From: Phil Osborn (philosborn@altavista.com)
Date: Tue Mar 12 2002 - 20:03:46 MST
Re Richard Steven Hack's
(richardhack@pcmagic.net)detailed analysis of my
earlier posting:
There are some good reasons to preserve the concept of
"rights." For one, how is it that you define
"coercion" in practice. First, you have to know who
owns what - right???
If we both claim something as personal, exclusive
property, then either we are both right and justified
in our claim, in which case there is a defect in the
ethical formulation of the concept of property, or one
or both of us is wrong. How do you make that
determination without something equivalent to the
concept of "rights?"
As I discussed, a more precise formulation of "rights"
involves the use of "ethical," rather than simply
"moral" sanction. I forgot momentarilly that this
itself involves problems, due to the language
ambiguities.
An "ethics" can be pretty much completely divorced from morality. When you read that a dentist subscribes to the ethical standards set forth by the American Dental Society, all you really know is just that. This really tells you nothing about the honesty of that dentist. Various professional societies have statements defining their ethical code, but I doubt that many of them actually try to define what the moral grounding is or make any claims in that realm.
Thus, "moral" is true of a sanction specified by a
genuine "right," while "ethical" might not be, depending upon what one means by "ethics." Moral, however, is too broad. You have to include an ethical context in order to sort out complex rights, so let's make a stab at it with "morally sound" ethics, since there doesn't seem to be a single term that really suffices. "Morally grounded" might be another option, I suppose. Perhaps we need to invent a new term.
So, when I claim that your high-rise violates my
property rights because it cuts off my view of the
beach - or the sun - now we can refer to a rationally
specified methodology and a set of standards by which
to evaluate our competing claims. Then we can
determine who is violating whose rights. Simply
asking who is coercing really does not address the
issues that still have to be resolved. In fact, it begs the question, as you can't tell who is coercing until you make a more extended analysis of the property "rights" involved.
Rights can be violated without coercion, simply by accident. In fact, whether coercion, in the sense that it is normally used - an initiation of force or a substitute for force, is used or not may play a major role in determining how to deal with someone who has violated your rights, from a security point of view or from a moral analysis, but in another sense, it doesn't matter.
Whether your rights were violated by the initiation of force or by accident or ignorance or negligence, the important facts are: 1. what are your losses, 2. who caused them, 3. how can you recover damages to return you to where you were, or, 4. failing that, how can you minimize similar losses in the future.
The state positive law, with its overwhelming bias towards hurting or killing anyone who violates its edicts, has so distorted our conception of justice that even the Catholics(!), with their "heaven or hell" paradigm are backing these restitution/reconciliation programs as a replacement for punitive action against offenders.
We, as rational individuals (I hope), need to clear our minds of this sickness. It shouldn't rationally matter to us if someone who caused us damages is suffering in hell or some federal surrogate or partying in Vegas. It shouldn't matter especially WHY they caused us damage, except as it relates to future possible occurrences. Right?? What matters is that things are set right for us, the victims.
>From that perspective, the issue of coercion or accident as a cause of damages palls to relative insignificance. Again, what matters is fundamentally JUSTICE. When we can depend upon justice, then we don't need vengence or war. This has been expressed in many different ways, in fact: "Where there is no justice, there can be no peace." or, "To achieve peace, seek justice." etc.
But if coercion, as such, is pretty much irrelevant - or should be, then what happens to "the libertarian axiom"?
True, as you pointed out, prior contract is so very,
very helpful - especially, as I have promoted for some
time, a general social contract that specifies the
ground rules by which we will peacefully settle
disputes. However, there are always the cases that go
outside the contracts realm - as should be obvious
when you ask yourself the question: What supports the
contract's validity itself?
(As an aside, many libertarians - Wendy McElroy being
a noted example, have defended the "right to lie."
But if you have a "right" to lie, then you can be
lieing about agreeing to any contract, right? So what
good is any contract if that is in fact a right, an
sich? And without contracts, how can we make any
long-term plans involving other people?)
The ultimate validity of a contract comes from an
analysis grounded in reality independent of the
contract. Similar to "rights," we have to have the
ability to start from morality - the analysis of
values - and then extend that to an analysis and
formulation of principles that define in abstract and thus describe how to define in particular concrete
cases how to implement these values via ethical
constraints that can be translated into claims of
rights bound up in such a contract.
I do find your insistence about the lack of real
lifeboat situations to really smell of religion.
Libertarians went down a seriously invalid and
self-defeating path when Jarret Wollstein made his
famous speach at the Ist Southern Libertarian
Conference in '71 on the "libertarian ethic." (Which
was really too bad, after his great start in promoting
anarcho-capitalism with his "Public Services Under
Laissez Faire.)
Ethics is derived from morality, not the reverse. When you try to reverse epistemological hierarchy, you inevitably find yourself in a religious, not a rational position of trying to live by a non-sequitor.
Then you find luminaries who ought to know better - eg., Don Ernsberger at one of Dagny Sharron's conferences saying that "yes, it is immoral for me to prevent my child from drinking poison (playing in the traffic, etc.), but I do it anyway." So what is morality for, rationally speaking, unless it provides a consistent and rational method for analyzing values? If your morality specifies that you must do something irrational and destructive of your basic values, then OBVIOUSLY your morality is WRONG!
Then of course you can NEVER solve problems like how
to deal with children - biological, or upload babies...
Think about it..
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