From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 13:31:55 MST
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 02:11:55PM -0500, Alexander Sheppard wrote:
>
> Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "equal", but generally I think
> that deviation from a roughly equal distribution of resources to each
> person signals tendencies in a society which are anti-liberty, that is,
> some people rewarding other people for actions they believe are good, and
> other people punishing people for actions they do not like those people
> taking.
Yes. I generally find this good - I want to see more of the things I
value, and less of the things I dislike, so I spend my rewards
accordingly. So does everybody else. The fact that a lot of people would
reward Britney Spears even when I couldn't care less for her music
doesn't bother me - there is room both for her and the music I would pay
for. A system were people were not rewarded according to how valued
their work was would be far more unjust, and also act as a disincentive
of doing good stuff since you would be just as rewarded as the one who
didn't. Such systems where some centralized power distributes the
rewards can be even worse, because then the priorities and prejudices of
the power are allowed to set the pattern of all of society.
> >There are still classes in many societies, but now the constraints are
> >cultural and in many cases possible to overcome. You can become a
> >corporate CEO even if you are an immigrant woman (but it is harder, of
> >course), there are no rules *built into the state* that prevent it. Hence
> >the state is more or less just in this respect.
>
> But I don't think that's the point. I mean, having no classes doesn't isn't
> the same as class mobility. You can have class mobility while still having
> classes. Now, in our society, because of the barriers that people face,
> there isn't too much mobility anyway--but these are not the same things.
Hmm, you are an American, aren't you? The US is one of the most
stratified western societies incomewise, but at the same time it also
shows a high degree of class mobility compared to for example Sweden
where I live, which has a rather egalitarian income distribution but far
less social mobility.
> Well, I don't really know if you can phrase this as a "cultural" thing or
> not--but it seems to me that ultimately these problems result from
> tendencies of coercion in society, sort of like how you mention.
I think it is important to be careful with the word 'coercion'. The
original marxist definition was so wide that it said that anything done
due to external threats, rewards or punishments was coerced. This means
that working in order to pay for one's hobbies is coercion, as is eating
to escape hunger. In the end this definition ends up with a worldview
where everything is coercion that cannot be escaped. In the liberal
sense coercion occurs only when somebody infringes on a person's rights,
especially the rights to life and liberty. I can see a grey area of
coercion where somebody introduces arbitrary *decreases* in the utility
of different choices a person can make (if you do X, I will fine you
$20). The coercive aspect is that this somebody is affecting our
behavior outside our control, but it is not strict coercion since we can
in principle act freely and the penalties might not infringe on our
rights - but with sufficiently harsh penalties it is nearly identical to
coercion. Note that adding rewards for desired actions is not coercion
IMHO, since they actually can be ignored in our utility analysis if we
so wish. The point of a penalty is that it cannot be ignored.
> And I think that
> has a lot to do with capitalism, really: I mean, what kind of preying are
> we talking about? Why do people prey upon eachother, anyway? Well, the most
> obvious reason, and probably by far the largest one, is to gain control of
> things--resources, members of the opposite sex, security, etc. Of course,
> it isn't always direct: you might beat up some random person to make
> everyone afraid of you, so that you'll be able to have your way in the
> future. So it seems to me that if everyone was allowed to have resources
> regardless of the dictates of the Powerful (who would then no longer be
> powerful) you would see a whole lot less of this, you'd see a major drop in
> all kinds of social problems which draw heavily from the capitalist system,
> which is built of coercion and fear (see above).
I think people would be a lot more peaceful if they had their material
resources guaranteed. But Maslow's hierarchy of needs doesn't end there,
people will seek respect, social networks and so on, and that can also
be done coercively (prison culture, which is resource-wise relatively
guaranteed, is notoriously violent due to the self-perpetuating nature
of violence (and to some extent the high propoertion of irrational or
mentally damaged individuals, of course)).
People act to increase their utilities (roughly speaking, the internals
are a bit more complicated, but as a first approximation it will do),
and coercion is an option that always exist. It has costs and also
expected values, and if the value is greater than the cost and possible
cultural inhibitions it will be used. The real danger is when we get
game theoretical lock-ins: if there are coercers around, it may make
sense to coerce before you are coerced, and this reinforces the spread
of coercion (I have played around with coercion in the iterated
prisoner's dilemma, and it produces some interesting effects). But this
can be prevented by reciprocal strategies, where agents band together to
punish coercion (making it less valuable than cooperation) even without
centralized control (but coercion is a far nastier problem than lack of
trust in the IPD).
Also, I disagree strongly with your claim that capitalism is based on
coercion and fear, but this has obviously been hashed forever in other
threads so I won't argue about that.
> >Even if people had *exactly* the same material preconditions
> >their cultures would cause a differentiation into groups. This
> >seems to be human nature; we think in terms of ingroups and
> >outgroups, attributing good things to our group and bad things
> >to other groups, valuing cohesion in the ingroup and punishing
> >people breaking these arbitrary internal rules.
>
> Well, I think a lot of times they aren't arbitrary, really: of course
> sometimes they are, but a lot of times they're crafted to suit the needs of
> a certain group. For example, sexism favors men, almost universally.
Sure. But why are we not seeing an equal proportion of reverse sexism
favoring women? My guess is that there are real differences (which in
themselves have no ethical content, such that males can speak louder)
that has made the power symmetry biased in favor of men. This is an
example of a non-arbitrary rule, although it is built on an ethically
arbitrary fact. The fit between group rules and the leaders of the group
can be a feedback loop: the leaders are leaders because they fit the
group values, the leaders promote group values because they enjoy being
leaders and might even believe in the group values, and so on.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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