[david_konietzko]

Thanks!

[david_konietzko]

It seems rather silly to me to interpret humanity’s special status in Christianity astronomically as opposed to metaphysically (i.e., as referring to rationality and free will). This confirms that atheists aren’t always as rational as they think they are.

Unfortunately, North propagates the myth of the incompatibility of science and Christianity. Like many atheists, he tends to conflate science with certain philosophical positions that are allegedly derived from, or presupposed by, science. He also implies that teleology only refers to conscious goals, and he doesn’t clearly distinguish between Aquinas’s and Paley’s arguments for the existence of God. On these issues, Edward Feser’s writings are very instructive.

[david_konietzko]

Thanks for the explanation. Quite an interesting topic!

[david_konietzko]

Thanks for your efforts!

[david_konietzko]

Thank you!

I think this is the most relevant chapter in Prescott’s book for my question.

[david_konietzko]

5. Under anarcho-capitalism, all airports, roads etc. are privately owned, and the owners have the right to arbitrarily decide who can use them and who can’t. Most owners would probably exclude habitual criminals.
It isn’t easy to decide how public property ought to be managed while it’s still (unjustly) “owned” by the state. Rothbard (in his last years) and Hoppe think the state ought to manage it’s “property” the way it would probably be managed by it’s rightful owners (the net tax payers); this should preferably be done at the local level. This means that local governments ought to be able to exclude criminal immigrants. In addition to the article Sons of Liberty linked to, see “What To Do Until Privatization Comes” by Rothbard (here) and this short argument by Stephan Kinsella against open borders. See also this article by Hoppe against free immigration and this article by Hoppe on privatization.

[david_konietzko]

A sentence has a certain meaning precisely because people interpret it to have that meaning. Therefore, if it is in principle impossible to understand the meaning of a sentence, then it simply doesn’t have a meaning.

[david_konietzko]

I don’t think you have to hold that all self-referential sentences are meaningless in order to show that This sentence is false is meaningless. Sentences which refer to themselves qua linguistic entities (strings of words) seem to be fine; e.g., This sentence is in the present tense is probably meaningful (and true). But problems arise when a sentence refers to its own content. In order to understand what such a sentence even means, you need to already know what it means; therefore, it’s impossible to understand it. I don’t think this is “disturbingly ad hoc.”

JohnD: To say that an English sentence is false is to say that its content is false. So This sentence is false really means The content of this sentence is false. But this sentence doesn’t even have an intelligible content, so there’s nothing of which anything is affirmed.

[david_konietzko]

This sentence is false is a meaningless string of words; it’s neither true nor false, since it doesn’t express any claim about reality. You can’t understand what it means without already understanding what it means.

[david_konietzko]

Thanks for your answer, Dr. J! I’m glad you’re posting again.

[david_konietzko]

I see I misunderstood you. Perhaps the case of medieval Iceland is evidence for Hoppe’s contention that a libertarian society would have to be based on strong family and kinship ties, coupled with conservative social mores.

[david_konietzko]

These would not have been societies in which individual liberty was necessarily prized, though.

Could you expand on this? How was liberty violated in medieval Ireland and Iceland? Do you think the unlibertarian aspects of these society were caused by the lack of government, or did they persist despite the absence of government?

In the article you link to, David Friedman writes:
And yet these extraordinary institutions [in medieval Iceland] survived for over three hundred years, and the society in which they survived appears to have been in many ways an attractive one . Its citizens were, by medieval standards, free; differences in status based on rank or sex were relatively small;[5] and its literary, output in relation to its size has been compared, with some justice, to that of Athens.[6]

Friedman’s footnote 5 reads as follows:
Sveinbjorn Johnson, Pioneers of Freedom (1930). A partial exception is the status of thralls, although even they seem freer than one might expect; in one saga a thrall owns a famous sword, and his master must ask his permission to borrow it. Carl O. Williams, in Thraldom in Ancient Iceland 36 (1937), estimates that there were no more than 2000 thralls in Iceland at any one time, which would be about 3% of the population. Williams believes they were very badly treated, but this may reflect his biases; for example, he repeatedly asserts that thralls were not permitted weapons despite numerous instances to the contrary in the sagas. Stefansson estimates the average period of servitude before manumission at only five years but does not state his evidence. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Icelandic Independence, Foreign Affairs, January 1929, at 270.

Friedman also writes, “Third, a person unable to discharge his financial obligation [to pay the fine for a crime] could apparently be reduced to a state of temporary slavery until he had worked off his debt.” Thus, it seems that some slaves were justifiably enslaved.

Doesn’t all this suggest that medieval Iceland was pretty free in comparison to other contemporary societies? Could you recommend a source that gives a different evaluation of Iceland?

[david_konietzko]

“The difference between the republic and empire is one of aristocracy (Senate) vs. monarchy, so the parallel is not exact.”
Given that consuls in the Roman Republic were elected for one-year terms and could not be immediately reelected (except during the decline of the Republic), Hoppe’s argument ought to apply to them, i.e., one might expect them to have had an incentive to act with high time-preference rates. Which incentives (besides the ideology of pietas) did the Romans use to make their consuls more farsighted?

“Are you trying to compare the Roman government to some other State?”
This would also be interesting (e.g., a comparison between Rome and other ancient civilizations such as Egypt or Greece), but I was mainly trying to compare various periods within Roman history. Can you recommend an essay or book on the history of Roman governance and law and the effects of institutional changes on policy?

[david_konietzko]

I believe Dr. J is referring to Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman.

[david_konietzko]

The link http://web.uvic.ca/grs/bowman/myth/gods.html (Lecture 8 ) doesn’t exist. The correct link is probably http://web.uvic.ca/grs/department_files/classical_myth/gods.html.

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