Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Bacchus]

But in doing that they already assume that they own this pile of gold as a group.

But they don't have to assume anything like that. Moreover, if they are the only relevant group here (which seems to be the implication of the virginity of the forest), that assumption would be strictly speaking meaningless. There is just no difference between stating that the pile is owned by the group or by nobody. The difference would arise only if there is some other group, and then ownership will become meaningful in differentiating this group, which owns the gold, from that group, which doesn't. To make a proclamation of ownership, you have to make it to somebody.

It seems like you are saying that there are moral considerations which would trump ownership titles and which would justify rearrangement of ownership titles rightfully established earlier.

I'm saying that ownership titles could be viewed as arising from requirements of justice, and could be invalidated by requirements of justice, as opposed to by some other, prior, ownership title. If that's the sense of Seven's argument, and I think it is, he has no need at all to posit primary ownership, because ownership is not taken to be foundational. If you do take it as foundational, there is probably not much more to be said, not until you give a much clearer picture of how ownership derives its normativity independently of justice.

[Gavagai]

Moreover, if they are the only relevant group here (which seems to be the implication of the virginity of the forest), that assumption would be strictly speaking meaningless. There is just no difference between stating that the pile is owned by the group or by nobody.

But there is a difference. If gold is owned by the group, then the group has a right to split it as it sees fit. If the gold is owned by nobody, then the group does not have such right but has a duty to leave it in place. The presence of other groups is not required to conceptualize these two different normative realities.
I believe, it also answers your second concern. There is no choice, whether we believe that ownership is foundational or not. Ownership is always foundational. The only question is who is the primary owner.

[Bacchus]

If gold is owned by the group, then the group has a right to split it as it sees fit. If the gold is owned by nobody, then the group does not have such right but has a duty to leave it in place.

This makes no sense. A duty towards who?

More broadly, if a conscious being finds itself alone in the universe, there is just no question of rights with respect to its interaction with that universe. There is no foundation on which you could rest any claim that a particular action of that being towards unconscious matter is right or wrong, except for maybe if the being wrongs itself through suicide or some such, and even that effectively requires postulating the future-being as a separate person from the current-being. I would welcome an account of rights that does not rest on there being at least two parties to them, but I don't think anyone here is familiar with such an account, I'm certainly not.

[Gavagai]

If gold is owned by the group, then the group has a right to split it as it sees fit. If the gold is owned by nobody, then the group does not have such right but has a duty to leave it in place.

This makes no sense. A duty towards who?

To God? To themselves? Just "a duty"? Pick any answer you wish. A duty should not necessarily be towards someone. We have a duty not to break moral rules; this duty by its design is not directed towards anyone in particular, you would need to adopt a specific conception of morality to claim otherwise.

[Gavagai]

I mean, that sure, you can design a conception of morality which would render this distinction meaningless but it is not meaningless on a conceptual level.

[Bacchus]

Well, my concept of rights and duties is different, and it is by design other-regarding, I don't think I understand the concept of duties which isn't. The duty to follow moral rules -- that's just using the word duty to describe anything that has normative force. I think it's just an imprecise use of language. In the same sense we have a duty to accord our beliefs with logic -- it's not really an obligation, it's just the right thing to do, if we fail on that front we are mistaken, not in breach of our obligations. For me, the characteristic feature of duty is that a failure to fulfil it justifies rectification. This also shows that it is necessarily social, because there should be somebody who should have been wronged and now to be set right, and actually somebody who could carry out the rectification. But even on the conceptual level -- if you fail to follow moral rules, just on that account no rectification is justified. But that means it's not a real failure of duty.

Duty to God, or to yourself are of course valid (and other-regarding) answers. I can see why a religious person would be concerned about establishing how God would like us to treat his creation, and what rights do we have towards it, but that's not a path you are following. The duty to yourself -- maybe, how would you explicate it in property?

Another issue that I have with you stance is that property is created by "concrete physical acts". But presumably everyone starts with the right to carry out those acts? What gives that right? What are the limitations of it? Presumably, one limitation is that if someone exercised that right towards a particular object, everyone else loses it. Any other limitations? What are they based on, if not justice?

This last point can also be put somewhat differently. You say that everything starts unowned and gets owned through a physical act. However, you also say that a group would be in breach of some duty if it takes something unowned and does anything at all with it. First you say that doing something with an unowned object makes you own it, then you say you can't legitimately do anything at all with an object until you own it. So which is it?

[Gavagai]

Well, my concept of rights and duties is different, and it is by design other-regarding, I don't think I understand the concept of duties which isn't. The duty to follow moral rules -- that's just using the word duty to describe anything that has normative force. I think it's just an imprecise use of language. In the same sense we have a duty to accord our beliefs with logic -- it's not really an obligation, it's just the right thing to do, if we fail on that front we are mistaken, not in breach of our obligations. For me, the characteristic feature of duty is that a failure to fulfil it justifies rectification. This also shows that it is necessarily social, because there should be somebody who should have been wronged and now to be set right, and actually somebody who could carry out the rectification. But even on the conceptual level -- if you fail to follow moral rules, just on that account no rectification is justified. But that means it's not a real failure of duty.

Duty to God, or to yourself are of course valid (and other-regarding) answers. I can see why a religious person would be concerned about establishing how God would like us to treat his creation, and what rights do we have towards it, but that's not a path you are following. The duty to yourself -- maybe, how would you explicate it in property?

Another issue that I have with you stance is that property is created by "concrete physical acts". But presumably everyone starts with the right to carry out those acts? What gives that right? What are the limitations of it? Presumably, one limitation is that if someone exercised that right towards a particular object, everyone else loses it. Any other limitations? What are they based on, if not justice?

This last point can also be put somewhat differently. You say that everything starts unowned and gets owned through a physical act. However, you also say that a group would be in breach of some duty if it takes something unowned and does anything at all with it. First you say that doing something with an unowned object makes you own it, then you say you can't legitimately do anything at all with an object until you own it. So which is it?

1) A thought experiment. Imagine a lonely person on an uninhabited island. The island has all natural wealth to sustain the life of the person and the person has all the knowledge necessary to exploit this wealth.
However, our protagonist believes that touching anything on the island is intrinsically an act of evil and that he should rather starve himself to death than to commit such evil.
A question: don't you think that the most natural way to describe this belief is to say that this person does not recognize his right to use the resources of this island? How would you describe it otherwise?

2) Sure, the right to commit those physical acts needs to be justified. I want to blackbox the particulars of my theory of ownership here. It is very complex and requires dropping some of the simplifying assumptions we take for granted so far. No need to make the debate more complicated than it already is.

3) I do not say that the group "would be in breach of some duty if it takes something unowned". I say that our ability to conceptualize such breach turns the act of group taking something unowned into a moral statement - the rejection of this alternative. It not just acts in physical reality, it also acts in normative reality by creating an ownership title for itself which have not existed before.

[Bacchus]

1) Sure he doesn't recognize a right. What's that got to do with him actually or not having rights? Unless you are a strong subjectivist about rights, this person's beliefs have no bearing on the situation. Continue the experiment -- say he does, in his weakness, eat something. And he calls you in as a judge, by Skype maybe, and asks what the appropriate penalty is -- wouldn't your answer be: "nothing, you haven't actually done anything wrong?"

I know your point isn't to ground normativity of property in beliefs about it, so I don't really see the point of the example. I mean, I do, you are trying to bring in Rand's perspective of practical consequences of philosophy to bear on the issue, a la the West Point address, but if there is a way to do that, it's not through this thought experiment.

2) Well, you can't really avoid discussing this, because that's where the disagreement is. Seven, and I, take ownership to be relational, you take it to be ... essential, for the lack of a better word? You need to provide at least an outline, because as of now I don't think we even understand what you mean by the word 'ownership'. For us, you literally cannot conceptualize two different normative realities in a case where there is only one relevant agent. In fact, you cant conceptualize even one normative reality with respect to material things; whilst there is just one agent, there are, objectively, no normative aspects to his interactions with stuff at all. He can imagine that there are of course, but any normativity stemming from those beliefs would be of a completely different nature than that which stems from ownership.

3) I just don't understand this. What does it mean to have a duty to refrain from X, if doing X doesn't constitute a breach of that duty? A rejection of what alternative? You say it creates a title, whilst my point is just that it doesn't -- titles are a relational matter, and if there is no group that's excluded from ownership, there is just no content to saying that the group now owns the pile of gold. If you want to say that to manipulate the pile the group must, as a practical matter, believe that it is not doing anything wrong by manipulating it -- that's firstly not even true as a practical matter, the group can sin and then do penance before its God, or something; secondly conceptually believing you are not doing anything wrong does not entail believing you have a right, you can also believe that there are just no normative aspects to the situation, which is just what I would believe.

If I encounter something, and it looks unowned, the correct appraisal is that the property status of that thing is ambiguous. It could even be ontically ambiguous. The disambiguation will only occur when there is a rival claimant, and only then would normative aspects appear.

[Bacchus]

To put it another way, whilst I am the only person in the world, there is no good reason I can give for dividing the universe into "my property" and "not my property". There is stuff I happened to interact with, and stuff I have not yet interacted with. There is no good reason to curtail my interactions with stuff, nor is there any reason to justify them. To be sure, I could come up with any number of arbitrary reasons to do both, but those reasons would be just that -- arbitrary. I could reassign 'property rights' at a whim, choosing to play different 'variants' in my interactions with the universe. Today I can't touch anything that's red. Tomorrow I only eat insects. That's not ownership, that's whimsy. Something entirely different and unwhimsical happens when another person appears on the horizon. If you want to call a robinson's arbitrary variants 'property rights', you have to offer some other name for the non-arbitrary propositions about what two people ought and oughtn't do to each other's stuff. If you believe such propositions exist, of course, but I'm sure that you do.

[Aiwansau]

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