My own position is that social norms are emergent properties. Social life demands inter-personal coordination - interpersonal coordination, to be efficient at all, needs conventions. Conventions emerge necessarily from social life.
@ Eleanor, sorry, my bad, my collectivist detector gave a false alarm.
Sounds pretty much like J.S. Mill to me! or even Rawls for that matter. :bookworm::whistling:
JS Mill, the man who Rothbard described as "The Lenin of Laissez Faire" and his seriously screwed up son as "el wimpo". They're far too authoritarian for me (I don't think there is a single evil which cannot be justified by utilitarianism).
I try not to preface my anarchism, except to say that I don't throw bombs. I think what it boils down to is an understanding of interpersonal boundaries and a rejection of abuse.
My biggest influences are the early Quakers (I wish I could be as brave as they were), Bastiat and de Molinari from the French laissez faire school, the "Austrians"(Hayek was very flippy floppy, his reasoning in "Road to Serfdom" was anarchist, then he kept spoiling it with "but I think"s, Mises was far more consistent, even if he never followed Rothbard into being an anarchist) and the present day natural law scholars such as Bruce Benson, Frank van Dun, George Ayittey and the late Michael van Notten. Gerard Casey, at Dublin, falls into several of the categories. I'd like to meet him for a tea (or a beer) before he leaves UCD this summer. He actually teaches modules on the philosophy of libertarian anarchy, at one of the top mainstream Irish universities.
and I can't leave out the first person whom we know of to come up with the idea of "emergent orders", Lao Tzu. I love the idea that the most printed and most translated book in the world, second only to the Christian bible, is a 2500 year old anarchist text.
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ps
I haven't forgotten Wendy McElroy:hug:, author of (among many other works) "a woman's right to porn"
