Week 3 Post 1 libertarian psychological disposition
Week 3:
Lecture 7
At face value John Locke is a powerful ally of the first libertarian.
He believes as many libertarians today maintain that there are certain fundamental individual rights that are so important that no government(even a representative government/democratic gov can override
Those fundamental rights ensue the natural right to
LIfe
Liberty
Property
He argues that the right to property is not just the creation of government or of law but that the right to property is a pre political right that attaches to individuals as human beings not just political beings.
In order to think about what it means to have a natural right we have to imagine what things are like before gov/law
He says the state of nature is the state of liberty with no natural hierarchy. We are free and equal in the state of nature yet he makes the point that there is a difference between the state of liberty and the state of license
He believes that the law of nature constrains what we can do even when we are free/in the state of nature
The only constraint is that the natural rights we have we cant give up nor can we take them from someone else
We are not free to give ourselves to anyone else to have complete arbitrary power
Locke says this constraint comes from the idea that we are not strictly speaking ours but a creature of god. God has a bigger property right in us, a prior property right
For those who don't believe in god locke says that when we reflect on what it truly means to be free, freedom cant just be doing whatever we want
^that is paradoxical
Our natural rights are unalienable
Labor is the questionable property of the laborer
Locke is distanced from libertarian ideas because he says that rights are unalienable and hold responsibilities
Rich v. developing debate…
Trade related intellectual property rights that came to head recently over drug patent laws
Western countries say we have a big pharmaceutical industry that develops new laws and we want all countries in the world to respect the patents.
EX. the aid crisis in south africa. The US aids drugs were way too expensive and far more than could be afforded by most africans at the time so the south african government said we are going to begin buying a generic version of the drug for a fraction of the cost because an indian company will produce it for cheaper
America says you have to pay the licensing fee to save lives. The US pharmaceutical companies sued the south african gov. Eventually the pharm industry gave in and said alright you can do that
This dispute shows what is up for grabs until some settled rules and consent
Objections to locks Ideas:
It justifies european cultural norms that have harmed the native people. It complicates the idea of original acquisition.
^appropriating land
Why does the natives idea of “owning the earth” less valued than eurocentric ideas
Defender of locks account of private property:
Maybe locke was not condoning the european colonization (bad come back)
^was it just a state of way
You cant take common land. There must me as much and enough good left for others
How does the natural property right concept constrain what a legitimate government can do
Human laws are only legitimate if the respect natural right but WHO is deciding this
^My question is what does a legitimate government look like for Locke
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690)
John Locke (1632-1704) argues that legitimate government is a limited government based on consent, in which the majority rules but may not violate people’s fundamental rights. At first glance, Locke’s theory may seem familiar, but it also conceals some puzzling questions. On Locke’s view, a legitimate government may not violate our natural right to life, liberty, and property. But Locke allows that government may legitimately take our property through taxation and require citizens to sacrifice their lives in war. If government may do these things, then what counts as a law that violates our rights?
The Second Treatise of Government places sovereignty into the hands of the people. Locke's fundamental argument is that people are equal and invested with natural rights in a state of nature in which they live free from outside rule.
Locke rises above the specifics of the political situation described in the Introduction to outline a coherent theory of liberal political government, based on the sanctity of individual property and the state of nature. In Locke's state of nature, no person has control over another, natural law governs and renders all people equal, and every individual holds the executive power of natural law.
This Treatise of government is 243 sections long and as of current I have no time to read all of that
Lecture 8
Can there be a right to private property without a government
What is the work of consent
Everyone is the executor of the state of nature, Locke believes that if someone violates that they are an aggressor, beyond reason, you can punish them. He says everyone can do the punishing
You can punish a thief, or your own attempted murderer.
IF someone has stolen from a 3rd party you can go after them
There is no police court
There is no judge, so people get carried away
What starts out as a seemingly benign state of nature quickly becomes fiercely filled with violence and that's why people want to leave
The only way to escape from the state of nature is to undertake an act of consent where you agree to give up toe enforcement power or a community where there will be a legislature so everyone agrees in advance to abide by the majorities decision
The majority cant violate you unalienable rights
How much does the majority have and how limited is the government?
Does locke give grounds to redistribution/taxation
If that majority rules one way the minority should still not have to be taxed because that taking away property which is one of the rights of nature
The supreme power cannot take from any many any part of his property without his own consent
Men therefore in society having property have such a right to the goods by which the law of community are theirs
What counts as property is not natural but conventional now^?
Still it must be within his own consent i.e. the consent of the majority giving it by themselves or their representative chosen by them
Natural and conventional approaches to taking property. What would be arbitrarily illegitimate.
Does our consent to some things become collective when you are part of a society?
How do you withdraw consent? At what point do you consent if you were born into it
What if you don't want to blanket support something
Can the gov elect by conscription to go die for the sake of the whole. Difference between picking out individuals and having a general law
Locke is against arbitrary taking/singling out. Scared of the arbitrary power of kings.
Against suicide because of unalienable rights
Locke was an administrator of one of the colonies and may have been as interested in providing a justification for private property through enclosure without consent as he was with developing a theory of government based on consent that would reign in kings and arbitrary rulers.
What is consents moral force?
Lecture 9
Non-arbitrary systems cannot take money. Ex. officer can command soldier to death but cannot take his money because that would be random
Consent to join the gov and be bound by the majority is the consent that matters for locke
Looking at consent through military constriction
US fighting war in Iraq
The news tells us the military is having great difficulty meeting its recruitment targets.
3 options to consider
Increase pay and benefits
Shift to military conscription (a draft)
Ousource (hire mercenaries)
I favor increasing the pay
In the civil war there was a mix of conscription and market that began with conscription but if you were drafted and did not want to serve you could hire a substitute take your place and many people did this. You could pay whatever the market required to find a substitute
^this conscription with the buyout provision is classist and preys on the poorest and most vulnerable of people
This gives rich people the way out. This allows some people to chose life and others not to.
^this puts a price on human life. They are trying to accomplish something that really isn't feasible.
^objection to that reason is that you don't have to buy into this system. He is consenting to that price.
This buying your way out is profound coercion of the worst kind because it falls so disproportionately upon one segment of society
^an Argument to this is that drafting systems aren't terribly different from volunteer army recruiting strategies because there is coercion and the volunteer part because there are benefits and pay for joining the Army and military volunteers come from disproportionately lower economic status and from certain regions of the country where you can use patriotism take coerce people.
The issue with the civil war course is that with an all volunteer army there is a flat non-varying rate whereas with the hybrid civil war approach it leaves it to be not completely but relatively arbitrary
Extra Research:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/consent-political-philosophy-and-ethics
Consent
By Loren A. king.
Consent is fundamental to social contract accounts of political legitimacy, arising as early as Plato’s Crito but most prominently in the 17th-century writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke
In modern moral and legal thought, actual consent—whether express or tacit—is of great importance in determining the force of moral obligations and the validity of contracts.
In political thought, however, hypothetical consent has increasingly played a central role in justifying particular accounts of justice and legitimacy.
Consent-based theories of legitimacy and obligation generally agree that consenting parties must be rational agents, capable of understanding moral categories such as right and wrong
Disagreement ensues over what counts as sufficient information and what forms of coercion and constraint limit or nullify obligations arising from consent
Few people, for instance, would argue that a person forced at gunpoint to accept an exploitative contract is legally or morally obligated to adhere to that agreement. In such a case, consent does not generate an obligation.
In modern liberal democracies, are citizens obligated to obey a law that they find, after sincere and informed reflection, to be pointless and offensive but which has emerged from an acceptable democratic process?
Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians:
By ravi iyer, spassena koleva, jesse graham, peter ditto, and jonathan haidt
Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians.
Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview
Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles
a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style
lower interdependence and social relatedness
Libertarians score slightly lower than liberals and similar to conservatives on personal distress, perspective taking, and fantasy.
Libertarians appear to have a coherent moral philosophy, which includes a general opposition to forcing any particular moral code upon others
what might explain the libertarian focus on liberty to the exclusion of other moral concerns?
moral attitudes arise, at least in part, from low-level “dispositional traits” [23], emotional reactions [8], [24], social function [17], and the moralization of preferences [10].
libertarians were less morally outraged by “taboo” moral tradeoffs (e.g., buying and selling body parts for transplantation) than were liberals, conservatives, or socialists. Recent research in moral psychology has emphasized the importance of intuitive and emotional reactions in producing moral judgments that appear, on their face, to be based on principled reasoning
libertarian writers have historically been proud of the rational — rather than emotional — roots of their ideology [28]. The possible exception to this rule, of course, is the vigorous reaction libertarians often have to violations of personal freedom.
Libertarians may have a dispositional preference for independence, perhaps even for solitude, and therefore less use for moral principles that bind them to others.
Participants and Sampling Considerations
The analyses presented are based on data from 157,804 participants (45.6% female, median age = 34) who visited YourMorals.org and participated in one or more studies between June 2007 and January 2011
The full libertarian sample in most specific samples was primarily white (85-87%)
79-80% were in college or had earned a college degree
Varying age range
Most varying traits between libertarians and other groups is the substantial gender differences
Libertarians were similar to conservatives on the fairness foundation, as both groups scored substantially lower than liberals. However, like liberals, libertarians scored substantially lower on the ingroup, authority, and purity foundations compared to conservatives. Finally, libertarians scored slightly lower than conservatives and substantially lower than liberals on the harm foundation
Libertarians have weaker intuitions about most moral concerns, but stronger intuitions about liberty.
Our results suggest why libertarians do not feel fully at home in either of the major American political parties. Consistent with our prediction, libertarians were relatively low on all five foundations.
Libertarians share with liberals, a distaste for the morality of ingroup, authority, and purity, characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right [43].
Like liberals, libertarians can be said to have a two-foundation morality, prioritizing harm and fairness above the other three foundations.
But libertarians share with conservatives their moderate scores on these two foundations. They are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.
Libertarianism is clearly not just a point on the liberal-conservative continuum; libertarians have a unique pattern of moral concerns, with relatively low reliance on all five foundations.
we see that libertarians look somewhat like liberals, but assign lower importance to values related to the welfare or suffering of others–the benevolence value (which Schwartz defines as: “Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact”) and universalism (defined as “Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature”).
It is also noteworthy that the highest mean for any Schwartz Value dimension was libertarians' endorsement of self-direction (defined as “Independent thought and action – choosing, creating, exploring”).
Self-Direction was the most strongly endorsed value for all three groups, but for libertarians the difference was quite large compared to the next most endorsed value, achievement (d = 1.04).
If libertarians have indeed elevated self-direction as their foremost guiding principle, then they may see the needs and claims of others, whether based on liberal or conservative principles, as a threat to their primary value
libertarians were the only group to report valuing pragmatic, non-moral traits more than moral traits.
Libertarians are not unconcerned about all aspects of morality, as suggested by their scores on the MFQ and several other widely used morality scales. Rather, consistent with their self-descriptions, they care about liberty.
Like conservatives, they endorse a world in which people are left alone to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, free from government interference.
They also exceed both liberals and conservatives (but are closer to liberals) in endorsing personal or lifestyle liberty.
libertarians indeed hold an empirically distinct set of values, compared to liberals and conservatives. Given that liberty values form an empirically distinct value cluster that has pragmatic utility in differentiating groups and is distinct from other self-oriented concerns such as power and achievement, it is likely that concerns about liberty represent a moral intuition previously unmeasured in Moral Foundations Theory.
Top 5 personality traits
Libertarians report lower levels of the traits that indicate an orientation toward engaging with and pleasing others (i.e., extraversion and agreeableness). Low scores on agreeableness in particular have been said to indicate a lack of compassion and a critical, skeptical natur
we see that libertarians share traits with liberals (high openness to experience) as well as conservatives (low neuroticism).
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI [56]) is a 28-item measure of empathy, with 7 items covering each of four distinct aspects of empathic responding to others: 1) empathic concern for others, 2) fantasy, 3) personal distress, and 4) perspective-taking. Participants were asked whether certain statements did or did not characterize them very well (e.g. “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” for empathic concern).
The low level of disgust sensitivity found in libertarians is consistent with previous research about the relationship between disgust and conservative attitudes on social issues, particularly those related to sexuality (e.g. MFQ-Purity in Study 1). Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of unorthodox behavior
The high levels of reactance expressed by libertarians fit well with the value they place on liberty as a moral foundation. It is of course possible that libertarians' responses to the scale are primarily expressions of their current political beliefs, but it is also possible that people who have the strongest visceral reactions to interference from others are also the people most drawn to the ideals and identity of libertarianism.
has shown that relatively high systemizing and low empathizing scores are characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.
We might say that liberals have the most “feminine” cognitive style, and libertarians have the most “masculine.” These effects hold even when men and women are examined separately, as can be seen in Table 3. Indeed, the “feminizing” of the Democratic party in the 1970s [63] may help explain why libertarians moved increasingly into the Republican party in the 1980s.
libertarian valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion. Libertarians may enjoy thinking about complex and abstract systems more than other groups, particularly more than conservatives.
libertarians are indeed more capable of “rational ethics” where costs and benefits are weighted according to utilitarian principles. Given the body of evidence suggesting that utilitarian judgments in these dilemmas are more likely to be reached via “cold” calculation, and that deontological (rights-based) judgments are more likely to be reached via “hot” affective processes (e.g., [24], [65]), our results suggests that libertarians are particularly unemotional in their moral deliberations
Libertarians appear more individualistic and less collectivistic than both liberals and conservatives
The relative preference for individualism occurs in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical circumstances.
libertarians feel relatively low levels of connection to their community, country, and people globally. This pattern suggests that libertarians are likely to join conservatives in opposing transnational humanitarian undertakings, and they are likely to join with liberals in opposing projects and legislation that are aimed at strengthening national identity.
libertarian independence from others is associated with weaker loving feelings toward friends, family, romantic partners, and generic others.
Libertarians' weaker social interconnectedness is consistent with the idea that they have weaker moral intuitions concerning obligations to and dependence on others
Libertarians have a unique moral-psychological profile, endorsing the principle of liberty as an end and devaluing many of the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives. Although causal conclusions remain beyond our current reach, our findings indicate a robust relationship between libertarian morality, a dispositional lack of emotionality, and a preference for weaker, less-binding social relationships.
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