Wherein Charles Hueter Attempts to Describe Just What the Hell He's Talking About...and Fails

In Noise Ordinance Laws and Libertarians, I took the position that municipal noise ordinance laws ought to be opposed.

Does it deserve to be? Do the property rights of homeowners wishing for peace and quiet override the property rights of drivers blaring music? Does the nuisance of booming bass require the government to get involved?

I say "no" to all three questions.

The problem, as I saw (and still see) it is one of the initiation of force.

Does blasting music loud violate the property rights of those around you, especially if the bass from said music is powerful enough to rattle windows a block away?

Does it act as an initiation of force, which would be such a violation? Certainly from a pure physics perspective it does. Subwoofers literally force liters of air outward at great pressures in order to create the bass effect. However, if you were to use this arguement, you'd have to address normal and everyday human-generated soundwaves, as they all operate on the same principles. All soundwaves impact the objects around them once generated and cease once they loose enough power.

But all this is gibberish and nonsense if I can't provide a foundation for what "rights" are and how they are derived.

That post from November 2003 has gathered over 80 comments and a significant portion of them are from "Doc" and I; we've been arguing the issue back and forth since January 2004. Unfortunately, I think the strength of my argument has suffered because it was during this timeframe that I began to really take seriously free market anarchism. I am by no means finished with this line of personal development, but the infantcy back then was closer to the surface.

As in most discussions resulting from disagreement over a specific political issue, the conversation quickly drifted towards why we stood for what we did. The importance of this became such that it overtook the particulars of the political issue (noise ordinances) near the end and dominated the discussion. Doc has persistently challenged me throughout the length of this and we finally came down to the fundamentals.

Drizz, wake up. We all love "freedom", but those who have advanced beyond high-school-level thought realize that nothing is absolute. No simple principle has ever managed to build a working society unmodified.

[...]

What one person sees as violence, another might not. So you might modify it that "no one can touch anyone else without permission". Okay, where do you get this idea? How is it logical? Why is touching another wrong? How about if I just touch their clothes and not their skin? Exactly how close must my fingertip be to their skin (or clothes) to constitute "touching"? And who is going to measure it to prove that an illegal touch/violence has happened?

I assert there is really no difference between my position that noise ordinances are good and your position that physical violence is bad. We are both saying that there are limits to freedom. We have different definitions of violence - that's all. Now, how is your definition on where to limit freedom fundamentally any different from mine? We both draw a line in the sand. Everyone draws a line in the sand. Fact is, with millions of people living in close proximity, democratic ways of deciding where the collective line in the sand stands is how things are done. Your line in the sand is not morally superior to the line in the sand drawn by the taxpayers of a city.

You have A LOT of work to do in explaining how your positions have any moral or logical authority.

To which I responded, in part:

"Nothing is absolute"? Isn't that an absolute statement of what you hold to be true? Is it false that you typed and posted a comment? Did I not read what you wrote and responded? This is sheer self-refuting silliness. There ARE absolutes. Reality exists. The trouble is in identifying these absolutes and integrating them together to form a logical whole.

[...]

Allow me to "come clean" and be forthright. I am an anarchist. I want no "laws" because I want no government. When I say the only actions that should be prohibited in my ideal society are those that constitute the initiation of force (aggression and fraud), I mean in such a society those are the only actions that deserve to have the perpetrator punished through restitution for his crimes.

[...]

Regarding logic, I proceed from a set of premises that are axiomatically true. If you try to refute them, you end up contradicting yourself and affirming their existence. For an example, see the "absolute truth" discussion above. From these premises, one can derive other truths. It is upon this foundation that I disagree with the justification of the state and the coercion and aggression it necessarily must engage in.

Doc followed with:

The fact that you think an "inconsistancy" in the words of a thinker means that we should entirely ignore that thinker betrays your fundamental problem: you believe you can find a set of fully consistent axioms that completely describe a world system. Ever heard of Gödel? Look him up - whatever axioms you come up with, they'll never answer every question with absolute precision. Doesn't matter how true each axiom is, and it doesn't matter how many millions of new axioms you "prove" with the previous axioms.

I should point out that I wrote a separate post titled Noise Ordinances, Redux that covered some important aspects of this.

So the issue is this: I believe moral action should be guided by objective ethics and those ethics should not contradict each other. If I am challenged in an arguement to prove what I believe is correct, that proof must be rooted in logic. Otherwise, it falls apart and becomes indefensible. Therefore, I have serious trouble accepting pragmatic and utilitarian (P&U) arguements for or against something.

[...]

From my absolutist viewpoint then, I should support noise restrictions because they violate the NAP and initiate force against those who have done nothing to you. In the case of subwoofers and powerful bass, the principle's violation becomes explicit as the forces involved can be great enough to rattle windows, wake people up, and literally disturb the peace. So why would I support the abolishment of noise laws as I did in my original post? Because I considered the individual property rights of the car owner to be more important than the property rights of the people affected by his music.

Admittedly, this feels strongly arbitrary, and it's beginning to trouble me. As the discussion in the comments continued, I began to realize I couldn't defend myself adequately. The typical way to determine property rights problems is to determine who initiated force, but using that standard in an ideal society would result in consequences that even I'd be wary of.

[...]

In the end, though, I have to stick up for what feels right in my gut if I'm unable to defend it from human criticism. And my position that noise ordinances violate property rights remains because they do. When I read about a law that makes it illegal for someone to play music on public roads that is loud enough to be heard from X feet away, I cringe. It represents another government attempt to exercise collective control over individual property. It's a symptom of the "do something!" syndrome that afflicts so many and provides room for the state to wade in and socially engineer.

Is this consequentialist and therefore a different form of P&U arguementation? I have a bad feeling it is.

That blog post, in retrospect, is something I am not proud of. It doesn't really solve anything or provide a serious answer other than, "Hell, I dunno. Opps?"

So I am here today faced with Doc's criticism, a criticism that is regularly mentioned witin the confines of the internecine minarchist-anarchist warfare that takes place amongst libertarians: rational objectivity in reality, epistemology, and ethics. I am not so arrogant to state I have found the solution, or to state that I have discovered a proof that withstands hard scrutiny. As much as I have progressed over the years from someone who simply took the existence of forced collectivization as a necessary given to someone who looks at just about everything from an individualist perspective, the formal understanding I desire just isn't ready to be systemized in writing. I'd be wasting everyone's time because I simply do not understand the most essential fundamentals yet. I cannot clearly express just how much it bothers me to say that, but there it is.

Therefore, after thinking about this for almost three weeks, I cannot provide to Doc what I promised I would provide: the axioms that lead to my position in favor of a completely free market in everything. Some I can, but I now realize I cannot explain how to get from something nonfalsifiable such as "reality exists" or "humans act" to "humans have specific rights and they are never to be violated." In other words, I've run up against both the problem of identifying the correct axioms that my current philosophy relies upon as well as the classic Is-Ought problem.

This is deeply troubling because I strongly think there are no moral justifications for the use of aggression to accomplish goals. Whether that aggression is performed by individuals against individuals in the name of individual reasons (everyday street crime) or collective (the state), I see nothing but evil in and net harm from such a system. This realization is stark indeed when you consider the tone I took with the post previous to this, William J. Bennett and Brian T. Kennedy Need Slaves.

In light of my understanding that I lack essential understanding on some issues, I'm going to seriously curtail the moral posturing I engage in on this blog and with others. I'm not about to add to the general amusement and dismissive attitude the statist-collectivist majority feels towards my side of this debate. I'd rather just keep my thoughts to myself and work on my understanding. My grasp on something so important as this should be grounded in something more firm than what I have now.

I don't want to say the right things for the wrong reasons. I see little value in asserting things I have no hard reason to consider true.

However, I wish to make clear that just because I cannot do this and the overwhelming majority of the humans on this planet disagree with me doesn't mean it cannot be done or that the concepts of objective morality are incoherent. I'm just a bad messenger when pressed on the issue.

If you'll excuse me, I will now get drunk and separate myself from this fucking problem for a few days.

Posted by Drizzten at March 26, 2005 09:48 PM