I meant I couldn’t find grounds for disapproval of defamation under a libertarian system.
Ah, OK. Then what I want to suggest is that you should probably see this as a reason to be dissatisfied with libertarianism. (Though of course it might turn out that actually there’s nothing you can do to stop massive defamation campaigns that wouldn’t have worse adverse consequences in practice. I doubt that, though.)
in a racist society, a person’s race will impact how well they do at their job.
It might. I think there are two sorts of mechanism. The first is that a racist society might mess up some people’s education and other opportunities, leading them to end up worse at things than if they belonged to a favoured rather than a disfavoured group. The second is that some jobs (most, in fact) involve interacting with other people, and if the others are racist then members of disfavoured groups might be less effective because others won’t cooperate with them.
Both of these mean that the principle “don’t discriminate on the basis of things that don’t make an actual difference” isn’t enough on its own to prevent all harmful-seeming discrimination, so appealing only to that principle probably justifies less anti-discrimination law than actually exists in many places. I’m OK with that; you’re saying that there shouldn’t be any anti-discrimination law because of its arbitrariness, and I’m pointing out that at least some has pretty good and non-arbitrary justification. I’m not trying to convince you that all the anti-discrimination measures currently in existence are good; only that some might be :-).
it’s very hard to determine what characteristics actually correlate with performance.
I agree, but my argument was that “this characteristic correlates with performance” generally isn’t good grounds for discrimination in hiring etc.
That’s a bit unfair—I readily admitted the weakness in my whole theory re property rights.
You did (for which, well done!) but someone can be epistemically virtuous on one occasion but not another :-). And I did admit that maybe I was being uncharitable. But I really don’t see how it’s plausible that negative externalities are just Too Much for the human race’s mental tools to cope with. You say the problem is that it’s difficult to draw boundary lines (if I’m understanding you right); yeah, it is, but that’s a problem with pretty much everything including, I suggest, infringement of liberty. The real world comes in shades of grey; our institutions sometimes need to be defined in black and white; the best we can do is to draw the boundaries in reasonable places, and I don’t think it makes sense to throw up our hands and despair merely because practical considerations sometimes require slightly arbitrary decisions to be made.
(It is only a matter of practical considerations. We could organize our laws and whatnot to acknowledge that most things vary continuously, and e.g. instead of having an offence of “murder” that one either has or hasn’t committed say sometimes that someone has committed 0.1 of a murder, etc. But it would be far more complicated and the gain would probably not be worth the cost.)
could you paraphrase please?
You argued: There is no universally agreed moral system or moral authority, nor any prospect of their being one. Therefore, it can never be right to force your moral system on someone else. Therefore, we should be libertarians. (As I’ve said, every step in this seems dubious to me; my apologies if as a result I have presented it badly.) And this is how you derive libertarianism. Now, you say that libertarianism is the one true objectively right moral system, which you know to be right by means of this argument. And here’s the thing: if this is really a good argument, then others ought to be persuadable by it too, in which case ultimately everyone should end up libertarian. But then it would no longer be true that there’s no universally agreed moral system! But that was an essential premise of the argument. So it’s self-undermining. If it’s a good argument, then it provides a universal moral system, whose nonexistence was a premise of the argument.
Ah, OK. Then what I want to suggest is that you should probably see this as a reason to be dissatisfied with libertarianism. (Though of course it might turn out that actually there’s nothing you can do to stop massive defamation campaigns that wouldn’t have worse adverse consequences in practice. I doubt that, though.)
It might. I think there are two sorts of mechanism. The first is that a racist society might mess up some people’s education and other opportunities, leading them to end up worse at things than if they belonged to a favoured rather than a disfavoured group. The second is that some jobs (most, in fact) involve interacting with other people, and if the others are racist then members of disfavoured groups might be less effective because others won’t cooperate with them.
Both of these mean that the principle “don’t discriminate on the basis of things that don’t make an actual difference” isn’t enough on its own to prevent all harmful-seeming discrimination, so appealing only to that principle probably justifies less anti-discrimination law than actually exists in many places. I’m OK with that; you’re saying that there shouldn’t be any anti-discrimination law because of its arbitrariness, and I’m pointing out that at least some has pretty good and non-arbitrary justification. I’m not trying to convince you that all the anti-discrimination measures currently in existence are good; only that some might be :-).
I agree, but my argument was that “this characteristic correlates with performance” generally isn’t good grounds for discrimination in hiring etc.
You did (for which, well done!) but someone can be epistemically virtuous on one occasion but not another :-). And I did admit that maybe I was being uncharitable. But I really don’t see how it’s plausible that negative externalities are just Too Much for the human race’s mental tools to cope with. You say the problem is that it’s difficult to draw boundary lines (if I’m understanding you right); yeah, it is, but that’s a problem with pretty much everything including, I suggest, infringement of liberty. The real world comes in shades of grey; our institutions sometimes need to be defined in black and white; the best we can do is to draw the boundaries in reasonable places, and I don’t think it makes sense to throw up our hands and despair merely because practical considerations sometimes require slightly arbitrary decisions to be made.
(It is only a matter of practical considerations. We could organize our laws and whatnot to acknowledge that most things vary continuously, and e.g. instead of having an offence of “murder” that one either has or hasn’t committed say sometimes that someone has committed 0.1 of a murder, etc. But it would be far more complicated and the gain would probably not be worth the cost.)
You argued: There is no universally agreed moral system or moral authority, nor any prospect of their being one. Therefore, it can never be right to force your moral system on someone else. Therefore, we should be libertarians. (As I’ve said, every step in this seems dubious to me; my apologies if as a result I have presented it badly.) And this is how you derive libertarianism. Now, you say that libertarianism is the one true objectively right moral system, which you know to be right by means of this argument. And here’s the thing: if this is really a good argument, then others ought to be persuadable by it too, in which case ultimately everyone should end up libertarian. But then it would no longer be true that there’s no universally agreed moral system! But that was an essential premise of the argument. So it’s self-undermining. If it’s a good argument, then it provides a universal moral system, whose nonexistence was a premise of the argument.