treated as a blank check that absolves any future actions on the mothers’ part – a great thing for the mother, considering all that’s needed to get that check signed is to have sex and give birth. Motherhood, by this principle, equates to a kind of moral ownership.

The moral omnipotence of motherhood is, unsurprisingly, pragmatically appropriate. The power disparity between parents and children is the greatest power disparity in the world. This applies to fathers, obviously, but because the role of females has developed as the primary caregiver, mothers are in a position to exercise this power disparity on a more frequent basis. Power disparities can be accompanied by abuse, and when the mechanisms that check that abuse are eliminated, the abuser is in an ideal position to extract the maximum from the abused. Generally, if someone encountered someone who was manipulative, even only once physically abusive, or simply uninteresting, among other unpleasant characteristics, they would choose not to associate with that person. Yet a majority of people always return to their parents’ sides and take care of them in old age, repeating adages like “love thy father and mother” – a phenomenon most certainly attributable to that initial power disparity. Everyone would look at a man walking up to an adult in a wheelchair and beating him up and verbally abusing him as a most horrid moral act. The great irony, of course, is that the man in a wheelchair has infinitely greater power than a young child does.

Just by this intuition, it’s easy to argue that the worst kind of violence that can be committed is to abuse children. Mothers are in an optimal position to do this. Given the omnipresence of familial mythology, mothers’ primary caregiving, and the clearly frequent exercise of parental power, it is impossible to conclude that females have some kind of intrinsic immunization against the use of violence. While they may be more hesitant or less disposed to commit direct acts of bodily harm, they are – most importantly – not less likely to commit ethical wrongdoing.

Movies generally incorporate this formula for much entertainment, but who’s going to be on the receiving end of a shield bash and a spear to the face? Oh, countless evil henchmen, how we appreciate thee for thy action-opportunity-creating-and-often-ineffectual-bodies: Hide-clad barbarians; tin-can black knights; stormtroopers and TIE pilots; the endless baddies who get tooled by Superman, Batman, and James Bond; the dudes who get their asses kicked one by one by Bruce Lee. In their stories, those dudes are evil – all of them. I’ll grant at the very least the premise that they either had it coming for working for some nefarious jackass, or were simply caught in the middle of what was their ass-kicker’s right to defend himself, avenge his family, champion his people, protect the rainforest fairies and trees, or defend his right to defend himself.

But what about the red-shirted Ensigns of the moving picture world? The good guys who are slaughtered beyond count? I particularly remember one scene in Excalibur in which Arthur, in his campaign to unite the fiefdoms under his control, joins a siege in progress. Countless troops die on both sides, until Arthur reaches the enemy lord, and the lord surrenders when Arthur’s ready to claim his severed testicles in the name of Camelot. But the lord then proclaims his undying allegiance to the great King Arthur. Meanwhile, obscurely in the backdrop, dead and dying soldiers lie scattered everywhere, now allies in being the “good guys,” probably wondering “well, what the fuck was all that for?” But: “the story? it’s not about them.”

This is exactly what I want to talk about here. Fine, it’s a story, I get it, a pretty good one at that. But when warnography is everywhere in which the lives of the pawns don’t matter as long as we’re “looking at the big picture,” how does this translate into our values? Over 4000 soldiers dead in Iraq; don’t worry, we’ve got 1.1 million more of them. 1 million Iraqi civilian casualties; no problemo, they’ve got 27 million more who are freer than ever! Yes, sometimes losses are inevitable, and trade-offs must be made to protect life. Recognition of this fact, however, does not require ideological indoctrination that “little” trade-offs are always acceptable as long as you look at the big picture, because it essentially puts a utilitarian or otherwise freaky morally mystical spin on things which can lead to all kinds of horrid moral results.

I can imagine a myth-loving, military-masturbating, “individualistic” conservative who likely enjoyed an excellent childhood with love, hugs, and divine command saying now: “What are you some kind of dipshit communist! If everything were up to you there would be no heroes! Every story would be about living in a shit-hole gulag! Everybody would be fucking starving! Get real asshole!!!!”

As interesting as the prospect of getting real asshole is, my position does not imply that stories should be egalitarian, proletarian, collectivist, etc. in their character developments. This is the conclusion fallaciously drawn by leftists, rightists, centrists, and other douchebags inhabiting the discontinuous function of mainstream social and political thought. We live in an era of false dichotomies: you’re either a Democrat, or a Republican. You either want to tax everyone to hell for large welfare programs, or you want to tax everyone to hell to fund large foreign wars. You’re either with our terrifying rampage of violence around the world, or you’re a terrorist who wants to kill Americans. The cliché is at least superficially correct: the world isn’t just black and white. In fact, it’s white, and non-white, but everyone seems to be thinking in terms of red and blue. It’s the false dichotomy with which we’re being constantly presented in mainstream culture, whether it’s in political values, in social dialogue, or in art forms. Much like how not all political systems are not stuck between the imaginary poles of the individual’s success at the expense of society (fascism) and “society’s” success at the expense of the individual (socialism), not all portrayals of individualistic triumph need be subjected to this false dichotomy. On one hand, anything that challenges tales of kings or valiant warriors is a communistic, individual-hating endeavor, and anything that demonstrates proud and successful individuals must be selfish aristocratic capitalism that disregards everyone else’s well-being, alienates the worker, and rapes carebears.

It’s certainly true that there is an expressive utility in focusing on individual characters and their heroic displays of virtue; in great irony, even collectivists will invoke this, because reality forces them to. Talking about how a class triumphed over another class can maybe last them a poem, song, or national anthem, but then they simply run out of actions a gelatinous blob of a concept can possibly do before lapsing into overt absurdity. Classes can, well, triumph, struggle, march, protest, fight, and if you’re feeling particularly loose with your concepts, shout a slogan in unison, carry a banner/flag, etc. They can’t tell a joke, smoke a cigarette, be introspective, walk down empty streets and encounter an old friend, among all the other things that fun characters do in interesting stories. In Soviet Russia, concept define YOU!

However, in good art, individual triumph goes beyond mere artistic instrument to become the theme and essence of the art itself. In the case of Arthurian myth, or the exaggerated tales of Che Guevara, there is individual triumph, but that triumph is geared toward the attainment of some good beyond the individual. They dramatically sacrificed themselves as a bright and shining light from the sky enveloped their body, filling them with erotic love for swords and mankind and what-not. Their actions moved toward the fulfillment of some prophecy set long before their births, whether it was the return of the king’s rule with Excalibur at his side, or the victory of the working class over the evil capitalists. Philosophically, both of these narratives are a heap of garbage, though perhaps entertaining as fiction- in suspension of disbelief. Yet stories like these must certainly affect society’s values, or, rather, reflect society’s values. The easy story this might tell is that people hold different viewpoints. What this tells me is that society is wildly revolving between different versions of what is effectively the same viewpoint: that the individual does not determine goodness, but something up and above him does. I guess this is what’s necessary to make a war film- an interesting one- just like this is what’s necessary to make a war, period.

Excalibur, overall, is a cool movie. A keen eye must be pointed toward it and movies of its kind, however, to distinguish entertainment from pure warnography- those stories and images that get us habituated to and accepting of the use of state violence. Even more importantly, we must not let the “big picture” conception of “the good guys winning” lead anyone to believe that the individual can be, without his consent, forfeited on the behalf of any cause. Beyond that, we must also prevent the “big picture” from leading anyone to believe that the individual should ever feel a moral obligation to forfeit himself to the satisfaction of fictional moral rules. Parental influence, religious parasitism, and mass-media warnography generate moral demands and glorification of sacrifice and violence in children’s minds, perpetuating violence in the world. So next time you’re watching Star Trek, take a moment to lament the Ensign who beamed down and never came back.

Here’s a link to the movie on Amazon, with an excellent price. Hot 80s sex scene for $2.50 + shipping? awesomes!

The problem of induction can be characterized as having two sides: the epistemological problem, which is how to distinguish between good and bad inductive methods, and the metaphysical problem, which is how to altogether distinguish between good and bad inductions.[1] On the Wittgensteinian view put forward here, we will offer agreement with Hume’s response to the epistemological problem. However, the epistemological response is only possible when predicated upon some idea of a good induction—before we can determine reliability, which is a tabulation of frequency of “successes,” we must first determine what we mean by “success.” Fundamentally, the question of good and bad inductions is what underlies the real crux of an attack on induction: in most cases, how we might traditionally define truth (particularly in a realist fashion) is going to lead to a susceptibility of our inductions to skeptical objection. Indeed, some have been inclined to, in accepting Hume’s arguments on induction, concede that the metaphysical problem of induction is insoluble.[2] Given their criteria for truth and falsehood, this is not surprising.

First, by investigating the terms used in Hume’s argument—particularly “necessity”—we will show how the argument against induction must presuppose induction to succeed. Then, by clarifying our picture of truth, we will argue that the metaphysical problem is in one sense irrelevant to our own position, but show a sense in which we do account for how good inductions are separated from bad inductions. Before proceeding into our arguments, however, we must explain Hume’s arguments against induction.

Hume on the Problem of Induction[3]

In Book I, Part III of the Treatise of Human Nature (1740), Hume formulated what would come to be known as the problem of induction so commandingly—especially for his time—that the problem is also accordingly named “Hume’s Problem.” While the contemporary terminology of induction does not enter his discussion, Hume’s primary concern in Part III was with notions of causality and causal inference.

Because we have no impression of the relation of causation, Hume seeks to alternatively couch causation in terms of human thought, and hence defines a “cause” like so: “An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter.” He provides several definitions in the course of his work, but this adequately characterizes his general notion of causation.

Hume distinguishes causal belief from causal inference, the latter of which is only the anticipation of similar conjunctions between a precedent and some state from past conjunctions when the precedent is observed. Causal beliefs, on the other hand, are of the form “[Precedent] X causes Y,” which comes about from reflection on causal inferences. Hume’s framing of the problem of induction, implicitly through his discussion about causation, then, is as follows: in trying to find an account for good or reliable inductions, if we take the statement “all past experiences of X have also been Y” to be a statement of causation, then adding “t is X” to it should yield the good induction “t, not yet observed, is also Y.” However, since causality is not an objective feature of the world, this is not a possibility. The Humean problem, then, is to adjudicate among inductive habits in the absence of any objective distinction like causality, broken down into the epistemological and metaphysical parts described in the introduction. Broadly speaking, Hume’s point is that judgments about future or otherwise unknown instances are problematic, because such judgments are neither a report of an experience, nor a logical consequence of prior experience. This leaves an uncertain space in which we have multiple means of making those judgments that yield different results, but must find a way of choosing the best one (the epistemological problem). Further, we must define “best” in this context (the metaphysical problem).

Some have suggested that Hume has set induction up for failure by making induction far too stringent in suggesting that it proceeds from the premises “All observed Fs have also been Gs” and “a is an F” to the conclusion “a, not yet observed, is also a G.” Instead, they contend that the proper conclusion is “it is therefore probable that a, not yet observed, is also a G.”[4] Hume’s response is simple enough: probabilistic connections are no different from causal connections in that they are not to be found in our experience of the world, but they depend on habits of the mind. Thus, while we can complicate matters more by incorporating probability, the same problem remains.

Generally, Hume puts forward the following dilemma to demonstrate the impossibility of justifying any sort of induction. Given that any justification must be either deductive or inductive, deductive conclusions (which are necessarily true) can not justify inductive conclusions (which are never necessarily true). On the other horn of the dilemma, inductive justification of induction would be circular, since it uses the very principle it sets out to defend. Thus, it is clear that by this reasoning, induction is unjustifiable.

Hume qualifies this conclusion by saying that we may review our inferences and reflect upon their reliability, forming a hierarchy of meta-level inductions—specifically, a chain of inductions about inductions about inductions and so on. Reflecting on these inductions in sequence progressively increases our uncertainty ad infinitum, leading Hume to ask how we “retain a degree of belief, which is sufficient for our purpose, either in philosophy or in common life?”[5] Hume’s answer, in short, is to propose two general epistemic rule types: those that lead us to singular predictive inferences (in other words, our basic inductive methodology), and those that we apply as corrective or qualificatory measures toward the products of rules of the first type. The former could be described as some system of sorting out confirming and disconfirming instances, and the establishment of a threshold of evidence at which we accept or reject an inference. This could also be framed probabilistically (e.g. Bayesian induction). The latter type of rule would form some system of delimiting the precise significance of an inference given its evidence; for example, it might show us in what ways an inference may be falsified, and thus the level of certainty with which we should treat a particular proposition.

The Non-Problem of Induction

A Wittgensteinian response to any philosophical “problem” can be described as a reduction of the problem to a linguistic puzzle, and a subsequent resolution of that puzzle. In short, a linguistic puzzle is a seemingly insoluble contradiction that can be successfully rectified by clarifying the definitions of the terms in use. Once the definitions have been clarified, the next stage is to determine whether the conclusion (whose terms have also been clarified) still follows from the premises, and whether the premises are true. Once this has been done, a problem should have been shown to be merely confusion. This methodology is most strongly associated with Wittgenstein’s most significant work, Philosophical Investigations.[6]

Given this background, we can now freely address the problem of induction. To show how the problem of induction can be reduced to a linguistic puzzle, we will first return to a simplified formulation of it: no inductive conclusions necessarily follow from their premises, because we have no justification for believing that the unobserved will be like the observed once we observe it (a generalization of “the future will be like the past.”) The justificatory problem of induction, put in simple terms by Hume, states it similarly: the definite outcomes of deduction can not justify the indefinite outcomes of induction, and induction can not justify induction without circularity. Thus, we are not justified in believing the conclusion of an inductive argument.

Now, to prove that this is merely a linguistic puzzle, we have to show how clarifying our terms in this argument will dissipate the problem, whether in showing some self-contradictory aspect of the argument, showing that the conclusion that follows from those definitions is unimportant to us, showing that the desired conclusion of the argument does not follow from the premises, etc. By an “unimportant conclusion,” we only mean that all further implications of that conclusion do not constitute anything that merits addressing or reparation. In other words, the conclusion made to have followed from the premises is not a philosophical problem requiring a solution on our part, but just some proposition that conforms to its premises. Our criteria for importance is not simply soundness, as there are many sound arguments that are not of philosophical concern to us. Thus, it is certainly the case that if we define “justification for a belief” as “immunity to the logical possibility of subsequent falsifying events,” we could easily concoct an argument from skeptical premises that (properly) concludes that we are not “justified” in believing any proposition because we have not immunized it from subsequent falsifying events. But, as we will see, this conclusion sounds important because it uses a word which is usually of epistemic importance (justification), but is in fact unimportant because it fails to have any implications worth considering.

We can apply this method to the problem of induction by first investigating the employment of the idea of necessity in the argument against induction. Asserting that there is no necessary connection between matters of fact is not incorrect, given a particular meaning of the word “necessary”—namely, where “necessity” implies conformity to the rules of deductive reasoning. Given that induction has been identified as non-deductive because of the “unfounded” assumption that the future will be like the past, then we can conclude that there is no “necessary” connection between inductive arguments and their conclusions. Asserting that this poses some sort of epistemic problem is a mistake, however. In other words, clarifying the definitions as we have, this conclusion follows from the premises, but it does not tell us anything important. The sense in which we mean “necessary” to establish this conclusion is much connected to the sense in which we used “justified” above: it produces a conclusion that sounds scary because of what we associate with the words in it, but can only establish its conclusion by redefining those words in a way that makes the conclusion ineffective.

Naturally, a defender of induction would be impelled to ask “why is the assumption that the future will be like the past unfounded?”; but note that we are returning to the justificatory dilemma once again. In the dilemma, Hume has ruled out induction justifying induction, on the basis that it is a circular argument. But Hume must find circular arguments unacceptable for some reason: specifically, because of deductive logic. We know from this that the only way to “justify” anything, as the word is used in the argument, is to find a deductive argument for it. So it is evident that understanding the exact implications of accepting the notion of necessity as it arises in deductive logic as our standard for justifiability will help us understand why the conclusion that there is no “necessary” connection between inductive arguments and their conclusions is not important. In fact, we will now show how using deductive logic as a standard of justifiability (in this context) renders the argument against induction useless.

Much like the concept of infinitude, the concept of necessity has no direct referent in our sense experience. Because we have implicitly rejected an a priori account for it, we can only say that the notion of necessity is an effect of our repeat experiences and interactions with the world which represents an effective certitude with which we expect some association to hold. We say that by necessity, the sun rising in the east is associated with morning, but this is an expression of an effective certainty than a certainty so as to assert our omniscience; we simply have little incentive to mention the remaining logical possibility that the sun might not rise in the east. Hume’s account of necessity is the same:

Upon this head I repeat what I have often had occasion to observe, that as we have no idea, that is not deriv’d from an impression, we must find some impression, that gives rise to this idea of necessity, if we assert we have really such an idea. In order to this I consider, in what objects necessity is commonly suppos’d to lie; and finding that it is always ascrib’d to causes and effects, I turn my eye to two objects suppos’d to be plac’d in that relation; and examine them in all the situations, of which they are susceptible. I immediately perceive, that they are contiguous in time and place, and that the object we call cause precedes the other we call effect. In no one instance can I go any farther, nor is it possible for me to discover any third relation betwixt these objects. I therefore enlarge my view to comprehend several instances; where I find like objects always existing in like relations of contiguity and succession.

Clearly, Hume adheres to our view that the epistemic origins of an idea must reside in sense-experiences (“impressions”). Though he was speaking about causal necessity in this passage, his reasoning ensures that he accepts that our idea of deductive logic is also the consequence of a series of impressions. So, given that, we have actually gone ahead and strengthened Hume’s justificatory dilemma by turning it into just a lemma: the option of justifying induction deductively is nonsensical for reasons that prevent us from even admitting it into our discussion. To justify using deduction, we must first justify induction.

Hence, the conclusion of the argument that constitutes the problem of induction, that we are not “justified” in believing the conclusion of inductive arguments, is itself dependent on an inductive argument. Here, we have reached the skeptical error of externalizing logic, which creates arguments more paradoxical than unimportant on this account. If the logical possibility that things could be some other way than we believe them is used to undermine all of our beliefs, then no beliefs undermined in this way can be believed while constructing logical possibilities. But the construction of logical possibilities is only possible given the inductive process that creates our idea of necessity. Further, we cannot sensibly falsify (or take any other action standing outside of) logic, since we can not describe what a non-logical world would look like.[7] Yet this is precisely what, by implication, skepticism requires by questioning our foundations for logic, which are the very experiences and thus inferences from experience that they challenge.

Because Hume does not want to make extra-sensory assertions at all, he is then also committed to holding to this account for the very logical principles he uses to criticize inductive statements. Thus, we have established that the argument attempting to establish that induction is problematic implicitly must assert what it intends to disprove. By showing how we can not use deductive necessity as a criteria for justification (at the epistemic level), we have eliminated the standard by which induction is considered to be problematic. More generally, we have implied that some coordination of repeat sense impressions is the only means we have of generating any criteria of justification. And we can properly call such coordination “induction,” as it is indeed in what “the problem of induction” purports to show defect. By this, we have shown how the general argument against induction fails.

More clarification of the unproblematic nature of induction is still worthwhile, nonetheless. For one, we are still pressed with the question of importance of skeptical arguments such as the argument against induction, as suggested earlier. If the lack of necessity of inductive conclusions prevents us from attaining omniscience—an immunity of our theories to subsequent falsifying events—and can validly offer no prescriptive changes in our behavior, there seems to be no value in pointing it out. It is part of the unavoidable limits of our world. We can label this state as our being “unjustified” in believing inductive conclusions, but what have we changed by doing so? We could easily say a belief is unjustifiable when it does not reduce its conclusions to the properties of cheese. We must ask, “Unjustified relative to what?” The word must be put in some context to have any implications. Saying that we are “unjustified” because we can not look beyond the limits of our world—a precise lack of context—can not have any condemning epistemic implications, for the simple reason that there is no prescription that could ever conceivably change it! To speak meaningfully about “justification,” then, we must affix it to some sensory phenomena to which we can appeal to differentiate among the justified and the unjustified. In this regard, there is still a sense in which we have “justification”; in Humean terms, that sense is predicated on the notion that some inductions are more reliable than others.

Finding out how to distinguish the reliability of different inductive methods is the epistemological component of the problem of induction. More or less, Hume’s response to this part of the problem works quite well: Hume’s intuition that induction about induction begins to yield how we separate good inductive habits from bad ones is straightforward enough. We look at different inductive methods applied over time, and see how often each method produced a good induction. From this, we discern the reliability of different methods.

It is in reference to the so-called metaphysical problem of induction that we can offer more clarity regarding the validity of induction. Certainly, the metaphysical problem, if unanswered, leaves the epistemological problem insoluble as well: after all, we do need some account for what is a “good” versus “bad” induction in order to determine which inductive methods are more reliable than others. Yet, having tossed out criteria for “good” and “bad” such as “corresponding with the external world,” the answer is quite simple: there is no metaphysical problem because there is no metaphysics (at least in the relevant sense).

One posing the metaphysical problem might ask: if we only have sense experiences, what is there that could possibly provide objectivity? Indeed, what reason do we have to sort and organize different experiences to form theories? Without constraints, our sense experiences are simply floating variables from which we could construct an infinite amount of different theories with no difference in consequence. Thus, just as a 2-variable equation has infinite solutions until another equation constrains it, so too does what is “true” have infinite solutions until we affix some constraint to our interpretations. In short, our interpretation of sensory phenomena only has implications when those phenomena arise to some degree outside of our will, and we have particular goals for those phenomena. We have particular desires to bring about certain things in our sense experiences, but we can not simply will these things to come about. We wish to taste something sweet, but no amount of willing a taste of sweetness into our mouths gets us that. Ultimately, this lies against a background of what we understand to be necessary for accomplishing our goals (life) and what we understand to be the end of all accomplishment (death). Simply put, our “metaphysics” is one of life versus death.

That we can not merely will certain things to occur is a basis for objectivity in interpreting our sense experiences; our acceptance of mortality is what gives us the motive to take one interpretation over all and call it “truth,” even if only by the actions we take. 14^th-century explorers had two competing views of the earth, one saying it was flat, one saying it was round. Without fear of death or fear of a voyage done for nothing (both objective constraints), this debate would have been meaningless. After all, there are infinite logical possibilities as to why a flat-earth theory might still prevail over a round-earth. But that explorers found new lands and, after sailing in one direction long enough, wound up in the same place, and have acted on the principle of “circumnavigation” successfully up until the present, has compelled people to accept a round-earth theory over a flat one. People who have acted on this principle, other things equal, have achieved the goals they set out, and they and others will continue to act on that principle. In this sense, people have accepted the round-earth theory as truth; it was a “good” induction.

Thus, good inductions are separated from bad ones on the basis of how successfully they inform our goal-directed actions, where success is measured by the presence of a desired sense experience. By our having thrown out realism, the only case of error that can even be meaningfully considered is where some theory posited based on sense experiences is later falsified by a subsequent sense experience. On our view, this is no longer a problem with induction, of course. It is merely a case in which a particular induction has been identified as “bad” through induction.

Undoubtedly, we can be continually pressed to justify each successive answer we have given. Why shouldn’t we doubt mortality, or anything else foundational to the above discussion? Certainly, there is a point at which we can no longer give any justification, yet it is the very point from which we get our notion of justification. We do superficially agree with the skeptic that such foundational propositions lie beyond any empirical verification, but this is only because our notion of empirical verification is solely derived from these kinds of propositions. At some point, we must reach bedrock: certain beliefs “underlie all questions and thinking.”[8] Even if we imagined the most hard-core doubter telling us that we have “no reason” to believe the “biological myth” of death, he could not be using anything but human-contextual concepts in, say, appealing to our self-interest through telling us that what we believe is false and that we ought to change it. In that way, doubt is only possible with knowledge, so an all-encompassing, ‘hyperbolic’ doubt is clearly nonsensical; in even thinking of that doubt, much more communicating that doubt, we are invariably asserting things that we know.

In addition to questioning the logical feasibility of Hume’s general argument against induction, we have now also supplemented it with an answer to the fundamental question of how we separate good inductions from bad inductions. Most importantly, we have shown how a careful examination of the terms at play in the argument against induction demonstrates how it relies on a contrived sense of necessity as a criterion for justification and improperly treats this idea of necessity as standing independently of induction. In this, we showed how induction is, in fact, the basis of all criteria in evaluating the justification of our beliefs. Then, in addressing the metaphysical problem, we showed how meaningful criteria are generated against a back-drop of goal-oriented action.

With this answer to the supposed problem of induction in hand, we have a kind of argument which, when generalized, defeats skeptical arguments against empiricism. By reducing our criteria for the truth or falsehood of a proposition to its relation to strictly sensory phenomena, we have removed the possibility of skeptical error, and brought the concept of error within the boundaries of the senses: we can only be mistaken in a sense that is relative to other sense experiences. Hume, imaginably, would have appreciated this, as he did not desire to be a thoroughgoing skeptic; he only wished to fight off philosophical phantoms, much like Wittgenstein did. Again, like Wittgenstein, he sought a rational basis for our norms of speech and action, but found the answers of philosophers to be mystical and woefully deficient. Indeed, he did not see a convincing means of showing how we could justifiably believe in induction, and retreated to a seemingly resigned position of “custom and habit.” Our goal here, as was Wittgenstein’s goal, was to show how we are justified in believing in our senses, and thus induction—without resignation.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid. This exposition of Hume’s account of the problem is paraphrased from this source.

[4] Ibid., section 2: “Hume”

[5] Ibid., section 7: “Hume’s Dilemma Revisited”

[6] The Wikipedia entry on Philosophical Investigations explains Wittgenstein’s approach well, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Method_and_presentation

[7] Tractatus, 3.031

[8] On Certainty pp. 415.

In a way, said vandal has deployed the concept of the destructive prank put forward in American Graffiti as an argument for taking a particular action. This action, he believes, will be a functional means to his end (a specific kind of destruction of police property with desired aesthetic consequences). Naturally, one would reject this argument, probably retorting “Don’t believe everything you see in movies.” Indeed, on the popular T.V. show MythBusters, this was tested: a police cruiser was put under the circumstances portrayed in the movie, and it was discovered that the axle could not be removed from the chassis after several attempts. Essentially, what the MythBusters team did was test the validity of the argument, “it occurred in the fictional story of American Graffiti; therefore, it will occur when we try it.”

Like the screenplay writer puts a concept in the script and the director’s crew executes it on the screen, the philosopher postulates a concept in his writing. Through visual representation, the movie scene symbolizes the event of a normal police cruiser’s axle being cleanly pulled off as a result of its attachment to a fixed object; the concept is conveyed to us like the words on a page convey to us the concept of “the People” or “goodness.” The “police-car-axle-trick” concept is a more tangible one, but in due course, it is just as well a concept as “the ideal city.”

Looking in reality for referents for these concepts—or their sub-components—is an act of verifying arguments invoking those concepts. Those arguments which fail to provide concepts with referents sufficient to reasonably draw their conclusions can be described as holding concepts as primary. No philosophers who posit these arguments, naturally, would agree that this is unreasonable. In fact, some may even embrace those kinds of arguments as the only kinds of arguments one could possibly make on the subject matter. The suggestion that concepts are primary in a belief system is hence either one of the philosopher’s own implicit metaphysical and epistemological admission, or one of simple description of a belief system’s fundamental nature.

Here, my intention in exploring belief systems from the perspective of the concepts they employ and the manner in which they employ them is not to form a strictly bounded definition of “the primacy of concepts,” though one could perhaps be created; instead, my intention is to create a helpful way of thinking about how many belief systems—whether they are epistemic, religious, political, social, and the like, or comprehensive—predicate their conclusions upon conceptualization over empirical evidence.

Epistemology

A thorough explanation of what is meant by “concept” is necessary for the proceeding discussion, due to the widely varying use of the word across different disciplines and philosophical viewpoints. The phrase “a concept” refers to an abstract idea in the human mind used to organize sensory information, often expressed through language. Concepts serve as a means by which thought is simplified and communication is made possible, via the distillation of immense amounts of mixed sensory information into discrete and meaningful units. The process of abstraction is the means by which such distillation occurs.

Though they are constructed from information gathered from the senses about the external world, concepts only exist within the human mind. Matter and energy are arranged in a particular way out in the world, which lends itself to certain sensual impressions upon a perceiver; commonalities are then sorted out in the perceiver’s brain to create general attributes or sets of attributes. A natural difficulty of speaking in this manner, of course, is that we can not conceive of a universe without our conceptualization; in other words, we can not think of reality without using concepts like “matter” and “energy” in doing so.

To continue the tradition of epistemologists’ uncanny obsession with furniture, we can begin with the concept “chair.” In common understanding, it is something intended for humans to sit on, with a flat surface and some kind of foundation to separate that flat surface from the ground. There are many different kinds of chairs: rocking chairs, swivel chairs, dining room chairs, patio chairs, and so on. The concept “chair” holds the attributes all of those chairs share in common.

There are certainly things in the world that fit the definition of “chair” given above, but what about the imagination? An easy and commonly cited example of a concept in the imagination is the Pegasus: a winged, white, and horse-like creature. Examining the Pegasus, we find that concepts need not have a direct referent in reality, though at some level the concepts that constitute them must. Thus, the first person to conceive of Pegasus never once had to experience a Pegasus but, having seen horses, white things, and winged creatures, combined some of the attributes he saw into one concept. That we can conceive of something does not imply that such a thing exists somewhere, in the spatio-temporal sense; it only implies that some component parts of the Pegasus exist.

While the process of abstraction requires multiple instances of an attribute for abstraction to make sense, a concept itself is not necessarily an abstraction but can be built of abstractions. Those things in the world to which a concept refers can also be unique things. That there is only one Empire State Building does not mean that the Empire State Building, in our minds, is not a concept. It is a concept built of other concepts, or, better said, is a member of multiple and sometimes overlapping classes of objects: things with a name, buildings, edifices taller than 1,000 feet, and so forth. A concept is hence not necessarily a particular abstraction, but can be a combination of abstractions. A concept without a direct referent—like Pegasus—is one composed of abstractions that do not jointly hold with any object in reality. There are things in the world with wings, horns, and horse-ness, but there are no things that are all three.

In a theoretical context, the process of concept deconstruction is, in logical terms, reducible down to the most basic logical unit of reality. If one had knowledge of the most elementary unit of existence (supposing such a thing was real) and all of its properties, he could hypothetically conceptualize anything: all manner of materials, phenomena, organisms, machines, etc. The human mind, however, is limited to what the senses can perceive and what the brain can process.

Those objects in the world which we immediately perceive help accelerate the process of creating concepts, especially useful ones. Birds, for example, provided to human beings the concept that things could move above the ground; their wings inspired the idea that friction between air and a surface can create a force opposite to gravity.

Someone very intelligent could have figured out that he could make a flying object after watching a leaf fall off a tree, or even just by the feeling of wind pushing against him. It is the first-hand experience of aerodynamics, though, that allowed those inventors to create the concept of aerodynamics. Psycho-epistemologically, all conceivable things must have their origins in some minimum level of experience.

In light of this definition, a concept itself can not be invalid by definition, since what makes it a concept is that it can be conceived of in the human mind. Words are then used to signify concepts and their relation to each other. Each concept, with relation to evidence (the referents of its constituents) in reality, has a range of arguments in which it can be validly used. However, a concept can also be used in an invalid manner.

One may argue that accepting certain concepts as reality can generate desirable consequences. Here, we must make an important distinction between accepting concepts as reality and contextually employing concepts as functional metaphors. In mathematics, for example, complex numbers (even roots of negative numbers) can be argued to be lacking a referent or even inconceivable in reality (like a “round square”). Applying mathematical conventions, though, they can be written down and operated upon. It turns out that the use of the complex number system has resulted in several useful implications about the real number system. The idea of validity, as used here, however, relates to the kinds of claims that are made on the basis of a concept itself. The complex number system as described above serves as a functional concept employed in context of another conceptual system—namely, the system of mathematical operators.

Suppose the adoption of the “legal fiction” of a corporation—treating it like an individual in the legal system, among all the other implications as we know them—was argued for with the justification that it would increase the overall economic product of a society by reducing the costs of causing legal disputes at a greater rate than its negative consequences. Such a hypothesis can be empirically tested. However, the concept of the corporation as an autonomous entity in reality, of course, is a strange one: there is no such being that is conscious, self-aware, can take action, etc. that represents the totality of what is involved in legal proceedings involving a corporation as an individual (all of its assets). Individual human minds make decisions and take actions within that corporation.

The corporation as individual serves as a functional concept employed in context of another conceptual system—in this case, the legal system. Thus, there is a distinct difference between a concept’s being a convenient way of thinking about something—not unlike a metaphor—versus its possession of a referent in reality. To clarify (or maybe jumble things some more), the concept of a metaphor being useful or effective is a concept with a referent in reality. The concept of the food pyramid does not imply that the universe intrinsically organizes food in the shape of a pyramid; however, conceptualizing a healthy diet as a pyramid is a useful tool in teaching one how to proportion his diet.

Warranting clarification is what constitutes a valid claim about reality—or, in other words, what truth is. Phenomenologically, all truth is ultimately a matter of human action. We can not look “behind the curtain” of human experience. In light of that, truth as “correspondence with the external world” is an unverifiable hypothesis, formulated on the basis of a god’s-eye view of human experience. The material consequences of human existence and experience can be the only basis upon which a meaningful idea of “truth” is founded. With skeptical arguments pushed to their limits, life and death are the ultimate standards of knowledge: where we fail to act in accordance with our sense-perceptions, we are hurt—that we are having an experience of pain can not be doubted—or we die, after which doubt seems to be unlikely. Empirical methodology is the adherence to the evidence of the senses and the recognition of its validity. From the standpoint of the mind, the senses are a brute fact; all theories which try to deny the evidence of the senses or to construct truth via some non-empirical means have their origins invariably in the senses. One must have knowledge in order to doubt.

The evidence of the senses has produced a methodology—reason, the scientific method, etc.—which has repeatedly led to successful human existence through consistent integration of sense data. Belief systems in which concepts are primary contradict that methodology. Accordingly, devotion to those belief systems bears the consequences of failure to act upon fact, or at the very least, failure to act upon the best possible methodology for forming beliefs about the world.

The Primacy of Concepts

The phrase “primacy of concepts” thus refers to a particular kind of use of concepts in reasoning to a conclusion. We can not define it without, to some degree, pointing to its inherent flaws, for it is a phenomenon which embodies invalid reasoning by its definition. Because all that we, as humans, can conceive of predicates upon experience, any statement someone makes that bears any meaning to us is a concept, and thus has some relation to reality. The mark of the phenomenon of the primacy of concepts, however, is the outright inadmissibility of certain empirical evidence. Note that the view of concepts outlined here and earlier will quite distinctly run up against others—in particular, the classical theory of concepts, especially of the kind that holds that concepts are mind-independent entities. The primacy of concepts as a fallacy only persists if we accept a mind-dependent and empirical theory of concepts and reject the classical and mind-independent theories of concepts.

Thus, unsurprisingly, the first and most prominent examples of the primacy of concepts are belief systems which embody the “classical” theory of concepts: classical concepts possess a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for that concept to apply to something that hold across all worlds. Classical concepts are represented in philosophy by the tradition of conceptual analysis, the first and most prominent example of which being the work of Plato, which has sought to provide an answer to certain questions such as, “What is happiness? Virtue? Beauty? Freedom? Good? Evil? Knowledge? Space? Time?” These kinds of questions—in most cases when they are asked—personify philosophy in which concepts are primary. Certain concepts possess a nature or essence which can come to be known through the proposal of candidate definitions and the seeking of counter-examples (through thought experiments) to invalidate them. In a way, this process the treatment of concepts as static objects of sorts in philosophical discourse; philosophers of this tradition examine concepts like scientists examine physical specimens, as though they were things in plain view to examine.

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates seeks from his discussion with Euthyphro what the essence of piety is; he asks what in the world makes pious things pious—what they share in common—and not for examples of people who are pious or what the gods are known to think is pious. In the Lysis, he pursues the essence of friendship similarly; in the Phaedrus, love; in the Thaetatus, knowledge; and in the Republic, justice. Behind the character of Socrates in these dialogues is Plato’s theory of the Forms, the most prominent example of a belief system that makes concepts primary. The Forms themselves are a kind of hypostatization of concepts—the forms inhabit a timeless reality outside the human mind. He attempts to provide a direct metaphysical explanation for concepts: they are caused to appear in the human mind as a result of their exact metaphysical counterparts. Hence, it is no surprise that Plato’s approach to concepts is one of classical analysis.

In the case of the scientists, when they ask a question of a physical specimen they capture—such as “of what is this creature made?”—they have agreed upon a referent of the concept signified by “creature,” as applying to the matter in front of them; they have, implicitly and instinctually as a matter of rules of language, agreed that this animate and discrete entity composed of matter is the object of discourse. They can then shock it with electricity, give it food, douse it in chemicals, dissect it, etc. to answer the questions they may have about it.

In contrast to the scientists’ investigations, there is no such obvious referent when it comes to Plato-type questions. They only make sense in context of the theory of the Forms or similar postulations about the external and discrete existence of concepts; so long as we reject such metaphysical claims (and with good reason), the referents that are brought under inspection can only be a product of the amalgamated meanings of the words brought by the parties to the discussion. The explicit reliance of answers to “What is F?” upon intuition is perfectly explainable by the non-existence of concepts as entities in reality and the different definitions brought by different parties to the dialectic. Plato’s exposition of the forms through the character of Socrates in the Republic and other works is very educative in the actual ambiguity of reference, but specimen-like treatment of words.

The above kind of concept primacy is only a subset of a broader definition of concept primacy. One need not formally accept the classical theory of concepts in order to commit a similar fallacy. The idea of concept primacy merely requires that the rational necessity of instance-to-concept reasoning be invalidated, with a concept used to exclude an instance. In this way, belief systems inhabit a continuum of concept primacy: on one end, there are its most egregious cases, in which one conceptualizes something and holds it as reality purely arbitrarily; on the other, there are concepts which have reasonable uses and that are even reasonably used, but are held to a reality above the instances that derived them. The spectrum can be loosely characterized by the placing the examples of mythology, religion, and fantasy on one extreme, and scientism, skepticism, and cynicism on the other.

The Plato-type errors are frequently just unconscious ones; they take the words of language, which are created to describe reality, and turn them into reality itself. At the core of the problems of philosophy—especially those of the Platonic kind—are issues of language. The fallacies of concept-primacy, in general, constitute the removal of concepts from the human context in which they were generated, and the assertion of those concepts as a priori fact. Because those concepts are defined without experience or to the exclusion of some experience, thought experiments can endlessly “refute” one’s conclusions about the world, precisely because they are not based on experience, but upon conceptual construction. Adherence to some system of rules—following religious texts, star-gazing, meditating, utilizing heuristics, and so on—in deriving certain conclusions, when it is to any degree non-empirical, necessarily requires that some empirical evidence can never be cited as both arguments and counter-arguments: the discussion is bound by the domain of the system’s rules.

Descartes’ exploration of knowledge and doubt in his Meditations is subject is another notable—and highly influential—example of concept primacy. Indeed, Cartesian foundationalism and the other deduction-focused metaphysics of several of the Continental Rationalists leave little room in the world for contingency—metaphysically and thus epistemically. They call upon a methodology for verifying beliefs that downplays the senses in favor of “logical truths” and, as Descartes describes them, “clear and distinct” things. Because of the inherent deficiency in providing any truths about the world on the basis of his “hyperbolic doubt” in Meditation I—the hypothesis of the powerful, evil deceiver—it is no surprise that Descartes appealed to the concept of God and argued “logically” for his existence.

The epistemological school following in the tradition of Descartes’ “hyperbolic doubt” is one of skepticism. The claim of skepticism—that knowledge is impossible—is justified on logical grounds: we can not be sure that what we experience as truth about the external world is in fact the external world and not an illusion. As one of skepticism’s most recent representatives, Keith Lehrer put forward a “skeptical hypothesis”:

There are a group of creatures in another galaxy, call them Googols, whose intellectual capacity is 10¹⁰⁰ that of men, and who amuse themselves by sending out a peculiar kind of wave that affects our brain in such a way that our beliefs about the world are mostly incorrect.

The irrefutable logical possibility of this being true, he claims, entails that our beliefs can never be completely justified. Thus, we cannot have knowledge.

The important issue at hand with Lehrer’s skepticism is the prescription accepting his conclusion offers. So we cannot have knowledge of a certain kind; “Now what?” we ask. Not coincidentally, the claim “knowledge is impossible” could itself be a reiteration of the Plato-type language problem—depending on the implications we draw from it. We can be sure here that the skeptical argument defeats the classical conceptions of knowledge (a correspondence theory of truth, for example). The world of the perfectly known and perfectly deductive, from a psychological standpoint, is not a concept with a direct referent found in human experience. Certainty of that kind is either a functional tool of discovery (as in mathematics or logic), or merely a manner of speaking: when I say, “I am certain that I will turn in this paper on Saturday,” I do not mean that in my mind I have discounted the logical possibilities of my severe injury, death, sudden lack of interest in the academic, and so forth. The probability of those occurrences is so low that my statement of certainty is one of cost-benefit analysis: to warn the reader of an alternative outcome is to insure against those outcomes, but such outcomes are so unlikely (and the magnitude of the payoff is so low) that the inconvenience of enumerating the alternative possibilities is a net loss in well-being.

The discussion of skepticism here is not aimed at addressing the flaws of skepticism specifically, but at how the concept-primary world of traditional philosophy’s conceptual analysis is vulnerable to paralyzing criticisms that leave it unable to explain the world with its methodology. However, from the epistemology laid out in this paper, the question “So what?” should immediately follow Lehrer’s argument. Only through fallacy can Lehrer’s argument lead to a significant implication beyond the nonexistence of the classical concept of knowledge—one which this epistemic paradigm holds as an empty fabrication, anyway (to say “I know that x” where there is no possibility of doubt is to be redundant; “x” suffices).

Specifically, the fallacy of equivocation is an exploitation of, or a mistake with, symbols in language that create the illusion that conclusions follow from particular arguments. Take the following silly example:

1) O’Doul’s Non-Alcoholic Beer is better than nothing.

2) Nothing is better than a nice, hearty lager.

3) Therefore, O’Doul’s Beer is better than a nice, hearty lager.

Though the word involved in the relations of quality about the beers is the same one—“Nothing”—it clearly shifts senses from one premise to the next. Only while assuming the word meant the same thing in both premises (“nothing,” as in the absence of all things) would the argument would be a syllogism.

The concluding statement of Lehrer’s argument—“we cannot have knowledge”—certainly does not eliminate the phenomena we associate with our use of the word “knowledge”: the Microsoft tech support knowledge base, the knowledge of the physical sciences, self-knowledge, and so on. There is certainly a distinct difference between my assertion that “I know the earth is round,” versus another’s assertion that “I know the earth is flat.” For one, there are pictures of the world showing its roundness; I can travel off into the horizon, and if I travel long enough, I will return to the place where I started; and when I travel on the land versus how the crow flies, the disparate distances between the two voyages are as geometry would predict with a sphere versus a straight line. I have evidence for my knowledge; while I still may be wrong in some remote sense, the distant possibility is excluded from my speech because it is useless (and wasteful) to enumerate every remote logical possibility of my being wrong. Speech is a means to an end—not a slave to logic. Hence, “knowledge” can be understood by its use: in my case, it is the presence of scientific evidence for my claim.

The classical theory of concepts grants a window for the assertion that there are no referents of a classical concept. Logically, the claim is moot, but it bears psychological implications for those not aware of the linguistic nature of philosophical puzzles. “There is no justice,” as one interpretation of Thrasymachus in Republic would have him say. Someone convinced of Thrasymachus’s assertion would then challenge any person who used the word “justice” with a particular referent in mind, as if to tell him that the “justice” he was looking at did not exist—even if the person who tokened “justice” used it in reference to the legal system, whose norms are often labeled “justice.” That Thrasymachus asserted “There is no justice” changes no reality; it does not alter any rationale for the legal system’s “justice” (that does not depend on the classical concept of justice). Likewise, that Lehrer argues “we cannot have ‘knowledge’” changes no reality; it does not cause me to drop my belief that the world is round, and I am none the worse for it.

How do we ever come to invalidate a primary concept, once accepted? To illustrate, we can begin with an extreme case of a primary concept: belief in a deity as strictly a matter of faith. Acceptance of that premise as true can then explain away any empirical evidence to the contrary. If one believes he has prayed and has not received the desired results, the only explanation is that he was not, in fact, praying correctly, or that he failed to meet some other necessary condition for his prayers to be answered.

Yet this could occur in any variant of concept primacy. Take the example of Marxism: the concepts it employs are founded in historicity of observations about power relations between the powerful and the dominated. In as much as the methodology of historical analysis is applied, though, Marxist concepts must be taken as truth. In turn, when some Marxists are confronted with evidence of countries which have embodied Marxist principles, with their performance measured by amount of violence, material well-being, and other empirical data, they are forced to respond in one of two ways: they must assert that those countries are, in fact, successful in some way according to Marxism, or they must assert that those countries are not, in fact, Marxist.

In either case, there is no way of finding empirical evidence that stands against the theory besides that evidence which can be used to contradict the grounds upon which Marxist concepts are founded. Certain evidence is simply precluded by the acceptance of those concepts themselves. For example, the concept of alienation asserts that it provides objective features of individuals in capitalist society independent of their awareness, so some evidence—such as any assertions made by said persons about their own psychological states—is irrelevant. From a logical and empirical standpoint, a simple way of understanding the inherent irrationality of reasoning from unreasonably chosen concepts is to view doing so through the demands of Occam’s razor. When we cannot distinguish between a world in which the theory is false and the world in which we live, we can not reasonably postulate that theory over another one similarly situated, much less over one which actually has evidence.

The pragmatic problem of the acceptance of any empirically exclusionary belief in practice is quite clear: it creates an infinitely-recurring, invulnerable hope in seeking an outcome that will never be realized. If the reality is that there is no deity who answers prayers, people who pray and accept the argument for this deity will perpetually spend their time praying and depending on this fictional deity, with an argument perpetually compelling them to do so against the empirical evidence they will have (no consistent answering of prayers). If the reality is that the claims of Marxism about human nature, the path of history, and economics are false, societies will continually be founded on Marxist principles and will continually be met with failure, but will continually be compelled to do so when swayed by the arguments of Marxism, against empirical evidence of those failures. Sinners will be created to take the blame.

The philosophically admissible at the level of metaphysics and epistemology (and, ultimately, ethics) translates necessarily to the admissible at the level of the political. The Classical Greek philosophers, as adherents to the classical theory of concepts and their analysis, can be said to be the fathers of formalized political theories in which concepts are primary. Returning to Plato once more, observe the political philosophy he generates from his theory of the forms. To him, justice in the political is to be found in the structure of the city, like justice in the individual is to be found in the structure of the soul. Critical to Plato’s polity is the division of individuals into three classes: producers (farmers, craftsmen, etc.), warriors, and rulers. He bases this tripartite political division on a tripartite division of the individual soul: the appetitive, the spirited, and the rational.

Those assertions about the individual soul can be translated into the modern tongue as assertions about human nature. Like all concepts he expressed must have been, each of the three parts was at some level derived in Plato’s human mind from an empirical experience of human beings as possessing those faculties. However, the broader concept of the human mind as being composed distinctly and exhaustively of these three parts is the concept which he came to use to derive his idea of the just polity. This concept, to a large degree, precluded actual worldly observations about human psychology, and how likely it was in actuality that, for example, a human being like a philosopher king could singly embody rationality.

As a brief aside, it is important to note once more that a formal observance of classical conceptual analysis is not the only way for a series of political implications to be drawn from a concept. Though Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in part modernized political philosophy by founding it on a more fully integrated and empirical view of existence, the thought experiment that underlies his view of the state, the State of Nature, is a concept bearing primacy over experience as well. He puts forward a hypothetical situation in which humans are engaged in a perpetual state of war “of every man against every man”—a state so horrible that men will endeavor to seek peace, the only recourse being an all-powerful state. That this state will occur is based on his own construction of human nature. Quite similarly to Plato, he derives the aspects of that nature from some level of experience with the humans of his time: a restless appetite for power, reputation, glory, riches, and so on. However, it is questionable whether those observations—made in the context of a period of political power, religious dominance, poverty, and despair—hold universally and a-contextually.

One final specific area of interest with regards to conceptualization as truth lies in morality. The idea of an intrinsic kind of goodness brings with it a host of problems, both in its derivation and in the end-state it envisions. The “is-ought gap,” a problem with the idea of goodness brought to the forefront by Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, becomes an issue the moment consistent empirical methodology is brought to bear on moral assertions:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with… I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.

All systems of morality must overcome this challenge—how can a plain fact about the state of affairs of the world entail a (categorical) ought?

Furthermore, how do we come to observe that goodness occurring in the world? As J.L. Mackie explains, “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” Is it possible to observe these relations? Can they be pointed to without being circularly defined? In the realm of physical fact, it is easy to go from instance to concept: those instances are ostensible. We can point to objects falling down and the orbits of planets to derive the concept of “gravity”; we can observe the lack of bone structure in creatures and derive the concept “invertebrate.” We can even observe human parents who cause pain inside their children and enjoy it, and call that “sadism”—but that, of course, is a sense of sadism as a matter of descriptive fact (i.e. “sadism” means one who causes pain and enjoys it) and not a matter of moral fact. With goodness in most cases, however, the only means of ascribing moral fact to the world is to proceed from concept to instance.

Usually, the most important effects of any belief system stem from its conception of the good; when the goodness it posits is derived from an approach to knowledge in which concepts are primary, the consequences are quite significant in terms of the measurable aspects of human life. That which possesses goodness is what possesses “to-be-pursuedness”; it is that which an end-in-itself is. It is an argument from morality, which historically is easily seen to be a compelling argument for human beings: millions have martyred themselves and otherwise been exploited for causes they believed were right.

How might one rank priority in achieving those goods, however? Here, we can pick on an often self-described moral approach to politics: constitutional liberalism. In Constitutional Theory, Carl Schmitt argued that governments operating under the principles of the Rechstaat are plagued by an inability to take necessary action to preserve it. Primarily, they are bound inextricably to certain rules and procedures that are unbreakable, even in times of need. Constitutional liberalism indeed is sometimes interpreted as carrying with it a supra-legal set of principles by which it is governed. Often times, that supra-legality is itself written into a nation’s constitution. Thus, even adherence to the procedures outlined in that constitution is more than just an instrumental act: adherence to procedure is directly the fulfillment of the principles of goodness upon which the nation is based, or, at least, non-adherence to those procedures is a violation of those principles.

While in practice there may simply be politically expedient reasons why such action is not taken, at least in the context of philosophical debate there persist irresolvable problems between different positions each taking up the cause of, by the given principles of goodness, a worthy end. The results are frequently win-lose situations—zero-sum or negative-sum games—between opposing camps. The long-standing struggle between the often-mutually-exclusive liberty and security, with its many variants, is one such example of this inherent conflict. Should habeas corpus be suspended, or should the risk of a terrorist attack killing citizens (whose lives and property the government is also morally tasked with protecting) be allowed to increase? Should the rights of electoral participation be extended to those who hold values opposite the constitution—threatening that very constitution—or should suffrage and office holding be regulated, an action which by definition opposes the constitution? Are the lives of those living outside the state worth anything next to a citizen of the state, or can those outside the state be killed or harmed so long as it preserves a citizen? If these questions were not a matter of intrinsic goodness, at the very least they would be questions of pragmatism, utility, or even whim. Still, goodness demands that it be followed in itself, presenting a quandary for all states built upon a moral foundation.

No doubt, too, we have brought a new issue into consideration: what are the principles or moral foundations of a given constitution when that constitution is understood to have a life beyond the organisms that brought it into existence? Who is to determine these? From where did these principles come? In any case, national constitutions are representations of belief systems in which concepts are primary, in as much as those constitutions are not in principle built on the explicit consent of those governed by it (or the forcible imposition upon some by others); they are, instead, built upon a concept above human action.

Conclusion

There are many more examples of the primacy of concepts fitting the loose definition provided here, and many implications to be observed from them. All of them are bound together, perhaps, by the broadest implication of the fallacy: it creates a never-ending battle of refutation and counter-example, by means of its dependence on the realm of infinite conceptualization. Indeed, 2500 years of philosophy “qua philosophy” has failed to answer successfully, to the same degree of consensus as the natural sciences and mathematics answer their own questions, the questions which it is purportedly intended to answer—namely, those of human nature and action: what are we? What ought we to do?

Practitioners of the natural sciences, to a large degree, possess a shared language and methodology. As a result, fields like physics and medicine have seen huge advances. The shared methodology, the scientific method, is a means by which conflicting viewpoints are resolved. At the root of this methodology is the presence of clear and distinct referents of discourse: the observations made from controlled experiments involving the materials and phenomena in question. In light of this, there is no surprise that philosophers have been frequently relegated to a back-seat role in new discoveries about the nature of the world, particularly to scientists. Human nature, or at least the empirical data to be used in determining it, is now in the purview of evolutionary biologists; no longer is it the role of the philosopher to postulate it and other things on the basis of intuition.

The philosopher can still try to do this, obviously, and some still do. Nonetheless, the chief difference between the present in the past is that the work of those philosophers has less predictive power and even has facets which contradict the organized empirical evidence of the sciences. Indeed, empiricism in recent human history has created friction between the realities of the world and theories produced by traditional philosophy and other non-empirical means. As the disciplines of science and statistics have increasingly both discovered phenomena unexplained by the old answers and produced theories explaining old phenomena better. At the foundation of this new approach to knowledge are the epistemic postulates put forward at the beginning of this paper. Applying consistent experiential methods is a necessary condition for analytical robustness: just as we can be certain that our experience was what our experience was, we can be certain that we observed what we observed. The realm of interpretation of that experience lies within the scope of doubt and debate, but even with that caveat, empirics have brought mankind a long way from the days of the classical philosophical approach.

When we see the concepts of God, logic, justice, beauty, science, the state, or The People used to draw a conclusion about the world, we can always think of the concept of the American Graffiti police car gag and how a television show went about looking at it objectively. MythBusters is aptly named for this analogy: these concepts can constitute the “myths” upon which society runs (whether effectively or not). The MythBusters are the “boots on the ground” in investigating the many interesting assertions about reality put forward in popular culture.

Though they may just be entertainment, they wave the banner of empiricism in the boldest way possible: they dive straight into reality, replicate the circumstances, and put claims to the test. They do not dream up extreme action scenes to confuse young people more, and they never use visual trickery; they always recreate, observe, and analyze. To do the same to battle myths of the broader, societal kind, there are a parallel set of prescriptions: do not create new myths by deriving a concept and holding it as real without evidence, and never equivocate; always, work from instance to concept and reason from there.

He first sets out to define what libertarian self-ownership means. To do so, he asserts that a libertarian’s claim to a full right of self-ownership must face the following dilemma: such a full and uninfringed right either is, or is not, compatible with some nonconsensual incursions upon one’s body that result in serious harm. If it is not compatible, Otsuka argues, the libertarian is committed to a “moral fanaticism” that holds, for example, that one may not turn a trolley in order to kill one person and save five. More importantly, it is a “moral fanaticism” that rules out serious harms to innocents, foreseen or not, as necessary consequences of minimizing harm rather than intended as a means of minimizing harm (i.e. it also rules out cases conforming to the doctrine of double effect). The other case of the dilemma (if it is compatible) places the libertarian in the position of having to explain why certain incursions and not others are compatible with such a right of self-ownership.

Otsuka claims that he avoids this dilemma because his position “is not committed to a full right of self-ownership.” He defines a ‘libertarian right of self-ownership’ as one that encompasses two rights: a stringent right of control that bars others from forcing one to sacrifice life, limb, or labor through incursions upon one’s mind and body or threats thereof; and a stringent right to all the income one gains one one’s own or through unregulated and untaxed voluntary exchanges with other individuals.

In the next section, Otsuka criticizes Nozick’s claim that taxation is equivalent to forced labor on the grounds that it is in fact a complaint against taxation being a violation of property rights. Otsuka then says that such a critique is weakened if the premise that one’s right of ownership over worldly resources he uses to generate income is as full as his right of ownership over himself. This leads to questions of world-ownership, which Otsuka addresses in the next section by putting forward an egalitarian version of Nozick’s Lockean proviso: “You may require previously unowned worldly resources if and only if you leave enough so that everyone else can acquire an equally good share of unowned worldly resources.” While he leaves the meaning of “equally good” an open question, he simply intends to argue that libertarian self-ownership and equality are reconcilable when equality is measured by equality of access to welfare.

Otsuka answers Cohen’s argument that the egalitarian proviso is incompatible with a libertarian right of self-ownership by asserting that libertarian self-ownership says nothing about the acquisition and distribution of worldly resources. As a means of reconciling self-ownership and equality in a “non-Pyrrhic” fashion, he defines one’s libertarian right of self-ownership as ‘robust’ if and only if one has rights over enough worldly resources so that others can not force one to come to their assistance in some form (sacrifice of life, limb, or labor) through withholding access to their resources. Leaving aside institutional or political unfeasibility, Otsuka claims that it is possible, through some distribution of worldly resources, for the badly off in society to support themselves through voluntary exchanges that do not involved forced assistance of this kind. Because of this, the badly off can justify their equality of welfare on the grounds that they have a right to a share of worldly resources that enable them to secure an equal level of welfare to everyone else.

Next, Otsuka addresses the intergenerational problems of egalitarianism, as well as issues of voluntary transfers. His egalitarian proviso spells out that equality of opportunity is intergenerational. The egalitarian proviso, interpreted as allowing a single generation to appropriate and destroy all, or as allowing that generation to bequeath all holdings to the few, generates what he terms an arbitrary and indefensible bias against proceeding generations. He concludes that it is reasonable to deny the existence of complete rights to consume, destroy, or bequeath worldly resources one has acquired in an unowned state. Further, he argues that bequeaths should be treated no differently from one’s natural talents (that one with a bequeath should be allowed to acquire fewer unowned resources.) Here, Otsuka, quite critically, concedes that nonmarket transfers and sharing of worldly resources (through gifting, marriages, etc.) is incompatible with the egalitarian proviso. Beneficial sharing and giving disrupts patterns of equality, so any form of this giving can only occur when no one derives any net benefit from such actions.

The difference between Star Wars and religion is their number of followers who hold their realism. Many people believe in the latter, so those of us who disbelieve should take pause at this, especially considering that these beliefs often have political implications. In light of that, what good does studying religion serve?

Mythological Particularities: Not so useful?

As I suggested in a discussion of Plato’s Republic, the study of falsehood is only useful in as much as it leads us to truth. If you know that you’ve either got a muscle cramp or just have to go to the bathroom, and disprove the latter by trying and failing, then you can validly believe that you’ve got stomach cramps. The wider in scope that a given theory is, the more likely it is that any of the propositions entailed by its negation are true.  Thus, the best argument that states, “There is a world of the supernatural where things occur, and this is why,” is useful to us, for if it can be defeated, then we can know that we now must explain everything in the world naturalistically.

In this regard the scholarly pursuit of many different belief systems can yield insight into truth. However, utilizing the insights gleaned from ruling out random possibilities of unicorns and leperchauns does not always work, since we are not logical super-computers that can piece together every known proposition of the universe and make deductions from them, and find the sum total of valid human knowledge all at once. Deduction by negation sharply decreases in value as the scope of a proposition “A” shrinks, its referents become more specific, and the number of possibilities lying inside the region of “not A” vastly grows. OK, maybe that wasn’t so clear. In short, it’s that an overwhelming majority of the propositions considered under religious belief systems are extremely specific, low-scope assertions and thus, if debated, tell us little to nothing relevant about reality.

Point in case: what difference does it make to those of us who are scientifically questioning the validity of basic religious claims if there are in fact FOUR horsemen of the apocalypse as opposed to three? Or seven Imams instead of twelve? Or that there are no billiards tables in heaven? Suppose one side were proven to not be the case. What now? What can we conclude about the universe, besides that it is not the case? If it is a proposition that is used as justification for other beliefs, there are millions of other possibilities that can reconcile any problems caused by the refutation of a single detail, if any such problems arise. If two verses in some holy text are in conflict, I can guarantee that some other verse or interpretation is going to fly out of a professional religious advocate’s mouth to fix everything up.

When arguing with religious propagandists, keep that in mind: they can taunt you into pursuing them into the depths of their twisted and humid jungles and ambush you with an arbitrary verse here, a unicorn there, and maybe a flaming sword somewhere. Yet if fundamental analysis points to the fact that their story about reality is in fact a fantastical human construction, why would any rational person opt to talk about what’s “true” in the endlessly deep human imagination, as opposed to talking about truth in the reality to which everyone has sensory access? Furthermore, think of the other side: if someone were committed to defending a position whose fundamental assumptions were false or unprovable, why would he even go near discussing those assumptions? Clearly, if he’s committed to a position rather than a methodology, he’s interested in passing off what he has arbitrarily chosen as truth; why would he allow questionable premises to come under scrutiny?

To help illustrate how skipping past fundamental claims about reality and instead delving into religious mythology is a huge waste of time for the human condition, let’s revisit Star Wars. If someone asserted, as a matter of fact, that the story detailed in Star Wars movies was actually a historical occurrence, would your objection be that it couldn’t be the case because there was no way that the Rebel fleet could have survived the onslaught of the imperial fleet at the Battle of Endor, which by all calculations, would have laid 350 imperial turbolaser batteries for every rebel one, and 200 TIE Fighters for every rebel starfighter, not including the firepower of the Death Star? Surely, you could, and then spend another few hours, years, or centuries answering the counter-objection that “the force” played a major role, and then question why the force perhaps didn’t decide to intervene earlier in the war, then argue about midichlorians and how the rebels had more of them on their side, etc. Or, you could just ask, “What’s your proof that it is the case and not just some fictional story someone made up? Why is Star Wars history and The Lord of the Rings not?” Surely you can not dare to challenge the Star Wars geek’s vast “knowledge” of a human-constructed universe, but you can adequately point out that it’s human fiction, not reality. The difference in effort is gigantic.

But before we proceed, avast, hardy theoreticians: I do not mean to deny the validity of demonstrating internal inconsistency as evidence against any belief in addition to external criteria. Internal consistency is an excellent starting point, because if it can be defeated easily, it is the simplest route to disproof one can find since it speaks purely in terms of what the defender of a theory already believes. Internal contradiction makes a theory disprove itself.

By the same token, however, it is a home-field advantage for mythology-peddlers: they would much rather prefer to argue you in circles about nit-picky details about how some word actually means something other than something else and the translation screwed it up, instead of defend the fundamental presuppositions upon which their entire belief system rests. Islam, for example, has an uncanny knack for running around inside its secret cave-tunnel network of Arabic linguistic ambiguity and pop out tactically to suit its P.R. needs. If the propositions under consideration were those which played a fundamental role – for example, that there is some world which exists which lies beyond the senses, the supernatural – then proving that they’re false would end the religion debate altogether.

Religious advocates know this, and hence they would prefer to prop up the legitimacy of their belief system by spending a majority of their time and resources on what amounts to a gigantic non-sequitur argument: “we debate and discuss fervently about the content of [insert holy text], we are charitable, we create a community where children play together and do fun and creative things, therefore we are right.” Theologians spend their time trying to prove the existence of God in convoluted and complicated ways, but does the average churchgoer or clergyman ever delve so deeply into the validity of accepting God as a premise?

No, of course not! That would be a direct threat to the illusions upon which they power their lives; for the clergyman, it would be his job at risk. For a parent, it would be the possibility of having to tell his child that he was teaching him something false all along – and that would challenge the illusion that the parent can order the child around because he is right, not just because he is stronger. For that parent and for anyone else who would be religious, it would be this same realization about their own parents, which causes a devastating loss of such a critical fantasy. Erasing that fantasy leads to other questions: what else was I taught arbitrarily? Is the rest of my family like this?… and so forth. It’s not a fun proposition.

Understanding the gravity of the consequences of approaching religion from a truth-seeking angle is key to understanding the ages-old evasion technique of dotting i’s and crossing t’s instead of searching for logic and coherence. Truth seeking methodology – logic and empiricism – have the answers, and these methodologies tell us to justify our premises and adhere to the demands of parsimony. To avoid challenging their fundamental illusions, some people simply prefer the mere facade of methodology in order to pretend to themselves and others that they are truth seekers.

Quite predictably, 99% of religious activity and resources are spent on treating this problematic God-assumption as though it were true. In other words, the vast majority of publicly revealed religious activities are not designed to address fundamental arguments (indeed very few are). They are instead designed to utilize this implicit non-sequitur argument, that “we are so honest and giving and great and happy, there’s no way our religion can be wrong!” These things clearly can exist without god existing or even a belief in god (this is why it is a non-sequitur). It is true that they are nice and good things, community and sharing and loving and solidarity and charity and kumbaya around the fire. When one finds that he can substitute many different mythologies in a particular religion’s place, though, he is forced to acknowledge that those things are not an argument after all- they are predicates of value systems, not justifications thereof.

For anyone who has the patience to sit through some sociopath’s erratic fairy tale in order to successfully defeat falsehood, I have the utmost respect. By no means am I implying that myth does not need to be studied in the context of its social necessity. My conclusion has two main parts: first, that the study of mythology and religion would not be necessary if it were not the case that people hinged their personal lives upon them, particularly with regards to how they treat others; and second, that even in the context of our social necessity, far too much time is spent (at least by non-specialists) delving into the tiny inconsequential details, the turbolaser batteries and TIE fighters, of religion rather than arguing the fundamentals that serve as the basis for its rational acceptance.

If someone related to you their long and convoluted fantasy, emphasizing distinctions among details like some unicorns actually being green instead of white, you typically wouldn’t dive into it as academic study and write your dissertation on it. If everyone believed in this fantasy though, and you were being treated differently on the basis of this fantasy, or even had violence used against you as a product of it, you would have no choice but to figure out what the hell it was all about.

By the same token, if you’re busy making a living and working hard, you don’t have time for a dissertation on unicorns. Lucky for you, you are not totally in the dark or at the mercy of academics. All that is required of you is to analyze the basic foundations of a theory and see if they are sufficient for continuing discussion of the theory, and working from there. Even if you don’t succeed at reaching conclusive evidence, it’s always better than the course of action that never leads to knowledge: to delve into only a limited amount of mythological minutiae as your only thought on the subject, which will only inevitably result in your choosing of the side of the debate with the most effective propaganda apparatus. Searching “bible quotes” is NOT going to give you answers about religion. Posting on forums and arguing about the meaning of a particular line in a religious text is not only not going to give you answers, it’s going to waste your time and perhaps confer upon you the illusion of answers, which is the worst possible outcome.

One last thing to note is that, beyond the religion-bashing on my part, both religious and non-religious persons of the kind who hold that beliefs should be formed by something a bit more consistent than random impulse should take heed. Intellectual honesty on both sides of the debate is an absolute necessity; if one refuses to attain conclusive answers in the realm of a theory’s foundations and instead proceeds to just delve into the internal details, then he’s really doing nothing for truth. Doing this with a theory is like carefully calibrating to perfection a ship’s navigation system while it has a gaping hole in the hull. It is an outright denial of reality – an insane bout of wishful thinking – promoted by many reasons which I shall not address here. Its consequences are quite clear, though: the less we understand reality, the less our interactions with it produce the positive results we need. This behavior can not be good for the person who does it, nor for the people he will interact with.

Any avid debater of religious issues should keep all of that in mind. Don’t just tell me that the answer is on page 33. Tell me why page 33, or any page, has the answer. Don’t make my bunk, stock the fridge, clean the showerheads, feed the cats, or swab the decks. Please, just fix the damn hole in the ship.