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Dan_Burfoot comments on The Fallacy of Gray - Less Wrong
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Comments (78)
That which I cannot eliminate may be well worth reducing.
I wish this basically obvious point was more widely appreciated. I've participated in dozens of conversations which go like this:
Me: "Government is based on the principle of coercive violence. Coercive violence is bad. Therefore government is bad." Person: "Yeah, but we can't get rid of government, because we need it for roads, police, etc." Me: " $%&*@#!! Of course we can't get rid of it entirely, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth reducing!"
Great post. I encourage you to expand on the idea of the Quantitative Way as applied to areas such as self improvement and everyday life.
Seeing Dan_Burfoot's comment from four years ago, I felt compelled to join the discussion.
I would put it like this
Libertarian: "Government is based on the principle of coercive violence. Coercive violence is bad. Therefore government is bad."
Me: "Coercive violence is dissuading me from killing you. So maybe coercive violence is not so bad, after all."
Seriously, what some people call "government" is the ground upon which civilization, and ultimately all rationality, rests. "Government" is not "coercive violence", it is the agreement between rational people that they will allow their
I was nodding along until: "The ground upon which all rationality rests".
You seem to have fallen into same trap of self-defeating hyperbole that the quoted straw-libertarian has fallen into. It is enough to make your point that government, and the implied threat of violence is not all bad and is even useful. Don't try to make ridiculous claims about "all rationality". Apart from being a distasteful abuse of 'rational' as an applause light it is also false. With actual rational agents all sorts of alternative arrangements not fitting the label "government" would be just as good---it is the particular quirks of humans that make government more practical for us right now.
I am embarrassed that I accidentally clicked "close" before I was done writing my comment. While I was off composing it in the sandbox, you saw the first draft and commented on it. And you are correct, I think. Is my face red, or what? I have retracted my original comment. My browser shows it as struck out, anyway.
So, yeah, saying that government is "coercive violence" is a straw argument. I think we agree.
I think we agree. What are "actual rational agents"? I am new here, so maybe I should do some more reading. I'm sure Eliezer has published extensively on defining that term. My prejudice would be that "actual rational agents" are entities which "rationally" would want to protect their own existence. I mean, they may be "rational", but they still have self-interest.
So what I'm saying is that "government" is a system for settling claims between competing rational agents. It's a set of game rules. Game rules enshrined by rational agents, for the purpose of protecting their own rational self-interests, are rational.
Rational debate, without the existence of these game rules, which is what government is, is impossible. That's what I'm saying.
Here's another way to look at it. The Laws of Logic (A is A, etc.) are also game rules. We don't think of them that way because we don't accept the Laws of Logic voluntarily. We are forced to accept them because they are necessarily true. Additional rules, which we call government, are also necessary. We write our own Constitution, but we still need to have one.
We are using approximately the same meaning. (I would only insist that they value something, it doesn't necessarily have to be their own existence but that'll do as an example.)
I'm disagreeing that government is actually necessary. It is a solution to cooperation problems but not the only one. It just happens to be the one most practical for humans.
Well, for sufficiently large groups of humans.
Bringing party politics into a discussion about rationality makes you the straw man, my friend. Attacking a philosophy of limited government would imply that every government action is the same shade of grey, and all must be necessary, because a group of people voted on a policy, therefore it must be thought out. Politics in itself is not the product of careful examination and rational thinking about public issues, but rather a way of conveying ones interests in a manner that appears to benefit the target audience and gain support. Not all rules are necessary or of the same necessity, simply because they are written.
I would also add that we do, in fact accept the Laws of Logic voluntarily, but only if we are not indoctrinated to do otherwise. To believe that we don't, would suggest that the first philosophers had to have been taught, perhaps by some supernatural or extraterrestrial deity, or perhaps the first logical thought was triggered by a concussion.
Doesn't "coercive violence is bad" beg the question in a way that would only be deemed natural if one were implicitly invoking the noncentral fallacy?
No, many people think coercion qua coercion is wrong - for example, philosophers of a Kantian bent, which is very common in political philosophy.
Point taken, but I would advance the view that the popularity of such a categorical point stems from the fallacy. It seems to be the backbone that makes deontological ethics intuitive.
In any event, it's still clearly an instance of begging the question.
But my goal was to cast a shadow on the off-topic point, not to derail the thread.
I'm not sure it is; that government involves coercion is a substantive premise.
Unfortunately, people who agree with the off-topic point can hardly accept such behaviour without response.
Many libertarians think that. I'm not so sure about that. I don't think he would have wished "no criminals should be captured" or "Everyone should dodge taxes" to be the Universal Law.
I'm not referring to Kant, I mean contemporary philosophers, like Michael Blake, who is not a libertarian.