The Liberty Papers

Edit: I should point out that I’m a doofus. I didn’t intend to mischaracterize Francois’ position. Didn’t even mean to intimate that this was a direct response to his position. Just a general thingy on the problems I see with anarchy…and why I support the concept of negative rights. And, as a couple point out, I might be dead wrong in my characterization of anarcho-capitalism entirely.

Introduction
There are many who claim not to see the difference between negative and positive rights. However, this isn’t a valid position to take given the extent of application of the positive/negative distinction. Far from being applicable solely to the rights of man, they find use in describing virtually every situation in which action is required. For instance, in Operant Conditioning, the terms positive and negative are used to denote different forms of reinforcement. Negative reinforcement isn’t punishment and positive reinforcement isn’t reward. Negative reinforcement is withholding or not using a stimulus (whether a reward or a punishment). Positive reinforcement is giving that stimulus to the subject (again, whether it’s a good or bad stimulus).

When it comes to rights, negative rights are quite simply those things you would have with no interference; Unless you murder me, I live. Unless you stop me, I’m free. Unless you take it, I have property. Unless you attempt to take it away from me, I have that right. Positive rights on the other hand are things you can only have with interference (again, ‘good’ or ‘bad’). A ‘right to a standard of living’ can only be maintained if those who don’t have that standard of living are given it by an outside source. This outside source is inevitably government. And said government works through taxation and regulation. You have a ‘right to a standard of living’, if I subsidize it. You have a ‘right to maternity leave’ if your employer concedes it. The difference can only be made up through the contribution of others. It is thus a ‘positive right’. And, because this ‘right’ can only be maintained through the coercion and loss of property of others, it is mutually exclusive to the maintenance of negative rights. The same is true for all ‘positive rights’. They thus result in a net loss of liberty.

But a man could ask why any rights at all?

Which is an exceedingly more difficult question. But one I’ll try to handle in the following post. As I’ve said, I’m a behavioral ecologist. And while I love monkeys, I also have a passion (if you couldn’t tell) is for philosophy. Particularly evolutionary epistemology and ethics. Evolutionary epistemology is comparatively easy to derive from first principles, and even easier to expound upon. Evolutionary ethics, on the other hand, is a huge mess. It is nearly impossible to derive a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ when all actions essentially derive from selfishness. We call the selfish but devoted father that is the Titi monkey ‘good’, while we call the infanticidal–but no more selfish–male Howler monkey ‘bad’. I still haven’t figured that problem out, and the manuscript still sits on the back burner more or less untouched, 2.5 years later.

The Problem
This basic problem of how to define ‘good’ without a clear universal is even more complex when it comes to political philosophy. The reason is because what at first looks like a simple problem is actually twofold:

1)Why are ‘negative rights’ good? Why are ‘positive rights’ bad?
2)Why any rights at all?

I’ve discussed Problem 1 at length both here and at my own blog. The major defect in ‘positive rights’ is that it posits the existence of ‘The People’ as a single entity, a collective. This differs from ‘the people’ as used by the Framers to denote a collection of individuals who share a common government. The idea of a collective, of group selection, has little or no basis in reality. It hasn’t been shown to exist. Rather, as outlined by Adam Smith and corroborated by two decades of economists, mathematicians, and behavioral ecologists progress and cooperation are simply epiphenomena relating to self interest. To quote Terry Pratchett:

‘I’m sure we can all pull together, sir.’

Lord Vetinari raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.’ He smiled. ‘It’s the only way to make progress…’

Forcing humans into a collective goes against our very nature, which is why such coercive governments seldom last without the added coercion of lethal retaliation for disobedience. And why they inevitably succumb to stagnation.

The Solution
And in here we see a makeshift solution to the ‘good’/’bad’ problem: What were we built to do? How were we built to behave? What are the rules by which we function? And if the trend continued, how would things end up? In other words, if the models that behavioral ecologists and economists used were taken to their logical conclusion, what would we see?

With Problem 2 we run into greater difficulty. ‘Surely what we see in nature is anarchy,’ would inevitably be an anarchist’s reply. And in that no animal other than humans has a codified rule of law, he’d be right. Yet there are trends we can see within the animal kingdom, particularly among the most intelligent social mammals, that would seem to tend toward things that are too expensive to fight for.

The basic idea is that the ‘worth’ of an individual can be calculated in terms of the time and energy spent to create said being. An insect or a mantis shrimp doesn’t cost a whole lot to make. Neither does an egg-laying vertebrate like a fish or a frog or a snake. Small mammals aren’t much further up the scale. But as one goes up the scale in intelligence, sociality, longevity, and size, they get much more expensive and much more demanding very fast. Just for some perspective, while some rodents can produce up to 6 offspring every 3 weeks, you can only produce 2-4 wolves every two years in your average pack (which consists of several adults of both sexes). It takes a monkey anywhere from 2 to 6 years to achieve completion, a chimp or a gorilla up to a decade, and a human close to 18 years, with correspondingly lower interbirth intervals.

A mantis shrimp dying might only represent 50-100 calories lost. A chimpanzee on the other hand, would amount to literally anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of calories of lost investment if he died. Interestingly enough, the cost of producing an adult of a given species and the intensity, frequency, and lethality of fight situations within and between groups shows a pretty robust trend toward fewer and less intense fights the more expensive the individual. Fights to the death are not uncommon among invertebrates and ‘cheaper’ vertebrates such as the famed lethal dances of male hummingbirds. But amongst higher primate males (excluding humans), within-group lethality is such an uncommon occurrence that a simple description of the incident is often worth an entire scientific publication (in other words, pretty remarkable). Lethality between groups is likewise low, with Chimpanzees being the only other primate known to do so in a systematic manner. And even that is rare.

As might be predicted, the general trend we see, from ‘life’ on down through ‘property’, is that the higher the energetic worth of an animal, forcible coercion through violence drops lower and lower. Instead, the mere likelihood of retaliation is enough to convince the would-be aggressor not to bother. This is the basic principle behind Heinlein’s assertion that ‘an armed society is a polite society’.

Conclusion
This would seem to be an argument in support of the anarchist’s assertion that society will find order on its own anyway. But an important part of this understanding is that violence does happen. Animals’ ‘property’ (whether food or territory) is stolen. And females and males alike find themselves coerced by more dominant individuals on a regular basis.

Although the incidences of all of these would decrease relative to other animals in a human anarchistic society due to an increased fear (and cost) of retaliation, they would still exist. So what the anarchist asserts is that a basal level of murder, coercion, and theft is somehow ok. The depredations against others in an anarchy represent the background noise that proponents clearly ignore as mere stochastic effect. Which seems just a bit dismissive, if you ask me. And not all that different from the collectivist mentality of the leftist when you get down to it. Just as–according to the Supreme Court–the police are responsible for the protection of ‘the people’ but not a single individual, the anarchist is fine with a relatively low level of transgressions against man’s right to life, liberty, and property among ‘the people’ despite its continued occurrence amongst individuals. ‘As long as ‘the people’ are more or less free, who cares about a couple of them?’ is what they seem to say.

But more importantly, the anarchist imputes too much to statement that ‘All men are created equal.’ Even at birth, some are taller, some are heavier. Some are healthier, some are more alert. Should one strip away all of the material (environmental) differences, the genetic differences would still leave vasts gulfs between the most capable and the least. The anarchist’s basic argument of self order is dependent upon not only a level playing field but teams consisting of cloned players. While his assumptions hold basically true in the animal kingdom where the difference between the Alpha male and the lowest of the subordinate males doesn’t tend to be all that great, in a population as varied as humanity, the assumption doesn’t even begin to resemble reality. In such a system, where some are capable of greater acts of coercion than others, and where the threat of retaliation varies widely from almost none to almost infinite, a few will inevitably come to control the many. An oligarchy. History tells us much about these oligarchies, and about how noble, how meritocratic, how well-meaning they are in the beginning, such things will inevitably become mere tools for the ambitious, the greedy, the predators, to all the more easily take power with. And so tyrannies are born.

The anarchist turns a blind eye to the difference between the perfect world of their assumptions and the real world. The classical liberal merely acknowledges them. He sees that for society to remain free from tyranny, individuals must treat each other as if they were equal. It is not only the logical conclusion of the trend toward less and less coercive acts in the animal world, but also the only way to prevent tyranny. The young man must not kill the old one merely because the latter cannot protest. The man must not rape the woman merely because he can pin her. The strong must not take bread from the mouth of the weak merely because he can. Because eventually the young man will become a general, the man a police chief, the strong an iron-fisted dictator.