@jlou I do not unconditionally approve of contracts to purchase groceries, especially if all the groceries are provided by one producer such that you can only starve if you don't buy from it.
Consent goes as far as the outside option goes. If the outside option is death, consent is meaningless.
I agree, but that is a criticism of monopolies not of capitalism per se. Many pro-capitalist thinkers are anti-monopolist. The anti-monopolist argument, by itself, doesn’t philosophically justify abolishing capitalism. The alternative to any particular employment contract isn’t death because there are multiple employers.
To rule out capitalism decisively, the argument must be that employment itself inherently violates workers’ inalienable human rights
@jlou I am skeptical by default of arguments that rely on human rights, because it takes a state to enforce rights. To make an argument against employment from human rights is to argue that the state should ban employment. And that's an absurdity. States are value-extraction machines, and it will never be in their interest to ban the institutions that enable value extraction.
Human rights don’t need a state. Human rights are a moral concept. How they ought to be protected is another question altogether.
Construing the employment contract’s abolition as a ban is misunderstanding the situation. The state’s legal system is the one that creates the employment contract. There are no factual transfers of possession that correspond to the legal transfers of property in an employment contract. Abolishing the employment contract is liberating.
@jlou Rights look good on paper, but the argument is not complete without the matter of enforcement. I don't oppose capitalism out of an abstract commitment to human rights. I oppose capitalism because it makes people's lives worse.
Employment contracts are no more, no less state-enforced than any other kind of contract. I don't get that part.
Making peoples’ lives worse = violating peoples’ rights and/or reducing their freedom
The state enforces the employers’ ownership of the firm’s whole product despite the whole product being in the workers’ de facto possession and control rather than labor being in the employer’s de facto possession. This is a mismatch between contractual and factual transfers. Here, the state enforces a contract as if it had been fulfilled despite it being unfulfillable even in principle.
Gun violence violates people’s right to life. What constitutes making people’s lives worse depends on the moral framework.
I don’t see how people’s moral rights are necessarily being trampled always.
You’re conflating the state’s system of rights with moral rights. The two concepts are different.
The state can violate people’s rights and it does so quite frequently. Anti-state arguments often appeal to rights arguments based on lack of consent to the social contract to delegitimize the state.
Well, I just don’t see why you believe that rights have to be enforced by the state. If I protect someone from violence, surely, I’ve protected their rights, but I’m not the state. Moral rights can fail to be enforced, and still be valid.
what you could oppose = you have a right to overrule
Consent is a consideration from rights-based deontological ethics. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy defines rights as:
“Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.”
What would it mean for consent to be primitive here?
Rights aren’t a primitive notion. They’re always derived from moral principles. Also, there are rights that are non-transferable even with consent, so consent doesn’t capture all rights.
In metaethics, there are 3 types of ethical theories: rights-based/deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethics. Consent is from the rights-based/deontological tradition. There is no consent-focused ethical theory that isn’t rights-based.
@jlou “Consent is primitive” in this context means that the notion of a right is defined in terms of consent. For example, “one has a right to X if one's absence of consent for not-X compels others not to deprive one of X” is a definition of rights in terms of consent.
(It is an objectionable definition, but i'm just giving an example)
One could then define consent in terms of further primitive notions, or take consent itself as a primitive.
Yeah I don’t see how this isn’t a rights-based system as it has a conception of rights. Rights aren’t primitive. The primitive notion is moral principles. Rights are established with a moral argument from these moral principles.
Rights can be violated though. The existence of a right doesn’t necessarily compel anything from immoral or amoral actors. This suggestion doesn’t seem to handle inalienable rights, which are rights that can’t be given up or transferred even with consent.
Yeah it does. Non-rights-based ethical systems like consequentialism have no concept of rights whatsoever.
The ethical system I advocate derives the rights it argues for from moral principles. You could just as easily call it responsibility-based because it centers personal responsibility. It would lead to the same conclusion regardless of whether you emphasize rights or responsibility principles.
Those are legal or institutional rights not moral ones, which is what I meant. These arguments claim having a certain set of institutional/legal rights enforced leads to better consequences such as increased happiness. With rights-based, I mean deontological ethics. I used this because it seemed more intuitive. Consent is a deontological paradigm. Committed consequentialists override consent if it leads to better consequences.
Neither of us seems to believe rights are primitive.
A deontological theory without inalienable rights would have a hard time criticizing self-sale contracts, non-democratic governance and coverture marriage contracts. It would be hard to critique capitalism because you’d have no objection to workers selling their voting rights in firms and any organization to the highest bidder.
Workers consent to the employment contract with their particular employer. Labor monopsony is solvable with unionization like capitalist Nordic countries.
@jlou Under the gold standard for consent, it is specific, informed and reversible. Self-sale and coverture require one to unconditionally give away all rights forever: not specific, informed or reversible. They cannot be validly consented to.
Even supposing the argument against the sale of voting rights failed, it is only concentration of power that creates the mutual incentives for such a sale. Economic egalitarianism = the sale ceases to be mutually beneficial even if morally permissible.
In a self-sale contract, you relinquish your labor rights for your working lifetime but retain your right to life, etc. Irreversibility isn’t unique to self-sale contracts. For instance, transferring material property is also irreversible, as the purchaser can transform it or refuse to sell it back. This argument doesn’t rule out self-sale in all cases. After a self-sale, the person can still buy themselves back. Inalienable rights actually rule out these abhorrent contracts.
There are still incentives to engage in voting rights transfers, even in egalitarian circumstances, as a risk reduction through diversification strategy or because the seller doesn’t get much value out of their individual voting rights. Even if you start out egalitarian, without inalienability, rights will eventually concentrate and accumulate resulting in an inegalitarian situation. The only way to truly prevent an inegalitarian situation is non-transferability of rights.
Of course there would be mutually beneficial incentives. I buy your voting rights and you get paid. Seems mutually beneficial to me.
Do you have any evidence to support the claim that no buyer would be able to afford any sellers price? That’s a pretty strong claim.
@jlou Social aversion to concentration of power.
When you start buying votes, that draws skeptical looks. Other people's voting rights have a social cost that no one's willing to pay.
If you don't have inbuilt social mechanisms against the concentration of power, if political power is just another commodity that can be bought and sold without raising eyebrows, you don't have an economically egalitarian society.
Why would there be a social aversion if there is nothing morally wrong with selling voting rights?
“If you don't have inbuilt social mechanisms against the concentration of power, if political power is just another commodity that can be bought and sold without raising eyebrows, you don't have an economically egalitarian society.”
Exactly, inalienable rights are essential to economic egalitarianism.
I’ll concede that violations of social etiquette constitute social aversion. However, there are problems that make this limited in its effectiveness at preserving egalitarianism.
1. Social etiquette violations don’t merit as strong of a response as moral rights’ violation.
2. Social etiquettes are difficult to preserve in the presence of strong economic incentives for breaking them.
3. What is economically incentivized transforms culture.
@jlou Under egalitarianism, political parity is valued roughly equally by all agents, i.e. even if the agent who valued it the lowest were to trade it with the one who valued it the highest, the surplus would be very low.
Social norms impose a high transaction cost, higher even than the surplus. Thus the transaction is not mutually beneficial at any price point.
I could just as easily come up with an alternative narrative where individuals don’t value political parity that highly due to the initial equal distribution of voting rights, they can expect other voters to have similar interests. By the time the attacker has bought up a large share of voting rights, it’s too late to do anything.
Also, you don’t know that social norms would create transaction costs higher than the benefit to the attacker. You’re speculating. That isn’t evidence.
I’m not convinced that social norms are sufficient. Trying to accrue power through purchasing voting rights is a kind of fraud from a moral point of view.
Assuming away the problem doesn’t solve it.
@jlou It's definitely fraud if it happens under the table (and the social cost involves keeping the transaction secret even as the payment visibly takes place). And fraud spoils consent (it deprives others of the ability to make an informed decision).
If it happens openly, it's not necessarily fraudulent but it invites retaliation (withdrawal of cooperation).
No we don’t. You have no criticism of capitalism. What you advocate, if it were possible, would evolve back to capitalism.
Fabio G.
J Lou