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And this is the crux of why I beat up on Murray Rothbard, Hans-Herrmann Hoppe and other anarcho-capitalist thinkers all the time. Their moral epistemology can't be true! If you accept what I'm saying, it rules out these natural rights claims in the first instance.
I think there's reasons to believe it isn't, as I touched on during the episode of WBD, I did with Peter McCormack.
You can construct a logical framework from any arbitrary starting axioms, as long as the axioms are self-consistent. So metaphysically, I don't find it a compelling point.
Thank you! That's good form!
Yes! I am familiar with Priestley. There probably aren't many liberal philosophers who I am not familiar with tbh, since that's one of the areas I'm most well-read in.
I haven't read the book, no. I've read a brief summary of Pirsig's "Metaphysics of Quality" after some Googling. He seems to be very much influenced by and based in Eastern philosophy, so I'm probably not on the same page as him, epistemically.
I'm a moral constructivist. Which is to say, I don't think moral truths exist outside of the domain of human experience. In fact, I think most of what we think of as universal moral truths are in-built intuitions we have about how to relate to others. As much as philosophers have tried to construct rational moral frameworks, from virtue ethics to natural rights theories to utilitarianism, the fact remains: humans reason about moral things principally with intuition. I would argue that most of what we're doing is, as David Hume says, applying reason to explain our "passions" in a rational framework.
In this sense, our morality such as it is, is path dependent on our genetics. Most of our moral intuitions emerged because they were evolutionarily selective. Humans don't have claws, fangs, or other biological pre-dispositions to being terribly good predators. Instead, we have the capacity to reason about the past, present and future. Which led us to the ability to make tools, to think about the use of the tools, and to recognize the benefits of social cooperation in making tools and creating sub-specializations in social groups. These behaviors all largely stem from our intuitions that are in-built. And they've served us pretty well, to get us to this level of technological civilization.
So when I suggest that property rights definitely can't be the true basis for ethics in human society, I'm really not standing up for alternate conceptions of natural rights, or a utilitarian argument either! I'm saying all of these claims of objective moral truths seem obviously wrong to me. And i think these moral systems never quite work perfectly when applied, for the very reason that people are not applying logical reasoning to moral reasoning! They're listening to their intuitions about what is wrong and right. Obviously everyone doesn't agree intuitively on what's wrong and right, and that creates conflict and disagreement.
I just talk about philosophy stuff on Nostr on weekends.
... maybe! I want to. Going to see if I can make it work for the schedule.
Yeah!
I'd prefer not to use the word "attacking" to describe intellectual discussion and debate!
The weekend is almost here. You know what that means! It's getting close to Philosophy Nostr again!
And as I said above, I don't really agree the physical-information category distinction is as clean as is being suggested, regardless of whether the universe is fundamentally mathematical or not, as Tegmark hypothesizes.
I don't necessarily buy it. I myself am skeptical of mathematical platonism -- as I briefly have skirmished with Troy Cross about. But the point is, I don't agree axiomatically, that information must sit on top of a physical ontology.
Why do you think information and physical are categorically distinct in nature? There's good reason to think from our current knowledge of fundamental physics that it's a false distinction! Human intuition is a bad guide to conceptualizing the truth of nature.