(July 4th, 2016, 14:07)Gavagai Wrote: Seven, I would also like to ask what is exactly your concern. If you are worried about practical consequences of libertarianism, then most surely there will be none: currently in US there are more parents who want to adopt then children waiting for adoption, I don't see why in our hypothetical the situation would be worse. If you are worried about logical consistency, then it is answered by the distinction between consequences of natural events and consequences of actions of other humans or by quasi-delictal theory of parental obligations.
I, like many people, have practical concerns about the implications of libertarianism.
Libertarianism however is built from principles and its proponents typically want to discuss it in terms of principles. So I've tried to figure out where I think its principles fail. And I think they fail in two meaningful ways.
1) Concept of property right as inviolable baseline works poorly for a world where new people keep appearing.
Right now there is some HUGE amount of valuable stuff (capital) in existence. It is owned by the current population of the world. You can imagine the current, very uneven, distribution, or a more even one. It's not important to me for this argument. The fact remains that there is a massive pile of stuff, mostly created by people who are now dead, or by no one, which is nevertheless currently owned by people who are alive.
Our world also has an esoteric system for creating new people, involving all kinds of crazy functions of human bodies. It is somewhat, but not totally, under the control of presently alive humans. (I.e. no single human can make a new human on their own, and some have no power to do so whatsoever, and also, creation of new humans can happen by accident.) When new people are created, they have NOTHING. Under libertarian principles, none of the capital that has accumulated from the beginning of time itself is granted to them except the particles that make up their bodies. And in fact, under these conditions, they will die very quickly, before they even become capable of realizing the nature of their condition. This despite the fact that libertarianism treats them as legal entities and nominally recognizes that they have right to not be harmed by others and right to hold property.
When I look at libertarianism as a system purporting to give people the things that are their natural right, it seems awfully biased towards people who already exist. That is: ALL currently existing stuff is granted to people who exist.
I think that as a practical decision by all people who are currently alive, that is rational and selfish. As a system purporting to derive from moral principles, I find that to be morally bankrupt and idiotic. It relies on a constant stream of private generosity to avoid the situation of all newborns being slaves who must assign away their rights at birth in exchange for subsistence. Basically it's relying on human parenting instincts to not descend into total economic totalitarianism as existing people have children and force them into indentured servitude in exchange for permission to live on the earth at all.
For me, a critical component of a political philosophy claiming to derive from moral principles is that it considers future people to have rights too, not just present people.
This difference in philosophy explains to me the difference in attitudes towards government intervention in life.
* I think governments should enforce and provide protection of the environment, because we have some obligation to future people.
* I think governments should enforce and provide education for new humans, because (while they don't know it) we know it is an important component of their success as future people.
* I think governments should provide a basic income for their citizens, as a way of distributing capital that isn't just a one-time distribution to currently-alive people, but distributes some amount of it to future people too.
* I think governments are justified in extracting taxes to do these things, because I believe that some portion of currently available capital is implicitly owned by future humans, held in a trust by the government, and merely rented out to current humans, with the taxes corresponding to the implicit rental costs.
2) Libertarianism erroneously treats people as entities with continuity over time.
I.e. me posting this comment and me when I first registered at RB are considered the same entity - property and obligations that was owned by previous-me shall be inherited at every moment in time by present-me. While that is how most people think about how the world works (i.e. they see themselves and others as continuous entities), it is only partially realistic. In reality, me-as-infant has not much in common with me-as teenager, who has only some stuff in common with present-me. You can see this in practice in that people make decisions that later-them regret or are even ruined by, like going deeply into debt. You can see it in the ways that people's values change over time. Someone might start out as a very altruistic person, then be emotionally wounded by a singular event and become angry and selfish (perhaps doing something criminal), then later change their perspective and see their previous behavior as reprehensible and childish. And of course, infants start off with no knowledge of how the world works whatsoever and through many, many years of learning, eventually reach a nebulous state of canniness we call adulthood. By the way - though this may just be me trying to fit something unrelated into this way of viewing people - I think that at least part of people's time preference (e.g. preferring a marshmallow now to two later) can be attributed to people's intuitive understanding of themselves as being not quite the same as their future selves.
One can trivially argue that decisions made by infants about their future selves should not be legally binding. In fact I would say that the reason this is obviously true is that people change so much from infancy that we all recognize that the infant is a different person and has no right to be making decisions for some later adult that they will transform into. But this doesn't just apply to infants. Me-as-20-year-old selling myself into slavery for life should also not be allowed - and I argue that the reason this is so is that I am a different enough person from 80-year-old future-me that I have no moral right to make a contract in their name. (In fact, I believe that 60 year difference is overkill to make my point, but I hope I am choosing some non-controversial age differences so we can talk about the broad concepts rather than quibbling about exact details.)
In this sense, new people are not only being introduced to the world when they are born as infants, but also gradually over time as every human grows continuously into someone new.
I do not think it is fair to treat a person-today as a completely different person from the same person yesterday. There is value in assuming some continuity of personhood: it incentivizes future-thinking behavior and responsibility for ones actions. But neither is it fair to treat them as 100% the same person. How much we consider people to be continuous-over-time entities seems to me to be a continuum: both extremes are clearly wrong, and the best compromise is somewhere in between. That means that there is no easily choosable single point on this continuum that we can naturally agree on. I.e. I think the degree to which we reward and punish people for their past actions is not something we can use principle to decide; we have to be somewhat pragmatic about it.
In my opinion, the idea that property rights are continuous as a principle is incompatible with the fact that personhood itself is not continuous. Similar to how capital should be apportioned in part to newly-born humans, I also think it fits principles and practice that some small proportion of capital be transferred to the partially new entities inhabiting bodies that were different people 5 years ago. From thinking about continuity of personhood and concluding that it's a gray area, I believe that:
* Contracts should become less and less enforceable the longer they are.
* There should be strong bankruptcy laws; it should not be permitted to sign away too much of your future self's possessions.
* Regular distribution of basic income throughout a person's life are even more heavily indicated.
* Property rights are less clear than libertarianism claims; to the extent that people become different people over time, the continuity of their property is not essential to a just system.
* Prison sentences should not be inappropriately long.
(I'm not saying libertarianism is incompatible with not e.g. having bankruptcy laws. Some of these differences are more like differences with current society, which also takes continuity of personhood as a given in many respects.)
To summarize (since this might have been a bit rambly), what I have seen of libertarianism does not treat the rights of future-people with enough importance. I acknowledge and appreciate that it is built up from first principles, but I think that to build a good version of it requires for those first principles to include a higher value placed on the rights of future-people, even though it's really difficult to figure out how to give future-people what they want given that they don't exist yet.
Regarding your practical observation that most American kids are not, in fact, abandoned by their parents and are adopted: no, that's missing the point. I'm not talking only about kids who are put up for adoption. I'm talking in my hypothetical about the potential for kids who are born in debt and have to pay it off for the rest of their lives. And a mild version of this DOES exist - certainly one much less terrible than what I would call slavery, but not nothing!
* The US as a whole is in debt something like $50k per citizen. When you are born a citizen of the united states, you are in fact a part-owner of that debt and must implicitly pay interest on it when you pay taxes. (Counterbalancing this, the US as a whole also has a whole lot of assets, which you are implicitly benefiting from and perhaps earning interest on. So I'm not sure this is actually a good argument. However, I do think it's worth noting that the current trend is an increasing burden of national debt.)
* If you want to get a "good" job, society tells you to take out loans to go to college. No one's forcing people to do that, but a lot of people do, and a lot of them sure regret it later. And we have laws specifically to prevent people from getting rid of that debt through bankruptcy. (To me, that single fact is the most screwed up thing about our education system.)
* In this US, there is literally a tax ("Social Security") that young people pay on their income whose sole purpose is to be redistributed to older people.
* The big one: lots of kids are born into poverty and, like it or not, their parents do not support their growth and prospering to the extent that we would like. This is because we aren't willing to ban people from having kids, but we also aren't willing to spend very much money on supporting kids who are unlucky enough to have shitty parents.
However, very importantly, the US has laws against child labor. In most cases you are protected by bankruptcy laws. And people under 18 have much less power to sign away their lives with contracts. (I'm speaking only about the US because I'm the most familiar with it.) My impression of libertarians is they generally want less of these protections, not more. Albeit not by much.
Or even political philosophy
