A response to my previous post on this topic was such a perfect illustration of what I was talking about, I thought I would share and discuss it.
Without going into too much detail, the response was basically: Oh, yeah, well if we had liberty, here are some good things that wouldn’t happen¹.
Note is that while it seems like the respondent is arguing with me, he’s actually not. What he’s doing is sort of like running into the middle of a baseball game and trying to insist that one of the teams crossed the line of scrimmage before the snap.
That is, what he wants to argue is that if liberty (L) leads to the absence of something he thinks is good (G), then liberty must be bad:
Premise 1: L -> ~G
Conclusion: ~L
(You can read ‘P -> Q’ as ‘If P, then Q’, and ‘~A’ as ‘not A’.)
But this only works if there’s another premise, which is that the thing is actually good in and of itself. That is, he thinks he’s making this argument:
Premise 0: G
Premise 1: L -> ~G
Conclusion: ~L
That is a valid argument (it’s just modus tollens), if those are the premises. But I’m starting from a different set of premises, one of which is that liberty is good in and of itself. That leads to a different conclusion:
Premise 0: L
Premise 1: L -> ~G
Conclusion: ~G
That is, from these premises, we can conclude (via modus ponens) that something might happen that he wouldn’t like. And I might not like it, either. (For example, if people have liberty, they can keep and bear arms without restriction. Some people who keep and bear arms will use them to hurt innocent people. He wouldn’t like that, and neither would I.)
But we can’t conclude anything about liberty, because the assertion that liberty is good doesn’t depend on anything else².
From this perspective, suppose you have liberty, but you end up with cancer and can’t afford treatment; or you have liberty, but you end up in an unequal power relationship with your employer; or you have liberty, but you end up getting shot by a robber. Then that’s just how it goes. You don’t have to like it. But you still win, because you have the thing you want most, which is liberty.
In other words, whether L -> ~G is persuasive depends on which you value more: liberty, or something else. People who differ on that point are playing games that are as different as baseball and football.
The point of my post was that if you’re thinking about playing a game with someone else, it’s a good idea to establish beforehand
(1) whether you’re actually playing the same game (i.e., whether you share the same premises); and
(2) whether that’s a game you want to play (i.e., whether you are willing to accept their premises).
Otherwise, you’re just wasting everyone’s time.
The respondent jumped in — as so many people so often do — with an ‘argument’ of the form L -> ~G, without bothering to consider whether I share the premise G with him. I don’t — I have L as a premise — so he’s just talking past me, wasting his time, and mine.
And that was what I was warning about: If you’re someone who believes that liberty is important in and of itself, then arguing about how liberty would (or wouldn’t, or might, or mightn’t, or should, or shouldn’t) lead to something else is (1) pointless, because it’s not going to convince you of anything; (2) worse than pointless, because it wastes time and energy that would be better spent on something else; and (3) destructive of liberty, since liberty is always going to involve responsibility and risk, which are scary to a lot of people, who consequently will push liberty inexorably towards the bottom of the list of approaches to be tried.
Which is to say, the more you talk about liberty as a means, the more you hasten its end.
¹ I’m intentionally setting aside for now the question of whether those things are, in fact, good. For example, the respondent thinks it’s a bad thing for an employer to be able to set terms of employment that might not be entirely to the liking of a prospective employee. He calls that ‘oppression’. I call it ‘freedom of contract.’ I’m also ignoring the question of whether the things he likes things might follow from liberty, rather than be prevented by it. Both of those points deserve consideration, but are tangential to the point I want to make today.
² This is what it means to say ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident‘ in the Declaration of Independence. It’s not a statement that the truths can be easily proven or demonstrated. They can’t. It’s a statement that they are being chosen as premises, and require no justification beyond that choice.
