Ya but you also cite sociology papers as gospel, so I'm incredulous.

You ever been camping?

I don't conflate. Liberty is a right, endowed to you by nature. It is constrained by a lot of things, so it's not unlimited, but it still exists. But liberty is not the only right you have.

Huh? Yes, I think most governments organizes collective security (primarily through the military and diplomacy), punishes criminals (police and courts), organizes collective projects to benefit the economy (eg infrastructure projects, basic science research), and helps needy individuals (Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, SNAP, etc.).

I guess you think that in addition to these things, governments also do other things, including various oppressive things. Yes, I agree.

I think a state of anarchy is typically quite unfree for the reasons I laid out previously. Some people seem to think that governments are the only things that can make people unfree. I find this a dogmatic and frankly bizarre belief. There is nothing magical about governments, so that only their violence should affect people's lives. For instance, the gender norms common in a society have a major impact on people's freedom to live according to their own desires and govern themselves. It seems obvious to me that you can hold a political system constant, but significantly increase or decrease the amount of freedom people have if society has the more permissive attitude towards unusual gender roles common today compared to a society with much stricter expectations about what attitudes and actions are required of your gender.

But this implies that it is possible actually increase people's freedom from when they are in a state of anarchy. If government power is only one form of power among others, then it is possible to use that power to weaken the control other hierarchies - religious, mercantile, family, etc - can hold over you. In other words, no, anarchy is not perfectly free, at least not inherently.

Not anarchy at all.

Government is horrible at everything, including defense. That is outweighed by the danger of private defense forces though. It is bad at health care, bad at building infrstructure, bad at stealing my money to give to others, etc. It should be highly limited.



The definition of anarchy is perfect freedom. The problem is it doesn't last long because insanely lopsided power structures develop rapidly. So we try for the next best thing: mostly anarchy with the government in place to limit and prevent lopsided power structures from forming.

Oh here we go Gender norms? You mean like the normally distributed, hormonally expressed characteristics of biological males and females? Oh my word how oppressed by nature we all are.

Such a minor issue it doesn't even register on the radar.

The definition of anarchy is perfect freedom.



The other definition of anarchy is lack of government.

Indeed I have! I'm more of a glamper these days; I require that the champagne be chilled.

Are you suggesting that camping is a demonstration of the "state of nature"? So far your claims about this state have been thus:

(emphases mine)

I do not see how you can argue that camping provides an empirical demonstration of the state of nature as you've defined it here.

To restate it, my argument is that if you're going to call your concept a state of nature, then you need to demonstrate that such a state actually exists in nature. Pointing to people going camping comes nowhere close to doing so. People camping do not exist in an environment free of hierarchies or power structures, nor are they free to go wherever they want.

Right, so when I said these are some of the things governments do, and you said lol at that, you were just kidding.

Okay. "Mostly anarchy" is not something I strive for.

Sorry, I forgot that you won't abstract away from your substantive political concerns to discuss the issue at hand. Let me give you another example instead. Imagine two polities with identical political structures, but one society is dominated by a religion with very strict rules about what clothes you can wear, what kind of activities it is permissible to engage in for pleasure and so on, and the other one is dominated by a religion that is non-specific about what to wear or whether it is bad to eg drink alcohol, dance, have sex, etc. I would consider the first society a less free society. Notice, I am not claiming that it is a worse society - I do not assume that maximal freedom is what we should be aiming for. But nonetheless, the amount of freedom people have is affected by the religious norms of the society in which they live.

I mean, I would guess what is really going on here is you are assuming your conclusion by defining "freedom" to mean absence of government interference or something. If so, then I would agree that anarchy is a state of maximal "freedom," but then also claim that maximal "freedom" is a bad thing - we should not seek to have a perfectly "free" society. I care about the ideas involved, not the labels we use to refer to those ideas.

1. Anarchy is perfect freedom. (by definition)
2. Anarchy is not perfect freedom (by definition)
3. Therefore anarchy is perfect freedom and not perfect freedom.
4. Either Anarchy is perfect freedom or God doesn't exist (disjunction introduction)
5. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

This is a valid argument. If you think it is unsound, what is the error? Remember, definitions are tautological and so necessarily true.

You really should look at the Articles of Confederation. You might prefer them to the US Constitution.

Yes, that's nice, but what do sociology papers say about camping?

Camping and Cohesiveness: A Sociological Study of the Effect of Outdoor Recreation On Family Solidarity (West and Merriam, Jr. 1969)

Looks riveting :P

Second google link for "sociology of camping" was a blog post about camping being gendered as masculine. DODN would love that one I'm sure.

It's irrelevant what you personally want. The conversation about gay wedding cakes should be discussed within the context of the country it's taking place in, and the laws of said country. If you want to change the laws, go for it, but your personal view has been shown to be at odds with what the United states was intended, and is laid out functionally, as.

As an actual believer in freedom, I think anyone should be able to do whatever they want so long as they don't infringe upon other people's rights. Denying someone my association or service as a private business owner is not infringing upon their rights, because they don't have a right to my business or my service. Getting the government involved and forcing me to do something I don't want to do is infringing upon my rights.

This goes farther to your point about the social sphere. You can "Express gender" however youd like or any number of other benign behaviors that go against the norm. What you cannot do is use government to force me to like it or morally accept it, or call me a bigot or racist when I politely decline to associate with you because of it. That is infringing upon my freedom, and you are the tyrant now. You seem ok with this. It doesn't surprise me, but it's far from the tolerance and all inclusive attitude you project. It's also far from rational.



Again, it doesn't matter how you want it to be, it matters how it is. As it stands, anti discrimination laws are used as a weapon to infringe both socially and legally upon the natural right to free association. We see this in the arguments of progressives like yourself and more and more, in practice. Like I said, this strategy has been used to great effect in the success of minority movements for the better part of the last 50 years, but its ostracized and pissed a lot of gun toting Republicans off. It's the major reason Trump got elected.

If you like the current state of affairs, keep it up. If you actually want to argue from principle and have rights protected for everyone, then you need to refine your reasoning.

Indeed I am. Not speaking of glamping or camping at a public camp site or anything like that but true, off road, inthawoods camping. What do you see when you do this kind of camping (just ignore for the sake of argument that you are on US land for now)? No one around, no signs of government or civilization, no power structures or authorities, no police or security cameras; it's just you and nature (and you are part of nature). What do you experience? Liberty (and I will not go over other natural rights here for brevity).

Total uninhibited liberty. You can do anything you wish. Travel, hunt, forage, build a shelter, speak, worship God, masturbate, draw a cave painting, whatever. This is a glimpse into the 'state of nature.' If it applies to me, then it applies to you as well, because your standing in nature and experiencing liberty is no different from mine, as individuals.

This liberty you experience (and it's why I think people love camping so much-they experience release from their freedom being infringed upon on a daily basis in society) is your right as a part of and product of the natural world (or God). This ability has been given to us by the very thing that created us; nature.

Your right of self government and liberty can be infringed upon by force or duress, but it's still a part of nature, and because you are a part of nature it's still a part of you (immutable).

It's only when man made institutions and legal apparatix (almost always ideologically based) starts living a life of it's own and monopolized force that this natural freedom you experience as a part and product of nature starts to be infringed upon. The very unique and beautiful part of the American experiment was that the law of the land was designed in such a way so that the institutions themselves were to be enshrined protectors of these natural rights.

It didn't play out that way exactly, but it doesn't destroy the intent of what it was and the unextinguished potential of what it could still be.

For that to happen, of course, tens of millions of ideological Americans on both sides are going to have to accept (for once) that the true cost of freedom is reconciling yourself to living next to people you sometimes despise. I don't suspect that will happen. Unfortunate, because the historical alternative has been, almost without reservation, violence.

You have claimed that consumer discrimination should be legal because we have a natural right to discriminate against consumers and the government has guaranteed this natural right. I asserted that there are no natural rights, so no government can protect these non-existent rights. Presumably, you acknowledge that this is a rational view for me to hold, since you believe that atheists like me can't consistently believe in objective moral claims, such as that people have natural rights.

You have ignored this argument, pretending for some reason that I should believe in natural rights even though that claim flatly contradicts your own view of atheism.

I'll also point out, I don't need to change the law - it was already changed before I was born in the 1960s. The law of the US is that some forms of consumer discrimination are illegal - if you do them you will be punished by the government. I would say that your personal views about which US laws are Constitutional are irrelevant to the actual laws of the US. It is the Supreme Court that makes this judgement. Of course, you can disagree with its judgements, but nonetheless, their judgements make laws, your judgements just make people confused.

And lol at your claims about what was intended by the US Constitution. You weren't even aware that the US had a different constitution before our current one. Your credibility regarding historical claims has been well shot in this thread.

Evidently you don't believe in freedom either. Preventing people from infringing on other people's so-called (non-existent) natural rights is tyrannical. If I want to take some clothes from the drawer in the room you sleep in, or food from the refrigerator in the house you live in, and you get the government involved and force me to not do that, you are infringing upon my freedom. You justify these tyrannical acts by appealing to some made-up fairyland thing called a "natural right" that supposedly allows you to make me unfree by locking me in a box if I try to take those things. What a tyrant.

Sorry, next time I'll remember to not bring out the red cape. Also lol at the bolded from a so-called defender of freedom. A free society certainly does allow people to call you a bigot or racist when you discriminate against consumers because of their race or sexual orientation.

Let me very clear and you can quote me on this. I am an intolerant and exclusive person and favor tyranny in the sense in which you define these terms. If you ever thought otherwise, that is just because I am polite and try to take people on their own terms, not because I agree with your goals or understanding of the world. We are both (presumably?) Americans and as such we have some common interests. However, I disagree on a fundamental level with your political philosophy and think that if enacted it would do a great deal of harm to American society.

I mean, this is just bizarre. "How it is" is that anti-discrimination laws are the law of the land.

As for Trump, the major reason he got elected is because of structural changes to society making elections more democratic, the incompetent or unprincipled behavior of GOP leadership since Gingrich, and the nihilism of a large segment of GOP voters.

Also, I'm not a progressive.

Cheers, I will keep it up, thanks.

I have claimed you have a right to freely associate with whoever you wish, as well as trade with whoever you wish (conversely--refrain from associating or trading with who ever you don't wish to). Don't think so? Please explain why not, or how its justified for someone to force me to associate or trade with someone I don't want to.


You can believe whatever you want. If you don't believe that then petition to change the law of the land, because your view is at odds with it.

I don't think much is rational about atheism, so this is no different. What is irrational about your view is that you dont believe natural rights exist but yet still operate from the premise that "all men are created equal" and it's necessary corollary "all men are equal under the law." The former is self-contradicted without an acceptance of the existence of natural rights. Empirically it's quite obvious that no men are created equal, in almost any way, so really you should start there if you want an internally consistent view.

Unfortunately for your contradictory view the CRA is beholden and subservient to the constitution (the supreme law of the land). Judgements on constitutionality of subservient laws made by the supreme court have been overturned before, and the CRA or consumer legislation infringing upon your natural right of liberty is no different.



This is just a gross misunderstanding of what a law is. Laws aren't intended to prevent anything, they're fundamentally intended to remedy infringements of rights.




You didn't need to write a paragraph on this. I was well aware of at least some of your ideological predispositions reading your numerous self-contradictions, as thinly veiled as they are.





Like most of the left, you are totally out of touch with the basket of deplorables.

You can't be defined as much of anything, considering the patchwork of self contradicting principles you appear to subscribe to.

This is not an example of the state of nature as Locke uses the term, or even as you've previously used the term.

Our hypothetical wilderness camper is not in a "pre-political" state, nor one which is prior to the formation of hierarchies and power structures. It is explicitly a state that only exists subsequent to all of those.

The camper prepares for the trip within a given social context, taking with him both a large number of supplies which he could not have procured apart from that society, as well as skills he could not have learned apart from it. In the US at least the very definition and existence of the wilderness into which he goes also depends on political structures, i.e. the designation of national parks and wilderness areas. A person's capacity to go on such a trip depends very much on their position within the social hierarchy, and at the end of the trip he will return to that same position. The freedom he enjoys for the duration of the trip is entirely dependent on that same society for its existence. Beyond that, of course, he is not actually free from the law during that time. He may be less likely to face sanctions for certain actions, but (for example) if you start a substantial forest fire on purpose you will certainly find that you were not in such a state of freedom.

I think it's clear that the problem with this example is mostly that you're describing something very temporary, but such a transient state can't really support this idea of a "state of nature". It's also clear that the example only comes close to describing something like your concept of freedom because it describes a state of social isolation, but there again the entire point is that no such state of isolation is sustainable as a way of life.

Locke describes the state of nature as one in which a person can act "without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man" (Two Treatises, Essay Two, Ch. 2), and my point is that there are no human cultures in which such a state exists as a general way of life, and most likely can't be, purely as a consequence of the fact that humans have evolved to be social creatures.

Beyond that, I think if you can only define the "state of nature" as one of pure social isolation, then it's not clear why such a state should even tell us anything useful about the concept of rights, which are explicitly concerned with social life. Obviously an individual in complete isolation has no need of rights, natural or otherwise.

Your example fits much better with my conception of freedom than your own. Backpacking is not really like living in a state of nature understood as an absence of government. Such trips typically require permits purchased from the government, and you are still required to follow the rules of the government, eg whether or not fire is allowed, pack in pack out regulations, hunting and fishing rules, and so on. Furthermore, the trails along which you hike are also often maintained with government money, and the forest is cared and watched over by government employees.

However, I agree there definitely is something freeing about hiking in the backcountry. But it's the absence of other people and the expectations and norms that come with living in close proximity to other people in organized societies that can feel so freeing in the forest. I identify this as a sense of freedom as well, but it is more in reference to temporarily laying aside some of those other aspects of life - religion, gender and family, business and work, civic responsibilities, etc that can constrain our ordinary life.

I can't think of any examples of laws struck down for violating natural rights. By the way, did you ever respond to this? If so I didn't see it.

It is if you grant me for the sake of argument that you aren't on any US soil, as I asked, which you obviously refused to do in your response.

You wont get it unless you allow yourself to conceptualize. Clearly you can conceptualize a man, alone, in nature. You just refuse to do so.

I'm sorry for missing the "outside the US" bit, you can feel free to ignore that part. It's not even particularly important to the argument. The above, instead, is the crux.

Of course I can conceptualize a man, alone, in nature. I have not argued that the "state of nature" concept is incoherent, instead my entire point is that such a concept is an abstraction that does not, in fact, exist as a natural state for human beings. It is not a "state of nature". It only exists as a philosophical abstraction.

Hence my original statement:

Again, it's a thought experiment that requires you put away all the things your mind attaches to your own current existence. I asked for the sake of argument to imagine a man in nature free of societal and governmental restrictions and then describe what that state is like.

It's not norms that are restricting your sense of freedom, it's actually your freedom being infringed upon. Whether that happens in physical reality or in your head is a different thing. Regardless, the social norms according to your positivism are what informs the law in the first place, so it shouldnt be a problem for you!

So does the entire philosophy of law, and most of the legal and financial system. Are you arguing we just get rid of laws altogether?

Again, my argument is that the abstraction does not represent a state of nature.

The emphasis is on nature because, at least so far, your argument for the validity of a certain theory of rights is based in the assertion that those rights exist naturally. This naturality is taken to bestow upon this same theory a kind of legitimacy. The fact that the assertion is false does not preclude you from arguing for the legitimacy of this understanding of rights on some other basis, for example on utilitarian grounds.

Beyond that, since I have argued that the law as it actually exists is not based in a theory of natural rights (hence the request for you to substantiate your claim that it is), I am not arguing against the existence of laws, or that we should get rid of laws, by arguing against the existence of natural rights.

I think you should have a legal right to freely associate with whom you want, and to do business with whom you want. I think the government guaranteeing such rights will lead to a more free and economically vital country. However, people can obviously use these rights to do bad things - such as refusing to sell goods to black people because they are racist. Still, I think protecting these rights for everyone requires that the government should protect it for those people using them to do evil as well.

However, these legal rights were put in place to serve specific ends (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are pertinent examples), and I don't think we should lose sight of that. In the 1960s, many Americans from both parties came to believe after decades of trying to get white Southerners and other racists to stop making life unfair and miserable for black Americans, that our right to refuse business to whomever we want for whatever reason we want had been so abused and caused such great harm to the life, liberty, and happiness of women and minority racial, religious, and ethnic groups that we should limit those rights by barring consumer discrimination on those grounds.

I don't pretend to know better than those Americans whether they were right. I've lived a relatively privileged life as a white half-Jew, never really experiencing any direct racism, so it is difficult for me to judge from personal experience the extent of the harm caused by the discriminatory social structure of Jim Crow or the racism common at the time (I also recognize that if I lived in the 1960s I would have experience much more direct racism because of my ethnicity, and so have likely personally benefited from the Civil Rights Acts). However, it is clear enough that black Americans had suffered from centuries of an unjust government and society, and it looks to me like the CRA helped make both of these less unjust to black Americans. My impression is that except for a few fringe people like Ron Paul(?) and yourself, most Republicans and Democrats also think that the CRA made the US a better place.

As for gay wedding cakes, the ruling by the Supreme Court seems sensible to me. I can't adequately judge the legal merits of the case, but the decision seems on substance fine.
Name the specific part of law (I mean the specific legal statute or section of the Constitution) that you think contradicts my view.

I thought your view was that atheism was equally rational as theism, that they are both based on incommensurate starting points, but neither is more or less rational than the other?

Your basic problem is that you are mostly ignorant of philosophy, but seemingly either don't care or aren't aware of this ignorance, but yet all you want to do is argue philosophy. Your ignorance causes you to continue to confuse conditional (at best!) statements like:

1. If all men have natural rights, then all men are morally equal .

with biconditional statements like:

2. If and only if all men have natural rights, then all men are morally equal.

There are many ways to derive the claim that all men are (or should be) morally equal (let alone equal under the law) without assuming that all men have natural rights. I even pointed to an example earlier in utilitarian philosophy.

Indeed, they have been overturned, but before they were overturned, they were the law of the land.

Okay.

I'm not really of the left, and I am definitely not out of touch with the GOP base.

Name and demonstrate that even one principle I accept is self-contradictory. As for my political affiliation, I am mostly a Rawlsian-style liberal, except a little friendlier to markets than he was.

It doesn't have to. Abstractions dont have to exist in reality to be logically true or possible. This is like saying in 1848 thinking about flying to the moon is debunked because it's not possible to do so. Your theory of social norms isnt based on reality either but philosophical abstractions.

My argument is when boiled down to first principles ala descartes human experience is fundamentally and primarily the relationship between a human being and his own mind. His mind interacts with his environment, so it is the relationship between reality, an individual, and his environment. When looked at from this state, there are certain characteristics about human experience that are fundamentally true, one of which is liberty.

What you seem to be saying is that human beings cannot be removed from the equation, which is totally untrue. You can remove yourself from all humans and all society right now and move to remote parts of your own country.


The law, the constitution, is certainly based on natural rights theory, especially considering the major philosopher dealing with the alternative of legal positivism didn't even formulate his theories until after the declaration was articulated, and even moreso because he wrote essays challenging its legitimacy!

Okay. Honestly, when I try to imagine myself in such a state, what I mostly think is that I am in a high degree of danger and should immediately go back to civilization where there are laws protecting my rights as a citizen, or at least to buy a gun to protect myself with. I think I would be extremely cautious of anyone I meant whom I didn't know. I would probably try to find people I could trust to form a mutual defense agreement. I'm single, so thank God I don't have to worry about protecting a family. I'm still not really sure how I'm going to feed and shelter myself for the long term though.

I don't really understand what you are saying here about it not being norms that constrain my freedom in ordinary life. Unsurprisingly, you don't understand what legal positivism is as it explicitly claims that the existence of law does not imply the goodness of law (that is very close to a one-sentence summary of legal positivism!).

However, you misunderstand me on a more fundamental level. I don't want to get rid of those freedom-shrinking constraints. I enjoy a vacation from responsibility, but my life would lose much of its meaning and purpose if I gave them up completely. Again, I don't think that pursuing maximal freedom should be our goal, either personally or corporately.

You do? What about the converse, that you are free to not associate or trade with people you dont want to. This really has to be regardless of reason, or you're crossing into moralism and thought crime.

So you're for repealing the CRA then?

You're contradicting yourself again here because as a legal positivist you should be perfectly alright with the segregationist norms of certain parts of southern society and laws derived thereof by the states that had authority over rules not laid out to the federal government in the constitution. The CRA had to be hidden in the commerce code, because an amendment was not possible due to conflict with other amendments.

This all has deep roots in the civil war. Interestingly, you should also be for the right of the southern states to decide for themselves the slavery issue or to distinguish themselves as a separate society with it's own norms and laws as well, as a positivist.

Argument from consensus. As a positivist you can make this claim, but you have to follow it through and accept both segregation and slavery as fully legal and justified if you want to be consistent.




The legal positivist view? Um probably the part where the major philosopher of positivism first writing was challenging the legitimacy of the declaration of independence by attacking its philosophy of natural rights!!!



In a vacuum, yes. What follows from atheism leads to inconsistency with experienced reality though.



That's pretty rich, considering as a positivist there is no relation between morality and law. There you go, trying to be a natural law theorist and legal positivist at the same time again.


I assure you that you are.

I brought this up, so to clarify, legal positivism does not imply that natural rights don't exist. Legal positivism is a theory about legal ontology. Alternatively, legal positivism gives a theory about the conditions necessary for something to be considered law. What is distinctive about legal positivism compared to natural law theories of law, is that legal positivists do not include include a moral component as a condition for something being law, and natural law proponents do. So a legal positivist would that say the CRA is the law of the land in the fullest sense, regardless of their view of its merits as law, whereas a natural law theorist who believes the CRA conflicts with our natural rights might say something like, the CRA is not well-formed law and so doesn't have any legal authority. Notice that this doesn't imply that the legal positivist doesn't believe that we have natural rights that are infringed upon by the CRA.

Also, while it is not quite accurate to call Hobbes a legal positivist, he is a clear forerunner of many of the same themes, including most pertinently the claim that the ontology of law is conventional, so I wouldn't appeal to Bentham coming after the Constitution as an argument here.

And again, don't turn a conditional into a biconditional. There are more than just two theories of legal ontology.

What is destructive about it? If a law is suspected to be broken, it can be tested in court. What is wrong with that?

And the "little man" argument is just silly. This is Northern Ireland, where the religious conservative lobby has spent enormous amounts of actual and political capital to suppress gay rights for decades, and it is the same lobby that is sponsoring this man's court fees.