A while back I published a blogpost here about the individualist American strain of SF and the more cosmological perspective of the British strain. I just published and expanded and revised version at The Libertarian Standard, working in more explicit libertarian observations.

First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour–inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization“ (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being — not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

There’s a new website and group blog in town, by a great group of radical Austro-Libertarians, including yours truly. It’s The Libertarian Standard. I’ve been pre-occupied with admin work for the site the past couple weeks, getting it set up and looking nice, but I’ll be getting around to blogging relatively soon. I’ll probably be doing a lot of cross-posting between TLS and here. Hopefully TLS will help break my blogging dry spell. In the meantime, check out the introductory post and the About page as well as all the great posts already published by my fellow TLS bloggers. We’ve also got a Twitter account (libstandard) and a Twitter list of tweeting TLS contributors as well as a Facebook fan page set up. I hope you enjoy our work!

Ingredients

• 1      6-oz can frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed
• 1      6-oz can frozen pineapple juice concentrate, thawed
• 1      cup  catsup
• 4      tablespoons lemon juice
• 3      teaspoons cayenne pepper (less if you’re a pansy, more if you like)
• 4      tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca
• 2      2-inch stick cinnamon
• 16    whole allspice
• 8      whole cloves
• 2      15-oz cans diced tomatoes, drained
• 3-5  medium carrots, chopped thinly into disks
• 3      pounds boneless chicken breasts, cut into small to medium-sized pieces
• Hot, cooked couscous.

Recipe

1. To make sauce, in a medium-sized bowl combine the juice concentrate, catsup, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and tapioca. Pour into 3.5-4 quart slow cooker.
2. Make a spice bag by placing cinnamon, allspice and cloves in 100% cotton cheese cloth and tying the package closed with clean kitchen string. Beats having to fish the whole spices out of the finished product one by one when it’s time to serve. Put this in the slow cooker as well.
3. Peel and chop carrots. Open and drain cans of tomatoes. Add to cooker.
4. Prepare the chicken (thaw, clean, cut, etc.), then place in the cooker. Stir.
5. Cover. Cook on low-heat setting approximately 9 hours, high heat setting approximately 4.5 hours. I find this dish tastes best when cooked on low for 9 hours. The chicken browns turns brown and absorbs all the flavors. It’s mouth watering.
6. Discard spice bag. Serve over couscous. Optional substitution: Serve over basmati rice.

(Click to enlarge.)

In an undergrad philosophy class on problems in ethical theory, taught by libertarian James Stacey Taylor (who introduced me to the IHS), we were required to write 300-words-or-less summaries of each chapter of the philosophy books we were reading. It’s not easy summarizing 10-30 pages of academic philosophy into 300 words or less, and such summaries are not good vehicles for debates, but it was good exercise in learning how to identify what’s essential and what’s not as well as how to write concisely. Anyway, here is my summary from that class of Christine Korsgaard‘s entire book, The Sources of Normativity. I can’t remember what the word-count limit was for this, but the summary is only 661 words. Korsgaard is a very prominent modern Kantian. Needless to say, I don’t buy into the Kantian paradigm; but my disagreements are not on display in this summary.

Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity
PDF Version

In laying out her theory for the source of normativity, Christine Korsgaard attempts to be inclusive by integrating her own variations on voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and appeal to autonomy. Korsgaard’s theory culminates in her account of practical identity and the value of one’s humanity. The result purports to be an objective and universal theory of meta-ethics.

Korsgaard’s goal is to show that we do have moral obligations irrespective of our individual desires. As reflective beings, we must reflexively endorse a desire if it is to be considered a reason to act. Korsgaard turns inward the voluntarist formulation of legislator and citizen, positing the thinking self and acting self as our double nature. The thinking self has the power to command the acting self.

Human beings must act under the idea of free will. To be autonomous, however, one cannot merely follow one’s desires; one must have a goal and one must have a reason to reach that goal. The reason cannot be imposed by an external source. Autonomy requires self-imposed laws, which cannot be picked arbitrarily.

The Categorical Imperative tells us to act only on a maxim that can be consistently willed into a universal law. A good maxim is an intrinsically normative entity. Korsgaard avoids the trap of substantive moral realism by arguing that we have no need for recourse to intuition if we can show something’s intrinsic properties make it a final good. We can do this with a maxim, for it has the form of a law by virtue of its intrinsic properties, and it is this that makes it a final reason for action. This is still procedural realism. Values are created through our legislative wills by the procedure of making laws for ourselves.

Korsgaard distinguishes the categorial imperative from the moral law, which “tells us to act only on maxims that all rational beings could agree to act on together in a workable cooperative system.” The former is the law of a free will, but the traditional Kantian argument does not establish the moral law as the law of a free will. Only a law that ranges over every rational being will be a moral law. It is our practical identities that guide us in our acquisition of moral law and the actions we take based on them. These laws are constrained by the Categorical Imperative.

Our practical identities give us reasons to act in one way rather than another. It is unthinkable to act contrary to our identity. When we are acting under volitional necessity, that is, when all actions but one are unthinkable then we are most autonomous. As autonomous reflective beings that act for reasons, we must value our practical identities. “It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are.” If we value our practical identities then we must also value our humanity, for it is our humanity that makes our practical identities possible. It is here, in the Self, that Korsgaard locates the source of normativity.

Like some realists, Korsgaard holds that reasons are intrinsically normative entities. However, she rejects the commonly held belief that reasons are private, and that one can derive public reasons from private reasons. Taking a cue from Wittgenstein’s public language argument, she argues that if private reasons existed then they would be incommunicable to others. A private reason would be a reason only for X, whereas public reasons are reasons for all agents relatively similar to X. Reasons are inherently public. Since human beings have only reasons that can be shared, if we value our own humanity we must recognize that we share that humanity with others and so must value the humanity of others as well. To do otherwise would constitute a failure to be consistent. Herein lies our moral obligations to others.

That was to be the subtitle for my chapter in Open Court‘s recent addition to their Popular Culture and Philosophy series, Transformers and Philosophy: More Than Meets the Mind. Alas, no subtitles made it into the book.

I have received official permission to provide a pdf copy of my chapter, “Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings,” on my website. Technically, I don’t think I really need legal permission; I don’t recall signing over to Open Court the copyright that federal law automatically vests in me as the author. Anyway, download it from that link and enjoy!

The chapter title comes from a quote by Optimus Prime in the first of the recent live action movies. The chapter itself is kind of a condensed and lite version of the Aristotelian-liberal theory of virtue ethics and natural rights explained in more detail in my dissertation, applied to the transformers and to artificial intelligences more generally.

This is from a page of notes I put together in grad school for a presentation on Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

Sources: De Anima III.5, Metaphysics XII (especially 7 & 9), Physics VIII (especially 8-10).

PDF version.

Characteristics of the Prime Mover (Divine Nous)

• First principle
• First mover (logically, not temporally); itself unmoved and unmovable/unalterable
• Substance (and arguably form) without matter
• Self-thinking thought
• Eternal and in eternal possession of its object (thought); therefore always active and never passive, always actuality and never potentiality.
• Simple and one
• Final cause; that for the sake of which; moves others by love; produces movement through infinite time (not a temporal first cause)
• Necessary
• Most good
• Living, insofar as thought itself is the highest expression of life
• No magnitude (and so neither finite nor infinite)
• Without parts and indivisible

The Ordered Universe

• “[T]he universe is of the nature of a whole” (M XII.1). “[T]he world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end” (M XII.10). “There always was motion and always will be motion throughout all time” (P XIII.9), i.e., the universe is eternal; not created or generated ex nihilo. The Prime Mover is the original source of motion in the universe and is the ordering principle that makes the universe a whole. The Prime Mover, God, the Divine, “encloses the whole of nature” (end of M XII.8).

Human Nous and Divine Nous

• Men participate in the divine insofar as they contemplate the higher things (Nicomachean Ethics and M XII.7).
• Can the human soul survive death? In Metaphysics XII.3 Aristotle suggests that it can, “albeit not all soul but [only] the reason.”

Contra Plato (M XII.5-6)

• For Plato everything in the phenomenal world is a mere imperfect, particular manifestation of the Ideas or Forms. Each Idea or Form is universal in the sense of being one. In Metaphysics XII (and also in NE), Aristotle rejects universals of this sort. “The primary principles of all things are the actual primary “‘this’ and another thing which exists potentially. The universal causes, then, of which we spoke do not exist. For the individual is the source of the individuals. For while man is the cause of man universally, there is no universal man” (M XII.5). For Plato, the Agathon (the Good), at least in the Symposium and the Republic and prior to the Sophist, is beyond being. One might argue that Plato’s “mature metaphysics” expressed in the Sophist precludes this, however.
• For Aristotle it is particulars that exist and the forms are always forms of individual particulars. Aristotle’s universals are not physically separable and independently existing things but rather are aspects of the nature of particulars, which we can separate out mentally by a process of abstraction. For example, the universal “‘man’ does not exist for Aristotle except insofar as it can be located in all the individual men who have ever lived, are living, or will ever live. The same might be said of the Prime Mover; insofar as it is the first mover, the organizing principle of the universe, and encloses the whole of nature, it might be reasonable to say (although I’m not certain that Aristotle would agree) that it is the form of reality, the logical structure of reality. Arguably the Metaphysics introduces separable substances, but even so for Aristotle nothing, not even the Prime Mover, is beyond being.

~~~

Now, I’m an atheist, but I believe there is a logical structure of reality. I don’t think my views are entirely inconsistent with Aristotle’s idea of the Prime Mover. For more on this, see Roderick Long’s “Theism and Atheism Reconciled” and “The Unspeakable Logos.”