Epistemological Anarchy

[Meta Blog]

Originally posted by Don from NoodleFood,

If you have ever debated the issue of limited government versus anarchy with an anarchist, you have undoubtedly run into this argument: "Every government in history has violated individual rights, so what grounds do you have for believing there could be a government that doesn't?"

In fact, our own Stephan Kinsella raised this point in his current discussion with Dave Harrison. He said, "All of our experience and history shows all states to ride roughshod over citizens' rights."

(Dave's response was perfect: "To some extent or another, depending on the state. And therefore what?")

What I want to note is the epistemological error in the anarchist's argument. Specifically, the false view of induction.

To take the standard example, suppose I observe a hundred swans, all of which are white. This by itself would not justify concluding that all swans are white. Induction does not work by enumeration. To generalize, you would have to know why all swans must be white -- what in their nature causes them to be white?

In the same way, you cannot argue that because all governments have violated individual rights, that all governments must violate rights. You would have to be able to identify something in the nature of government that necessitates the violation of individual rights. Never has an anarchist succeeded at this task.

The closest anyone has ever come was Roy Childs, who famously argued that in barring other individuals and organizations from the use of retaliatory force, a government is initiating force. But, as I have argued elsewhere, Childs' argument shares the fatal flaw that plagues almost every anarchist argument: the complete evasion of the requirements of objectivity.

In one of her Ford Hall Forum speeches, Ayn Rand read a quote so horrific and illustrative of the point she was making that the audience burst into applause. Rand paused for a moment and explained to the audience that their applause was non-objective, since she had no way of knowing whether they were agreeing with the quote or with Rand. Rand's point is that objectivity imposes requirements, not only in a person's mind, but in how they express themselves in a social context. Each audience member knew why he was applauding, but his applause was non-objective because the person he was trying to communicate with, Ayn Rand, had no means of knowing what his applause was attempting to communicate.

The same principle applies to the issue of retaliation.

In his open letter to Ayn Rand, Childs disputes Rand's claim that, "The use of physical force -- even its retaliatory use -- cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens." He writes:

This contradicts your epistemological and ethical position. Man's mind -- which means: the mind of the individual human being -- is capable of knowing reality, and man is capable of coming to conclusions on the basis of his rational judgment and acting on the basis of his rational self-interest. You imply, without stating it, that if an individual decides to use retaliation, that that decision is somehow subjective and arbitrary. Rather, supposedly the individual should leave such a decision up to government which is --

what

? Collective and

therefore objective

? This is illogical. If man is not capable of making these decisions,

then he isn't capable of making them

, and no government made up of men is capable of making them, either. By what epistemological criterion is an individual's action classified as "arbitrary," while that of a

group

of individuals is somehow "objective"?

Morally, a man has the right to retaliate against those who initiate force. In fact, as Ayn Rand pointed out, assuming he is able to do so, retaliation is a moral imperative. Refusing to retaliate against an aggressor is to sanction his aggression -- and to welcome more of it. Yet, if he is living in a society of other men, it is not enough that an individual determine in his own mind that his use of force is retaliatory. Since whether an act of force is initiatory or retaliatory is not self-evident, and since a man who initiates force is by that fact a threat to society, any man who engages in force that has not been proved by objective means to be retaliatory must be considered a threat. This is the deepest reason why the use of retaliatory force must be delegated to the government: an act of retaliation that isn't first proved to be an act of retaliation is indistinguishable from an act of aggression -- and must be treated as such.

What, then, are "objective means"? To determine that an instance of force is retaliatory, men must know what the act of force was, the general standard by which guilt is to be determined, and what evidence was used to meet that standard in a particular case. Every member of society must have access to this information. And, of course, each of these elements must be objective (the laws, standards of evidence, and the evaluation of whether the evidence in question meets that standard). By its nature, then, objectivity in retaliation cannot be achieved without a government (assuming we are speaking here of a society of men and not individuals or isolated tribes). If an individual uses force, by that very fact he is an objective threat to other members of society and may properly be restrained, even if he was responding to another man's aggression. He has no grounds for claiming his rights are being violated.

Imagine you are walking down the street and a man walks up and punches the person next to you in the face. The anarchist would argue that if you use force to restrain that person, you are initiating force if it turns out that the man he punched hit him first. Yet that is pure intrinsicism. It is non-objective in the same way that the audience's applause was non-objective. He may be retaliating but you don't know it.

Contrary to Childs, the point is not that individuals are unable to make objective determinations of what constitutes retaliatory force -- it's that objectivity demands they prove it to every other member of society. Only a government can provide such a mechanism. (The anarchist would of course dispute this last claim as well, but the point here isn't to make the case for limited government -- merely to demonstrate that government is not inherently aggressive.)

[Grames]

This is an excellent response to the "Roy Childs argument".

edit: link to The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism provided by Ronald Neff with annotations.

Edited June 25, 2011 by Grames

[2046]

This is indeed the fundamental crux of the issue: vigilantism in the intrinsicist versus the objectivist theory of rights.

In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard writes [All italics original in both quotes}:

Many people, when confronted with the libertarian legal system, are concerned with this problem: would somebody be allowed to “take the law into his own hands”? Would the victim, or a friend of the victim, be allowed to exact justice personally on the criminal? The answer is, of course, Yes, since all rights of punishment derive from the victim’s right of self-defense. … Suppose, for example, that Hatfield murders McCoy. McCoy2 then decides to seek out and execute Hatfield1 himself. This is fine, except that, just as in the case of the police coercion discussed in the previous section, McCoy2 may have to face the prospect of being charged with murder in the private courts by Hatfield2. The point is that if the courts find that Hatfield1 was indeed the murderer, then nothing happens to McCoy2 in our schema except public approbation for executing justice. But if it turns out that there was not enough evidence to convict Hatfield1 for the original murder, or if indeed some other Hatfield or some stranger committed the crime, then McCoy2 as in the case of the police invaders mentioned above, cannot plead any sort of immunity; he then becomes a murderer liable to be executed by the courts at the behest of the irate Hatfield heirs

Whereas Rand writes in "The Nature of Government":

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

Rand's argument against anarchist revolves around the issue of whether or not retaliation without objective procedures should be illegal or not. Of course, as Hsieh mentions at the end, the anarchists would say that it doesn't follow that one monopoly government is necessary for objective law, and that's true as far as the deduction goes, but to establish whether that is valid or not, we need additional facts about the nature of objective law. There may be good reasons why it doesn't (Roderick Long, for instance, has argued that objective law is possible without a governmental monopoly, but I find his argument lacking in details and proof.) But, in addition to defending the fact that government is not inherently aggressive, it does rule out vigilantism, and with it the kind of anarchism that Murray Rothbard advocated, and the vast majority of anarchists who advocate vigilante law and intrinsic rights. It would be interesting to see if it can be discovered whether or not objective law can be created and sustained by the competitive process in market-based legal system.

[A is A]

This is the most concise and principled answer to this issue that I have read.