Noise Ordinances, Redux
Back in November, I wrote a post about noise ordinances and my opinions regarding them. The post lay dormant for months before getting a few comments. Those comments erupted into one of the most active discussions my blog has had.
As with the nature of people arguing over the scope of state power, the commentary veered off into theoretical and philosophical grounds, as it should. It became apparent to me that the thread was loosing coherency and needed seperate posts to address some of the issues brought up. This is the first; the second will follow this one.
Gil, from A Reasonable Man, disagreed with my fundamentalist stand against noise ordinances, saying:
I disagree with the "libertarian" position expressed here that opposes all noise ordinances affecting vehicles on public roads.[...]
I think the essence of libertarianism is the idea that people should be free to pursue their own projects without other people imposing unreasonable costs on them. I say "unreasonable", because there is a threshold of "cost" below which it is ridiculous to enforce this rule. Every time I breathe I'm reducing the available oxygen to everyone else, etc. On the moon, it might become reasonable to enforce property rights to oxygen because it would be more precious.
In a following post that replied to my suggestion he apply the Nonaggression Principle to the subject, he replied:
I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand's works, and I think that the NAP is a great general guideline. But, I'm confident that it fails to capture the whole of morality.[...]
I appreciate your concern for avoiding a slippery slope, but that's not a sufficient reason to insist that what's wrong is right. And a dogmatic application of the NAP is wrong.
I think there is objective morality and I think we can approach moral truths, just as we can approach physical truths, through an honest process of conjecture and refutation, and not by adhering to dogma.
He pointed to this article by J. Neil Schulman that takes the NAP to task for the sometimes messy outcomes a hardline NAP approach would create.
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.
I base a great deal of my ethics on the NAP and examining which actors are initiating force against one another to determine who is in the wrong. Normally, this doesn't cause too many problems. But in the case of soundwaves, it does. By its nature, sound is physical force that travel through air and object. Every day we are exposed to uncountable numbers of soundwaves of various frequencies and powers. We can hear some and only feel others. Once we create sound, the path it takes and the things it impacts are out of our hands. Beyond the simple thought experiments that we might dabble in regarding where a sound might bounce to or end up, we can't tell what'll happen to it.
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.
Gil says he thinks we can solve moral dilemmas through a Popperian approach just as we can solve scientific questions. I must say that I don't accept everything Objectivism proposes. However, one thing that has always remained close to me and was reinforced greatly by reading Objectivist writing is that in order to have standards to compare behavior to, we must have rules/statements/principles that are either directly axiomatic or a priori. Otherwise, if we adopt general themes or guidelines and use them instead, we run the risk of contradicting ourselves down the road, negating our positions. It's my deep distrust of P&U-based arguements. Additionally, the Popperian approach bothers me somewhat because it deliberately leaves open the chance that anything previously considered fact and truth could be false, ultimately resulting in a situation where no issue is truely considered settled.
Perhaps I'm as (or more) ignorant of critical rationalism as I am of Objectivism. I do leave open that possibility. :)
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.
But then again, the comments are open for those who disagree.
Comments
Schulman has a few pearls of wisdom in his article. However, the most striking aspect of his essay is Schulman admits it took him 30 years to really see a major flaw in libertarian philosophy. Only when faced with the new and strange circumstances of a devastating act of terrorism have some libertarians admitted that the non-agression principle sometimes fails! Someone alert Schulman to this blog - he needs to think about other gray areas that libertarians are bound to have a hard time with - like this noise ordinance debate has demonstrated.
I would like to add some more food for thought: are there not many other forms of aggression/coersion besides mere physical force or the threat of imprisonment? It seems to me that libertarians are too focused on the types of coersion that a government can employ, and are too little concerned about aggression which is more difficult to spot or define. Do not people with money often gang up on people without money? Huge chains like Wal Mart deliberately undercut the competition. Consumers, with limited supplies of money, are literally forced to shop at the giant store, even though no one threatened them with violence. A consumer might hate Wal Mart with a passion, but that won't stop the small local shops from going out of business.
Drizz openly shuns pragmatism and utilitarianism, but are not these exactly the operating principles of most businesspeople? Libertarians idolize the "free" market in which pragmatists are essentially at war. In the process, the behaviors of people are often altered, jobs are lost, different areas lose or gain wealth, good and bad circumstances - all without any direct violence or physical coersion (most of the time, theoretically). The world of economics is a complex web of subtle arm-twisting, compromise, aggression, struggle, politics, white lies, etc. I don't see how libertarians can believe that the world of private enterprise is so much more pure than the world of government. It's not. Both worlds utilize coersion in an effort to be pragmatic.
There are also hidden aggressions in everyday life. A lumber company might be granted logging rights in Borneo by a corrupt government that gives no consideration to the rights of indigenous tribes. The transaction was technically legal, money changes hands and contracts are signed. Cheap lumber comes ashore in the US and Mr. Drizzten feels like a great guy when he plops down some hard-earned money and builds a house with that lumber, but without looking any deeper, no one sees that there is aggression behind this money and the neatly typed deeds and contracts that make us feel all official and spiffy. This example is no different from the emminent-domain cases in our country that raise the hackles of libertarians. "Modern civilization" moves in and takes over where it sees fit, ignoring the territorial rights of natives. So, Drizz, if you want to be so absolutist, I suggest you start re-examining more and more of the assumptions made in being a member of our society.
The fact will always remain that people playing music very loudly on residential streets are inconsiderate. I believe in standing up against inconsiderate people. Their rights do not over-ride mine, and if I let them get away with thinking their rights over-ride mine, then what kind of a future am I waiting for? The triumph of the inconsiderate? No thanks.
Posted by: Doc | January 27, 2004 11:39 PM
Doc, sorry to have take so long to reply.
I don't follow your reasoning on other forms of force. Force is force; you'll have to use another term to describe business competition between Wal-Mart and local grocery stores. Unless Wal-Mart is actually using "Mafia tactics" to intimidate or destroy property and people, then from my point of view they are not using force against their competitors. No, consumers who shop at Wal-Mart are not forced to go there. They make up their own minds, weighing what's important to them (price, selection, convenience, customer service, etc.) and then go where they want.
Describing that kind of relationship as forced is silly. Even in situations where consumer choices are few, consumers are still fundamentally free to choose...or move somewhere that meets their wants better. I'm sorry, but you aren't going to win points with me through this line of arguement. Being forced to do something is the opposite of voluntarily picking what you want to do.
You are right; most businessmen and -women operate from a utilitarian pragmatic standpoint. But they aren't trying to prove objective things like we were in previous arguements. Morally, I consider U&P arguements to be hollow. That doesn't mean they don't actually work in real life. Businesses must be flexible to changing market conditions. But your morality should never be.
Private enterprise is more "pure" than government because private enterprise is based on voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange. Government is not.
In your lumber example, if the natives owned the land prior to the government walking in and granting logging rights to the lumbe company, then the natives were greatly wronged and I would support peaceful efforts to get that property back to those natives. But even if it is the case that the property was wrongly taken, I cannot be made responsible for events and things beyond my knowledge. I can't be responsible for participating in the enrichment of a bad company if I am unaware of what makes them bad. The aggression behind that lumber company would change my mind behind buying their products. Don't be so quick to assume.
Of course, this knowledge problem is considerable. Are consumers expected to dig up the history of the businesses they work with to uncover immoral acts in their past? At what point does some wrong cross your ethical lines? I'm all for "policing" companies that defraud and steal through the informed actions of consumers. But at the same time, doing business with a good company might not always be the highest priority. In Ideal Fanatasy Land, sure, we'd stamp out the final last bits of moral corruption by being diligent in this regard. But I try not to operate in IFL too often.
Doc, I agree loud bassy music is inconsiderate. But I don't want that to be a legislative baseline. The world is populated with inconsiderate, rude, dangerous, and self-centered people and it is very likely you possess characteristics that others consider inconsiderate. It's just too easy to play fast and loose with that kind of standard.
I wish I had a good answer regarding noise ordinances and whose rights are being violated. If I ever run across something, I'll be sure to e-mail you. :)
Posted by: Drizz | February 3, 2004 10:42 AM
No problem, Drizz (on the time to reply). Unfortunately, I cannot accept the whole "I'm not responsible because of my ignorance of the situation" claim. The problem is that we're all in the dark on such a vast majority of what's going on in the world. A sort of a sense that no one is at fault for anything builds up in a culture. After the liberations of the concentration camps, Germans claimed they had no idea what was happening. You take my isolated example and respond to it, saying if you know what was going on, you would change your actions. But I'm saying that this type of coersion is so commonplace that we simply can't avoid being involved in it! A 60 Minutes story a few weeks ago talked about how several large US corporations have been doing illegal business with Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea in recent years. They did this by transacting through shell corporations (offices based in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands). So some retirement fund manager in New York found this out and got all in a tizzy because he couldn't believe that the retirement fund of millions of people was taking part in this type of activity. Suddenly people act outraged about it. Well, guess what - about half of all Americans own mutual fund shares, and that means half of all Americans were doing business with "the enemy." Yet 99.9% of them didn't have a clue. So are they blameless? Well, they're sheep, but I don't think that excuses them. Hell, I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I did sell off my meager mutual funds six years ago when I fully realized the insidiuos nature of the Wall Street Beast, dipping its hands into damn near every folly on Earth. By the way, I'd venture to guess the half of Americans who don't own any stock would gladly accept it if their employers started contributing to retirement funds for them, but alas, half of all jobs are such disrespected professions that they're not deemed worth of "benefits."
Your answer that you would support "peaceful efforts" to right the wrongs done to natives is simply an inert compliance with the status quo. You know that such efforts always fail. A "peaceful effort" means involving lawyers and courts and international organizations. The natives are at a huge disadvantage since they aren't accustomed to lawyers and courts, in addition to being poor. You get processes that last decades, meanwhile the lumber company rapes the land in question, the culture of the natives is altered, the young ones are corrupted - probably by working for the lumber company - and the culture disintegrates.
You think private enterprise promotes "mutually beneficial" exchanges. I think that it does too, but its a bit more Orwellian that you like admit: both sides benefit, but some sides are more mutually benefitted than others. (All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. For the illiterates out there.)
The Wal Mart argument is a simplification. You may not buy it now, but some day you might. I'm pointing at a trend. Where do you see more freedom?
A) Wal Mart comes to town and hires managers for their garage, their landscaping section, the store in general, and the McDonald's inside. A corporation owns everything. (Aren't you anti-collectivist??) Small businesses die off.
B) Wal Mart doesn't come to town. A local citizen owns a garage. A local citizen owns a nursery. A local citizen owns a grocery store. A local citizen owns a clothing store. A local citizen owns a restaurant.
The Wal-Mart-ization of the world is to be expected, I guess, looking at capitalist theories and desires for "growth" and efficiency. The result, besides Wal Mart itself, is more corporate farming and less family farming. More corporate everything and fewer independent proprietors. That spells LESS freedom for citizens. I think the ideal world is one in which ALL adults are landed proprietors. Everyone would have both freedom and responsibility. Ironically, you seem to be all for setting up giant castes of low-paid renters who feel free because they don't have much responsibility, and because they can get their swerve on with mega-bass, or they can "party" all they want.
Freedom for corporations seems to be a big thing for libertarians, but why? Aren't corporations also collectivist entities? You might claim they are voluntary collectives, but doesn't that bring us back to much of our previous argument - cities, and even countries, are voluntary collectives. You don't HAVE to live in any particular city (at least in the US). Corporations have rules for their employees. Why shouldn't cities and states have rules for their citizens, especially when the citizens are free to write the rules?
Darnit, I wanted to keep this simple. Well, there you go. I think I'm nearing the end of my rope on this debate.* I feel satisfied that I seem to have made a dent in your ideological armour (along with ~TM and whoever else helped). Yes, governments suck, but so do corporations, and so do many people. With suckiness abounding, we need to maintain some good balances of powers. I think the balance of power for individuals only remains in our favor when both governments and corporations are kept in check.
* Of course I will be glad to keep debating, but I think I would like it to end soon.
Posted by: Doc | February 7, 2004 03:38 AM