Actually, the main strand of anarchism today is communist anarchism. No market at all. So yeah.
If by "main" you mean "most popular then yes. Amongst contemporary published philosophers (e.g. Robert Nozick), some form of market anarchism on another seems to more popular.
Also, if you were going to have an "anarchist market", you wouldn't need regulation. Because the basic assumptions of Mutualism (the economic theory that anarchists who advocate markets advocate)
Important nitpick: not all market anarchists are mutualists. Unless you intend to take the ridiculous "anarcho-capitalism isn't really anarchism because anarchism can't be capitalist" position.
(FWIW I'm a market anarchist and neither a mutualist not strictly an anarcho-capitalist, but that's just because I've got my own original economic theory I came up with in the course of my philosophical studies. I'd be happy to describe it to you if you'd like).
So you want a society where people are doing things which you yourself personally consider to be wrong? Not what this or that popular conception of "morality" considers to be wrong, but things which you yourself consider wrong?
That seems like logical nonsense to me, for what is the difference between "things you consider to be wrong" and "things you don't want people to do?" Of course there is a difference between either of those and "things which really are wrong" (aka "things which people really shouldn't do"); but then, there's also a difference between "things you consider to be true" (aka "things you think should be believed") and "things which really are true" (aka "things which really should be believed").
It makes no more sense to say you want that which you consider immoral than to say that you believe that which you consider untrue. Whether you're correct about what's moral (or true) is another question.
Which is better? In my opinion a moral society in which people can do what they want with their money is desirable to a morally corrupt society where everything goes as long as you're paying extortion money to the liberal government. But that's just my opinion.
But of course, it's a truism that morality is better than immorality. Nobody wants an immoral society. The point of disagreement comes when some people question whether what social conservatives call "immoral" really is immoral. Socially liberal people want less government control over personal behavior because they believe that much of the behavior social conservatives want to regulate is not wrong at all. Nobody (except a few fringe nihilists) really wants an anything-goes society. Even anarchists believe in a small set of rules (they just don't believe in rulers).
On the subject of liberals and conservatives both wanting to protect choice, though: as another poster has already commented, those who are called "liberal" today are not those who are properly called liberal; though neither are those who are called "conservative" today (though many of them are not far from those who are properly called "conservatives"). When these terms first came into use, the State controlled all economic activity and the Church controlled all social activity (though these powers often colluded and shared their respective control). Liberals were those who wanted to wrest such control out of those powerful hands and place it with each and every individual; conservatives were the ones who wanted to keep things the way they were.
Then at some point the powerful began to co-opt the now-dominant liberal economic ideology and exploit its weaknesses to their illiberal ends; and many of the less powerful, in return, put their faith in the State to fix this. As the powerful remained socially conservative and the less powerful remained socially liberal, it came to pass that those called "liberals" were in fact socially conservative (actually regressive, as the State-controlled economy had been dissolved by the earlier liberal movement); and those called "conservatives" were in fact, at least nominally, economically liberal.
But neither side is fully liberal or conservative these days (though the vested business interests on the conservative side, while nominally economically liberal, seem like they'd be quite happy with an illiberal economy so long as they get to be the new kings). About the only people close to true liberalism, as you noted, are those now called libertarians, though even they aren't quite as liberal as I'd like. Unfortunately we've got our share of true conservatives(*) around aplenty... fascists, corporatists and communists are all different faces of the same "we know what's best for you" ideology.
( * Technically speaking, anyone striving to preserve the status quo is a conservative, so if the status quo is liberal then conservatives would be liberals; but I'm using the term loosely in the sense equivalent to "illiberal" here, as it was used at the start of liberalism).
Bollocks. What about the provision public goods (e.g. national defence)? Market regulation? Wealth redistribution? Welfare isn't a "right", you know. What about representation on an international level? Your characterisation of a government's primary role may be (well, is) closer to the truth than that of the GP, but your oversimplification hasn't helped any.
I get the feeling that the GP was specifically meaning to deny that provision of public goods (other than protecting peoples rights, which would include national defense), market regulation (other than in the Adam Smith sense of protecting peoples property rights), and wealth distribution are things that governments should be doing. There are a lot of people with that opinion out there, you know... they're called libertarians. Plenty of them right here on Slashdot too. Surprised you hadn't noticed.
Schadenfreude may be shameful, but today I nonetheless feel the joy I don't think you're using that term in quite the right way. Schadenfreude is not enjoyment of others' pain but rather indifference to it; it literally means "cold blood".
the bacteria "knew" the ice was gonna start melting some day?
if it didn't then what's the purpose of staying "alive" for 120000 years? Evolution is not teleological (which means "purposive" or "goal-oriented"). This bacterium happened to be able to survive long periods in the freezing cold due to some mutation or another. This would be a big evolutionary advantage because it could then live and reproduce in areas where most other things cannot.
Some of these bacteria got frozen for 120,000 years. They weren't waiting for it to thaw out; they're just out there living in the cold regions where nothing else can live, and sticking it out even when it gets too cold for them.
Analogously, imagine that there is some primitive tribe of humans with no knowledge of climatology, currently living in tropical or desert climes who, unbeknown to anyone, have a mutation which allows them to survive in hibernation in freezing cold temperatures, and then reawaken when it warms up again. They did not evolve this because they needed to survive freezing cold temperatures, they just have a genetic adaptation which is not disadvantageous, and might even correlate with some other adaptation which is advantageous. And because they live in warm climes, nobody knows they have this mutation.
Then say someday we enter another great ice age, so cold that everybody on Earth dies out, except this tribe, who barely manages to live on for thousands of years, frozen in the ice, due to their mutation. And then eventually the ice age ends and the world gets nice and warm, these people thaw out and start living their lives again.
Now imagine we're aliens watching this future Earth thaw out. We might ask, did these people know that an ice age was coming? No... they've probably never even heard of ice. So they certainly didn't know that the ice age they never expected was going to end eventually. So what's the purpose of them having this mutation that allowed them to stay "alive" frozen in the ice for thousands of years? The answer is that there was none; they didn't mean to have the mutation, and nobody meant for them to have the mutation, they just had it by chance, and as chance would have it it came in really handy when the whole world froze over and everybody but them died out, which is why they're still around for us to wonder about.
Or in short: They didn't get the mutation so that they could survive. They survived because they had the mutation.
"prescriptive" and "moral relativist" simply aren't properties that play nicely together You know, this gets me wondering... could you have a moral nihilist who is a descriptive absolutist? Someone who believes there really is no prescriptive basis for morality, there's really no reason why you ought to do the things that we call good, moral, right, just, etc... but that there is some innate human disposition toward calling certain things thus, and so deep down inside everybody can agree on what to call, good, moral, etc... even though there is (in their opinion) no actual truth to such moral opinions?
This is precisely the turn that many commentators (including the great...great-grandparent) make -- "moral relativism" has become a convenient accusation pointed at permissive/tolerant universalisms by less permissive ones, to the extent that it's become a sign without a referent. But it's such a *useful* label, whether it means anything or not... It's sad, because if "relativist" didn't carry all this damn rhetorical baggage with it, it would be a perfect term to describe all philosophies which are neither nihilist nor absolutist; those philosophies which say that there are certain universal moral truths, but that they are all conditional or contextual in nature, "thou shalt not P if not Q", as opposed to blanket absolute "thou shalt not P". Both liberalism and (lets call it) 'popularism' fall into this category:
For liberalism, P = "act upon X" and Q = "the owner of X consents to X being acted upon by you";
And for 'popularism' (formerly known as 'relativism'), for all values of P, Q = "P is popularly accepted".
These things could both be literally considered "relativism", as they both say that whether or not you may P is dependant upon, or relative to, some other thing, Q. Absolutist doctrines like "thou shalt not eat pork" fall outside of this category of literal "relativism", and of course nihilists have no doctrines and so are neither "relativists" of this (or any) sort, nor absolutists.
So I guess in a sense I'd like to agree with the talking heads that liberalism is a form of relativism... so long as I get to take "relativism" in this literal sense without all the pejorative bull that they mean to go along with it.
While the rest of your post, in particular the possible similarities between nihilism and liberal universalism, is quite fascinating and spot on, I'm not so sure about this point:
The prescriptive moral relativist can't [forcibly intervene in foreign affairs], because he theorizes a morality which is subject to local popular opinion and which it would be wrong to replace It seems that a person holding that opinion would again be asserting a universal moral truth: (1) "it is wrong for anyone to act counter to the popular will at whatever location they are performing said action". That seems no less universal than (2) "it is wrong to act upon a person counter to their will" that is the cornerstone of liberalism. So it doesn't seem like someone holding to (1) is any more a prescriptive relativist than someone holding to (2).
Which just seems to raise the question, what would a prescriptive relativist say about such intervention? I can't think of any answer which is neither nihilism ("I think that [...], but that's just me") nor some form of universalism ("I think that [...], and so should you"). Which I suppose was my own point... prescriptive relativism is nonsense that tries to distance itself from both universalism and nihilism, but there's no way to really do so, unless we want to reclassify all forms of universalism where permissibility is dependent on a variable as "relativism", in which case liberalism is a form of relativism too. But failing that option... I think that's why you and I have never met a real prescriptive moral relativist - it's not a coherent position that anyone can hold.
Game theory answers "Why did certain moral attitudes become prevalent?" not "What is morality?". Actually, you've got that backwards.
Game theory will tell you which are the winning strategies - that is, what you ought or ought not to do, which specific things are right and wrong, what is moral - independent of any particular implementation.
What game theory doesn't tell you is the specific biological mechanisms whereby humans are inclined to behave in those ways, or the historical contexts which lead up to the evolution of those biological mechanisms, and so forth. That's what evolutionary biology is for.
Game theory tells you the reasons to be moral. Evolutionary biology tells you the causes of people's moral inclinations. Positing an evolutionary explanation to a philosophical question (a question about, loosely speaking, 'normative' reasons) is pretty much always taking the wrong approach, answering the wrong question. For a parallel example: evolutionary biology could tell me how and why it is that people form their beliefs about the world based on sensory input, but it doesn't answer the question "why should I believe my senses?" Telling me why I do believe my senses doesn't tell me why I should; likewise, evolutionary biology may tell me why I am inclined to be kind and generous, but it doesn't tell me why I should be.
(And if you really want to press it, game theory doesn't either; it provides an instrumental reason, I should be kind and generous because that will tend to be the "winning" strategy in terms of providing me with a pleasant life; but it doesn't answer the question of why I should strive for a pleasant life. Obviously I do desire a pleasant life and so telling me that behaving this way or that will lead to such might incline me to behave that way; but say I was completely and totally apathetic toward even my own immediate suffering, and someone told me that I should care about living, I should care about experiencing the pleasures of the world and so forth, I should want to avoid death, and I asked them "why should I?" What possible answer could they give me? This is actually even more parallel to the case of "why should I believe my senses" - well what else are you going to believe?)
if you think that nothing is really right or wrong, things are just popular and unpopular, then you are a moral nihilist, and again not a universalist; though the two are pretty close Gack! Major error: that last "universalist" should be "relativist". Universalists are nothing like nihilists; relativists are. Brain fart. My bad:-(
wow, i wish i had mod points. that might be the best-written explanation of moral relativism to someone who's confused over prescriptive vs. descriptive statements that i've ever read, and i did philosophy in uni. Thanks:-)
wtf is this doing on slashdot? I'm also a philosophy graduate and this is where I write most of my essays because I'm irrationally phobic of publishing in proper print journals, and misguided Slashdot comments provide good fodder for spur-of-the-moment essays like that. (though I am very slowly working on a grand treatise in the old Modernist style that I hope to publish some day).
Unless you want to convert the world to your own particular morality (i.e., destroy freedom), you have to live and let live to a certain extent
"Live and let live" is a moral dictum; it is the essence of liberalism (in the classical sense, not the American Democratic Party sense). If that is your ethic, and you go about pushing it on other people, that can only equate to defending other people from those who would deny them their freedom, and there is no way that that can possibly "destroy freedom".
If you think that everybody should live and let live, and that people who aren't doing so are doing something wrong, then you are not a moral relativist at all, you are a liberal moral universalist; you think everybody should be free, that nobody should deny anybody their freedom. If you think that we in the liberal west should live and let live, but it's ok for those strange alien foreigners in the east to go about oppressing each other because obviously different moral standards apply to them, then you are a moral relativist, which basically equates to either some kind of moral nihilism (it's not *really* good in any strict sense for people here in the west to live and let live, that's just how we happen to do things), or some strange kind of racism or nationalism whereby us westerners have true moral rights which it is wrong for anybody to infringe upon, but people in the east do not have such rights, so it's ok if they do things to each other which we here would consider violating eachothers' rights.
Backing up a bit:
It's not about condoning others' moral beliefs, it's about acknowledging that they have them, and are sincere about them, and might even be rather attached to them, and then modifying your behavior so that you can get along with them.
What you describe there is what's called descriptive moral relativism, coupled with some pragmatic considerations. Descriptive relativism is a trivial truism - obviously, different people disagree about what is right or wrong, and that's a fact that you might have to cope with and work around some times.
What's at issue is prescriptive moral relativism - the idea that different people have different moral beliefs (duh) and they're all equally correct, and we should respect their beliefs and not intervene and impose our own moral beliefs on them. Prescriptive relativism is just utter nonsense; say Person A has the moral belief that he is fully within his rights to physically beat Person B for disobeying him, and Person B disagrees and says that his right to be free from physical abuse supersedes any obligation of obedience he may owe Person A. True prescriptive moral relativists can't do any thing here but throw up their hands and say "oh well, people have different moral beliefs! who am I to impose my opinion on them?"
Of course actual people who call themselves relativists never think about it on an individual level like this but on a cultural level; whether A or B is right is relative to what their neighbors or countrymen think of the situation. But then you get into the question of where do you draw the arbitrary limit of what size group is necessary to establish such local moral truths; if my three housemates decide that I have no right to physical security and they can rightly beat me at their whim, does that make that morally true within the confines of this house? What if everybody on my block was of that opinion? Everyone in my city? State? Country? Where do the scales tip? Keep in mind that they *have* to tip at some point for it to be relativism: if you say that something like that is never ever acceptable, then you have just declared something a universal moral truth, and you are no longer a relativist; or conversely, if you say that everything is always acceptable (and no action is ever *truly* wrong, maybe just unpopular), you are a moral nihilist, and again not a relativist. Likewise if you accept the initial setup, that the situation with A and B is int
Particularly for males, fashion isn't that difficult to do properly, just take the few minutes to do so. Women's fashion is a whole other animal. Fortunately or not; I haven't decided. This is actually my particular complaint about fashion in the business world, as a man. Women have a far greater variety of clothes which they can wear which will be considered professional or acceptable. I agree with what all the fashion-defenders here say about the importance of looking clean and sharp and generally not dressing one step above a burlap sack; mainly because it shows something about your self-respect and self-esteem. I know that I at least dress better when I'm feeling better about myself, and worse when I'm not, and though I know in my head not to judge people by their clothes, the emotional first impression I get off of people wearing dirty, unfitting or mismatched clothes is negative. The impression may be "this person is having a bad day" or "this person is a bum" depending on other factors, but the poor dress does make an impression.
However, I object to the idea that *only certain cuts of fabric* are acceptable; that you have to dress in a particular style in order to look good. I typically make a point of trying to look my best every morning, however, I've never really been fond of the dress-shirt-and-slacks look, unless I'm going uber formal and get to wear interesting items like a dress jacket, cummer bun and bow tie. But just a plain solid shirt, dark slacks, dress shoes and a belt? I feel uncomfortable and look like your typical overweight desk monkey. I see other guys built about like me, who carry themselves about like me, who dress "well" by business standards, and they look like shit in my opinion. I've seen those same guys in more "casual" or "unusual" but still clean and good-condition clothes and they look much nicer.
A lot of my favorite clothes don't fit me anymore since I've gained weight, but back when they did, my favorite/standard outfit would be clean black boots, black loose-fit or boot-cut slacks or jeans, a high-quality solid-color (usually white) renaissance shirt tucked in to the pants, an interesting belt of some kind (my favorite was a black leather "rock star" belt, the kind with metal-rimmed holes circling the entire thing; makes adjusting your belt to the perfect size a cinch - pun intended),. It was definitely a different look, but it was still sharp and presentable, and the comments I got were usually along the lines of "hey, cool shirt", from people on the street as well as clients and my boss. (It was actually my boss, who saw a photo of me in a renaissance shirt once, who suggested that that was a good look on me for day-to-day wear).
Nowadays that I'm fatter than I used to be, I'm wearing more mundane, loose, long-sleeved shirts over baggier linen pants and more comfortable shoes, but I still make an effort to make sure that they're clean and that the colors match (which is easy since every color goes well with black pants). I'm lucky enough to work in a small business which is amenable to this sort of thing, but my objection to the "you should wear slacks and dress shirts if you want to be respectable" line is, why is only that style of clothing respectable? Certainly it's true that in the business world that style will be most automatically respected, but isn't demanding that people wear that style propagating the necessity of wearing it? It's just another issue of conformity, another shibboleth that a particular group who considers themselves 'elite' can use to exclude others from their clique.
The difference is that he is not demanding that beer be served on Sundays - he is demanding that beer be permitted to be sold on Sundays. The religious fanatics who push these blue laws demand that the world be changed to suit their way of thinking inasmuch as they demand that other people do or not do certain things. The person to whom you are responding does not, because he is not demanding that people do or not do anything, other than not make such demands.
If we gave money based upon actual risk, street and highway safety and heart disease would dwarf anything else by an incredible margin. But these aren't "sexy" ways to die or get killed. They don't raise our bloodpressure.... Actually, I'm pretty sure some varieties of heart disease do...
i think in the future when someone asks me what i mean by ridiculous theory grounded in zero real life experience, i shall refer to your post above
dude: you seriously have no idea how real human behavior works. oh i'm certain you think you do, but by your post above, you are revealing yourself to be a young naive college kid with a lot philosophy textbooks under your belt but absolutely no association with the expectations and challenges of your average family household... in any country, in any era of human existence
You know, you always have the most condescending attitude. Rather than going off like this about how I *obviously* have no clue what I'm talking about, why don't you instead just tell me what's wrong with what I said? I did my best to anticipate what your objections would be; either point out how I didn't address those problems sufficiently, point out new problems I overlooked, or STFU, cause otherwise you're not saying much other than "nuh uh" and calling me a stupid kid. Real mature of you there, oh wise elder one.
I may not have children myself but I've supervised children plenty often (I used to teach children's TaeKwonDo classes; I was once a teacher's aid for a 6th grade class; and I currently work as in a child-centered family therapy clinic; not to mention all the immature little snots on the various internet forums I administrate), and I've found that they respect you (and thus do what you ask of them) a lot more when you treat them like small human beings, rather as than animals that can speak. Obviously if they're going completely berserk, doing harmful things and not listening to reason about it then force is justified, just as it would be against an adult; but "not doing what I said" is not in itself a bad thing, nor is doing something which might influence them later to do bad things itself a bad thing. Those are tantamount to arresting people for resisting arrest, or criminalizing activities incidentally associated with criminals (c.f. the War on Drugs).
you are expecting human beings to behave in ways no human being has ever behaved. hardly the basis to comment intelligently on the subject matter
"People don't do that" is never a valid retort to "people should do that." Of course nothing ever runs as cleanly as it should in theory, cause people are broken. No political system is ever going to work flawlessly so long as it's flawed people who are implementing it, no method of dispute resolution is ever going to work perfectly so long as one party can be a stubborn ass and sabotage any attempts at resolution... so of course sometimes parents are going to be driven insane by their kids and fail to treat them justly. Of course it's going to be *really damn hard* to do this all the time, just as it's really damn hard sometimes not to punch some asshole in the face for giving you a hard time. But that doesn't mean that it's OK to just wail on anybody who pisses you off, and it doesn't mean that it's OK to treat your kids like the subjects of your own little kingdom. It just means that you're not some kind of monster for occasionally doing so; it's still wrong, but it's an understandable human failing. Nobody is perfect; but we should still always strive to be.
Incidentally I'm having one of these theory-practice breakdowns in my own living situation right now, with me in the "parent" role. I share a house with three other people (Santa Barbara housing costs are hellishly expensive), all of them younger than me. I have only three, very simple needs to be happy with my living situation: (1) I want it dark and silent by midnight at the latest, since I have to get up and go to work early every morning; (2) I want the place to stay about room temperature, around 70-73 degree Fahrenheit; and (3) I want to be able to walk through the living room and kitchen, sit down on the couch, or cook a meal, without having to step over or move a bunch of other people's junk around. I think these are all very reasonable requests, but none of
this is the same crowd that argues for parental responsibility being the proper way to deal with internet issues and children, rather than an intrusive nanny state. and i agree with that sentiment, but here we have the suggestion that a 7 year old have an abstract password her parents can't guess.
uh huh. the opinions of teenaged boys are apparently very worldly and experienced. work through the logical inconsistency, then update your opinion on a 7 year old's right to privacy from her parents. (quote slightly reformatted for compactness)
I think there is a very clear logical premise underlying both of these positions: authority is bad. By that premise it is bad when the government infringes on the liberty of us all, adults and children alike, For The Sake Of The Children; and it is also bad when parents infringe upon the liberty of their children. I'd actually say that these two positions are *more* logically consistent than the former without the latter. Otherwise would be like arguing against federal power on libertarian grounds and then condoning state-supported slavery; all you've done is devolve the authority down a level, when if you're really concerned with liberty, any authority at any level should be problematic for you. Devolving power down to the level of individual households still does not address the problem, which is not *who* exercises authority but *how* or even *that* authority is exercised.
You will of course then ask, "Well, what are we supposed to do about children getting butt raped over teh internets!?". The answer to this is two-fold: (1) Nobody actually gets hurt over the internet, ever, except perhaps for their feelings. Information cannot harm you. However, what you do with, or in response to, that information can lead you to harm, so the second part of the answer is (2) Parents should educate their kids. Talk to them. Be close to them, be trustworthy, and conversely be appropriately trusting. Make sure your kids know what's right and wrong and *why* it's right and wrong, and make sure that you are clear to them that you are concerned for their well being and not just making pointless rules to be mean. This involves being patient with them and explaining how and why such-and-such is dangerous and will lead to things that the kids themselves don't want. Then you become a helpful advisor guiding them through life, rather than the mean dictator trying to control them, and they will be more inclined to listen to your advice in the future rather than to fight you at every turn. An important facet of this is that the bad things not be something that you will cause in response to them doing what you tell them not to (i.e. not threats of punishment); the point is to warn them about the actual bad consequences to the kids of doing the things you're warning them about.
There's a further bit of argument to be made here, from a different angle: one concerned with kids who would *accept* and not rebel against parental authority. If we want a free society as adults, that requires that the majority of the population be absolutely unwilling to put up with the arbitrary imposition of authority. But if we have a society who as children were conditioned to accept mommy or daddy as the supreme authority who is to be obeyed no matter what, then it is all too easy for those kids to grow up and latch on to the mommy state or the daddy state as surrogate parents, or if such state institutes don't already exist, to demand that they be created. And then you get the slow creep of government power which has been the death of liberty the world over throughout history. The battle against that starts at home, with teaching kids that "because I said so" and "because you'll get a whoopin' if you don't" are never valid justifications for commands; that right and wrong are independent of anyone's authority.
That is why we should respect the privacy of a seven year old; both because, deontologically, she has a right just as much as you or I do, and we should address our concerns about her in a way that respects that right; and also, consequentially, so she will grow to expect that kind of privacy and not tolerate it when Uncle Sam tries to take it from her later.
I'm doing a Computer Science degree in Cambridge (world ranking university, partnered with MIT). I'm getting top grades. That didn't mean terribly much to me, either - I understood the second sentence, but not the first. Here's a contrary anecdatum* to yours: I'm not a CS major, have used almost nothing but Macs my entire life, have never used Linux or any other *nix (besides OSX, and then only the GUI) even once, and everything I know about *nixes I learned from reading comments here on Slashdot; and I understood the first sentence you refer to there. Probably not enough to actually do what he's saying to do, but I think I grok what he's saying to do. Actual Linux users, please correct me if I'm wrong:
My Linux installation is case-insensitive, if you use JFS you can enable "OS/2 compatibility" with the -O option to jfs_mkfs, which will make it case insensitive. This says that if you set the -O flag while running the command jfs_mkfs (which I infer is the command to make a JFS volume), it will enable "OS/2 compatibility" on the newly-created JFS volume, which makes it case-insensitive. Now I don't know what exactly JFS is (my guess would be Journalled File System), and I suspect that there is more to running jfs_mkfs than just typing "jfs_mkfs" in a terminal (like say, specifying a device on which to create such a file system). So I doubt I could just sit down at a Linux box and format a new HD with JFS in "OS/2 compatibility mode"... but I understand that that's what he was saying to do.
(*Anecdatum: new word for 2008! They say that the plural of anecdote is not data, but now with new Anecdata 2008, it can be! Just group your anecdotes together and convert them into convenient data points for graphing, statistical analysis, or any other use with our handy-dandy Anecdata Converter Utility.)
Again, society has apparently decided this is ok, so if you're in the minority that has a problem, YOU need to work around it, not bend the majority to your will. I agree completely with your conclusion, but this is a horrible justification for it. It wouldn't matter even if the rest of society agreed with him that this stuff should be censored - nobody has a right to tell other people what they can or cannot say, or print, or sing, or what-have-you. It's not a matter of being in line with some majoritarian social norms, it's a matter of each and every person's individual rights.
Do you think a kid that doesn't know about sex has any idea what the "naughty things you can do to him in the bedroom" implies? There's an act at some of the local renaissance faires around here called "The Bawdy Juggler", which is full of raunchy humor, and he's got a great line on this topic, since there are sometimes parent with children in the audience. He says "don't worry parents, they don't understand a word of it! and if the do, it's already too late!"
Having laws that are too specific means that we would need to have many, many more laws passed in order to "cover all of the bases" and keep up with changing laws and technology. Not so. There is a difference between a law (or any statement being) being vague (unclear, imprecise, subject to multiple interpretations) and a law being general (broad, non-specific, applicable to many different situations). The former is bad, as is the OPs point; the latter is good, as is your point.
A good way to express this for the Slashdot crowd would be to say that the laws of man should be like the laws of physics. A sentence describing the law of gravity is extremely, even mathematically precise, but also incredibly broad, applying to everything in the universe from a speck of dust to galactic superclusters. A good man-made law should be like that as well; simple, elegant, far-reaching and unambiguous.
One of my favorite bits of mathematical humor is the many cases where they have taken criticisms and turned them into terminology. Thus, when it was realized that numbers like e and pi couldn't be written as ratios of integers, there were a lot of dummies who didn't accept this, and attacked the rationality of the people who did. The response of mathematicians was to say, in essence, "Hey, they call us irrational; that's a good word. Let's call the numbers that our critics believe in as 'rational', and the numbers that they don't believe in as 'irrational'. They'll be happy, and we'll have handy words for talking about these two kinds of numbers." Although I get the impression that your entire post may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I'd like to point out for anybody who misses that fact that (as far as I am aware) rational numbers are so-called because they can be expressed as the ratio of two natural numbers, and irrational numbers, likewise, are those that can't be expressed as such a ratio. It has nothing to do with 'rational' in the sense of 'reasonable' or 'sane'.
Ah pfhorrest, always a pleasure engaging with you. I strive to be as dispassionate and logical as you are in my discourse, but fail miserably most of the time.;-)
Why thank you, it's quite a pleasure to hear you say that:-)
As for property, I've thought about this quite a bit. First, you don't own yourself. No one does, ownership is a moot concept when applied to people. Well, not moot, per se, but a nebulous concept, used as a shorthand to refer to whatever bundle of rights the person using the phrase wants to justify. Why should the same concept of ownership apply to you, when you are so unlike any other form of property? Why not just enumerate the list of rights that you mean? Because self-ownership is a semantic trick used to justify private property.
You're right that property can be a nebulous concept, as can all concepts, so I suppose I should more formally define at least my usage of it. My 'categorical imperative' of sorts, my overarching principle of justice, is that all and only people have all and only the following obligations: to refrain from acting upon property against the will of its owner, except as such action is necessary to enforce its owner's obligations. As you can clearly tell this is somewhat self-referential, and it basically my encapsulation of the Lockean notion of rights-limited-only-by-others-rights in the terms of deontic logic; but some of the terms, mostly 'property' need further clarification, which will turn out to be somewhat referential to this principle, hence why I stated it first. To me, all and only physical things are property - and as I am a physicalist, that pretty much means that everything is property. The only question is, what kind of property is it; self-owned, private, or public? A thing is property inasmuch as someone has claim rights regarding it; claim rights being identical to obligations upon other parties (by definition you have a claim right just inasmuch as others have a corresponding obligation to you); and as the only obligation I hold anyone to have is the above one, that pretty much defines my notion of property. Property is, in short, the right of someone to say "you can't do that" to someone else regarding some object; so when I say that someone is his own property, I mean simply that he have a moral right to prohibit others from acting upon his body (except as necessary to enforce his own obligations, i.e. to prevent him from committing crimes). No more, no less.
The other two classes of property besides people (self-owned things) are private property, which is exclusively owned by only some people; and public property, which is inclusively owned by all people. Nothing is unowned. Transfer of ownership is made by consensus, by which I don't mean popular vote but, more etymologically literally, consent, as in gift or free trade. In the beginning, there was only people and public property. Some of that property became private as society agreed that that stick, those rocks, or that land now belongs to that guy. This does not mean that people only have private property right as long as society lets them, any more than it means that you can only keep a gift I give you (or a product I sell you) as long as I let you; once it's given, it's the recipient's property, and can't be taken back. Of course, I'm sure that there is historically a LOT of theft from the public that went on, people forcible privatizing things that the public would not have consented to give or sell to them, but there's got to be a statute of limitations on some of these things, and the above is how private property could be legitimately created out of the initial commons. (And with my illegitimacy-of-rent principle, wealth would tend to distribute itself meritocratically, as the lazy rich who formerly relied on rent and interest to get by were forced to sell their property at market prices instead. I am, furthermore, somewhat amenable to the idea of reinterpreting lease cont
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Actually, the main strand of anarchism today is communist anarchism. No market at all. So yeah.
If by "main" you mean "most popular then yes. Amongst contemporary published philosophers (e.g. Robert Nozick), some form of market anarchism on another seems to more popular.
Also, if you were going to have an "anarchist market", you wouldn't need regulation. Because the basic assumptions of Mutualism (the economic theory that anarchists who advocate markets advocate)
Important nitpick: not all market anarchists are mutualists. Unless you intend to take the ridiculous "anarcho-capitalism isn't really anarchism because anarchism can't be capitalist" position.
(FWIW I'm a market anarchist and neither a mutualist not strictly an anarcho-capitalist, but that's just because I've got my own original economic theory I came up with in the course of my philosophical studies. I'd be happy to describe it to you if you'd like).
Nobody wants an immoral society.
Speak for yourself!
So you want a society where people are doing things which you yourself personally consider to be wrong? Not what this or that popular conception of "morality" considers to be wrong, but things which you yourself consider wrong?
That seems like logical nonsense to me, for what is the difference between "things you consider to be wrong" and "things you don't want people to do?" Of course there is a difference between either of those and "things which really are wrong" (aka "things which people really shouldn't do"); but then, there's also a difference between "things you consider to be true" (aka "things you think should be believed") and "things which really are true" (aka "things which really should be believed").
It makes no more sense to say you want that which you consider immoral than to say that you believe that which you consider untrue. Whether you're correct about what's moral (or true) is another question.
Which is better? In my opinion a moral society in which people can do what they want with their money is desirable to a morally corrupt society where everything goes as long as you're paying extortion money to the liberal government. But that's just my opinion.
But of course, it's a truism that morality is better than immorality. Nobody wants an immoral society. The point of disagreement comes when some people question whether what social conservatives call "immoral" really is immoral. Socially liberal people want less government control over personal behavior because they believe that much of the behavior social conservatives want to regulate is not wrong at all. Nobody (except a few fringe nihilists) really wants an anything-goes society. Even anarchists believe in a small set of rules (they just don't believe in rulers).
On the subject of liberals and conservatives both wanting to protect choice, though: as another poster has already commented, those who are called "liberal" today are not those who are properly called liberal; though neither are those who are called "conservative" today (though many of them are not far from those who are properly called "conservatives"). When these terms first came into use, the State controlled all economic activity and the Church controlled all social activity (though these powers often colluded and shared their respective control). Liberals were those who wanted to wrest such control out of those powerful hands and place it with each and every individual; conservatives were the ones who wanted to keep things the way they were.
Then at some point the powerful began to co-opt the now-dominant liberal economic ideology and exploit its weaknesses to their illiberal ends; and many of the less powerful, in return, put their faith in the State to fix this. As the powerful remained socially conservative and the less powerful remained socially liberal, it came to pass that those called "liberals" were in fact socially conservative (actually regressive, as the State-controlled economy had been dissolved by the earlier liberal movement); and those called "conservatives" were in fact, at least nominally, economically liberal.
But neither side is fully liberal or conservative these days (though the vested business interests on the conservative side, while nominally economically liberal, seem like they'd be quite happy with an illiberal economy so long as they get to be the new kings). About the only people close to true liberalism, as you noted, are those now called libertarians, though even they aren't quite as liberal as I'd like. Unfortunately we've got our share of true conservatives(*) around aplenty... fascists, corporatists and communists are all different faces of the same "we know what's best for you" ideology.
( * Technically speaking, anyone striving to preserve the status quo is a conservative, so if the status quo is liberal then conservatives would be liberals; but I'm using the term loosely in the sense equivalent to "illiberal" here, as it was used at the start of liberalism).
Bollocks. What about the provision public goods (e.g. national defence)? Market regulation? Wealth redistribution? Welfare isn't a "right", you know. What about representation on an international level?
Your characterisation of a government's primary role may be (well, is) closer to the truth than that of the GP, but your oversimplification hasn't helped any.
I get the feeling that the GP was specifically meaning to deny that provision of public goods (other than protecting peoples rights, which would include national defense), market regulation (other than in the Adam Smith sense of protecting peoples property rights), and wealth distribution are things that governments should be doing. There are a lot of people with that opinion out there, you know... they're called libertarians. Plenty of them right here on Slashdot too. Surprised you hadn't noticed.
AC/DC is the name of a band (who the GP is apparently a fan of) and also a slang term for bisexual.
I'm sorry, I was thinking sangfroid. Guh, shouldn't be posting this late at night...
if it didn't then what's the purpose of staying "alive" for 120000 years? Evolution is not teleological (which means "purposive" or "goal-oriented"). This bacterium happened to be able to survive long periods in the freezing cold due to some mutation or another. This would be a big evolutionary advantage because it could then live and reproduce in areas where most other things cannot.
Some of these bacteria got frozen for 120,000 years. They weren't waiting for it to thaw out; they're just out there living in the cold regions where nothing else can live, and sticking it out even when it gets too cold for them.
Analogously, imagine that there is some primitive tribe of humans with no knowledge of climatology, currently living in tropical or desert climes who, unbeknown to anyone, have a mutation which allows them to survive in hibernation in freezing cold temperatures, and then reawaken when it warms up again. They did not evolve this because they needed to survive freezing cold temperatures, they just have a genetic adaptation which is not disadvantageous, and might even correlate with some other adaptation which is advantageous. And because they live in warm climes, nobody knows they have this mutation.
Then say someday we enter another great ice age, so cold that everybody on Earth dies out, except this tribe, who barely manages to live on for thousands of years, frozen in the ice, due to their mutation. And then eventually the ice age ends and the world gets nice and warm, these people thaw out and start living their lives again.
Now imagine we're aliens watching this future Earth thaw out. We might ask, did these people know that an ice age was coming? No... they've probably never even heard of ice. So they certainly didn't know that the ice age they never expected was going to end eventually. So what's the purpose of them having this mutation that allowed them to stay "alive" frozen in the ice for thousands of years? The answer is that there was none; they didn't mean to have the mutation, and nobody meant for them to have the mutation, they just had it by chance, and as chance would have it it came in really handy when the whole world froze over and everybody but them died out, which is why they're still around for us to wonder about.
Or in short: They didn't get the mutation so that they could survive. They survived because they had the mutation.
The correct quote says "flying circuits" rather than "time circuits". The hover conversion was powered by Mr. Fusion was well.
For liberalism, P = "act upon X" and Q = "the owner of X consents to X being acted upon by you";
And for 'popularism' (formerly known as 'relativism'), for all values of P, Q = "P is popularly accepted".
These things could both be literally considered "relativism", as they both say that whether or not you may P is dependant upon, or relative to, some other thing, Q. Absolutist doctrines like "thou shalt not eat pork" fall outside of this category of literal "relativism", and of course nihilists have no doctrines and so are neither "relativists" of this (or any) sort, nor absolutists.
So I guess in a sense I'd like to agree with the talking heads that liberalism is a form of relativism... so long as I get to take "relativism" in this literal sense without all the pejorative bull that they mean to go along with it.
Which just seems to raise the question, what would a prescriptive relativist say about such intervention? I can't think of any answer which is neither nihilism ("I think that [...], but that's just me") nor some form of universalism ("I think that [...], and so should you"). Which I suppose was my own point... prescriptive relativism is nonsense that tries to distance itself from both universalism and nihilism, but there's no way to really do so, unless we want to reclassify all forms of universalism where permissibility is dependent on a variable as "relativism", in which case liberalism is a form of relativism too. But failing that option... I think that's why you and I have never met a real prescriptive moral relativist - it's not a coherent position that anyone can hold.
Game theory will tell you which are the winning strategies - that is, what you ought or ought not to do, which specific things are right and wrong, what is moral - independent of any particular implementation.
What game theory doesn't tell you is the specific biological mechanisms whereby humans are inclined to behave in those ways, or the historical contexts which lead up to the evolution of those biological mechanisms, and so forth. That's what evolutionary biology is for.
Game theory tells you the reasons to be moral. Evolutionary biology tells you the causes of people's moral inclinations. Positing an evolutionary explanation to a philosophical question (a question about, loosely speaking, 'normative' reasons) is pretty much always taking the wrong approach, answering the wrong question. For a parallel example: evolutionary biology could tell me how and why it is that people form their beliefs about the world based on sensory input, but it doesn't answer the question "why should I believe my senses?" Telling me why I do believe my senses doesn't tell me why I should; likewise, evolutionary biology may tell me why I am inclined to be kind and generous, but it doesn't tell me why I should be.
(And if you really want to press it, game theory doesn't either; it provides an instrumental reason, I should be kind and generous because that will tend to be the "winning" strategy in terms of providing me with a pleasant life; but it doesn't answer the question of why I should strive for a pleasant life. Obviously I do desire a pleasant life and so telling me that behaving this way or that will lead to such might incline me to behave that way; but say I was completely and totally apathetic toward even my own immediate suffering, and someone told me that I should care about living, I should care about experiencing the pleasures of the world and so forth, I should want to avoid death, and I asked them "why should I?" What possible answer could they give me? This is actually even more parallel to the case of "why should I believe my senses" - well what else are you going to believe?)
Unless you want to convert the world to your own particular morality (i.e., destroy freedom), you have to live and let live to a certain extent
"Live and let live" is a moral dictum; it is the essence of liberalism (in the classical sense, not the American Democratic Party sense). If that is your ethic, and you go about pushing it on other people, that can only equate to defending other people from those who would deny them their freedom, and there is no way that that can possibly "destroy freedom".
If you think that everybody should live and let live, and that people who aren't doing so are doing something wrong, then you are not a moral relativist at all, you are a liberal moral universalist; you think everybody should be free, that nobody should deny anybody their freedom. If you think that we in the liberal west should live and let live, but it's ok for those strange alien foreigners in the east to go about oppressing each other because obviously different moral standards apply to them, then you are a moral relativist, which basically equates to either some kind of moral nihilism (it's not *really* good in any strict sense for people here in the west to live and let live, that's just how we happen to do things), or some strange kind of racism or nationalism whereby us westerners have true moral rights which it is wrong for anybody to infringe upon, but people in the east do not have such rights, so it's ok if they do things to each other which we here would consider violating eachothers' rights.
Backing up a bit:
It's not about condoning others' moral beliefs, it's about acknowledging that they have them, and are sincere about them, and might even be rather attached to them, and then modifying your behavior so that you can get along with them.
What you describe there is what's called descriptive moral relativism, coupled with some pragmatic considerations. Descriptive relativism is a trivial truism - obviously, different people disagree about what is right or wrong, and that's a fact that you might have to cope with and work around some times.
What's at issue is prescriptive moral relativism - the idea that different people have different moral beliefs (duh) and they're all equally correct, and we should respect their beliefs and not intervene and impose our own moral beliefs on them. Prescriptive relativism is just utter nonsense; say Person A has the moral belief that he is fully within his rights to physically beat Person B for disobeying him, and Person B disagrees and says that his right to be free from physical abuse supersedes any obligation of obedience he may owe Person A. True prescriptive moral relativists can't do any thing here but throw up their hands and say "oh well, people have different moral beliefs! who am I to impose my opinion on them?"
Of course actual people who call themselves relativists never think about it on an individual level like this but on a cultural level; whether A or B is right is relative to what their neighbors or countrymen think of the situation. But then you get into the question of where do you draw the arbitrary limit of what size group is necessary to establish such local moral truths; if my three housemates decide that I have no right to physical security and they can rightly beat me at their whim, does that make that morally true within the confines of this house? What if everybody on my block was of that opinion? Everyone in my city? State? Country? Where do the scales tip? Keep in mind that they *have* to tip at some point for it to be relativism: if you say that something like that is never ever acceptable, then you have just declared something a universal moral truth, and you are no longer a relativist; or conversely, if you say that everything is always acceptable (and no action is ever *truly* wrong, maybe just unpopular), you are a moral nihilist, and again not a relativist. Likewise if you accept the initial setup, that the situation with A and B is int
However, I object to the idea that *only certain cuts of fabric* are acceptable; that you have to dress in a particular style in order to look good. I typically make a point of trying to look my best every morning, however, I've never really been fond of the dress-shirt-and-slacks look, unless I'm going uber formal and get to wear interesting items like a dress jacket, cummer bun and bow tie. But just a plain solid shirt, dark slacks, dress shoes and a belt? I feel uncomfortable and look like your typical overweight desk monkey. I see other guys built about like me, who carry themselves about like me, who dress "well" by business standards, and they look like shit in my opinion. I've seen those same guys in more "casual" or "unusual" but still clean and good-condition clothes and they look much nicer.
A lot of my favorite clothes don't fit me anymore since I've gained weight, but back when they did, my favorite/standard outfit would be clean black boots, black loose-fit or boot-cut slacks or jeans, a high-quality solid-color (usually white) renaissance shirt tucked in to the pants, an interesting belt of some kind (my favorite was a black leather "rock star" belt, the kind with metal-rimmed holes circling the entire thing; makes adjusting your belt to the perfect size a cinch - pun intended),. It was definitely a different look, but it was still sharp and presentable, and the comments I got were usually along the lines of "hey, cool shirt", from people on the street as well as clients and my boss. (It was actually my boss, who saw a photo of me in a renaissance shirt once, who suggested that that was a good look on me for day-to-day wear).
Nowadays that I'm fatter than I used to be, I'm wearing more mundane, loose, long-sleeved shirts over baggier linen pants and more comfortable shoes, but I still make an effort to make sure that they're clean and that the colors match (which is easy since every color goes well with black pants). I'm lucky enough to work in a small business which is amenable to this sort of thing, but my objection to the "you should wear slacks and dress shirts if you want to be respectable" line is, why is only that style of clothing respectable? Certainly it's true that in the business world that style will be most automatically respected, but isn't demanding that people wear that style propagating the necessity of wearing it? It's just another issue of conformity, another shibboleth that a particular group who considers themselves 'elite' can use to exclude others from their clique.
The difference is that he is not demanding that beer be served on Sundays - he is demanding that beer be permitted to be sold on Sundays. The religious fanatics who push these blue laws demand that the world be changed to suit their way of thinking inasmuch as they demand that other people do or not do certain things. The person to whom you are responding does not, because he is not demanding that people do or not do anything, other than not make such demands.
i think in the future when someone asks me what i mean by ridiculous theory grounded in zero real life experience, i shall refer to your post above
dude: you seriously have no idea how real human behavior works. oh i'm certain you think you do, but by your post above, you are revealing yourself to be a young naive college kid with a lot philosophy textbooks under your belt but absolutely no association with the expectations and challenges of your average family household... in any country, in any era of human existence
You know, you always have the most condescending attitude. Rather than going off like this about how I *obviously* have no clue what I'm talking about, why don't you instead just tell me what's wrong with what I said? I did my best to anticipate what your objections would be; either point out how I didn't address those problems sufficiently, point out new problems I overlooked, or STFU, cause otherwise you're not saying much other than "nuh uh" and calling me a stupid kid. Real mature of you there, oh wise elder one.
I may not have children myself but I've supervised children plenty often (I used to teach children's TaeKwonDo classes; I was once a teacher's aid for a 6th grade class; and I currently work as in a child-centered family therapy clinic; not to mention all the immature little snots on the various internet forums I administrate), and I've found that they respect you (and thus do what you ask of them) a lot more when you treat them like small human beings, rather as than animals that can speak. Obviously if they're going completely berserk, doing harmful things and not listening to reason about it then force is justified, just as it would be against an adult; but "not doing what I said" is not in itself a bad thing, nor is doing something which might influence them later to do bad things itself a bad thing. Those are tantamount to arresting people for resisting arrest, or criminalizing activities incidentally associated with criminals (c.f. the War on Drugs).
you are expecting human beings to behave in ways no human being has ever behaved. hardly the basis to comment intelligently on the subject matter
"People don't do that" is never a valid retort to "people should do that." Of course nothing ever runs as cleanly as it should in theory, cause people are broken. No political system is ever going to work flawlessly so long as it's flawed people who are implementing it, no method of dispute resolution is ever going to work perfectly so long as one party can be a stubborn ass and sabotage any attempts at resolution... so of course sometimes parents are going to be driven insane by their kids and fail to treat them justly. Of course it's going to be *really damn hard* to do this all the time, just as it's really damn hard sometimes not to punch some asshole in the face for giving you a hard time. But that doesn't mean that it's OK to just wail on anybody who pisses you off, and it doesn't mean that it's OK to treat your kids like the subjects of your own little kingdom. It just means that you're not some kind of monster for occasionally doing so; it's still wrong, but it's an understandable human failing. Nobody is perfect; but we should still always strive to be.
Incidentally I'm having one of these theory-practice breakdowns in my own living situation right now, with me in the "parent" role. I share a house with three other people (Santa Barbara housing costs are hellishly expensive), all of them younger than me. I have only three, very simple needs to be happy with my living situation: (1) I want it dark and silent by midnight at the latest, since I have to get up and go to work early every morning; (2) I want the place to stay about room temperature, around 70-73 degree Fahrenheit; and (3) I want to be able to walk through the living room and kitchen, sit down on the couch, or cook a meal, without having to step over or move a bunch of other people's junk around. I think these are all very reasonable requests, but none of
uh huh. the opinions of teenaged boys are apparently very worldly and experienced. work through the logical inconsistency, then update your opinion on a 7 year old's right to privacy from her parents. (quote slightly reformatted for compactness)
I think there is a very clear logical premise underlying both of these positions: authority is bad. By that premise it is bad when the government infringes on the liberty of us all, adults and children alike, For The Sake Of The Children; and it is also bad when parents infringe upon the liberty of their children. I'd actually say that these two positions are *more* logically consistent than the former without the latter. Otherwise would be like arguing against federal power on libertarian grounds and then condoning state-supported slavery; all you've done is devolve the authority down a level, when if you're really concerned with liberty, any authority at any level should be problematic for you. Devolving power down to the level of individual households still does not address the problem, which is not *who* exercises authority but *how* or even *that* authority is exercised.
You will of course then ask, "Well, what are we supposed to do about children getting butt raped over teh internets!?". The answer to this is two-fold: (1) Nobody actually gets hurt over the internet, ever, except perhaps for their feelings. Information cannot harm you. However, what you do with, or in response to, that information can lead you to harm, so the second part of the answer is (2) Parents should educate their kids. Talk to them. Be close to them, be trustworthy, and conversely be appropriately trusting. Make sure your kids know what's right and wrong and *why* it's right and wrong, and make sure that you are clear to them that you are concerned for their well being and not just making pointless rules to be mean. This involves being patient with them and explaining how and why such-and-such is dangerous and will lead to things that the kids themselves don't want. Then you become a helpful advisor guiding them through life, rather than the mean dictator trying to control them, and they will be more inclined to listen to your advice in the future rather than to fight you at every turn. An important facet of this is that the bad things not be something that you will cause in response to them doing what you tell them not to (i.e. not threats of punishment); the point is to warn them about the actual bad consequences to the kids of doing the things you're warning them about.
There's a further bit of argument to be made here, from a different angle: one concerned with kids who would *accept* and not rebel against parental authority. If we want a free society as adults, that requires that the majority of the population be absolutely unwilling to put up with the arbitrary imposition of authority. But if we have a society who as children were conditioned to accept mommy or daddy as the supreme authority who is to be obeyed no matter what, then it is all too easy for those kids to grow up and latch on to the mommy state or the daddy state as surrogate parents, or if such state institutes don't already exist, to demand that they be created. And then you get the slow creep of government power which has been the death of liberty the world over throughout history. The battle against that starts at home, with teaching kids that "because I said so" and "because you'll get a whoopin' if you don't" are never valid justifications for commands; that right and wrong are independent of anyone's authority.
That is why we should respect the privacy of a seven year old; both because, deontologically, she has a right just as much as you or I do, and we should address our concerns about her in a way that respects that right; and also, consequentially, so she will grow to expect that kind of privacy and not tolerate it when Uncle Sam tries to take it from her later.
(*Anecdatum: new word for 2008! They say that the plural of anecdote is not data, but now with new Anecdata 2008, it can be! Just group your anecdotes together and convert them into convenient data points for graphing, statistical analysis, or any other use with our handy-dandy Anecdata Converter Utility.)
A good way to express this for the Slashdot crowd would be to say that the laws of man should be like the laws of physics. A sentence describing the law of gravity is extremely, even mathematically precise, but also incredibly broad, applying to everything in the universe from a speck of dust to galactic superclusters. A good man-made law should be like that as well; simple, elegant, far-reaching and unambiguous.
Ah pfhorrest, always a pleasure engaging with you. I strive to be as dispassionate and logical as you are in my discourse, but fail miserably most of the time. ;-)
Why thank you, it's quite a pleasure to hear you say that :-)
As for property, I've thought about this quite a bit. First, you don't own yourself. No one does, ownership is a moot concept when applied to people. Well, not moot, per se, but a nebulous concept, used as a shorthand to refer to whatever bundle of rights the person using the phrase wants to justify. Why should the same concept of ownership apply to you, when you are so unlike any other form of property? Why not just enumerate the list of rights that you mean? Because self-ownership is a semantic trick used to justify private property.
You're right that property can be a nebulous concept, as can all concepts, so I suppose I should more formally define at least my usage of it. My 'categorical imperative' of sorts, my overarching principle of justice, is that all and only people have all and only the following obligations: to refrain from acting upon property against the will of its owner, except as such action is necessary to enforce its owner's obligations. As you can clearly tell this is somewhat self-referential, and it basically my encapsulation of the Lockean notion of rights-limited-only-by-others-rights in the terms of deontic logic; but some of the terms, mostly 'property' need further clarification, which will turn out to be somewhat referential to this principle, hence why I stated it first. To me, all and only physical things are property - and as I am a physicalist, that pretty much means that everything is property. The only question is, what kind of property is it; self-owned, private, or public? A thing is property inasmuch as someone has claim rights regarding it; claim rights being identical to obligations upon other parties (by definition you have a claim right just inasmuch as others have a corresponding obligation to you); and as the only obligation I hold anyone to have is the above one, that pretty much defines my notion of property. Property is, in short, the right of someone to say "you can't do that" to someone else regarding some object; so when I say that someone is his own property, I mean simply that he have a moral right to prohibit others from acting upon his body (except as necessary to enforce his own obligations, i.e. to prevent him from committing crimes). No more, no less.
The other two classes of property besides people (self-owned things) are private property, which is exclusively owned by only some people; and public property, which is inclusively owned by all people. Nothing is unowned. Transfer of ownership is made by consensus, by which I don't mean popular vote but, more etymologically literally, consent, as in gift or free trade. In the beginning, there was only people and public property. Some of that property became private as society agreed that that stick, those rocks, or that land now belongs to that guy. This does not mean that people only have private property right as long as society lets them, any more than it means that you can only keep a gift I give you (or a product I sell you) as long as I let you; once it's given, it's the recipient's property, and can't be taken back. Of course, I'm sure that there is historically a LOT of theft from the public that went on, people forcible privatizing things that the public would not have consented to give or sell to them, but there's got to be a statute of limitations on some of these things, and the above is how private property could be legitimately created out of the initial commons. (And with my illegitimacy-of-rent principle, wealth would tend to distribute itself meritocratically, as the lazy rich who formerly relied on rent and interest to get by were forced to sell their property at market prices instead. I am, furthermore, somewhat amenable to the idea of reinterpreting lease cont