Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
In 1780, John Adams succinctly defined the principle of the Rule of Law in the Massachusetts Constitution by seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men”. This reflects the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The very foundation of our legal system says that the law should work for us all, not just a select few.
This raises the question of what is a good law that serves the majority of society and what is a bad law that doesn’t serve the majority of society?
This idea is further bolstered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The latter addition of the 14th Amendment as well as the Preamble of the Constitution both reflect the spirit in which this country was founded as set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Clearly, the pursuit of the Rule of Law under the Constitution as informed by the Declaration is a pursuit of the Utilitarian concept of the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action; what is in the best interest of greatest numbers of We the People is in the best interests of the country.
Utilitarianism is a quantitative and reductionist philosophical form. Utilitarianism, however, is not a unified philosophical view. It comes in different flavors with the two primary flavors being Rule Utilitarianism and Act Utilitarianism. Strong Rule Utilitarianism is an absolutist philosophical view and rules may never be broken. Like any absolutist view does not take into account that reality occasionally presents situations where breaking a rule results in the greater good. For example, the strong reductionist rule that murder is bad is countered by the exceptional example of murder is not bad if performed in self-defense or the defense of others. This result of practical application is reflected in what John Stuart Mill called Weak Rule Utilitarianism. It becomes apparent that since not all rules are absolutely enforceable when seeking the common good and exceptional circumstances require flexibility in the law, that the Utilitarian pursuit of the Rule of Law must be in Mill’s Weak Rule formulation of Utilitarianism. But is considering the greater good and circumstantial reasons for breaking or modifying rules the best way to judge whether a law is good or bad?
If one considers Kant’s Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” – then any law not universally applicable should not be a maxim worthy of being recognized as universal. This is contrary to Utilitarianism in general as well as Weak Rule Utilitarianism specifically, but while Kant’s view takes subjectivity into account when dealing with circumstances it does not take into account that there can be objective differences in circumstances as well. It is part of the judiciaries role as a trier of fact to consider not only subjective differences but objective differences in circumstances in formulating the most equitable and just solution to a case at bar. In seeking to be universally applicable in defining maxims, Kant is an absolutist as surely as Strong Rule Utilitarians are absolutists. As a consequence of reality not being neatly binary in nature and thus not often compatible to absolutists approaches to formulating laws for practical application, what can be done to keep Weak Rule Utilitarianism from degenerating into Act Utilitarianism where actors will seek the greatest personal pleasure when presented with a choice rather than the greater good? Utilitarianism conflicting with the Categorical Imperative? Is there a unitary philosophical approach to evaluating whether a law is good or bad?
The answer seems to be no. If there is no single view, absolutist or otherwise, that leads to a practical system for evaluating whether a law is good or bad, then there is only one option for building a framework for evaluation. That option is synthesis.
Consider that absolutist systems as they are not applicable in reality should be confined to being considered theoretical boundaries rather than practical boundaries. This does not negate the value of considering systems like Strong Rule Utilitarianism or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but rather puts them in the place of aspirational goals rather than practically attainable goals in every circumstance. Given that Mill’s Weak Rule Utilitarianism can degrade into Act Utilitarianism and that degeneration can be compounded by the number of exceptions there are to a rule, are there ways to minimize the defects of using only Weak Rule Utilitarianism to determine the societal value of a law? What supplements can be made to that framework?
I submit that one such supplement is found in the form of Negative Utilitarianism. Negative Utilitarianism is exactly what it sounds like; the inverse function of Utilitarianism. Whereas Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action, Negative Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that requires us to promote the least amount of evil or harm, or to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. If one takes both into account in evaluation of the social value of a law (a synthetic approach), the test becomes a balancing act. On one side of the scale is the societal value of overall good consequences, on the other side is the societal value of preventing overall harm. This proposition suggests the following framework for evaluation of whether a law is good or bad.
- How many people benefit from the good consequences of a law?
- How many people benefit from the reduction of harm as consequences of a law?
- Does the benefits from promoting good consequences outweigh the costs of reduction of harm?
- Does the benefits from reducing harm outweigh the costs to the greater good in taking no action?
- Are the net consequences of a law perfectly knowable from either perspective or does the possibility of unforeseeable consequences exist? Can the unforeseeable risks be minimized either by construction of the law(s) to allow for contingencies or by regulating other risks or contributing factors?
- Do solutions from either perspective negatively impact human and/or civil rights? Do those negative impacts outweigh the positive effects to the greater human and/or civil rights of all?
This is but one way to evaluate whether a law is good or bad for society. What are other methods? Are there ways to improve this method? What do you think?
@Grossman: Obligations to other people are the effect of chosen actions
Can you PROVE that? No. This is a narrow-minded interpretation of “obligation,” and any proof you offer to the contrary will be a circular restatement of your simple assertion, nothing more.
Read what the word “axiom” means, this is one of yours and I reject it.
Grossman says: Argument from popularity
No, it is an argument from reality, and specifically labeled as pragmatism. As a matter of reality your system is impossible to implement. I did not say it is wrong because people wouldn’t like it, I said it could not be implemented because people wouldn’t like it.
As such I see little purpose in treating it seriously.
Grossman says: There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas.
That is either a lie or a meaningless generalization. You don’t know crap about psychology or what motivates people, usually it is not “ideas” but emotion, which are by definition irrational. On the other hand, if the claim is that every thought is an idea (and it isn’t) then it is the equivalent of saying “people are motivated by thoughts.” Duh.
If a young drunk Alan in a bar is provoked into a fight by another young drunk Billy, by the taunt that Alan is a chicken, and Alan in the heat of battle kills Billy, and then Alan is convicted of murder and sent to prison for life, please elucidate for me where the “rationality” entered this picture that determined the course of lives for Alan and Billy.
I trust that once again you will have to resort to redefining the words “rationality,” “idea,” and “power.” Not to mention the definition of “only.”
Of course this is what losers do, they insist that they use these words with their own very specialized definitions, but the words are chosen for their generally understood meaning, because with the generally understood meaning they will claim infinitely more than anything they proved.
But they think they have their safety valve. They will say, “Oh, in order to understand what is meant by ‘only one power’ you have to read the whole book prior to this statement, where you will come to understand the true meaning of the words ‘only’, and ‘one’, and ‘power.’ ”
Grossman says: Just exactly what positive, absolute value do you find in our culture’s nihilists?!
You are the one accusing them of something (and essentially claiming to be able to read their minds). Not me.
Grossman says: There is nothing other than concretes about which we can think ,however indirectly,
There you go again, redefining the word “concrete.” I can think about Darwinism, it is an idea of abstract relationships and non-concrete probabilities. If you claim that Darwinistic evolution is a “concrete” thing then the word “concrete” has lost all meaning. Once again you just redefine words to make whatever you say true, and even though it is only your ridiculous redefinitions that make your statements remotely plausible, you are purposely misleading people by hoping they will fall for your false statements because they interpret your statements using the common definitions of words.
It is as if I told somebody I am selling an all-beef hot dog, and when they bite into it and spit it out they say, “This is a turkey hot dog!” and I reply, “Yeah, but they sell better if I say ‘all beef,’ so I am using that like a brand name. Nobody wants to buy a turkey dog, dude, those are vile.”
That is what your arguments are like, you cannot argue successfully using the common meanings of words like Concrete, which means Not Abstract, Tangible, Real.
Not everything is concrete, some things are abstractions, and abstractions are what we think about most. Indeed, brain researchers believe that abstractions are the only thing we can think about; all our senses are turned into electrical impulses that trigger generalized neural models. In the case of things we have never seen before, the brain will resort to component modeling, where the components are abstractions: on a new animal we look for arms, legs, a head, eyes, ears, teeth, hair, fur, skin, tail, hands, claws, hooves, etc. All abstractions we can assemble, with their spatial relationships, into something we have seen before or a new model that is “like” some existing abstraction but with exceptions and additions. If I say “unicorn,” you think of your abstraction of a horse, plus a single long, straight, spiraling horn anchored at the forehead.
Even though that is true, I don’t want to sap the word “concrete” of meaning either; so even thinking in abstractions, if the thoughts are directed at a tangible, real, existing object or subject (like an existing history of interaction between two brothers) I consider that “concrete,” or as I prefer to call it, “reality.”
>Tony C
You can scream all you want about how you didn’t choose these services or agree to this payment, but that is a lie: Your agreement is implicit in your continued choice of residence. You have the right to stay here, but that right does not incur any obligation to stay here, so your choice to stay here is implicit agreement to abide by our rules.
Your contradiction: If I have a right to stay, its a right to ignore democratic violators of rights. If Im obligated to obey democratic lynch mobs, I have no rights. Your impotent, anti-independent judgment power-lust is clear.
Your false premise: collectivism applied as the denial of individual rights, including property rights. Each individual owns his own property, eg, a house. The individual has a right to his property regardless of a democratic majority or any other collectivism or religion or tradition. Society as a whole does not own it. Political obligation, based on the selfish right to one’s own life, is limited to individual rights. There is no moral or political obligation to obey the violators, democratic or religious, etc, of individual rights. Democracy as voting is limited to choosing officials and choosing among different applications of individual rights. Collectivism is an absolute evil, whether applied by Nazis or Progressives. The social compact is an invalid concept. Its not a rational claim.
>Tony C
your belief that you cannot owe anybody anything without having explicitly agreed to it first.
Obligations to other people are the effect of chosen actions ,including the action of agreement. And you merely asserted , w/o evidence ,that obligations can exists w/o chosen actions.
>that principle would not lead to a world that most people would want to live in,
Argument from popularity
>Not everything has a price tag on it.
There are spiritual as well as material prices. Man is a mind/body unity. If you meet a person whose moral character is rational, you owe respect. If you withhold respect, that says something about your moral character which the rational person pays with contempt. Etc. If you knew Rand’s ideas as well as claimed, you would know her extensive discussions on this general issue.
Basically however, everything has a price tag (value) because everything is related to man’s life. Life is the source of values. Inanimate things, eg, rocks, have no values because they dont face the constant alternative of life and death and thus the need for a constant stream of values to maintain and further their life. Values are things you want to get or keep. Morality is the study and practice of identifying the values needed for man’s life as a whole. The basic moral values are reason, purpose, and self-esteem. The basic moral virtues are (in no particular order) rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productivity and pride. There is more to Rand’s
“new theory of egoism” in _The Virtue of Selfishness_ and the online Ayn Rand Lexicon.
>Feeling suicidal is an emotion; feeling murderous is an emotion, feeling vindictive is an emotion, hatred, bigotry and fear are emotions, why would I recommend anybody strive to feel those things?>
Thats part of the conservative rejection of liberalism.
>when enough people believe they are being treated unfairly by a societal system they will, by sheer dint of numbers and as much physical force as necessary, institute a new one.
There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice. [Ayn Rand]
.
>Well, I’d bet the modernists and nihilists would disagree with you [that… modernist/nihilist intellectuals provide only the advice to experience emotions and a morality of the sacrifice of all values].
Nihilists?! Just exactly what positive, absolute value do you find in our culture’s nihilists?! Have you walked into modern art galleries? Or listened to university humanities professors provide brain-cracking, pseudo-arguments “proving” that man’s mind is impotent? Where is the respect for man the rational animal now that existed in Greece, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? Mainstream intellectuals have given up, with only some whimpers about the futility of life. See Dostoyevsky’s _The Devils_ (_The Possessed_) or _Crime And Punishment_. Why do even most liberals enjoy the classical or romantic composers instead of Cage and Stockhausen? Because they can experience a world better than the one of the culturally dominant ideas which tell them that man is a metaphysical mistake.
>Now it is necessary to think in “concretes
Ive always implied that. Thinking is always and only of concretes, regardless of the abstractness of one’s perspective on those concretes. To abstract is to selectively focus on a concrete or group of concretes. E=MC2, a very abstract idea, is abstracted from, among other concretes, Babylonian recordings of star observations. The widest metaphysical concepts are concepts of concretes. There is nothing other than concretes about which we can think ,however indirectly, as in epistemology or introspection. A mental process not rooted in the observation of concretes may be many things (eg, rationalism, schizophrenia) but it is not thinking.
> Happiness is temporary,
Happiness depends upon a standard of happiness. The happiness of a man who builds a factory has a different quality than that of the arsonist who burns it down.
But even some rational happiness is temporary, eg, from completing a piece of work. Some is long-term, as the background happiness possible to a person with consistently rational values (and who lives in a society with a significant amount of political freedom). Man can and should continually acquire new happiness from new values directing new actions.
humanegg
@Stephen_Grossman
>>re: >Government created the Internet, all by itself.
>I was quoting another
I’ll try to be accurate in attributions in the future.
@Grossman: Life as a whole or basically is not an emergency.
Nor is it for brute animals; the young water buffalo gambol and play, and the majority of them grow to become adults, mate, and produce young water buffalo that gambol and play. Like humans, some water buffalo of all ages will have emergencies, of food shortage, predators, accidents and so on.
However, there is a wonderful little paradox at play between humans and “brute animals:” We have more of these emergencies per capita than THEY do! The reason is that water buffalo don’t typically survive them; a water buffalo that breaks an ankle by stepping in a hole typically dies of the broken ankle; a human does not and will survive to suffer additional emergencies, and thus on average suffers more emergencies in its life than a water buffalo does in its short, brutal life of zero medical care.
On balance, life is more of an emergency for a human than it is for a water buffalo.
Grossman says: Youre not thinking in principles
Yes I am. Don’t just make assertions about my thought process without showing clear examples from which you infer my state of mind; neither you nor anybody else knows my state of mind. This is not a requirement I would normally put on a conversant that is normally and largely correct in their inferences of my state of mind, but you get it wrong so often, probably because you are so emotionally driven to argue against your imaginary mental straw men (where you always win, which reinforces that need) that you cannot handle a real person in front of you, so in your case, you will have to show me what you think of as “proof” so I can either accede to it or refute it.
Grossman says: He needs principles induced from concretes to guide his thinking and actions so that his daily actions lead to long-range happiness.
Now it is necessary to think in “concretes?” Never mind, I happen to agree with that, but I call it “reality” because I see no value in needlessly obscuring my language and therefore reducing my chance of being understood.
Happiness is temporary, several studies have shown it. People worth billions in their thirties that will never have to work another day in their lives get used to it, and revert to the same level of happiness they had before they had billions. Many claim they were happier when they were striving to get it than they were after it was all over; they like the fight more than the win!
Why do you think Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs (or many other billionaires) go to work on a full-time job practically every day, when any of them could do anything they want, anywhere they want, for the rest of their natural lives? Either of them could spend millions a day for the rest of their life and never run out of money.
Sometimes what makes people happy isn’t measured in dollars, but in choosing the future. That is true for me and many other researchers; what makes us happy is discovery, and our salary demands are for basic fairness and sufficient pay that we do not, as a rule, feel financial pressures extreme enough to interfere with our work or make us abandon our work for something else that would relieve those pressures.
Not everything has a price tag on it.
Grossman says: modernist/nihilist intellectuals provide only the advice to experience emotions and a morality of the sacrifice of all values.
Well, I’d bet the modernists and nihilists would disagree with you, but I can only speak for myself when I say that it is not MY advice “to experience emotions.”
I do not give people that advice because it would be pointless, “emotions” are too general a category of feeling to recommend. Feeling suicidal is an emotion; feeling murderous is an emotion, feeling vindictive is an emotion, hatred, bigotry and fear are emotions, why would I recommend anybody strive to feel those things?
Nor do I recommend people “sacrifice all values.” In fact I recommend people abide by values, but one value I reject is the value of unrestrained selfishness.
I suspect you really only care about ONE value anyway, and that is your belief that you cannot owe anybody anything without having explicitly agreed to it first. I completely reject that value, both on moral grounds and pragmatic grounds: From what I know of human psychology, that principle would not lead to a world that most people would want to live in, and they would eventually (and probably in short order) overthrow that system by violence and establish something else. Pragmatically speaking, I feel certain it would fail to produce a system of human interaction that most people would find fair and desirable, no matter how much you think it should. And in concrete reality the fact is that when enough people believe they are being treated unfairly by a societal system they will, by sheer dint of numbers and as much physical force as necessary, institute a new one.
I am sure you already know of several revolutionary examples.
Tony C.
>@Grossman: life is not an emergency except for brute animals.
Right, all those people I have seen wheeled into the E.R. terrified they are about to die might disagree with you.
Life as a whole or basically is not an emergency. If it was, man would have been an evolutionary dead end eons ago. Youre not thinking in principles but getting intellectually trapped in out-of-context concretes. Since life is not an emergency, man needs a guide, morality, to ordinary, daily life. He needs principles induced from concretes to guide his thinking and actions so that his daily actions lead to long-range happiness. But modernist/nihilist intellectuals provide only the advice to experience emotions and a morality of the sacrifice of all values. Thats the context for the experience and idea of life as a whole as an emergency.
@Grossman: to continue to attack business as providing little value or even as essentially destructive.
Have you mistaken me for somebody else? I have owned businesses, I have made a lot of money from businesses, I have captured 70% of a national market and put other businesses out of business. I have hired several dozen people in my life, and managed far more than I have hired. I don’t know or care how you define “value,” but in my view my business experience has solved a whole lot of problems for hundreds of thousands of people.
I’m a big fan of business, and competition on product. I am just not a blind fan of business, and I can tell when businesses put profits ahead of safety, and the truth, and the law, and the health and life of their employees and customers and the public. You, apparently, don’t give a shit about anything but money, and you try to excuse that despicable position by clinging to an indefensibly illogical philosophy that by some magic everything will take care of itself so you don’t have to think about it, you can just be blissfully and brutally selfish.
Well, guess what that means? I must be a hell of a lot smarter than you, because I can make money without being selfish, without polluting, without breaking any laws, with happy employees, and happy investors, and happy customers that are never endangered physically or financially, and I can pay my taxes and contribute to charities and still have money left over.
So I am sorry you are too dumb to succeed without being selfish, Stephen, but I don’t want you to worry. Many of us that lucked out in the genetic lottery in the brain department, us “mainstream intellectuals” as you call us (from outside of our circle, obviously) are committed to helping those less fortunate than ourselves, whether that is met with gratitude, indifference or hatred, because we do not see it as a favor but as our civic duty to our fellow man.
@Grossman: Funny how you keep saying we are evading reason when my posts are full of reasoning, and your posts are full of insults, evasion, and accusations.
Grossman says: Assuming that you have ever shopped, perhaps in an emergency, amidst the inelegant lower class masses at Walmart,
Ha! My mother has worked at Walmart for 15 years, I have had two nieces and a nephew work at Walmart, and I can walk into and through the back storage area, past the time clock and into the employee break room at my local Walmart at will and nobody stops me, including the manager, who is often happy to say hello and shake my hand.
I am FROM your ‘inelegant lower class,’ dumbshit.
>Tony C
Business offers essentially four points of product distinction: Price, quality, service and cachet. All of them are hard to improve; so in a free market (or even our current market) businesses WILL compete using deceptions and bullying tactics that have nothing to do with the product or their offering, because bullying tactics are easier. The idea that this will lose them customers doesn’t work, most national companies have an essentially infinite supply of suckers, and the suckers have no effective way of communicating with each other (not even the Internet), and don’t have the time to research every little thing they might buy.
This is true in the context of Marxist ideals. In the context of the explosion of continually better inventions and widespread wealth for maybe two centuries ,its explained only by the Kantian influence to evade reasoning and even the material universe itself in favor of intuitions and the alleged duty to sacrifice all values and to contemplate one’s intentions to sacrifice.
In the context of our wealthy, technological culture, one must create a large, illogical, overly complex amount of invalid ideas between mind and reality to continue to attack business as providing little value or even as essentially destructive. Modern, mainstream intellectuals explicitly regard their work as supplying those ideas. Eg, environmentalism, Keynsianism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, skepticism, nihilism. These explain the frothing hostility and even disorientation to the material prosperity and continued optimism and patriotism of American culture. Eg,
Allen Ginsberg’s, _Howl_, an apt title for the modernist hatred of the mind.
Or Sartre’s, _No Exit_, an attack on society itself.
Assuming that you have ever shopped ,perhaps in an emergency, amidst the inelegant lower class masses at Walmart, do you bring oxygen with you, just in case? Or , Marcuse forbid, dined at McDonald’s? Or attended a country music concert surrounded by giants driving pickups and wearing baseball hats? I’m not implying that I like all these things myself but I respect other people’s need to experience life-affirming values by their own best judgments. They are certainly getting no advice in being rational (as distinct from being intellectual) from our culture’s mainstream intellectuals (except recently as some conservatives praise American culture, however superficially). See “Frasier,” a clever TV series satirizing this situation.
>Tony C
Hopefully future humans will be better informed and have deeper understandings, but I doubt they will be any inherently smarter, although the percentage of inherently brilliant people may be increased significantly in the next few hundred years.
Man has free will and thus must choose to reason or evade. Its not an issue of IQ. For a century or so, the most intelligent people have been attracted to the irrationalism of modern culture or attempted an impossible escape from from it in the physical sciences or business. The basic source of modern culture’s irrationalism is Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, a work of extreme abstraction and thus intelligence but committed to the systematic, comprehensive, profound destruction of the mind.
Aristotle’s equally intelligent (if not more) works praising ,defining and applying reason have been rejected for a century and more by our culture’s leading intellectuals.
@Grossman: life is not an emergency except for brute animals.
Right, all those people I have seen wheeled into the E.R. terrified they are about to die might disagree with you. One day I asked a nurse why the civilian in the waiting room was in scrubs: Because she had driven her choking one-year-old to the E.R. in nothing but her underwear and a t-shirt.
Are you really this naive and un-experienced about the world? Do you actually think about these things before your write them, and ask yourself if what you are about to write is actually true?
Tony c
>All values stem from emotion
Emotions are the psychosomatic effect of values, the form in which we experience our values. Emotions are feeling something specific about something specific, thus requiring knowledge and evaluation of the thing.
I feel pleasure at the price and reliability of my car because I know what my life requires and my resources and I value my life as a unique value. A random stranger cannot do this re my car. I may feel pleasure at a well-built house but the carpenters who built it feel something different. Man _indirectly_ chooses his emotions by the thinking he has done or evaded.
This is known from the common human experience which is the context of the special sciences. Even the most specialized, narrow knowledge of psychologists and cognitive scientists begins in common human experience, however interpreted via different philosophies. The data of common human experience is available to all and is the base of all knowledge, even that of mystics and subjectivists. Philosophy studies that base. Philosophy is the study of the universe as a whole relative to man as a whole. Or, man facing the universe. Eg, is the material universe independent of consciousness? Is it orderly or chaotic? Is man rational? Is reason valid? What is justice? What is the meaning of Michelangelo’s “David?” Science uses such issues as a context and method for its specialized topics.
Even mystics know that emotions are caused by knowledge and values, which is why they need “innate ideas” to justify their emotions. And ideas are volitional as we know from introspection. Ideas are states of consciousness, which are not physically passed from parents to children.
Genes dont contain thinking about moral issues or of anything else.
@Grossman: . Every man is born free of moral obligations.
I disagree. That is an axiom of yours, not of mine. I think every baby is born with moral obligations, for one the baby’s mother (and especially modern mothers) has chosen to devote her bodily resources and time and risk her life to construct the baby, then usually to feed the baby, care for the baby, and teach the baby what it needs to know to survive an thrive. The father may be devoting resources to this entire effort as well.
To me, that creates a moral obligation on the part of the baby. your morals are different than mine; I believe that some moral obligations are incurred whether you chose the benefit or not, in particular when you were incapable of making such a choice (such as when you are injured and unconscious, or in the case of a blastocyst, have no brain). I also believe that most humans agree with me on this point.
@Grossman: the resources used for them are resources that our socialist govt has stolen from private, productive individuals.
I reject that premise. The government doesn’t “steal” or “confiscate” money any more than a restaurant “steals” your money for your meal. You voluntarily remain in this country and use the infrastructure and services (cops, courts, etc) it provides, just like you voluntarily order a meal in a restaurant and consume it. When the bill comes, you pay it or you are the thief. Taxation is payment for services rendered. You are not chained, you can go elsewhere, you are free. You are not in any way required to take part in these services in any way, but if you choose to stay you will pay for it, on our terms. As part of our terms, we treat these services like insurance, and you pay whether you need them and use them or don’t.
You can scream all you want about how you didn’t choose these services or agree to this payment, but that is a lie: Your agreement is implicit in your continued choice of residence. You have the right to stay here, but that right does not incur any obligation to stay here, so your choice to stay here is implicit agreement to abide by our rules.
Maybe you think all these services could be better administered and cost you less, but by our rules you have to convince a majority of us before we will change that. In the meantime, metaphorically speaking, this restaurant serves whole meals with dessert, and we don’t do a la carte because you prefer that, and we don’t let other vendors come in and serve food on our tables because that would be cheaper for you, and we don’t let you reduce your bill by opting out of our insurance coverage. If you don’t like our service, go find a McDonald’s somewhere, you can’t eat here: Ours is a take-it-or-leave-it package deal.
Tony C
>I disagree with Rousseau (and Locke)
Morality is a rational code of values for life and happiness accepted by choice, not a mystical or subjective (including socially subjective) rationalization of suffering and sacrifice. Every man is born free of moral obligations. There is no duty (unchosen obligations). Moral obligations are the effect of the actions one has chosen. If you sell something to a willing buyer, the buyer is obligated to pay. If you force something on a person, he is not obligated to pay. Morality ends where a gun begins.
>Some debt for the resources expended during that dependency, while involuntary, is real.
Begging the question.
>some of the cost of protection and food and teaching are provided by society
Parents, not children, are obligated to pay for the values needed by their children. Dependent children are not morally independent.
Society is a number of individual men, not an entity. Society, as such, is merely an abstraction from those individual men. Abstractions don’t act, whether providing protection to children or writing poetry. Parents pay, w/their work, for the products of the work of other individuals.
>So what is the fair price for such?
Prices are the products of the voluntary supply/demand interaction in a market. Beyond that, there are no prices ,fair or unfair (even leaving aside the problem of defining fair), only enforced demands which ,because enforced, create no obligations. A legally enforced price is impossible. Such a “price” is merely a govt edict to obey. The money involved is morally irrelevant.
>I do not believe the alternative, that since you did not agree to anything that you can consider their work an act of charity and owe them nothing.
Mind, the source of values, is the source of morality. The lack of mind is the lack of morality. You owe gratitude to a rescuer, nothing more. If you dont pay the spiritual price of gratitude, your rescuer is morally correct in despising you. There are no other considerations.
More widely, lifeboat ethics are invalid since life is not an emergency except for brute animals. Such a situation would destroy everyone, making morality impossible and irrelevant.
>involuntary but necessary services, like fire protection, food inspection, health care, military protection, police protection, courts, and so on.
One man’s needs are not a moral obligation of others. Man is morally free of others. We are not moral cannibals. You are not obligated to sacrifice to others and they to you. Sacrifice is an absolute evil.
Govt is a need only because of the possibility, in society, of the immorality of initiating force against the judgment of someone else’s mind. Thus govt is needed to protect the individual from the initiation of force from others. This applies and is limited to military, police and courts. Govt is a historical bloody monster which must be chained to an absolutist constitution of individual rights. Govt is not a substitute for man’s independent mind. If the individual’s mind is incompetent to judge, eg, food safety, the individual does not competent when he is a govt official.
>so we can enforce a doctrine of public accountability, transparency and unbiased application.
This is true of the socialist ideals of sacrifice and collectivism. It is not true of the material universe as known by the mind. The necessary failures of socialism are provided daily in screaming headlines. The claim of unbiased application is belied by everything known about govt economic intervention. Political pull is part of socialism. See: Soviet Union.
>we have the social responsibility of preserving its life.
Begging the question. And this is an issue of moral responsibility. There is no such fact as social responsibility outside of the context of the irrational claim that sacrifice is moral.
>[the infant] is obligated to repay the cost of his free societal ride by paying for the free societal ride of the next generation.
Ie, you advocate moral cannibalism, that everyone is a slave to everyone. There has never been a rational defense of sacrifice and your arguments dont even come close to such a defense. Your claims are the long-range influence of that defense of socialism, communism, and fascism called Plato’s Republic, long explicitly used by dictators as guide and justification.
There is no social contract. Collectivism is irrational, thus immoral.
>it is always better for productivity to save a life than to let it expire.
Productivity is a means, not an end. Youre dropping the context of the beneficiary of productivity, the morally independent individual. Lacking that, there are no values, no production and no beneficiary of anything. In a market context, however, the more people, the better, since more people means more creativity in production for solving problems.
@Mike Spindell: This to me is the problems that philosophers have, as great as their minds might be.
I agree, the human mind is quite plastic. A Spartan of 3000 years ago or a Norseman of 1200 years ago would laugh at the idea that life is the ultimate value; for both cultures honor, bravery in battle and loyalty, even if it required death or suicide, were far more important to those men (and to their women) than living.
It would be difficult for most people of 3000 years ago to conceive of society without slavery, it was such an integral part of their culture, or of equality for women. But those minds were genetically no different than ours, and I doubt the minds of humans 3000 years from now will be genetically different from ours, or more intelligent. There is a very good article in the July 2011 issue of Scientific American on the Physics of Intelligence (subtitle: Can we get any smarter?). It suggests the answer is, “Not by much!”
I do think they miss one point: we may be able to develop drug and care protocols to reduce the variance in intelligence significantly, and ensure the average intelligence is much higher than it is. I believe that could have an exponentially explosive effect on our culture. It is hard to imagine what our culture would be like if 95% or so of children born had the mental hardware to score 180 on an IQ test, complete a PhD at 17, or just mentally be equivalent to the smartest people in the world today.
Hopefully future humans will be better informed and have deeper understandings, but I doubt they will be any inherently smarter, although the percentage of inherently brilliant people may be increased significantly in the next few hundred years.
Tony C.,
There you are … what luck. Mike S. posted a response to something you wrote but he posted it on another thread, then apologized for the error. I figured the post from you he was answering was here so I put on my hip boots and jumped in.
I always read everything you post but must have missed the one Mike was answering … off I go to find it! 🙂
HumanEgg says: If you look at the economic value of research products, dollar for dollar, between private and publicly funded research, the private research wins every time.
I think that is a lie, and unprovable. Government engages in fundamental research, private industry engages in directed research and this is often based on the fundamental research of the government.
The results are intertwined: The Internet would not exist without the government funding, but no private concern ever stepped up to the plate to take the risk of developing the seed technology that became the Internet. That level of risk could only be undertaken by tens of millions of citizens all pitching in a few dollars, and it paid off. But it didn’t pay off to the government per se; it paid off to the citizens, and you cannot calculate the “dollar for dollar” economic impact of the Internet. It isn’t finished yet!
HumanEgg says: If every dollar that was spent on ‘public’ research instead went to a private research firm, we’d all be richer by an order of magnitude.
I think that is a lie, and unprovable, and simply illogical. If a private research firm tries to operate at a profit, and for the sake of argument let us say a 10% profit, then that is obviously 10% fewer researchers, 10% less equipment, 10% less staff, and 10% less knowledge developed. (or actually, by the laws of teamwork, probably about 20% less productivity).
I can also speak to this from personal experience. I am currently a full-time researcher at a university, but that gig started after I had already retired from over 20 years of professional consulting.
As a researcher I earn less than half what I was earning as a consultant; but that is my choice: In fact last year I helped a former commercial client of mine that was in a bind. I spent six months at half-time remotely managing his crew to get his commercial product back on track. I succeeded at that; he launched on time, and I charged him two years worth of my current salary, which he paid with thanks.
So I think I could earn more, but the reason I choose to earn less as a researcher is that I know my work will be (and has been) made public and will benefit everybody, literally hundreds of millions or billions of people, and that pleases me. So I accept the average salary for my position so that I can contribute. Nobody I work with earns a profit or benefits financially from the work any more than anybody else, and neither does our university, so there is no out-sized reward to which I feel entitled to a share. If somebody else takes our ideas and makes a billion dollars: Well they obviously did that with an original idea we did not have or an idea we did not care to do the work to pursue, or did not have the capital to put at risk in order to pursue, or had potential we just did not realize, so good for them.
However, I would not (and did not) do that or feel that way when the point of my work and research was commercial. Under those circumstances, a condition of my employment was what I considered my fair share of the profits to be generated. In the early part of my career that was in the form of high salary; in the later part, it was in more explicit forms of partnership, time-limited royalties (e.g. 5% of gross sales for three years), stock options, stock, or milestone and completion bonuses.
A private research firm, unless it was a truly non-profit charity, has a profit motive; and successful researcher are not typically stupid. Intelligence, foresight and creativity are part of the job requirements for being a researcher. Consequently, I doubt any of the brilliant people I work with would work on for-profit research without an agreement in advance on how to share the profits they would be generating. They understand, as I do, that the capital and infrastructure and staffing of an organization is a critical component of research, but so is their brain, and fair is fair.
What I think is that the cost differential in talent (realized by higher pay, royalties, commissions, etc) and the reduction of resources due to the open drain of “profit” and higher pay or royalties or commissions, put the commercial research firm at an economic disadvantage. That is not to say they cannot produce a profit; Bell Labs certainly did, but Bell Labs paid higher salaries for their researchers than public universities paid for theirs at the time, and I think in the long run the public gets more value for their dollar than a private research firm gets for theirs.
Stephen Grossman:
“She bases rights in the need of the mind’s functioning in society, ie, freedom from the initiation of force. Ie, there is no absolute freedom in nature limited in society. Freedom and rights are relative to society (tho not granted by society) because society presents certain conditions that affect man’s life.”
The way I read Locke is that you are at the whims of other people in a state of nature and you enter into society to protect yourself from harm by others. Harm being categorized by loss of life or property or injury or being enslaved, etc. You dont give up rights to be in a society contrary to what Tony C and J. J. Rousseau say. Locke probably isnt as well thought out in terms of individual rights as Rand is but I dont think he would disagree with her.
Locke can be seen in her writings.
“They felt free to follow their own version of logic unconstrained by their past, and I see no reason to be constrained by them in my own reasoning.”
Tony,
Loved your reasoning in this whole post. I would add that perhaps the problems of all philosophers, brilliant as they are, is that they are trying to formulate all-encompassing systems upon a human race whose hallmark is constant variation. Einstein, no doubt one of the greatest minds of history could never develop a unified theory of everything, try as he might. Physicists today are trying to develop such a Unified Theory, encompassing both Einstein’s macro-cosmic theory of how things work on a large scale, with Quantum Mechanics theory of how things work microscopically. Both theories have been thus far proven experimentally, but are inconsistent theoretically.
This to me is the problems that philosophers have, as great as their minds might be. Even on a finite level of the universe, humanity/society, the interactions and variations are so wide that no one has yet come along with a Unified Theory, universally applicable to human interaction. If that is the case, then we each have to make up our own minds as to what’s going on here. Those that can’t see that suffer from that old nemesis hubris and we all know how that works out.