Indeed we are not going to be covering new ground here but isn’t it fascinating that after all this time we are still debating it?
I would define an aggression as an action that intently disturb harmony and an indirect aggression as one that does, independently of intent.
Example: Second hand smoke. The intent of the smoker is not to harm anyone but the consequence is that harm is done anyway. Pollution would be another example. Noisy neighbour, etc.
You might not be satisfied with this definition because aggression is usually tied to intent. Honestly, I’m not quite satisfied either but it’s the best term I can think of and it does fit well with what I’m trying to say.
What do you think of owning your actions and taking responsibility for their consequences as part of the basic principles of self-ownership?
Ok, firstly, I have at no point said that Economics is just about money.The societal safety net is included in certain Economic models, but not others (like the one in the video - the Mises one.
Lol, …maybe your time and resources could be saved by just nodding sagely and stroking your chin.
What exactly do you mean by that? Are you arguing an Absolutist position, or are you suggesting Human Rights should be replaced by some other interpretation of self-ownership, that is in some way more principled?
What exactly is your definition of self-ownership, that is not consistent with the idea of autonomy of thought and action, to the extent it doesn’t detriment others and therefore Human Rights. Are you suggesting self-ownership is a better guiding principle than the principles within Human Rights? If so, then I disagree because the principle of self-ownership provides no safety net or fundamental protections for people and it will therefore risk unnecessary suffering. This is why if you are going to have any kind of guiding principle, it should in my view be to take the path that causes the least suffering.
Your arguments can lead to a very Individualistic and selfish society, similar to Thatcher/Reagan. If the moral principle leads to more suffering in the real world, then it is the wrong principle. If morality is not concerned with the general wellbeing of all Humanity primarily, then what exactly should we base our morality on?..You appear to be suggesting it should be based on Economics - because life is all about Economics Right?
Sorry, but couldn’t disagree more.
This is either not saying what you mean, or plain wrong.
You asked:
Why would you hoard something indefinitely? What would be the point of
paying the overheads of storage? What would be the economic gain from
this?
I replied greed.
This does not equate to “hoarding is greed”. It means that one reason why someone would hoard in a way that does not fit your definition of hoarding, is greed.
If we can’t converse sensibly around such simple statements, I am not willing to spend so much time in dialogue when I have so many more productive and interesting things to spend my time on.
You seem to want to define hoarding in a particular way and paint it as always ok. I am not saying it is always bad, I think that’s pretty clear. Our difference appears to be that you don’t recognise any kind of hoarding as bad. Well, that’s fine. I disagree, and have explained why. I think that’s enough on this point don’t you.
In my mind, these questions tie together as follows. (I’m not trying to speak “authoritatively” here, just giving my full thoughts):
Aggression, by definition, implies intent.
But the non-aggression principle doesn’t relieve one of being responsible for one’s actions and the consequences of them, even if one is intending to do good, but accidentally does harm.
A very pedestrian, perhaps unsatisfactory, example:
Say you’re sitting on an aisle seat on a bus, with your foot out in the aisle. I walk by and accidentally step on it. You had your foot exposed and I was walking where I might have the reasonable expectation that it would be free. I’d certainly apologize and do what I could to ease your suffering, if any, within reason. But I’d not really be liable for any transgression, I think.
If you had your foot in its proper, protected, place and I stumbled and stepped on it, I’d have a higher responsibility, depending on how negligent I’d been in causing the damage. If the bus lurched and threw me into you, less so than if I were just being careless. After all, we’re both on the bus and such things as lurches are beyond either of our control.
On the other hand, your foot is exposed, I see it, look you in the eye and then step on it painfully, chastising you for being in the aisle. I think a good case could be made for punching me, as that’s a pretty clear violation of non-aggression, regardless of my opinion about where your foot should be.
Again, aggression implies intent, but if I take an action that causes harm to another, especially if negligent or careless, there is a debt accrued, in my opinion. I’ve still violated the property, rights, space, etc., of another, and would expect the same consideration in return.
Self-ownership and the non-aggression principle are fundamentals from which we start. They are guiding principles which apply universally, but that doesn’t mean that the circumstances are always clear cut. Perhaps this muddle of real-life uncertainty cause some to question whether the principle is universal.
These things scale up and can get complicated in terms of numbers of people, cultural expectations of what is helpful or good, many other factors. Also, what one decides to do or not do about any violations have a lot of inputs. But I think the principles are sound and universal.
For instance, one can pay taxes because they support some functions they agree with, yet still point out and try to get others to see that the essence of a tax is collection under threat, and therefore theft. Whether one pays “willingly” or not, the threat is still there. And the violence of that threat is enforce enough to remind everyone that the violence is there.
I’m thinking more . . . a sage smile, shake of my head, and an elegantly executed face-palm.
[After writing all the stuff below, I just looked back and saw that I’d missed the edit you did above regarding self-ownership and Human Rights. My problem with the term Human Rights is that it is not self definitive, and I’ve seen people try to throw some interesting things in under that category which don’t fit.
I start to see some of your objection to the term “ownership” in this context if you are focusing on the transferability aspect. I’m not sure what to think of that at the moment. Perhaps there’s a point there. But, no, nobody who values the concept of self-ownership is talking about it in that way, so try to grasp what IS being referred to. There’s certainly more agreement than seems to manifest in these back-and-forths.]
I don’t know the measure of what you mean by Human Rights (it is not very definitive and could have wildcards included), but generally I think what you say (in bold above) sums up my understanding.
Harping on self-ownership and the non-aggression principle is not to say that these are the only truths or principles in play or to be followed, just very fundamental ones that are rather immutable, though not always easy to sort out because life is messy.
Mutual interest in each other’s prosperity is also in the “self-interest” of each of us, even when we’re trying to be “selfish”. But also when we think of “self”, we often think of a lot more than our bodies and “our stuff”–like our loved ones, families, groups, environments, pets, etc., etc. But as far as I can see, all choice devolves to individuals, regardless of who they purport to be speaking or acting for. The sum of those choices is determines how the human world manifests.
To assume that “The Philosophy of Liberty” is about selfishness because it doesn’t start out talking about a social safety net really misses the point. It’s the foundation upon which a sane society can be built, safety net and all.
Lol…
I’ve just googled “self- ownership” and I think it zones in on a lot of where our arguments actually lie. This may be a good starting point for anybody wishing jump in the discussion.
Firstly, I think we may have started off on the wrong foot and my tone could have been taken as “be-littling”.This was mainly because of the context of the video, in that it was both the argument used to justify “tea-party” type social policies and was also created in order to promote the book about the same thing. It is a way to dis-honestly argue that the Economic policy is somehow ethical because it adheres to their interpretation of “self-ownership” rather than a Universal one as claimed. The current Universal interpretation I would argue is codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the video does not cover any of the protections within this, then therefore they have a different interpretation than the more Universally agreed one - one that suits their agenda, potentially reduces Humanity to property/commodities and grants personhood (Rights) to Corporations.
This is the thing I was be-littling, the whole dishonest propaganda aspect, I recognise this was not your intention, but I’m just explaining why I came across a bit brusque. Your intention was to ask if “self-ownership” should be a guiding principle - I would say that either it already is and is codified as Human Rights, or going by the video interpretation, No, because of the dangers.
OK, so if you would like to suggest we follow the videos interpretation as an over-arching principle, then you are necessarily saying that you have a better system/principle than Human Rights…so what is it?
here are the core provisions: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - Wikipedia
Here is the Economic Covenant: International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - Wikipedia
I acknowledge that rights can sometimes conflict, so logic is applied where this is the case, if it’s a massive debate, then the Courts of Human Rights will decidebased on basic Human Rights priorities. For example, A religious Nutjob’s right to manifest his Religious belief by way of hanging gays from cranes, is over-ruled by many other more fundamental Rights of the gay person.
This is not a perfect system, but it appears to be rational and logical and it is the logic and reasoning that direct the Society’s morality, which looks to me to be the best approach to morality, consistent with the “Stoic” thinking in philosophy I believe (thanks @Seneca).
Can you give me an example of a “Wild-Card” Human Right btw, because I find the idea of a random wild card Human Right quite amusing.
Anyway, waffled enough…
I’d just like to add something in support of the idea that morality should be arrived at by logic/reasoning, rather than a “you should never” absolutist type approach. I want to further suggest that this is the most Natural approach too (in for a penny…. : )) and that it would be the only (too far? :)) approach to morality, that would be conducive to a Global De-Centralised Democracy.
Ok, first, a bit bit of life story intro - I think I started off at odds with the World and had many issues with Religion and basically couldn’t believe how loads of people believed it, I felt quite Alien in a way on a very deep level that is hard to explain. It seemed you could either choose to believe or not, but there were some threats about “Hell”, if you chose not to and the word for such a person was an “Atheist”, which socially seemed to be associated with not having morals etc. I couldn’t even understand how you could “choose” to believe something in the first place, nevermind under threat. I also felt I had a strong moral sense. What I’m saying is that my “Natural state” without first being told by an authority figure “what to believe” or “what is true” not based on any evidence is “Atheist” – I would contend that this applies to everybody.
So, I then stumbled across “Humanism” and I thought…… wow, that’s what I am, one of them.
This is the bit that is a bit difficult to get across- It’s not that I was persuaded by any story or even argument to “adopt” Humanism, it was actually describing what I was….and yes I had morals and they were therefore to some degree innate in Humans. By approaching life in a Humanist way, I have reasoned my own morals out and this (I recently found out) is related to the Stoic way of thinking. Again, I didn’t get to the position of being in alignment with this philosophy by researching loads of “Stoic” philosophies – I had already reasoned myself there morally, - discovering the term Stoicism came after being a Stoic so to speak, as discovering Humanism came after already being a Humanist……you get me?
My logical progression has lead me to believe Human Rights are a very good way to create the basic Social playing field or guiding principles, on which Economic activity can take place. The Economics are not fundamental in deciding Morality, the Social impact is……is what I’m saying.
You know, I agree with you. You sound like a reasonable person, you understand that there are grey areas where following the non-aggression principle is not enough, careful judgement must be taken to avoid harming others. A world filled with Fergishes is probably a very peaceful and respectful place to live. So count me in, I’ll bring the beer.
Sadly, not everyone thinks like you, and if they had the chance to, these people would gladly suck all oxygen of the planet Spaceballs’s style and sell it back to you in a Walmart because it doesn’t directly go against the non-aggression principle and therefore, there’s nothing wrong with this and the free market will sort it out.
So instead of calling it the non-aggression principle, how about we call it for what it really is and avoid all confusion, namely, the non-aggression rule of thumb.
When I owned acreage with a river running along one border, the local council decided that they would charge the rural land owners for the rain that fell on their properties. It was overturned when sanity set in after a year.
Thank you. I appreciate your vote of confidence in my nobility, but past behavior doesn’t merit it. I guess I’ve always been sort of decent, but it’s only through understanding such principles that I’ve been able to align my actions with my desires for peace and harmony.
Whatever we call it, it’s still a principle. It is precisely because people are not angels that the non-principle and clear statement of self-ownership are so important. They give guides to measure the actions of self and others, in terms of when force is morally permissible, among other things. When you actually see it as a principle rather than just a nice idea, certain things that we take as unquestionable parts of life start to show up as errors in social assumption rather than just necessary evils.
I’ll stop before I go down another rabbit hole. Thanks again for stopping and thinking. Your (and even Al’s ) challenges are invigorating and make me question my own understandings. Thanks again.
Thanks, Al, for all this. We’re pretty close in our desires, though there’s still room for our means to align.
I don’t have time to devote a lot more to this debate, but I will say that I’m uncomfortable with the Declaration of Human Rights as a guide. I’ll have to give it more study now, but my impression of it is that though it has many good aspects, it also carries some assumptions about solutions that I’m very wary of. I won’t inflame debate just now by expounding. Like I say, now that you’ve put it on the table, I’ll have to examine it more closely.
Whether we call what we want to achieve “Global Decentralised Democracy” or “empowering the only true source of decision, the individual” we’re in agreement that SAFE is something new on the scene and we can both fully get behind it.
(Also, just got to say, you’re a pain in the butt, but not unappreciated. )
May I just add, as you have both inadvertently forgotten to , that a World populated by Al Kafirs, would be equally all lovely with flowers in your hair…
Cheers btw Fergish I know I’m a pain…lol… yes come back fully armed whenever. Appreciate the discussion.
I don’t want to restart the fight on this thread but I was thinking about what it would look like to more effectively decentralize government.
See in the US, the lines of authority flow (in theory) like this. People>Federal Gov, People>State Gov, State Gov> County Gov, State Gov>City Gov/Townships. (This goes from the largest territorial unit (the fed government) to the smallest territorial units cities/townships)
This is made more complicated in practice by the fact that the higher levels of gov, in particular the federal government, provides enormous percentages of the actual budgets of many of the state, county and city programs, and gains corresponding levels of control.
What would it look like if we had the people be the authorizing unit of each level of government, not just the federal and state governments but also the local county and city governments.
My preference, given the capacities of modern technology, would be to have all government proposals voted on directly by the people, using a secure (SAFE) internet based system. However, in order to have a critical mass of people actually participate in the system, enough to give it some kind of legitimacy, these kinds of votes would necessarily be up or down, yes or no binary decisions on preset proposals.
So even the best case scenario that I can fathom would require another process for coming up with proposals. Also there are some issues which stubbornly resist efforts to reduce them to binary sets, such as intricate financial decisions, (taxes, welfare, defense spending).
So one of my thoughts would be to have cryptographic means of assigning vote proxies. Each person has a vote. They can either vote on any specific issue, or they can assign their vote to another person, who can in turn either vote their bloc or assign that bloc to another person. You could have regional and national assemblies, where people have offices by virtue of holding a specified percentage of the voting bloc of that assembly’s territory. The critical point here would be that there would be true and immediate accountability. You as the voter could have a bot set up to strip your vote away from a proxy holder if and when he attempted to vote the bloc in a way with which you disagreed. There would be no more of this, “we have an annual or biannual schedule of elections and as long as we do undemocratic things months or years away from voting day, most people will forget our betrayal.”
Incidentally, I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this, but I can figure out what it might be called, I’ve tried searching for "reversible proxy democracy” or “reversible proxy parliament” but what came up were very different systems, if anyone knows the name of this please let me know.
That’s it…right there…the one thing loads of people appear not to grasp when proposing their various Utopian dreams.
Very good post…Get in!..Woo-hoo!..lol
What a coincidence, I had the same exact thought this week. What you call proxies I was calling them delegates though. I was thinking that you could have several different fields where you can cast your vote: urbanism, health, defence, cultural, etc. And you could delegate your vote for each field to a different person or doing it all manually if you prefer. Everything is cryptographically recorded so you would know exactly for what your delegates are voting for. You could remove your support in the blink of an eye and take control of your vote whenever you feel like it. I like the idea of cascading delegates, that’s pretty good.
People could advertise themselves as delegate in a certain field and you could compare what you vote for and what he vote for to see if it’s a good match. You can have an simple app that scans a QR code to delegate your vote to someone, see the history of votes, notification of the upcoming one, etc.
Democracy would then be lead by a new system of micro referendum. Every single decision decided by the mass, delegates makes this possible and efficient. If you are not a fan of democracy you still need to admit it would be a step in the right direction.
There’s a lot to flesh out like who defines what are the subject to vote for but I think it’s a pretty awesome idea. We are not gonna get there on a national level any time soon though. This kind of system would scare the hell out of the people in charge eheh. The good news is that you can start small and get some momentum. A good place to start I was thinking about is student associations. These association are often easier to change and youth are often more welcome to change. Once people are getting use to it and see the real difference they will start to implement it everywhere, until it reaches the national level. Anyway, yeah, awesome stuff, we need this.
I wonder which framework would work best for this. Safe gives us identities, communication and data, which is pretty good, but I think Ethereum would be more suited to handle the micro-referendum platform. A mix of decentralized technology perhaps.
EDIT: I google it too trying to find something similar, I didn’t find much either besides that it’s the perfect blend of direct and representative democracy; it sits right in the middle.
This is the critical point. Modern life and therefore modern government is highly complex and involves interactions of highly complex systems. Therefore you need a certain degree of specialization and long hours of study to even hope to understand if something is a good idea. Thats something we will continue to need legislators to do. What we do not need are people who can get into office by promising one thing, deliver another and drown their detractors in waves of corporate purchased advertising. If we can have quick and verifiable accountability, “If you attempt to vote this way, you will immediately and cryptographically be stripped of X% of the proxies delegated to you.” That removes the ability to abuse the people’s trust, and ideally much of the incentive of buying representatives.
My thought would be, particularly if we are starting to write our laws in code (to make their interpretations more reliable, so there is no doubt about which phrase modifies what other word etc), that each law will be assigned a category, some kind of numerical code. Now the basic types of law are criminal law (what the government will imprison you for), tort law (what other people can sue you for doing), contracts & corporate law (private business arrangements), business regulation (Public limits on business activities). Ideally this might even be done under some kind of constitutional system which more explicitly lays out the powers and limitations of each part of the government, and perhaps the laws could reflect the numbering and arrangement of that foundational constitutional document.
This structure could be extended infinitely by simply adding another . like IP addresses do, so a delegation of 192. would include all from 192.000.000.000 to 192.999.999.999.
Anyway, one thing to do would simply be to allow people delegating to specify which numerical IDs. Say, I delegate my vote on criminal law matters to Person A, because I think Person A is moral. I delegate my vote on torts to Person B, because I think that Person B is compassionate, I delegate my vote on contracts, corporate law, and business regulations to Person C, because Person C is good with business. I delegate to NO one my vote on any kind of central banking institution, and except from C’s delegation the numerical codes that deal with financial regulation.
)) and that it would be the only (too far? :)) approach to morality, that would be conducive to a Global De-Centralised Democracy.
) challenges are invigorating and make me question my own understandings. Thanks again.
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