From: platt@watson.ibm.com (Daniel E. Platt)
Subject: Re: Wage Slavery (Was: BIG LIE about the market)
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1992 14:53:12 GMT
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

In article <121901@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>, kent@phoenix.ocf.llnl.gov (Kent J Crispin) writes:
|> In article <1992Apr4.204559.7250@waikato.ac.nz> hgm@waikato.ac.nz writes, in
|> response to my response to someone else:
|> >
|> >I justify coercion this way: 
|> >I believe that natural rights are equal to all individuals. Individuals only
|> >have rights if they recognise the equal rights of others. If you kill me you
|> >forfeit your right to life. If you forceably take my rightful property you lose
|> >your right to property and your right not to have force used against you.
|> >
|> >Helen Marsh
|> 
|> I guess I take a different tack, and I tend not to think in terms of "rights"
|> at all.  In an earlier post I blathered on about how "ownership" is actually
|> a complex notion, only partly tied up with legal notions of property rights.
|> The idea of property rights itself is very complex.  It just isn't true 
|> that property rights in practice are based on abstract principles -- they
|> are based in a web of legal codes, customs, and social obligations, with
|> no single abstract inspiration.

Ownership means you have free use of something... a car, your land, etc...
(well, your use of these things are somewhat limited -- you are not supposed to
use these things in a way that damages other people's free use of their
property).

If someone deprives me of the use of my property, I *COULD* go out and hit them,
shoot them, or something like that.  However, without public record of what went
on, the family or other interested parties could claim I'd done that without
just cause and come beat me up or kill me.  Protection of life, property,
freedom to pursue a livelyhood, and freedom to associate with other people in
ways that can further a collective interest are rights that most people feel are
worth protecting.

This implies a public forum to record the transfer of property, judgements
against people who try to deprive a person of their rights to property,
livelyhood, or freedom to associate, and enough force to catch people who do
that, and to extract compensation after judgement.  (I don't believe that a
person who has commited a crime forfeits their rights; however I *DO* believe
they should pay for their crime).

In the midst of the kinds of conflicts that can arise, a set of precidents,
priorities, common law, etc emerges...  

I'm not sure that there isn't a 'single inspiration.'  I think there is an
underlying idea -- people own things (they have rights to the use of those
things), people have the right to pursue their interests by association with
other people, by earning a livelyhood, etc...  That's a very basic idea (it is
embodied in the psychological makeup of people).  The way it ends up being
implemented in the context of cultural expectation, laws, customs, etc can be
very complicated; yet it is those customs that define the details of what it
really means to 'own' something.

|> 
|> There are many possible reasons why I personally might coerce someone else
|> in some way, or why I personally might use force on another.  These reasons
|> are mediated through my morality, whatever that might be, but in general
|> I couldn't base it on logic alone, and in fact, I think it would be impossible
|> in principle to do so.  The only thing I could say is that, whatever the
|> reason, I am responsible for my actions.

There's a code over how much coercion can be applied; usually justification
depends on what one owes the other.  For example, the bank can coerce payment of
my mortgage under threat of foreclosure.  My boss can coerce work under threat
of losing my job.  Mostly, these coercions are small; they are just requests or
reminders.  The implications are always not too far from the surface...

|> 
|> Use of force by society, or the state, is even harder for me to rationalize.
|> Instead, I view the whole thing as a gigantic complex optimization problem,
|> where we collectively authorize the state (in a democracy, at least) to 
|> use force in the minimal way to accomplish certain goals of stability,
|> happiness, prosperity, and so on.  (Use of force is intrinsically not
|> very happy, in my experience, so there may be another way to factor it in.)

That's not a very bad picture of what emerges when one tries to balance rights
and enforcement.  The problem is that the instrument of justice needs to have
enough rights to pursue its job, or it becomes ineffective.  We're suffering
under the impact of that when criminals go free long enough to do real damage...
people have been feeling very dissatisfied with their protection, so they feel
like increasing the rights of police powers, at the possible expense of giving
up some of their ability to defend against inappropriate application of police
powers.  

It isn't just bounded from above (least upper bound or supremum), there's also a
lower bound below which police powers become ineffective (infimum).

|> 
|> I arrive at this point of view from introspection, really -- all the things
|> in my mental landscape that one might call "morals" are really based, as
|> far as I can tell, on emotional values attached to various experiences.
|> I then extrapolate from these values to decide how to act.  

I've seen documentaries discuss the impact of games on kids -- learning that if 
you don't obey the rules, you don't have a game, and there is no real way to 
'win.'  It was suggested that this was highly instrumental in the moral
development of kids.

|> 
|> To sum up (this sounds terrible, I know), I really justify coercion as just
|> a means to certain ends, one of which is to minimize coercion.

Don't like the sound of 'ends justifying the means?'  From a logical standpoint,
any effective means to get a job done should produce the desired end, or else
the means will be unjustified.  However, I would go a step further and say that
some of the 'ends' that the means must satisfy are that people's rights have not
been violated along the way.  If one disregards some of the ends in order to
justify other ends, then one hasn't really computed the cost correctly (I've
seen lots of managers underplay some elements of costs to justify a project they
think was 'worth while').  In that context, I don't think there's any problem
with the idea that the 'ends justify the means' except that one must look at ALL
the 'ends.'

Dan