Zack Sorenson

David Friedman Was Wrong

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 26, 2017 | Blog

Some time back, the libertarian community was engaged in a massive food fight over the question of whether it favored a consequentialist versus a deontological basis for the philosophy. I think this boiled down to whether one came into Libertarianism because of some sort of belief in a natural rights or similar theory, or whether one discounted that kind of logic and was libertarian for pragmatic or utilitarian reasons. The debate seems to have been unnecessarily divisive. Can't we all just get along? I don't want to rehash the debate. I was reading David Friedman, who is associated with...

Can Blockchain Technology Defend Free Speech?

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 24, 2017 | Blog

As an erstwhile reddit user, I was dismayed by this past election cycle's effect on the site. Reddit is a discussion forum site that lets users set up topic specific home pages where they can freely post links or text discussions. Other users vote up or down on a post to lead to a system of self-sorting that theoretically sifts between the wheat and chaff of a decentralized discussion. Unfortunately, reddit relies on human moderation a bit too heavily. Each sub forum has a human moderation team of enthusiastic users who block or ban offensive posts. This was considered a necessity due to...

America Is NOT A Product Of The Enlightenment

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 20, 2017 | Blog

America is a product of the Christian Enlightenment. The Age of Reason led to many awful things such as the French Revolution and (eventually) the modernist thinking behind Marxism, Progressivism and Fascism. The central premise of the Age of Reason is that there is an answer to the big questions of life. The Christian Enlightenment indeed applied the ideas of the Enlightenment to Christian thinking. Nevertheless, these efforts retained core theological elements. I've come to think that the Christian Enlightenment has more in common with post-modern thinking than it does with Progressive...

Libertarianism’s Moral Fulcrum; Why Other Philosophies Are Wrong

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 19, 2017 | Blog

Christianity's core theological paradigm presents one single object of life: to be reunited with Divinity. Metaphorically, this means nothing more or less than harmony with ineffable meaning. Life is nothing without this; meaningless life is arbitrary life. The quest for power, wealth, love, or anything else "for its own sake" is just an appropriation of meaning. You can't have purpose or desire, and deny the importance of meaning. To deny the importance of meaning, but also get up out of bed in the morning, is to express an example of Ayn Rand's stolen concept principle. Though the...

Scorsese’s Silence, And The Relationship Between Belief And Power

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 15, 2017 | Blog

I recently finished watching Martin Scorsese's film Silence. From both the spiritual and historical perspectives, it's an interesting film. The story is based on a work of Japanese historical fiction that speculates about the lives of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who have snuck into Japan after its severe crackdown on Christianity and outsiders in the 17 century. It is brutal in a situational sense. One character describes the methods of the Samurai lord persecuting him as "almost beautiful", but evil. The film's major theme relates to faith more than it does to history. It treats all...

Libertarian Philosophy Pinpoints The Source of Moral Injury

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 14, 2017 | Blog

In my recent article, The Moral Illegitimacy of War, I begin by discussing moral philosophy. I wanted to critique the moral logic which is used to justify war, and to do this I had to rely on the logic which shows that killing is wrong. The first step was discussing why killing is wrong at all. I had to rely on some objective basis for saying that killing is wrong, because I needed to discuss the morality of killing from a perspective that is outside of the state's. This is the only way to criticize the state's moral stances from a position of authority (such as the state's belief in its...

Arbitration With China: A Walk-Through Example

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 11, 2017 | Blog

To wrap up my discussion on using arbitration instead of war, I'll offer a concrete example of how it would work. I've repeatedly mentioned the situation in the South China Sea, so I'll use that in this example. Arbitration can succeed in this scenario if it can result in the following: a "law of the South China Sea" which both the US and China agree to follow. This arbitrated law would look like a treaty arrangement, and could be compared to conventional international law. It would be more than that. It would be a specific set of norms that these two powers both agree ought to apply in...

Is Arbitration A Practical Alternative To War?

by Zack Sorenson | Jun 10, 2017 | Blog

In my last blogpost, I discussed how the US government could be constitutionally restructured to use arbitration instead of war to conduct foreign policy. If every great power was structured this way, then obviously arbitration would be a practicable alternative to war. But what happens when not all international actors agree to the same norms? In my article about the moral illegitimacy of war, I applied David Friedman's ideas about arbitration between protection agencies in a stateless society to the realm of international politics. Friedman agrees that it would be inevitable for said...