Fabio G.@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.
J LouThe 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.”
@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.
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.
@jlou Of course there would still be incentives, but not mutually beneficial ones. Under egalitarianism, no seller would be willing to sell at any price point that any buyer were willing to pay. This is all assuming no circumstances invalidating consent (fraud, coercion, obfuscation, overreach).
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.
@jlou Why wouldn't there be a social aversion even if there is nothing morally wrong with selling voting rights? Breaches of etiquette are morally fine yet socially skeevy. Social norms are not the same thing as morality.
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 Reciprocally, from a level playing field the incentives are small enough that social norms keep them harmless.
@magitweeter source?
@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.
@jlou That's a silly idea. Consent is reversible. There's no such thing as “too late” for a significant mass of voters to take back their voting rights.
You can’t simply take back the voting rights if you sold them. They belong to the person who bought them. You’ve to buy new voting rights. It essentially makes governance into a corporation. Inalienable rights say that such sales are immoral.
@jlou Voting rights are an institutional fiction that is only preserved with consent. When consent is violated (such as when one actor tries to appropriate power by purchasing vast amounts of votes), the members are free to rearrange the institution to restore consent.
How is consent violated in that situation though? All the sales of voting rights were consensual.
@magitweeter wouldn’t they be violating the terms of those voting rights sales if they decided to ignore those legitimate transactions?
@jlou Nonconsensual contracts are void.
We're talking about an attacker trying to purchase a decisive share of the votes. This would not happen in the open because the attacker would not risk social retaliation. Thus it would happen under the table, hence violating informed consent.
I don’t think you have to have knowledge about every transaction that is happening behind the scenes to have informed consent.
I don’t see this couldn’t be over the table. The attacker could enter negotiations with each vote-seller than announce when a deal with all of them is secured
@jlou When it comes to a socially binding vote, yeah, information is paramount because the goal is social good. It's why manipulability is such a concern in social choice theory.
People would be alarmed that someone were going around trying to negotiate others' voting rights. This would carry an enormous risk of retaliation.
You’re mixing utilitarian considerations with deontological ones. For the pure deontologist, there is no conception of social good beyond protecting people’s rights. From the point of view of consent, there is nothing wrong with consensually exchanging voting rights in secret.
@magitweeter Selling voting rights is fraudulent for inalienable rights reasons. If you ignore those arguments, I disagree with your view that it violates informed consent. Voting rights are basically like voting shares when they’re alienable. You don’t necessarily need to know how many other shares someone has to be able to consent to selling your shares.
@jlou You have no moral argument against the sale of voting rights, because you've said that manipulation of a vote by distributing option contracts is admissible to you, and that is materially equivalent to the purchase of voting rights.
Giving people assets whose value will change, if a certain policy is enacted, is not equivalent to paying them to vote a certain way. You have to give people an economic interest in those ventures.
If this proves to be a serious attack against the system, I would just use a voting system that takes into account how coordinated agents are. I don’t see the issue with using such a voting system.
@jlou That's what an option contract does: it lets the holder buy an economic interest in the venture. Venture becomes unprofitable = the option becomes worthless. For the holder to cash in, the venture has to stay profitable, thus the holder is economically interested in the outcome of the vote.
@magitweeter yeah I understand. You’d have to give a large portion of the population these options depending on how popular the policy is without manipulation. I also think another mitigation a system can have is to have elements of sortition as well.
@jlou Of course, but the point is that you don't have a moral argument against that type of manipulation. “Very expensive” ≠ “fraudulent”.
@magitweeter what I mean by selling voting rights is trading them like shares not having certain economic interests that cause you to vote a certain way. I do have moral objection to these types of attack, but it just isn’t that it is fraudulent. It’s a false equivalence to suggest that both situations are equivalent.
@jlou Materially, they are equivalent. A sufficiently wealthy interest group can engineer a financial instrument that lets them chase any sufficiently favorable electoral outcome. If this type of arrangement is permissible, then full institutional capture is permissible.
I disagree that they are equivalent because I can treat them morally differently by giving different moral reasons for why they’re invalid.
I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.
@jlou Yes, you've said you don't regard it as morally equivalent. They are materially equivalent because their material outcomes are the same: an exchange of a vote for an economic benefit.
«I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.» I'm not following. Would you clarify?
@magitweeter just to be clear, I’m anti-capitalist. I’m arguing that consent vs coercion isn’t the right framing for arguing against capitalism. In that context, I was pointing out capitalism+Georgism+UBI could enable capitalist employment to be voluntary because it eliminates the work or starve aspect.
@jlou I'm aware. I don't think there's anything automatically wrong about labor contracts as such. The problem here is that labor contracts are embedded in a greater system that is founded down to its core on violations of consent. I've been trying to point out that Georgist/UBI institutions are capturable. That means an attacker can impose their will against the polity's consent.
okay, that is a major disagreement. Wage labor/employment contracts are always invalid and inherently violate workers inalienable rights to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor and to workplace democracy. The alternative is individual or joint self-employment as in a worker cooperative.
Going back to the quibble about consent. In the hypothetical, we would be starting with a roughly equal distribution of wealth. I was focused on critiquing labor contracts
@jlou I have no idea what “the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of one's labor” even means. It does not appeal to my moral intuitions in any sense.
@magitweeter It means the property rights and liabilities that workers create in production. Those ought to belong jointly to the workers in the firm. This inalienable right entails all firms must be worker co-ops to be morally valid.
The moral intuition is that the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of your labor is just the principle that legal responsibility ought to be assigned to the de facto responsible party applied to property.
Source: https://youtu.be/fvWJ10ONPkY
David Ellerman on Mistakes and Metaphors in Economics
@jlou I haven't watched the whole video, but the argument that the presenter seems to be setting up is not one that's intended to address one's moral intuitions. (And i have no moral intuitions about “legal responsibility”, no).
Regardless, i'm interested in your moral stance on a setup where all productive firms are worker co-ops with no productive capital while all capital goods are owned by private individuals. No labor contracts, only rental contracts for capital goods.
@magitweeter so you don’t think that the person who is factually response for a result ought to be the one held legally or institutionally responsible? For example, if someone commits theft, shouldn’t the person who actually carried out the theft be responsible rather than some innocent party?
I think a system with a worker co-op mandate and leased capital is fine, but it would need social ownership of the means of production through venture communes to make getting start up capital easier.
@jlou More accurately, legal or institutional responsibility is not how i go about framing ethical problems.
I think you may be conceding the admissibility of an arrangement that is materially equivalent to labor contracts under a sort of state capitalism.
The notion of responsibility is core to morality because it is what distinguishes moral agents from moral patients. The notion of justice is people are held responsible for the results to their own actions. Do you think it is acceptable for one person to commit a murder and an innocent person to be held responsible by the community?
It isn’t equivalent to capitalism because workers get a democratic say.
@jlou Responsibility, yes, just not legal or institutional responsibility. No, a community is not the same thing as an institution.
Workers would get as much of a democratic say as the rental contract said they get.
Communities can have institutions, such as mechanisms for democratic self-management and accountability for results of intentional human actions. If such an institution exists, then principles of justice are relevant.
You didn’t answer my question about who ought to be held responsible.
A “capital rental” contract that denies workers’ democratic rights in the workplace is not a capital rental contract; it’s an employment contract.