Thursday 4 December 2014

Jason Brennan's false argument for killing F.B.I officers

This, for a change, is quite a thoughtful post by Jason Brennan on 'killing Government Agents'.

On the one hand, it is refreshingly free of obvious and egregious fallacies arising from ignorance of recent developments in General Equilibrium theory. 
On the other, it is utterly illiterate with respect to doxastic logic.

Thus, it rather neatly shows the bankruptcy of 'public reason liberalism'. The fact is Roman Law, which Hobbes, Locke et al, were well tutored in, recognised an over-riding 'culpa levis' obligation, regulated by synteresis as providentially set to omniscience, such that the Social Fabric be maintained and neither individual ethos nor collective ethne ever be unconscionably imperilled. 

Governments, thus, were not organic Leviathans but only superveniently, therefore competitively, so on that immensely defeasible fabric, ethos, or hypokiemenon of Mutuality's own inward demesne such that doxastic logic faced no dilemma and demanded no pharmakos.
By ignoring every rule of any possible doxastic logic, Brennan suggests otherwise so as to present us with the Girardian scapegoat or pharmakos of a 'Fed' we, as in a Computer Game, gain points for 'blowing away'.
Brennan, who teaches at Georgetown- yeah, Jesuit Georgetown- tells us we must be ready to kill a servant of the State to inoculate ourselves against...what? Ceasing to believe we really are 'Bleeding Heart Libertarians?'
What is the common sense view?
Briefly, it is right to kill officers of the State iff, at the margin, its alternative (Stalnaker-Lewis) possible form has greater, i.e. more compelling, Moral Reality and 'zero regret' militates to that end.
Example- for a black cunt like me, when General Dunphore declare's I iz no longer a slave, fuck I ought fight for King George, innit? Except them cunts is lying big time. So I stick with Washington and wait it out for Lincoln.
That's marginal analysis- without which Substantivism turns immediately to shit.
However, Brennan isn't at the margin. He is making a substantivist argument without a substantive theory of the State compatible with minimal Liberalism- thus mis-identifying the margin.
It is impossible to find a hermeneutic model for his assertions which isn't inherently nonsensical. 
Brennan doesn't really do Maths or Econ or Doxastic Logic but there seems to be some imperative force impelling him to talk nonsense.
What is it that he prizes? I confess, I don't know. I'd like to. Clearly this is a successful American Man. But what, apart from being successful, does he actually valorise? 
Social Contract Theory, being rooted in Roman Law, had not just a concept of 'culpa levis' but also a governing principle of synteresis. In other words, the Academic Availability Cascades which distinguish 'Virtue Ethics' from 'Consequentialism' or 'Deontology' and so on are simply silly in their hermeneutic claims.

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