Subject:
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Do market based societies select for virtue? (was Re: Will Libertopia cause the needy to get less?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 29 Nov 2000 20:35:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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803 times
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Scott's going to regret turning me on to Friedman!
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal writes:
>
> > Besides, my understanding of altruism is that it is unconditional and
> > nselfish. I would think that that would be *counter* productive to evolution
> > (nice guys finish last idea). Altruistic people get trampled all of the
> > time, but they have a better understanding of what is important in this world.
> Current evolutionary theory identifies benefits in altruism, both among
> members of the same species and even accross species lines. Such altruism
> isn't necessarily conscious or deliberate, but it's altruism all the same.
> The idea is that, while competition breeds diversity and strength through
> evolution, compromise and cooperation, in the long term, fosters the help of
> the ecosystem (macro- or micro- scopic).
> I flatly reject the notion that we are doomed to doom ourselves.
Agreed.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I just can't buy this "people are
basically bad, and societies that depend on honesty are doomed to fail"
argument that comes from so many corners. (those that want police to
restrict us, those that insist we must use a belief in higher power to
overcome our nature, etc...)
I've tried in the past to construct arguments showing why people ARE
(mostly) fundamentally good, and why societies that depend on honesty will
do better than those that don't... starting from first principles. Didn't
get very far. Sigh.
Friedman came at it from a completely different angle. He argues in these
two articles that most people are honest/nice/polite/charitable/<your
favorite virtue>, because it's an efficient (utilitarian) survival strategy
to do so, and that actually being honest/n/p/c/yfv is easier than pretending
to be. No matter what the society type. Even the cruddy totalitarian states.
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/Virtue1.html
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/Virtue2.html
But I think the most amazing result comes in the second article where he
shows that a market based society skews the proportion of virtues *higher*
because the honesty/n/p/c/yfv advantage is higher in those sorts of societies.
Is it all wet? I dunno. But note the novelty here. Unlike me, he doesn't
suppose anything at all about basic human nature. He just shows how things
tend to come out and why, and how when you measure for the right things, you
get what you measure for.
It's intuitively VERY attractive.
Maybe I'm so bummed about property rights likely to be proven insufficient
(and most libertarians, including me, when confronted with the "you can't
let even one photon shine out" example are going to backpedal and say
"that's a ridiculous result, that's not what's meant, there must be some
flaw somewhere in some premise, etc.") that I'm being less than critical in
my thought (perish the idea!) and rushing to embrace.
I dunno.
I honestly don't think I do that. I read a LOT of economists when I was
younger and agreed with a number of them, not just a single "guru"... Hayek
is just a convenient cite for anti-planning-council arguments.
But I found it an interesting article pair.
YMMV.
++Lar
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