Thursday, September 15, 2011

A Note on the Libertarian Asteroid Dilemma

This is a brief afterthought to a post I wrote some time ago:
“Would Anarcho-Capitalists Allow the Earth to be Destroyed?,” February 28, 2011.
I write it because the issue continues to pop up now and again. The fundamental point is that the Austrian Anarcho-capitalists supporting natural rights theory are the ones subject to this problem. The Austrian advocates of a limited state justified by utilitarianism would be capable in principle of evading it by endorsing some form of government intervention.

And, as I have pointed out before, it is useless for anarcho-capitalists to try and evade the question by claiming that the situation imagined is “unrealistic” or “unlikely.” Hypothetical scenarios that are possible are perfectly legitimate to test ethical theories and their implications.

And it now strikes me that even that alleged “unrealistic” nature of the scenario can be questioned. Asteroid strikes and other threats we might face from natural events in our local part of the galaxy are no joke:
“Every century or so, a 10-meter meteor slams into the Earth with the force of a small nuclear device. Tunguska was the site of the last, in 1908, and it was pure luck that that meteor landed in the uninhabited wilderness of Siberia. Every few thousand years, Earth can pass through unusually thick parts of the debris trail of comets, turning the familiar light show of a meteor shower into a deadly firestorm. Roughly every 100,000 years, a projectile hundreds of meters across unleashes power equal to the world’s nuclear arsenals. The result is devastation over an area the size of England, global tidal waves (if the impact is in the ocean), and enough dust flung into the atmosphere to dim the Sun and kill off vegetation. That could ruin your day.

Then there's the “Big One”. About every 100 million years, a rock the size of a small asteroid slams into the Earth, causing global earthquakes, kilometre-high tidal waves, and immediately killing all large land animals. Creatures in the sea soon follow, as trillions of tons of vaporised rock cause drastic cooling and the destruction of the food chain based on photosynthesis. There's good evidence that this happened 65 million years ago and our tiny mammal ancestors were the beneficiaries as the giant lizards were extinguished. .... When massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, the result is a titanic explosion called a supernova. The dying star brightens to rival an entire galaxy and emits high-energy particles that can destroy the ozone layer of a planet like Earth if it occurs within 30 light years. The demise of large North American mammals 41,000 years ago has been linked to a supernova, and several other mini-extinctions may be tied to the cataclysm of stellar death. A supernova is a small squib compared to a hypernova. In this dramatic and rare event, the violent collapse of a very massive star ejects jets of gas and high-energy particles at close to the speed of light, and for a few moments the star outshines the entire universe in gamma rays. If a hypernova went off within 1,000 light years, and Earth was within the narrow cone of high-energy radiation, we’d experience an immediate global conflagration. It’s brutal luck if a hypernova ever goes off with its beam aimed at us.”
Chris Impey, “The End of the World as we Know It,” Independent, 14 June 2010.
We live in a dangerous, dangerous universe indeed, and humanity in fact needs to devote itself to detecting and dealing with threats like this.

And one immediately wonders: has the private sector concerned itself with threats like this, and by pure private funding provided a solution or detection system? I see no evidence of it. By contrast, both the UK and US governments certainly have:
Centre to Monitor Asteroids Opens, Guardian, 18 April 2002.

Robert Matthews, “Britain Leads Defence Against Asteroid Impact,” Telegraph, 1 March 2001.
Furthermore, the technology required for actually doing something about any such threat now exists because it has been developed in the state sector, with decades of government funding to programs like NASA.

If such a threat occurred and the solution required not just national mobilisation of resources and labour, but international co-operation by governments as well, the pure natural rights libertarian would be forced to condemn such coercive measures as an immoral violation of private property rights.

The extinction of the human species in scenarios where government intervention would be required to save it follows logically from natural rights ethical precepts. That is a very high price to pay for a theory which also lacks any credible justification.

The two major Austrian defences of absolute rights to property are Rothbard’s natural rights theory (which I have criticised here) and Hoppe’s argumentation ethic. Neither overcomes the ought from is dilemma of Hume. In the case of Hoppe, one can note that, just because you require the use of certain body parts in debate, it simply does not follow from this that you have any absolute moral right to the use of your body or of any external property.

16 comments:

  1. Classic comment from Sasha Volokh's post on asteroid impact:

    Shark says:
    I think this is the posting where libertarianism did this for me:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDthMGtZKa4

    (Fonzi jumps the shark)


    I have to agree.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The problem with hypothetical scenarios is that they try to create a problem in isolation when nothing in this world exists in isolation.

    I don't have any particular core principle, and I just see issues from pure casuitry. Works just fine.

    Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke about the possibility of an asteroid hitting the earth, and said it was about 1/45,000th. He explained, "But some people think they have a good chance of winning the lottery on that". Yeah, but some people are stupid.

    There's a 1/45,000th chance of me getting hit on the pavement by a truck carrying dangerous toxic liquids and melting down my body to an unrecognizable state - but I don't really worry about it. Let alone the ethical dillemmas there.

    The fact that government officials have set up asteroid collision prevention committees shows their lack of
    a) proportion
    b) scale
    c) priority
    None of which is surprising.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In your opinion, what theory of ethics solves the is/ought dilemma?

    ReplyDelete
  4. "1/45,000th"

    That's not enough information to base an analysis upon. To begin we need to know over what time period this 1/45,000th figure refers to, and also how much damage the asteroid will do. We also need to know how much warning will be afforded, how long a response would take, and how much preliminary work would cost.

    Since the earth has been hit by massive asteroids already several times, I'd say the probablility of its being hit again are closer to 1.00 than 1/45,000.

    Considering that in the worst case all human life might be extinguished, I think the small investment that has been made in asteroid defense is not unreasonable in the least.

    ReplyDelete
  5. What is the appropriate anarcho-capitalist response to a potential pandemic situation? How would/could a quarantine be enforced, for instance?

    (I suspect that it wouldn't be about keeping the infected contained so much as letting them go where they please with the caveat that most private property owners will bar them from entry.)

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is actually dumber by a factor of 4 than the "multiple natural interest rates means the demise of Austrian theory".

    It supposes (a priori) that a large plurality of people would be so stupid as to not want to contribute to blowing up the asteroid, but are smart enough to vote for people to tax them and engage in the correct response.

    It warms my heart to know that this is the best that the statists can do. Shooting Nerf bullets.... and missing.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "It supposes (a priori) that a large plurality of people would be so stupid as to not want to contribute to blowing up the asteroid, but are smart enough to vote for people to tax them and engage in the correct response."

    A mere cowardly evasion of the issue.

    I have already conceded that it may well be that people would contribute freely. But that is not the issue. The issue is constructing realistic and possible hypothetical scenario to test the implictaions of natural rights theory.

    The implications are clear: this theory would literally justify the destruction of humanity as opposed to private property rights violations.

    If your moral theory can't even attain the end of preservation of the species, even when the cost involved would be might not even be that large are anyway, then you have severe problems.

    And good luck trying to convince people that their extinction is preferable to some taxation.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "There's a 1/45,000th chance of me getting hit on the pavement by a truck carrying dangerous toxic liquids and melting down my body to an unrecognizable state"

    The difference is your death does not mean the exinction of species.

    ReplyDelete
  9. It supposes (a priori) that a large plurality of people would be so stupid as to not want to contribute to blowing up the asteroid, but are smart enough to vote for people to tax them and engage in the correct response.

    Well it's an imaginary pure libertarian world, Bob! It's bound to be silly!

    "It warms my heart to know that this is the best that the statists can do."

    Well actually the example came from the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I think what should make people jump the shark with Libertarianism is property:

    " Now let’s get to that more serious reframing.

    I had to live outside the Libertarian worldview for many years before I began to grasp the deeper problem with it: property. Every property system in history (and all the ones I’ve been able to imagine) are unjust. So a government that establishes a property system, defends it, and then stops is an agent of injustice.

    Libertarians tend to take property as a given, as if it were natural or existed prior to any government. But defining what can be owned, what owning it means, and keeping track of who owns what — that’s a government intervention in the economy that dwarfs all other government interventions. You see, ownership is a social thing, not an individual thing. I can claim I own something, but what makes my ownership real is that the rest of you don’t own it. My ownership isn’t something I do, it’s something we do."

    http://weeklysift.com/2011/08/22/why-i-am-not-a-libertarian/

    That's all that really needs to be said about Libertarianism. Just as behaviorism breaks down at the point where they say all human actions are learned behavior and that we can be studied just as a physicist studies a rock, Libertarianism breaks down in their attempts to make all rights a matter of property rights. A great deal of capitalist philosophy is refuted by this.

    A better way to approach political systems is the empirical approach, i.e., noticing which system works best for the majority of the people. If Libertarians want to say that we should have inefficiencies in the name of liberty, which indeed may be the case (such as having open borders despite terrorists coming in), the burden of proof is on them to make their case in a coherent fashion. Faulty arguments don't do anybody any good.

    As for the asteroid thing, I can see why it would make people leave Libertarianism. It could be seen to be a special case of the property rights refutation: they're effectively saying that (government backed) property is more important than human life.

    Ron Paul also has made the point that government backed property is more important than human life when he maintains that letting people starve would be more ethical than taxing away money that Libertarians themselves believe is the government's in the first place.

    The only way I would support markets is if markets are really better than a bunch of democratically run communities scattered throughout the country, but I will never believe property is more important than life and even many early philosophers said that if property has been extended to the point where people are harmed by it, that it has been extended too far and must be curtailed.

    In conclusion, pointing out that property and capitalism are government systems for all intents and purposes is also a death blow to their philosophy, esp. anarcho-capitalism.

    --successfulbuild

    ReplyDelete
  11. I'd also like to note that someone was saying that physics is a "predictive science" and that its laws are "true" and so on. There are cases in physics where even Newton's second law doesn't hold. I may eventually write up a post explaining how I was taught physics as it contradicts the Austrian approach. And the stuff about human behavior being grasped a priori is just nuts.

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/08/11/what-can-we-know-about-the-world-without-looking-at-it/

    This is a good, quick summary of why empiricism rules the day and why things like "deductive logic" are really only used in science to properly order things, in much the same way as a lawyer collects facts, comes up with principles to organize and order them, and then explains them in a coherent fashion.

    The link above should be the final word on empiricism here and the latest austrians coming on this blog should adhere to it instead of bringing up praxeology.

    I think it's actually dangerous because psychology is a well-respected, and now highly technical field of study. Certainly much more technical and technological than economics. So to place economics above what is known, and above centuries old methodologies, is offensive.

    --successfulbuild

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous--successfulbuild: excellent comments

    There are cases in physics where even Newton's second law doesn't hold. What are you referring to? Newton didn't say F=ma. What he said was the relativistically correct F=d(mv)/dt. Smart guy.

    On Rationalism vs. Empiricism. We are rationalism. And the rational thing "it" tells "us" is that it looks like there is an empirical out there. Putting one above the other is not very sensible.

    "deductive logic" are really only used in science to properly order things, in much the same way as a lawyer collects facts, Aristotle famously studied the Athenian law courts to develop his logic.

    What's wrong about the Austrian approach is that it is just uh, wrong, about some basics, particularly money. Maybe on Planet Austeria in the Zargool Galaxy, it is a good description.

    But the old Austrians did try to be consistent and think. They are worthwhile as a foil to more realistic ideas. Much modern mainstream econ is so confused it is "not even wrong". The web-Austrians however, are a cult. They learn a science. Web-Austrian Economic Science is a Science just like Christian Science, Creation Science, Vedic Science, Scientology etc.

    ReplyDelete
  13. What are you referring to? Newton didn't say F=ma. What he said was the relativistically correct F=d(mv)/dt. Smart guy.

    First, the commenter was referring to an earlier thread which included a discussion about epistemology. So, not only did you manage to completely miss the point, but you focused on the only part of the post that's largely irrelevant.

    Second, F = m dv/dt is not relativistically correct - but F = dp/dt can be, provided that the momentum is relativistic (i.e. p = mv times the Lorentz factor). It's an understandable mistake for someone with no physics training.

    Now can we please get back on topic? kthx.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Some people here really misunderstand Austrian methodology and all I ever see is a critique of Rothbard.

    Who are these prominent Austrians who are publishing and writing empirical studies and theoretical advances that are natural-rights Rothbardians, hmm?

    Or do the random posters on Mises.org opinions represent the whole of libertarian thought?

    Not to mention, quite a few Austrians aren't even anarcho-capitalists, let alone believers in natural-rights...

    ReplyDelete
  15. Anonymous,

    I am well aware that the Austrian school includes numerous subgroups, with different views on the state and ethical theories:

    http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2010/12/different-types-of-austrian-economics.html

    ReplyDelete
  16. I think the problem is that they assume that rationality will hold constant.

    What I mean by this is that there's a question as to whether everyone will contribute. How many religious people might view it as a sign of "end times" and decide that this is it and consequently not contribute? Similarly, how many people will completely lose their mind and go into a deep pessimism and believe that it doesn't matter anyway, it's not going to work we are all doomed so don't bother?

    So I really don't think it's reasonable to just proclaim that everyone will understand and contribute.

    ReplyDelete