Replying to x.com/thiagovscoelho/st…

Part 1

>Apparently the real JC Lester has found my posts about his work, and made an X account specifically to link his reply to me here! I’m honored to get his attention.

All genuine critical-rationalists qua critical-rationalists want criticism above all. I only wish there were more criticism of my theories. I shall reply as I go through yours.

>Since he went point-by-point through my longest comment on him, I suppose I should do so to his post as well, which I will do below.

And yet you do not leave my text, or even quote it much, to help the reader see whether you actually do this.

>Much of his reply consisted in offering references to his other works providing clarifications of his ideas, which I thank him for and hope to check out later, but will pass over in silence below.

That is only reasonable and prudent.

>1. On being “based on critical rationalism”

>In saying that Lester’s theory is based on critical rationalism, I suppose I did not mean that it is “justified by” critical rationalism in the mainstream-epistemology sense. At any rate, I am aware of the difference, even if I am not good at expressing it. I might say that Lester’s theory is “defended in the critical rationalist way”, or some such thing.

Slips are inevitable. That is an acceptable formulation.

>One of my constraints was that I had to make sure the beginning of the post contained enough keywords, since on X, the part of a post that goes after the “read more” cutoff is not searchable.

All news to me, thanks.

>2. On straightforwardness

>I did make “define liberty, ‘conjecturally’ take it as a primitive value, derive property from it, and you’re done” sound rather straightforward; and that’s because it did strike me as relatively straightforward compared to an attempt to provide a metaethics on which to support the ethics, etc.

The overall theory is certainly less straightforward than the propertarian “mix your labour; it’s yours”. I have all the ethics and meta-ethics, in principle (although I don’t say too much about them). It’s just that they only come after all the unpacking of liberty and applying it. And then they can only be conjectured explanations and refutations rather than “support”. The approach I take is that before you can morally evaluate the libertarian system, you first have to be able to say what it objectively is. To start with morals looks back to front to me.

>Lester’s theory is certainly a much more developed approach to foundations

Critical rationalists are likely to be allergic to any accusations of attempting “foundations”, “bases”, etc. It’s conjectures all the way down.

>than what he calls “the Lockean/Rothbardian/Blockian propertarian approach”, since these authors also provided no metaethics, but did not seem aware that someone could have even required a metaethics of them.

One can attempt a coherent explanation of what libertarianism objectively entails in principle and in practice without going into ethics or meta-ethics (or epistemology). If someone restricts himself to that narrower task then it is not an inherent fault.

• I don’t think Walter Block has addressed metaethics at all, or at least I have not seen it.

I see no inherent fault in that.

• Similarly, John Locke, as I interpret him, simply took his readers’ familiarity with scholastic natural-law for granted, and then introduced some modifications.

We always have to start with some back-ground assumptions with any theory. Otherwise, we will find ourselves in an infinite regress.

• I would regard Rothbard’s approach to metaethics as something of a handwave: he spent the whole first part of the Ethics of Liberty giving a history of natural-law arguments, so as to try to frame himself as within that tradition, but did not really do anything to explain the metaphysics behind it, whether it requires teleology, etc, which I think should certainly be required for a tradition that derived ethics from metaphysics.

“Not [merely hand] waving but drowning” (to adapt Stevie Smith’s poem). And it is an inevitably unsuccessful attempt to provide “foundations”.

>The Lockean/Rothbardian/Blockian approach seems simpler because they do not do what would be required of them by a disputant; as I see it, if someone required a metaethics of these authors, it seems like the work cut out for them would be quite immense, due to all the metaphysics they would have to do; and if they failed to do this work, they would have failed to defend their opinion.

I don’t see that they have any implied duty to do the “supporting” metaphysics. And that might imply an infinite regress as well.

>By contrast, Lester’s approach starts out by declaring that his theory need only answer criticisms (where it is implied that “you haven’t justified your theory” is not a good criticism, since we are to believe that no theory is ever justified), which to me does seem simpler.

But that is a criticism and it does need to be answered—with an explanation of critical rationalism.