Just Say No to Banning Pornography

There is a YouTube user who goes by the name Nuclearnight. I would do a video response to her myself on this one issue simply because her argument is particularly annoying, but I have decided to take an indefinite leave from making YouTube videos. Thus, I must put my response in written form.

Nuclearnight is a marxist-feminist. By this she obviously advocates the normal feminist positions, with a certain communist twist. I had no idea who this user was until a few people I'm subscribed to started doing video responses to her. The theme of most of her videos, from what I gather, is that pornography is bad, and people who support or patronize it are morally depraved slime balls. She commonly refers to women in porn as "masturbation accessories," which is clearly meant to sound demeaning to those who would even consider using them as such. She hates porn, mainly the heterosexual variety I assume, because the women in it are exploited and some of them even get hurt in the process of making pornographic material.

I should say from the outset that I'm all for people making their fellow human beings aware of the dangers of certain industries. If people are concerned about the harm one could face while tending corn fields in Iowa (you could get run over by a combine, you see), the more power to them in their crusade to spread the word about such dangers. The same goes for the porn industry. If you are concerned about the dangers of it, by all means tell others not to engage in it; tell them not to use it as well.

The problem comes when someone wants to ban porn, either in the form of placing restrictions on watching it or keeping people from entering the industry. This is what Nuclearnight seems to advocate. She is really worried that women in the industry are being harmed, once coerced into the adult entertainment business to begin with. My point is: so what.

In order to be consistent with this viewpoint, Nuclearnight needs to examine every industry that has the potential to harm its employees, along with the possibility of said employees being economically pressured into the enterprise. Take, for instance, coal miners. Many of the people who work in coal mines grow up in towns where that's just what you do when you grow up: you mine coal. Along with being pressured into the industry, many of them are actually harmed. Coal mines can collapse and a lot of miners get black lung. If you don't like that example, look at the steel industry, where the same thing occurs, along with the autos, farming, electricians, plumbers, garbage disposal workers, window cleaners, etc. The list could go on and on.

There is a certain amount of economic pressure that goes along with any industry a person goes into. People are limited by the geographic distribution of natural resources, the tastes of the people in the geographic location, the creativity of the entrepreneurs in the past and present, etc. Along with that, every industry possess risk: that's just life and there's no way to escape it. In life people get hurt. Yes, we should all strive to minimize it, but advocating the ban of entire industries with "risk of harm" as a crucial factor is a leap in logical reasoning.

I know Nuclearnight would object to much of this as the coercion of the capitalist system itself. But my claim is that the argument I just put forth about risk and economic pressure would be true in any society man could realistically conceive, even communism. Communism would not erase the desires of men; it would only try to arrange the system of production in a fashion that is more "fair" to certain people. The need to produce would still be there, along with the need for people to produce it. Those people would still live in areas that were more relatively conducive to the production of certain commodities and services than others. The limits of geography and scarcity do not disappear with the waving of the communist magic wand: hands still have to get dirty, machine wheels still have to turn, unless, of course, one wants to see humankind return to primitivism. In short, communist paradise would not eliminate the injustice that Nuclearnight so vigorously decries.

Further, true volunteerism (true anarchism for that matter) is manifested in a society that lets people decide to make bad choices. The analogy, which is perhaps overused, of Murder Park, is relevant here. Should people be able to decide to visit Murder Park, toting a gun, expecting to kill or be killed? Of course they should! So long as all parties are aware of what they are about to engage in and voluntarily enter. This is no different than allowing people to decide to commit suicide. Those of us who are more rational and concerned with our own physical safety, would not dream of going in such a park. In fact, we would all probably counsel others against stepping inside its gates as well. But counsel and force are two different things. To forcefully stop someone from making an idiotic decision is evil, no matter how much we disagree with that choice. It is force without consent, pure and simple.

The logical result of Nuclearnights anti-porn meanderings is a total breakdown in the division of labor and the economic ruin of society as a whole. If she fails to advocate applying her misgivings about porn to other industries in general, she is simply guilty of special pleading, and no one should take her seriously in the first place.

Explaining Anti-Authoritarianism's Contrast With Anarcho-Capitalism: Response To Peak + Why I Am Not Strawmanning Anarcho-Capitalism

The following is a re-post of what originally was a facebook note in response to a note by Alex Peak, in reaction to two recent youtube videos ("Voluntarism vs. Anti-Authoritarianism" and "Clarifying The Issue With Ancap") that I made in criticism of anarcho-capitalism.

Dear Mr. Peak,

I appriciate your response to my recent video commentary explaining one of the main reasons why I no longer consider myself an anarcho-capitalist, even of a left-rothbardian interpretation. Overall, I find your views to be more reasonable than the tendencies that I critisize.

However, I don't think that you have adequately grasped what I understand anti-authoritarianism to be about. In particular, you still are focusing solely on the issue of physical aggression. While physical aggression is inextricably linked to authoritarianism, my definition of authoritarianism extends beyond its explicit association with physical aggression. I understand authoritarianism to entail excessive or unqualified decision-making or rule-making power, even if it does not necessarily directly involve physical aggression in its enforcement. With this being said, I think one will find that it is often the case that such a claim of authority entails some degree of aggression at some point down the line.

The issue that I am addressing extends beyond objecting to shooting tresspassers and bubble-gum thiefs. What I am objecting to is the principle that a land owner has total rule-making power by virtue of having aquired land through homesteading, trade, or gift. Generally, anarcho-capitalism holds that having a property right in land grants "ultimate decision-making power", even if this is qualified by a proportionality principle with respect to punishment. The reason why I find the proportionality principle to be insufficient is because it does not really qualify the decision-making power itself other than to say that a land owner cannot randomly murder people. It seems to logically entail that a land owner can tell whoever happens to be on their land what to do - this is what I mean by "authoritarianism".

There is nothing about the proportionality principle that constrains a land owner from setting up an absurd rule such as "if you enter my land, you must give me all of your possessions, including your clothing, and you must have sexual intercourse with me". Is this, in and of itself, physically aggressive? No, it isn't. Is it authoritarian? Yes, it is. If "property rights" in land means that the owner has "ultimate decision-making power" of this sort, then "property rights" can, in principle, justify authoritarianism. Absolute property rights in land thus essentially translates to "you must obey what the owner tells you to do or leave". What, pray tell, happens if one does not leave? It seems to me that either property rights are inherently constrained in favor of human dignity, or the owner is justified in initiating force to get you to leave for not obeying their rules.

At this point, property rights have in fact justified aggression, and it seems to be quite a stretch to call it "defense". In short, there is a contradiction between the absolute nature of the property right and the limit on aggression. The propertarian thus faces a moral dillema between upholding the absolute nature of land property rights and upholding the opposition to initiating force. But, above and beyond this, the propertarian cannot object to an authoritarian rule without placing a limit on property rights. For the problem is not simply with the initiation of aggression, but with authoritarian rules. Even if, in the scenario I gave above, the visitor agreed to obey the rule, there seems to be something wrong with the picture. They likely obey the rule because of the power disparity. In other words, their "consent" becomes superficial in light of the limiting circumstances and the unlimited power of the proprietor.

What can non-aggression and proportionality principles do to counter this? Nothing. If approached reductionistically, they force the libertarian into a position of indifference: noone initiated aggression, so it's a voluntary relationship and thus legitimate. But this reveals something rather curious about libertarianism as a stand-alone social philosophy: it does not, in principle, object to exploitation. Yea, I used that buzzword: exploitation. What is exploitation? For our purposes here, I'm going to define exploitation as taking advantage of one's position of power in order to get people to do whatever you want them to, to put someone in a negative situation through the use of a power disparity. This can be manifested in anything ranging from familial relations to the workplace.

How do I relate all of this to the state? Well, above and beyond it's aggressive origins and the questionable nature of its aquisition and maintainance of land, the state is problematic because of its exploitative function. It is an authoritarian institution. Aside from the questions of land aquisition, the only thing that meaningfully differentiates it from a land owner that exploits people is a matter of scale. Even if a land owner aquires their power consistently with the anarcho-capitalist norms for property aquisition, there still is the pressing question of their power. If their power, qualatatively speaking, cannot be particularly contrasted with the type of power claimed by a state, then in my eyes the land owner is a state for all intents and purposes. If someone "voluntarily" aquires a chunk of land and goes on to claim "ultimate decision-making power" over anyone that lives or occupies that area, I have trouble seeing how this meaningfully differs from a state.

To be clear, scale is completely irrelevant to my concern here. This is an issue of quality, not quantity. The area of land in question could be as small as an estate or as large as a "nation", but the principle of the matter would be the same. A neo-lockean land owner that reduces other people to serfs is an archon, even if they do not have control over an area as large as modern nation-states. They don't even necessarily need to be perpetually initiating aggression on their subjects - modern nation-states don't even technically do that, they survive on the inertia of power and ideology in addition to aggression. States claim the legitimate power to establish whatever rules they want over everyone that inhabits a particular geographical area. For all intents and purposes, modern states are gigantic land proprietors. If a smaller scale land proprietor claims or excersizes the same or similar powers, it very well be or quickly turn into a state.

This the instability that I see with anarcho-capitalism. It objects to the modern state's monopoly over such power, but it does not seem to principally object to such power in and of itself. It has a standard of "legitimacy", viewing the current state as not having aquired power in accordance with this standard of "legitimacy", but this very standard of "legitimacy" can be turned around and used to justify more or less the same thing (perhaps in a more decentralized manner). I believe this is what some social anarchists mean when they claim that anarcho-capitalism is a just a more decentralized landscape of mini-states: it wishes to establish market competition for state-like power itself, without explicitly stating it like this. The problem with the state, from an anarcho-capitalist viewpoint, is its relative monopoly on this power. The key word, however, is "relative". "Monopoly", in this sense, is a relative term. Relative to smaller geographical areas, there still could be a "monopoly" on this kind of power. Anarcho-capitalism seeks to resolve the problem of the state by having competiting organizations wield this same power, while a more robust sense of anarchism objects to that kind of power as such.

I can see my last few statements opening me up to being strawmanned, so I should clarify that this is not an absolute rejection of all organizations. Nor does it imply that there is something wrong with, say, owning a home or a bedroom. Nor am I advocating absolute pacifism. The issue has to do with the scope of power that we can legitimately connect to a given ownership claim. Yes, you can own a home. Yes, you can protect your home from an attempted armed robbery. But no, you cannot claim by virtue of owning your home to have "ultimate decision-making power" in very much the same way that a state does. Your "power", if you could said to legitimately have any at all, is qualified contextually. The problem that I have when discussing this with many anarcho-capitalists is that they seem to view it in black and white terms: either you have absolute property rights and hence "ultimate decision-making power", or you don't own anything at all. I believe this is a false dichotomy.

In relation to the Charles Johnson quote that you bring up, a premise tied up with what I am saying is that while an "authoritarian" society could concievably be consistent with libertarianism in some sense, the practical reality of an authoritarian culture will inevitably devolve into statism for the very reasons having to do with the problems of power that I've been discussing here. Hence, I do not think that a sustainably free and flourishing society is possible without at least a reasonable degree of cultural change in an anti-authoritarian direction. On one hand, this may seem to hint at a sense of pessimism. Relative to the sentiment of "let's just push the no state button and then not care about consequences from that point onwards", it is. But it's also more realistic. It doesn't mean that I think anarchism is impossible, but that the prerequisites for it meaningfully being realized is more robust than most market anarchists seem to realize, and that they sow the seeds for a new state if they continue to limit their conception of freedom to non-aggression and ambiguous voluntaryism.

I hope that this helps clarify my position even more.

Best regaurds,
Alex Strekal

The following is a re-post of a follow-up note for the purpose of clarification and as an elaboration on what I stated in the original note.

A common reaction to my criticism of anarcho-capitalism is to claim that it is a strawman, that most anarcho-capitalists do not explicitly advocate what I critisize. I think the problem with this is that it confuses a consequentialist argument for a strawman. What I am doing is pointing out the logical implications of the theory, regaurdless of the intentions of its proponents. Yes, many anarcho-capitalists are probably not going to explicitly endorse authoritarianism (although a good look at the LVMI message boards and articles really makes one wonder). But the point is that authoritarianism can, in principle, be logically derived from their own standards. The intentions of a given anarcho-capitalist matter not one bit as far as refuting this is concerned. A particular anarcho-capitalist could, in theory, oppose some of the logical implications of their own standards, but this should put them in a state of cognitive dissonance.

As a stand-alone social philosophy, anarcho-capitalism does *not* object to exploitation (and some of its most vocal proponents cringe and balk at any usage of this word). At best, such a reductionism is forced into a position of indifference towards it by the nature of its own logic. This is not a mere fantasy that I have concocted as ammunition. By itself, anarcho-capitalism is strictly concerned with rights concepts, with these rights generally being defined in propertarian terms. As I believe I have rather methodically shown, the logical implication of treating these rights concepts as absolutes or as something to reduce the whole social philosophy to, at least as it applies to land, creates tension with some of our most basic intuitions of human dignity (and freedom!). This may very well include the intuitions of some anarcho-capitalists themselves.

In a sense, what the issue boils down to is how one concieves of rights, particularly with respect to their absolute or non-absolute nature and their overall coherance with each other in the conceptual network that they form. Compared with a "maximalist" position, a Rothbardian conception of property rights is a bit less absolutist, insofar as it puts foreward a proportionality principle. However, compared with my position, a Rothbardian conception of property rights is more absolutist. And if my own position is compared with the statements of someone like Francios Tremblay, I'm commiting a sin for even clinging to any sense of property rights whatsoever, although from my angle Tremblay is just being an absolutist in the opposite direction of the anarcho-capitalist and is playing a ridiculous semantic game with the word "property".

The reason why I am not strawmanning Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is because I am simply pointing out what its own conception of rights, interpreted in isolation from anything else outside of that system of thought, logically commits it to. "Ultimate decision-making power" means "ultimate decision-making power". If land property rights are absolute in the sense of granting "ultimate decision-making power", within the boundary of proportionality for retaliation and punishment, then this logically commits the Rothbardian to accept whatever authority a land owner claims and wields beyond that boundary -- *unless they open the system to additional considerations*. And the problem is that beyond that boundary we can theoretically fit in any rule that a land owner wishes to impose on other people who happen to be on their land. The "legitimate authority" of the land owner as a legislator, so to speak, is conceptually unlimited beyond this point. Short of randomly murdering their "guests", there is no limit on the land owner's authority to make commands.

A related issue is that I'm objecting to viewing everything only through the lense of rights concepts in the first place. This leads to certain tendencies of creating false dichotomies in a reductionistic manner. The most common manifestation of this is that when someone questions the absolute nature of land property rights, the anarcho-capitalist responds with a strawman of their own by accusing the property-skeptic of making a formal positive rights claim (this is what Thorsmitersaw/Darrin Knode almost always does when this issue comes up). This creates a false dichotomy between absolute land property rights and a claim to legitimately be able to take and use other people's stuff at whim. But the claim that a land owner doesn't legitimately have unlimited authority over whoever happens to be on their land is not the same thing as the claim that whoever happens to be on their land has unlimited authority to require the land owner to do things for them. The property-skeptic is not necessarily claiming that the owner has a formal or legal positive obligation to obey others. Quite the contrary, the whole point is that the person on the owner's land does not necessarily have a positive obligation to obey the owner's commands.

Are the problems with a reductionism to the NAP and property rights not the whole reason for having "thick libertarianism" in the first place? From my point of view, I'm only making (or extending on) a "thick libertarian" case against Rothbard. The "extra-rothbardian" concepts that I am bringing in, to open and expand libertarianism, is a robust anti-authoritarianism as I have concieved of it. The Rothbardian position by itself (and, to a lesser extent, the left-rothbardian position, although not altogether exempt from criticism) is in tension with these "thick" considerations. And this is not based on a strawman. The response that Rothbardianism does not condone shooting tresspassers and bubble-gum thiefs is only a perpetuation of the very fixation on physical aggression that I am critisizing, which misses the point. Even with proportionality principles in place, absolute land property rights is a constraint on the freedom of other people, and because of such considerations I'm suggesting that a robust sense of personal freedom is a constraint on land property rights.

There is tension within the conceptual network; it does not fully cohere. If I may put this in terms that anarcho-capitalists may be familiar with, "self-ownership" (putting aside my problems with this concept as it is normally used by many libertarians) and "land ownership" do not always jibe well with eachother. To the extent that land ownership claims extend over into a claim over people, it becomes problematic, and this is the sense in which I want to say that land ownership must be constrained. And this is precisely one of the main senses in which land is special: it is precisely the space which contains people. Continueing the usage of typical terms here, absolute land ownership rights inherently become a claim of authority over the "self-ownership" of other people. If it didn't, it wouldn't be absolute. The only way to make the two cohere is to place limits on one or the other. The implications of placing limits on "self-ownership" would be a justification for authoritarianism. Hence the problem that I've been addressing all along. The plainly stated Rothbardian position, insofar as it wants to uphold land property rights, should logically commit the Rothbardian to authoritarianism and a re-justication for the state within the boundaries of its land property norms.

It should be rather clear that this is not a strawman of anarcho-capitalism stated in bad faith. It is the outcome of a dialectical and deconstructive process in my mind. There is an antinomy, so to speak, between our basic intuitions of personal freedom and the Rothbardian construction of property rights. I don't think that this is an antinomy that resolves. If there is a synthesis, it seems to hint at something closer to geo-anarchism.