Without even examining your critique, I have to think there are problems with it.

After all, you posted praise from libertarians–people who are generally intelligent and insightful enough to have discarded some common illusions about the state. Those are the people that said that your explanation was not just desirable to them but actually *necessary*.

If even intelligent people find it necessary to have the assistance of others, it’s quite clear that what you were critiquing wasn’t very lame at all. Wrong perhaps, though I doubt it, but hardly limping and weak.

This is why your calling this one of the lamest arguments in the history of philosophy is not fundamentally insulting to Hoppe, but rather to the readers who find your assistance necessary! After all, they’re the ones who are most probably taking what you say about this seriously.

This lack of insight (at least I hope it’s that and that you don’t actually consider your supporters idiots) and this rather wide-ranging and unconscious cruelty when you talk about your critique both give some strong hints about what the critique itself will be like.

Just putting it succinctly: Kevin’s submissions are fallacious here in so far as they attempt to rebuke Hoppe, but unfortunately all too typical of the breed of attack in this kind of debate.

First, citing institutional or other credentials is moot. You don’t purchase reason, you are not endowed with reason with a piece of sheep skin: your arguments are either reasonable or not.

Second, citing the profile of the one advancing a particular argument is also moot. E.g. calling attention to Hoppe’s background as an economist and then by extension asserting he is not a “true” philosopher is hog wash.

Again, you either are something, or you are not. If someone is engaging in philosophy, then they are a philosopher. If their arguments are sound or lead to provoking questions, then they are a good philosopher. Doesn’t matter if they are “really an economist,” or “actually an auto mechanic.”

Thirdly, when Kevin stated “The normative presuppositions of dialogue are contingent and vary over time. While the presuppositions of dialogue may contain some core norms, this core is not determinate enough to provide strong evidence in favor of one particular political ideology, much less refute all other ideologies.”

There are so many problems with this. For one, the presuppositions of SUBJECTS of dialogue are contingent upon context and may vary with time, but dialogue ITSELF is not. If this were true, then all philosophic dialogue passed on to us from the past and/or translated into other languages would be literally unintelligible.

For another, it is fallacious to say that “presuppositions of dialogue may contain some core norms, this core is not determinate enough to provide strong evidence in favor of one particular political ideology” for the simple reason that for THIS statement to be true, it must presuppose that in all situations of argumentation ethics whatsoever, there will not be a case that supports a particular ideology whatsoever.

Not only is this a fallacy based upon unexamined presupposition, it is ITSELF A DEMONSTRATOR OF THE VALIDITY OF ARGUMENTATION ETHICS!.

I actually lol’ed when Keven wrote that, because in asserting his argument, he has just established an ideology of irrational determinism by claiming to deduce it is impossible to come to an ideological conclusion. In other words, he assented to a concrete axiomatic by way of saying there can be none of such!

Hoppe would be grinning if he was following along with Kevin’s ‘counter arguments.’

In regards to what Kevin wrote I agree with Mr. Wisniewski. Shortness and conciseness of new groundbreaking arguments are the characteristics of not only breakthroughs in philosophy but also in other fields of thought and research.

“Speaking as a philosophy graduate student at one of the more prominent graduate programs in the world…”
That is simply pulling rank and as such a un-respectful behaviour. Even the hoi polloi (which Hoppe certainly is not, but I probably am might stumble upon a truth or two.

Best wishes,
Jakub

No offense, but that makes me less likely to believe what you say is true.

To Michael: I gave reasons for concern about Hoppe’s argument above. As for the others, I take it that Habermas thinks that the rules of justice are those that citizens would converge on under ideal discourse conditions. You might think (a) that this allows for relativism, (b) that the discourse conditions are rigged to get social democratic outcomes, (c) that some idealization of the citizens are needed beyond the discourse conditions, (d) that the best form of deontological constructivism isn’t completed with a discourse procedure but something like an evolutionary procedure. I’m happy to go into more detail.