pull down to refresh
You can apply traditional frameworks and use their reasoning to draw different conclusions. I think raiding and slavery are good ones to draw different conclusions on. Slavery can be dismissed from the viewpoint of ethnocentrism not egalitarianism because it often leads to mixing outside of compatible peoples and because it often imposes the costs of enforcement on others. Raiding can be rejected on the basis of picking fights wisely (which Norse peoples often did). Those are two examples where you can deviate from tradition without resorting to modern or abrahamic moralizing.
Check out one of mine here:
#340108
I am still trying to untangle myself from epistemological abrahamism. My points on slavery and raiding may change a bit over time. It seems to me that some people literally crave the chains. That makes me uncomfortable to consider, honestly. If a being lacks significant sentience and a mastery over impulse I'm not sure you can classify them as human the same way you would classify a thinking man. Raiding can make sense in that context too (or in the context of honest competition, militia live training exercises, etc.). Unfortunately, unraveling an epistemological basis is like a fish who has swam in water all his life, not only learning that water exists, but teaching it to breathe air. Many people lack the ability to perceive the water, let alone the ability to attempt to breathe the air. I would certainly agree that tradition is mostly if not wholly correct in finding truth. It may be that shaking your epistemological foundation is so difficult that we have to undergo a multi-generational restoration to tradition to even begin to progress again. There are many unknowns. Libertarianism is good and in my view akin to an ancestral memory of pre-christian Nordic practices, but so much of it is corrupted by abrahamism. It's difficult to untangle the two. It doesn't help that our people have been purged of their native culture, religion, and practices for millennia and that writing only became low cost over the past few centuries making the rediscovery of culture and practices difficult. That's not even counting those that conspire against us solely because they view our very blood as a threat as long as it pumps through our veins as they call us Edom and Amalek and declare us to be their enemies according to predestination.
Yes, we all deal with epistemological abrahamism. It's a bane on the West for sures. I agree that some seem to crave the chains. I think most slaves in history were content to be so. But if we're throwing off abrahamism, why worry about this at all? Why concern yourself with whether or not they are classified as the same type of human as their "thinking man" masters? I think traditional epistemology would suggest we don't have to think our way through the morality of slavery. People either earn their freedom, or they don't. It has always been thus and still is today. No creature is born into the world entitled to freedom or even to life. We, like all creatures, must earn them both - perhaps daily. What gives a man a right to something? That no one is able to take it from him. If he has no way of stopping the theft, he is not entitled to the property. Why should it be any other way? On what basis could a man have a fundamental right to life and property; what basis that is somehow prior to his will, actions, ability, and effects in the world?
There are serious claims here about moral philosophy and, if only indirectly, quite strongly about metaethics. It's my biggest area of interest, so I couldn't help adding a few thoughts on the subject.
First, let me say that it's genuinely rare to meet someone who holds such an ambitious and unconventional position. In the history of philosophy, very few people have taken such a clear and contrarian stance, and most of those who did never said it openly, settling for veiled hints instead. So I appreciate that you voiced such a moral position this openly.
Still, I'd like to point out the chain of consequences your claims lead to and touch on a few inconsistencies.
Rights and responsibilities (in other words, statements containing an "ought", the is-ought distinction) are inseparable, and both are closely tied to moral philosophy, or more precisely, metaethics. Think of it this way: the statement "you shouldn't harm anyone" places a responsibility on me and grants the other person a right not to be harmed without reason. We try to fulfill that responsibility because we also have the right not to be harmed without reason, and the responsibility of others is not to harm us. I'm not saying anything new here. What I'm getting at is this: if you accept that rights are something earned afterward, you weaken the concept of responsibility as well. That causes every sentence you build with "ought" to lose its meaning.
Let me put it more clearly: the normative weight of every sentence you utter and every action you take gets equalized and reduced to zero. "People shouldn't steal other people's property" and "this road goes right" end up with the same value. Throwing away a broken pencil and taking a human life end up in the same category. (I think the same holds for aesthetic values, but I won't go into that so as not to derail the discussion.)
You might ask what harm that does, or say you've already noticed this and it won't cause a problem. But the only thing that makes something meaningful is "value". People's motivation to do something always comes from finding it valuable, whether objectively or personally. If you eliminate the concept of value, nobody pursues anything, and going even further, nobody does anything at all.
I've gone on a bit long, I think. In short: unless we establish at least a few fundamental moral truths that are profitable for everyone (and in my view one of them has to be the NAP), there's nothing left to defend. If we can't convince people that these fundamental and profitable values are objective, that will most likely be to the detriment of all of us, unless you're strong enough to be untouchable, of course.
Don't get me wrong: if you're defending this purely as a philosophical/metaethical stance, independent of its practical consequences and of whether you'd apply it in your own life, I genuinely respect that and withdraw my criticisms. Personally, I'm actually at a far more extreme point than yours when it comes to metaethics.
On slavery, I'd also add: there can certainly be people who are content with their situation, but that depends entirely on a gamble over who your owner is. You are your master's property, literally a piece of property. He can do anything that comes to mind to you without giving any reason, and he has the right to do to you whatever he could do to a stick he found on the road. A definition that says otherwise falls outside the definition of slavery anyway. So I think content slaves must be a rare case, only seen if you're a "lucky" slave.
You've seemingly arrived at my position of hesitancy regarding slavery and raiding. Within an epistemological framework that allows them and with tradition that supports them (or rather doesn't prohibit them), it becomes harder to argue against them from a principled standpoint. I think the disagreements I offered address these, but I'll have to dig into it further. Crossing pre-christian Norse morality and legal practices with the NAP and HBD/different intellectual capacities is something that hasn't been done to my knowledge so I would probably have to do some research. I personally think slavery has been devastating to the US even if you don't care about slaves at all. Raiding just seems like a poor practice in general tactically. That's one of the reasons I'm remiss to completely reject the NAP. I think in many instances it provides a well thought out framework to deal with these issues. I may be able to dechristianize/deabrahamize the NAP and readapt it to my framework without losing logical coherence.
Also, your points on slavery also have to be put into context. Slavery was something you could exit from in some societies including Norse societies. If an attainable and realistic exit is possible the label of "slave" doesn't carry as much weight. This may be what he was referring to. It's also something I haven't researched much and need to do more research on. We are speaking from an ancient Norse pagan context.
Also, @fujimoto if you didn't read the original post let me know and I'll refund the fee for free if you don't think it was worthwhile. I had 3 readers so far. Not sure if you were in there.
Awesome, thanks for reading! Glad you liked it. Feel free to share with thoughtful individuals even if you have to share it for free. I have a blurb in my bio about my position on IP and sharing my materials.
I think this is becoming one of the longest comment threads in stasher history.
I don't think the is-ought problem has been solved. There doesn't seem to be a sound philosophical defense for it. You cannot derive an ought from an is.
That said, I wasn't defending the position from a merely philosophical stance without regard to real implications. I recognize the implications on ethics and morality, and I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by building our ethics on unsound foudations. The opposite, actually. The reason I engaged here is because I think the ancient Germanics/Norse did have a much more coherent world-view and that's what we lack - coherence. Our morality and ethics don't add up and so we end up with a massive state monopoly on violence controlled by whichever party happens to be in charge today, which is ultimately determined by whichever interest can prop them up financially or with enough media power. We practice Orwell's 2-minutes hate for hours while we doomscroll to figure out which opinion on trans people or Ukraine we're supposed to have today.
I'd prefer to coexist with slavery, even if the slaves weren't content, if it meant we had coherence.
Thanks for the endorsement! I am glad you enjoyed it.
While I do draw heavy inspiration from Norse paganism and the pre-Christian Norse societies (and other pre-christian indo-european societies) I don't consider myself bound to anything other than the truth. If I think some portion of their ways were self-destructive I'll call those ways out and offer a robust explanation why I think they were counterproductive. I think the wisdom of the ancient peoples is often haphazardly discarded for the illusion of progress which I often think has been regression, not progression.
Regarding conflict: Yes, I agree. Avoiding conflict often leads to ceding ground that causes your subjugation or gives ground to your enemies that puts them in a better position to continue further force against you.
I still think the NAP is a robust framework that is mostly right. I do think it over-indexes on not harming innocents to the point that it basically becomes self-defeating. That being said, I think it is generally good as a rule of thumb. I may dig deeper into the philosophy of the NAP and where I disagree with it, but I haven't done so yet. It is also a nice olive branch to conservative libertarians who very much like the NAP. Otherwise I think rejecting the NAP severs much of the ties to libertarianism in general. If I must do so, so be it. It's not like I find most of their purity tests to be productive anyways.