KOL272-2 | Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019)

Kinsella On Liberty

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 274-2. This is the Q&A panel following my talk [KOL274 | Nobody Owns Bitcoin (PFS 2019)] for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sept. 12–17, 2019). For the four panelists' talks, see the Program, or the PFS 2019 YouTube Playlist. Transcript below. Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019) Unedited Transcript, with Guido Hülsmann, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Hans-Hermann Hoppe Sept. 15, 2019 00:00:09 M: Hans, congratulations. Your speech was really good food for thought, and because I want to hear more of it, I’ll try to challenge you and just create a little bit. You made it seem as if going from a state of more culture as human beings to a state of culture somehow was a conscious agreement between human beings to find tools or artifices to reach the purposes. And to me it seems like too much of separation between nature and culture because we see among animals quite a lot of complicated languages. 00:00:43 I call them languages, of course nothing compared to the complexity of the human being. We see tools used by animals, and of course by our ancestors. So it looks more like a spectrum which emerged out of our nature, and of course then complexities or at some certain level of complexity you can call it a more interesting culture and a more complex culture. But I think you focus too much on the gulf between the nature and culture. 00:01:14 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I would doubt that we can speak of animals using instruments. We can give completely causal explanations for them doing certain things. It has also never happened that animals were constructing something that they cannot do by nature. Men can construct instruments that make him – enable him to do things that he could not do by nature. We can construct a car. We construct an airplane. Yes, we have beavers doing – building dams, but no beaver has ever done anything else but building dams or come up with, oh no, we just divert the flow of the river or something of that kind. 00:02:00 So the explanation that we can give for animal behavior, we would not need any reference to human or teleological vocabulary of goals and means and ends and success and failure. We can – we do that because sometimes we like animals and like to describe them in human terms, but we could easily explain all of that in causal terms just as much. Also, when animals learn something that they didn’t know how to do before like circus animals or something like that, that we can – again, this learning we can describe in a causal way—reinforcement, repetition, beating them, or not beating them, giving them a piece of sugar and whatever it is. We never need human terminology to explain their behavior, but in our case, we do. That is – that would be my point. 00:03:06 GUIDO HÜLSMANN: Actually, the naturalistic position can also be challenged that there are many natural phenomena that we cannot truly explain without a teleological element, such as the function of an eye for example. Whenever we talk of a function, an eye, a liver, any human organ, a cell, DNA, information content and so on, you cannot just – the old terminology cannot just explain this in terms of the material characteristics and the so-called efficient qualities so what came before, and then what came after. You need to have a teleological argument. 00:03:45 M: I want to ask whether you will agree and perhaps expand upon this idea that another couple of good examples besides language are law, in particular, complex legal systems that emerge spontaneously over time. And I think that this argument actually was made by Hayek and Sudha Shenoy as well. And also, as a second example, as a second additional example, religion, and in particular one aspect of religion, that is, liturgy, different liturgies that embody sophisticated meanings that are transcendent.