Mastodawn

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.

@jlou That's a silly idea. The US constitution recognizes a right to bear arms. It is the existence of the right, not its violation, that makes people's lives worse, through unfettered gun violence.

Gun violence violates people’s right to life. What constitutes making people’s lives worse depends on the moral framework.

@jlou Yes, which is why basing opposition to capitalism on human rights is a silly idea. Someone's rights are always being trampled one way or the other.

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.

@jlou “Moral rights” are the very thing the existence of which i'm questioning when i say rights have to be enforced by the state.

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.

@jlou The concept of consent is not based on rights, to the best of my understanding. To argue from consent is not to argue from rights.

@magitweeter This is incorrect. Of course, consent is based on rights. Consent is about alienable rights. By consenting you give another party the right to do something you’ve got the alienable right to do.

@jlou Consent is about power. It is to forgo opposition to what you could oppose. A violation of consent occurs when you're denied the power to meaningfully oppose. Rights are not involved in it.

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.”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/

#deontology #deontoloigical #ethics #philosophy

Rights (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

@jlou Sure, you can frame it like that, but all you're doing is defining rights in terms of consent. There's no particular reason why rights should be the primitive notion and consent the derived notion, instead of the opposite.

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.

@jlou That the notion of a right is definable within the system doesn't make it “rights-based”. It is consent-based because consent is the primary focus. One could forget about “rights” and the system would lead to the same material conclusions. You can frame it as a matter of “rights”, but that makes no essential difference.

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.

@jlou I think you're confused. Consequentialism is not only compatible with a theory of rights, it can even be based on rights. In consequentialism, too, rights can be defined downstream of consequences (“it's better for people to have these rights”) or vice versa (“the better outcome is the one where rights are less violated”).

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.

@jlou “Rights-based” is a misleading way to describe deontology. Deontology is often duty-based: rights can be defined downstream from duties, as what others have the duty not to infringe. What appears as a “right” is a matter of framing, not necessarily the core ethical concept. Structurally, rights and duties are dual to each other.

@jlou More to the point: if i adopt a moral framework without inalienable rights, that's a loss to your argument, not mine. My argument against capitalism follows from consent, not inalienable rights.

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.

@jlou Reversibility is part of the gold standard but not an absolute requirement. Consent for surgery, say, is obviously not reversible, but it compensates by being thoroughly specific and informed.

«After a self-sale, the person can still buy themselves back» This misunderstands reversibility. Withdrawal of consent is enough to impose on the counterpart a duty of restitution. Merely the opportunity to “buy yourself back” does not entail reversibility.

Yeah, withdrawing consent from the self-sale would be a breach of contract and would be allowed with liability for breaching.

Without a theory of inalienable self-determination, I don’t see how selling labor by the lifetime is different from selling property. Labor is specific. Inalienability of labor is what demonstrates the moral invalidity of this contract. If you discard that, there doesn’t seem to be a strong objection from a deontological perspective.

@jlou “allowed with liability for breaching” = not reversible.

“Labor” is not specific enough. Get hired for a specific set of tasks for a specific term, and then it starts getting specific enough. What is the expected output, what are the risks, how are they managed? That's closer to specific and informed.

“Anything i want you to do for the rest of your life” can't be validly consented to.

Today’s marriage contracts have similarly complex termination procedures. You can lose half of your assets potentially in a divorce, yet marriage is consensual. I don’t think your argument works in all conceivable cases against self-sale.

The inalienable rights case against self-sale explains what’s special about it and employment that makes them wrong. Inalienable rights were also used in the feminist movement to argue against unjust marriage contracts like coverture marriage

@jlou Marriage has a termination procedure. Self-sale as you're describing it has only breach-of-contract impositions. They are not equally reversible.

The more you try to paint self-sale as “reversible”, the more it resembles just a very general long-term labor contract, the less “abhorrent” it appears and the less you have a case for inalienable rights.

Breach of contract is a termination procedure.

A contract where the master gets 100% of the positive and negative fruits of your labor for life is abhorrent.

I haven’t even made the case for inalienable rights yet in this discussion.

You’ve conceded that wage labor contracts aren’t objectionable on consent grounds, which is the point I’m making. Consent vs. coercion is not the right way to critique the employment contract and capitalism.

@jlou That's because the problem with capitalism isn't the employment contract, it's the concentration of power that drives consent invalid.

ok, so you admit that you have no criticism of the basic institutions of capitalism per se just a criticism of concentration of power? If concentration of power could be reduced without abolishing capitalism, that’d be fine then. How is this anti-capitalist when you have no opposition to the role of the capitalist?

Consider a well-off software engineer, a worker. How is them taking on a new high-paying role coercive?

@jlou Capitalism is the concentration of power.

The economic rights that underlie capitalism, the ownership of vast claims to resource flows resulting from other people's labor, cannot be enforced except by the state (a monopoly of force). Concentration of power lies at the core.

“The economic rights that underlie capitalism, the ownership of vast claims to resource flows resulting from other people's labor.”

The describes the employment contract, and hints at the labor theory of property critique of it.

Concentration of power existed prior to capitalism.

Concentration of power is bad obviously, but there are institutional problems that cause this concentration of power to occur in the first place.

@jlou Not just the employment contract but the housing rental contract too. Abolish jobs and you still have to abolish rent, else the landowners will eventually own all the resource flows.

Sure, Georgism. But Georgism has its own problems. Namely, it's institutionally regulated and susceptible of regulatory capture.

@magitweeter Landlords violate people’s rights in a different way. Landlords claim ownership of that which isn’t the fruits of anyone’s labor, but the justification for property is getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor. They are essentially appropriating what should be common value.

Your system allows people to just buy voting rights. Georgism, at least, blocks that.

@jlou Does it now?

@magitweeter Georgism doesn’t exist now nor does a UBI exist now. My point is that your consent-based critiques can be resolved with capitalism+Georgism+UBI.

@jlou Let me rephrase: is it actually the case that Georgism forbids the sale of voting rights?

@magitweeter Yes. It does for political voting rights.

@jlou And how is that prohibition enforced?

@magitweeter ballot secrecy, anonymity and unprovability together with identity verification and/or dyeing the voters’ hand after voting to prevent the same person from voting again.

@jlou That prevents fulfillment from being effectively verified, but it doesn't prevent one party signing a contract against several sellers that is conditional on the outcome of the vote. To ban that type of contract it takes laws, hence law enforcement, hence a state.

such a contract would be invalid and unenforceable.

@jlou Why invalid?

@magitweeter it’s trying to manipulate the outcome of an election by having voters commit to voting a certain way. Such commitments are impossible because a person’s beliefs are their own. They can’t sell control over them even if they want to

@jlou It's not about commitment. Consider a call option for a venture that is known to be profitable only in the event that a certain policy is defeated at the vote. The holder of the option is free to vote whichever way, but has an economic incentive to vote against the policy. The issuer gets to influence the vote without making anyone commit to any particular vote.

@magitweeter That would probably be fine. Voting in your own economic self-interest as a citizen or worker is fine. That being said, I’m interested in voting systems that take into account how coordinated agents are and mutual interests. These hypothetical voting systems would factor correlated interests when aggregating votes to determine a winner.

@jlou That sounds like a violation of anonymity.

(In the social choice sense: the system does not care who's casting each vote. All voters are treated the same. Shuffle which ballots come from which voters and the outcome remains the same.)

@magitweeter you’d have to use cryptography and other modern computer science techniques (e.g. zero knowledge proofs or secure multi-party computation) to ensure anonymity is preserved.

@jlou I stress that i'm talking about anonymity in the social choice sense. Under anonymity, the outcome of the vote doesn't depend on who's casting each vote, only on the aggregate contents of the ballots. If the outcome is different depending on the voters' social positions beyond the ballot box, the system is not anonymous.

@magitweeter okay, but why is that a bad thing? I meant anonymity in the computer science sense.

@jlou Because a lack of anonymity entails a power disparity. Power disparity can be abused, which goes against the goal of political equality if there is such a goal. What's the upside for the underweighted individuals to consent to such a vote?

Another concern is that the institution that sets the weights can be captured and thereby distort the vote in favor of private interests.

“Because a lack of anonymity entails a power disparity.”
Not necessarily. Groups that are economically coordinated have power over individuals. This voting system considers economic coordination. Two coordinated agents with shared economic interests voting is morally more like one person voting, unlike two completely atomized agents.

“Another concern is that the institution that sets the weights can be captured.”
Sure, we’d have to have mitigations against this potential attack.

@magitweeter I don’t think individuals would be underweighted. One example of how this could work. It’s more like when we count each pair of individuals. We’ll take into consideration how economically coordinated such as with assets common to both. If they are more coordinated, they will be treated more as one person, but if they are less coordinated they’d be treated more as separate people. The economist, Glen Weyl, has suggested quadratic voting, which could be a substrate for this weighting.

@jlou You're talking about a weighted voting system. When all individuals are not equally weighted, some are weighted lower relative to the others, hence “underweighted”.

That the weights within the voting system are intended to compensate disparities outside the voting system is a separate matter.

@magitweeter it’s not weighting individuals. It’s across pairs of individuals. In quadratic voting this looks like whether the votes across the pair, person a and b, are counted as either

1. sqrt(a) + sqrt(b)
2. sqrt(a + b)
3. something in between

Basically, we down weight pairs that are coordinated. Most people will have roughly equal voting power because most people will only have some assets in common with other people, and there will be people that have no assets in common with.

@jlou I dread the consequences of a coalition of owners/managers, landlords, small business owners and ideologically-invested individuals coming into power and reforming the weighting system so that, say, being part of a labor union means you're coordinated with your fellow workers and the weight of all your votes collapses, ushering in a dictatorship of capital.

Having one organization in common wouldn’t cause significant down-weighting. The only way to get significant down-weighting is if the pair has all organizations and assets in common. There would be no such thing as small business owners because the employment contract would be abolished, voting shares would always belong to the workers, and all firms would be structured as democratic worker co-ops. Landlords wouldn’t exist either because land would be commonly-owned.

If all workers in a worker co-op were also unionized, this wouldn’t affect the votes’ outcome since only workers hold voting rights. It’s only when a specific group of workers unionize separately from the entire body of workers like managers that this weighting would be relevant.

@jlou I'm assuming a larger-scale electoral system that the entire polity (owners as well as workers) is part of. Of course a union has its own internal democracy. I'm not talking about that one.

@jlou You're losing track. We're talking about capitalism+Georgism+UBI because you said that would solve the problem of labor having no outside option. Throughout this line of argument capitalism has not been abolished.

I thought we agreed on that. I was showing the flaw in the consent-based position by pointing out vote selling.

The claim is that all employment contracts are non-consensual. I gave an example of a well-off software engineer employee. It doesn’t seem non-consensual. If all workers receive a UBI, they have alternatives, so even if we accept the work or starve argument, solving the problem doesn’t mean abolishing capitalism.
You need inalienable rights to rule out capitalism

@jlou Of course, and the system that manages the mitigations can be captured, so there's second-degree mitigations to protect the mitigations. And i assume third-degree mitigations to protect those, and so on. Turtles all the way down.

@magitweeter you assumed that

mitigations → new system