Virtually every culture in the world has produced philophies and religions that cough up the same Golden Rule over and over and over. If that isn’t a good starting point for a universal morality, I don’t know what is.

You argue that the state is weaker than supposed, and (if I understand you correctly) that it must react to the culture and mood of the people as much, if not more, than it can command them. That may be quite true, but it does not excuse any incident in which the leaders of the state use its apparatus to commit amoral acts. Hitler would certainly not have been able to launch his genocide in a nation that had no shred of antisemitism. But would so many Germans (and Ukranians, Italians, Romanians and others) have colluded in the final solution if they were not “just following orders”? The fact that they had given up their autonomy to a government allowed them to do things they would not have considered doing on their own, and on a monumental scale. A racist may kill one man, a group of them may even kill hundreds in a pogrom. Only a nation can kill six million.

Obviously, that’s an extreme example. But think about an environmental problem in the democratic west. Would the citizens of a community accept their air being polluted by a major mill if a) the government had not established pollution minimums that cannot be challenged by lawsuit or b) many members of the community are not dependent on that business for jobs, yet powerless to change how it operates, because they are banned from effectively striking by law?

There are a lot of different kinds of anarchists and libertarians out there. Brad Spangler is probably the most enlightened person I’ve run across who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, and I generally lean much more far to the left in the kinds of anarchism I’m interested in. Check out Infoshop.org/faq, Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog, and Another Blog is Possible for individualist and lefty anarchism. Most people calling themselves Libertarians today don’t even know the bloody origin of the term. If you fear that libertarians do not believe the world operates the way you do, check around. Possibly you agree more with another branch of the thought.

On what stops one group from abusing another, weaker group: self interest and self defense. If a gang simply roams about stealing, they will still be dependent on others for trade and goods. Refusing to deal with them, or to offer them any legal standing until they make restitution, would be a good start. The second prong is the idea that people should make common cause to defend their local communities, with everyone who wants to having a say in how it is organized and carried out. In Spain, the anarchist fighters were horrible at offensive action, but pretty good at liberating their own areas and defending them.

First let me say thank you for the kind reflections on our arguments. Now, on to papering over my own cracks. I did not mean to imply that Hobbes was somehow historically correct, and you are right to point out that the state of nature is a fiction, but instead I meant only to say that the father of the rationalistic justification of the state did not himself seem to base equality upon reason, but on the fact that “each man is his own author” (paraphrasing, its in the last two to three pages of Book I). It is, on some level, impossible to understand in completely in what ways our own thoughts do and do not carry the legacy of Hobbes’ work, but I would not consider myself to be “Hobbesian”. Instead I have a quite serious interest in the traditions of political theory and democratic ideas over a very wide spectrum of theorists, including, but not limited to: Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Arendt, Dewey, and Barber.
When you pose the question of my being a murderer being based on something more than circumstance, you open up an important avenue of thought, I believe. What is it that prevents me from being a murderer? I would agree that it is not the law, in fact that was the very point I was trying to make, the law has to conform quite a bit to what is already there in order to be manageable. But, why is that already there? Part of it, I would agree comes from me, but part of it may also come from mores, climate, religion, etc. If I belonged to a religious tradition that believed in human sacrifice, or if I lived in a climate so unbearably warm that it made one quick to flashes of anger, these would likely change my condition. They would be no guarantee that I would murder still, but if we remove the state from the equation, we by no means have only our own free will and personal values as the only viable alternative from which to derive our motives. Which, in turn, leads me to conclude that the state as commercial republic is not so powerful as libertarians tend to fear if it must conform to the “spirit of the laws” and that the absence of government does not make free will any more powerful than it already is now. I’m sorry if this is long and confusing, I am pumping this out before I run to the grocery store, but I hope this further clears up my position. Let me close by saying that our goals ultimately are similar ones, for I too prioritize the importance of “isonomy”, to neither rule nor be ruled in the conducting of the public affairs of citizens. I just fear the world does not operate in the fashion that libertarianism tends to fashion it.

Just on one point: Hobbes was wrong. There has never been a war of all against all. He had never visited tribal peoples, had never seen a stateless society of even the most primitive sort. Some cultures are more violent than others, but some are positively egalitarian, even matriarchal and nascently democratic, like the Six Nations

And this quote, from Mr. Maloney’s post: What if it is simply opportunity rather than character that prevents most people from perpetrating these “criminal acts?”

Have you ever killed anyone? I imagine not. And was it because you feared punishment, or because you knew it was wrong? I know that my friends could, theoretically, turn on me, that my neighbours could burn my house down while I slept, that my girlfriend could easily dispatch me in the middle of the night. But I don’t fear these things, and I know that the government is not what keeps them at bay.

I don’t hate the state, I just think we should consider that a stateless society might be better. Many anarchists seem to become more fervent in their beliefs when they see a government injustice. That bothers me, but what really tips me towards anarchism is when I see people working together, compromising, donating to charity and just getting along. I become more an anarchist when I am optimistic and hopeful. It seems to me you believe in Leviathan because you are afraid.

On the point of “pursuing one’s ends towards destruction”, I believe that what Mr. Simpson calls aggressive tools of enforcing and informing certain behaviors is deplorable in a vacuum. As a pragmatic point, I fail to see how non-state entities would lay using such tools of the trade aside in the face of a minimimalist state, given that many private organizations do not lay them down now. My concern here is that the relationship between power and authority as it is understood in most libertarian schemas is a very modern conception of power, and that I find it more pragmatically useful to examine human behavior through understandings of power and authority through the lens of something like Hannah Arendt’s “On Violence”. If power and authority are related in ways that mean that we only really reconfigure them as oppoed to change how much there is, then the commercial republic, in roughly the way it exists today, carries great appeal in the way that it channels the energies and abilities of all the various groups and interests in society.

As to my second point, I still do not see how in practice we would expect people to come to some sort of agreement privately when one side may simply abuse the other side. If there is some other party to prevent this abuse, what prevents them from abusing one party or the other? Here we find ourselves back to the original problems of modern political theory, and I am not sure that this line of argumentation takes very seriously many of these questions beyond how they are addressed by Thomas Hobbes.

Third, I might say equality is “unreasonable” insofar as that equality does not seem to flow from reason. It does not in the manner that I present it, and it does not in Hobbes’ “state of nature”. In the account I allude to in my blurb, equality comes from the condition that human beings find themselves in the world and their capacity to act. This is true even in Hobbes, where the “war of all against all” and the “fear of untimely death” are not derived from reason, but are simply the way things are in the world.

Fourth, I simply cannot agree that somehow the majority do not exploit their position over others in pursuit of their own interests. If one gazes upon Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority”, Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment”, the Rwandan Genocide, the Civil War in Corcyra(sp?), etc., I think you will find a great many people are willing to do a great many things simply because they can. Who stops this “criminal element” and what stops them? Is it reason? Is it force? Who uses the force? Who protects us from the people who use this force? What if it is simply opportunity rather than character that prevents most people from perpetrating these “criminal acts?” What if only the virtuous man can truly resist?

I find Sandel compelling not for his vision of the state (which I have concerns about) but for his steadfast belief that politics is messy, particular and uncertain, and that broad schema such as libertarianism, liberal egalitarianism, etc. tend to paint with a broad enough strokes that they talk about politics without talking about the actual stuff of politics. I still carry that concern.

Finally, I tend to find exchanges with libertarians frustrating because they tend to refuse to come out of the pardigm constructions of man, society, state (the ones I talk to tend to anyway) as they appear to them inside of their model, and they argue from a model that is all-encompassing and can never be wrong. It reminds me of the frustrations expressed by Karl Popper about arguing with Marxism that he expressed in “Conjectures and Refutations”. At which point most arguments with libertarianism have about as much value as two people of different religions arguing about what “the one, true faith” is. I say this, again, only to clarify my position. I have known many libertarians, and have come up against NYU debaters enough times in my college life to understand that libertarians are gifted and intelligent people, and I created this list to sort of “hash out” why I have never found such arguments alluring.

Again, I want to thank you for your lengthy and well thought out responses to my post, and let me say that this does not, in my book, qualify as one fo those “frustrating” libertarian encounters, but I have found it stimulating and valuable.