The Failure of Mixed Law

#law #epistemology #excerpt
The Failure of Mixed Law

“Mixed law” system(s) refer to a position on law that conflicts should be avoided under certain circumstances, but not always.

Any mixed-law system that can be reduced to “we must aggress in these arbitrary situations” is refuted by the reasoning against the law of the jungle. Allow me to now quickly introduce a number of different proposals for a mixed-law system such that I may draw your attention to a common principle among them all:

  1. consequentialism—he whose victory would yield the best outcome is he who should win the conflict at hand;

    • utilitarianism is a sub-category, where “best outcome” means “the outcome of maximal utility.” Utilitarianism specifically can be shown to be false on purely economic grounds in its use of a category error with the determination of the data type of “utility.”

  2. racism—he who is fighting for the interests of the preferred race is he who should win the conflict at hand;

  3. Marxism—he who is fighting for the interests of the proletariat is he who should win the conflict at hand;

  4. primitivism—he who is fighting for apocalypse is he who should win the conflict at hand;[^1]

  5. monarchism—he who is deemed to be the proper victor by the monarch is he who should win the conflict at hand;

  6. democratism—he who is deemed to be the proper victor by majority opinion is he who should win the conflict at hand;

  7. Rawlsianism—he who is deemed to be the proper victor by a party situated behind a veil of ignorance is he who should win the conflict at hand, and;

  8. imperialism—he who is deemed to be an ally by the military leadership of the preferred country is he who should win the conflict at hand.

You will notice that on their face these ideologies fall under two categories: (1) the class-based, i.e. “he who is part of the preferred class is he who should win the conflict at hand,” and (2) the whim-based, i.e. “he who is deemed to be the proper victor by X is he who should win the conflict at hand.”

Since the same failure of the law of the jungle applies to the whim-based approaches, for the same reasons, we shall focus on class-based mixed-law systems. This would include 1-4; consequentialism has the class of detrimental individuals as against the class of beneficial individuals, primitivism has the class of producers as against the class of anti-producers, racism and marxism are obvious.

Any form of class-based law is an ethic in the form: one rule for class A and another for class A∁. (A∁ being the complement of A, i.e. the set of all people who aren’t in the class A.) If the ethics were compatible this would then not be one rule for A and another for A∁, it would rather be the same fundamental principle applying to both groups, and would therefore not be a class-based ethic. But by what possible means could one derive that one ethic applies to A and another incompatible ethic applies to A∁? Surely such an ethic could not be derived from the nature of man as such, because if it were then we would have a universal principle, not one that applies only to a particular subset of humanity.

Therefore, such an ethic must be arbitrarily particularised—we have an arbitrary distinction which forms a class of humans and a class of sub-humans, we do not here have a rational ethic for man. This particularisation then falls back into the primacy of consciousness and therefore fails. However, this is assuming that this individual accepts the metaphysical equality of man, as without such an equality it would not be the case that man as such has a particular nature which implies a certain ethics but rather there might be a proletarian class with their own proletarian logic as against a bourgeoisie class with their own bourgeoisie logic. This is the polylogist thesis, first identified by Ludwig von Mises.

First, the polylogist requirement that different groups have different logics rests upon the prior assumption that the laws of logic are subjective, rather than objective—that logic is not imposed upon man as a necessary requirement of validate his beliefs by the universe, but rather that man himself projects out such rules onto the universe. This is, again, primacy of consciousness—the starting point for the polylogist is not an observation of reality and derivation therefrom, but rather a deadly retreat into their own minds. When we have the proper starting point of existence we have it that the very first thing you can say metaphysically is that existence exists. From this we have it that we are conscious of existence. And of course, to be conscious of existence means that you are conscious of something that exists, implicit in this is the law of identity: that which is is what it is, A is A. If something exists, then something exists; and if there is a some-thing, then there is a something.

On top of this, there exists a built-in self-destruct for any mixed law ethic, in the form of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argument from argument. Demonstrating that any such conflict-engendering ethic, no matter how few areas you limit it to, cannot be justified. The fundamental insight of Hoppe's argument is that any normative proposal—any proposal that concerns how we should be resolving conflicts in this case—must be raised and decided upon in the course of an argumentation which is necessarily a peaceful conflict-free interaction.

(Above is just an excerpt. Link to the full article: An Ethical Defense of Private Propety, written by LiquidZulu.)