Please, oh wise one of the highest league, enlighten us lowly types as to how we can logically oppose violence, oppression, racism, sexism, class inequality, and bigotry.
Um, you oppose them because you prefer a society that is more prosperous, more egalitarian, and where people have a better opportunity to live fulfilling, satisfying lives. It's not difficult to demonstrate that violence, oppression, racism, sexism, class inequality and bigotry reduce these things.
What I'm trying to point out is that it is silly to be a libertarian and silly to be someone who goes on and on about 'liberty' and then act as if your ideology does not say anything about other forms of oppression and coercion besides state violence. No - it logically must say something about it, because the underlying reasons for supporting liberty is that it human beings are better off when they are free of oppression; oppression that is not just limited to formal law.
In your world without proof of objective right or wrong - how do I logically advocate liberty and freedom?
Can you prove liberty and freedom are logically good or worth supporting?
You could probably prove that "freedom is good" is logically consistent with some other moral axiom. But actions and concepts just aren't actually "good" or "bad" - although it would be true to say that something is "good" or "bad"
to you.
Start with objective reality (or as close as we can get to it). We all have our own self interests and we all are aware of that fact. Of course, I'd benefit the most from rules/systems which only took into account my own interests, and vise versa. Since we both know this, we can develop a compromise, to secure a minimum level of satisfaction of our interests, which involves recognizing other people's interests.
Of course, some of this is already hardwired into our brains as I said before, and we have evolved a capacity to internalize norms and view them as moral truths (when they aren't objective statements about the status of reality at all) because that benefited our survival in a social setting. Advocating liberty or freedom is quite simple, in that all you are doing is arguing that a particular set of rules (ranging from rules about who makes the rules, rules about how rules are enforced, rules about who enforces the rules, rules about who decides when the enforcer of the rules has broken the rules, to rules about punishment, etc, etc) not only because it conforms with the rudimentary notions of empathy and reciprocity hardwired in us (on the grounds that it makes it a set of rules which we are capable of living by, or practical) but also because it achieves that which is in our own personal interests - an objective issue.
How do we know our brains haven't constructed an artificial category of activities labeled "freedom" or "liberty" and then placed various things within them based on the social norms we've internalized as we have been exposed to them in various settings.
That's kinda exactly what we do... it's just how our brains work. We construct artificial things because of their practical effectiveness in helping us navigate and understand our environments and thus survive/procreate effectively. It doesn't mean that they somehow exist outside of our brains.
I mean, we know that cells, atoms, and other small particles exist, but our brains just weren't built with the capacity to understand the existence of those things on such a small scale because it wasn't necessary to our survival. Instead we developed other mental tools, one of which was the moral construct which is probably closely linked to our emotional responses (as is most our brain honestly).
There is, perhaps, a slight difference between moral constructs and the constructs of language which may be why we often confuse our moral judgments with some sort of external truth. Language, such as the word "freedom", is actually describing something about objective reality. It is a mental construct, but it's describing a state of affairs. When you think of something as "wrong," you aren't even describing anything about the status of objective reality other than perhaps the objective facts that the action/behavior is contrary to social norms or has materially adverse effects upon your interests. Indeed, that's what I'm arguing is the entire basis of morality: practical effects which influence social norms which are then internalized and conceptualized as "morality."
