Mastodawn

@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.

There are no capitalist owners once the employment contract is abolished.

Having one org in common wouldn’t significantly down weight you. The only way to be reduced significantly is to have all orgs and assets in common

@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 Oh, that's not the claim. I don't hold that “all” labor contracts are nonconsensual. My take is that concentration of institutional power is eventually founded on nonconsent. “Capitalism with stipulations” (UBI/voting weighted by coordination/any other technocratic solutions) doesn't solve the core problem that people do not consent to their own oppression.

@jlou In the long run i think we don't have much material disagreement.

Even ethically, my theory of consent may just be equivalent to your theory of inalienable rights. “Rights may be alienated if and only if the holder's consent is not violated” is almost tautological.

Our only real disagreement may be that my notion of consent seems wider and stronger than yours. For example, you neglect the role of specificity and information, and you neglect how democratic institutions require consent.

Inalienable rights, as opposed to alienable rights, are rights that can’t be given up or transferred even with fully-informed consent. Inalienable rights are a subset of rights not just a synonym of human rights just to be clear.

Where did I disagree with democratic institutions requiring consent? Consent is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for validity of an arrangement.

@jlou Upthread you postulated certain kinds of nonconsensual institutions as democratic. You also denied that voters' consent requires them to be fully informed.

I didn’t claim non-consensual institutions are democratic as far as I’m aware. Non-democratic institutions like employment contracts can be consensual. Full consent doesn’t mean perfect information. Some information should be private unless it relates to the consent. It seems more straightforward to argue in terms of inalienable rights rather than escalating standards of consent until morally ruled-out institutions are no longer seen as voluntary.

@jlou The gold standard for consent requires perfect information in the game-theoretic sense. You can't consent to playing a game unless you know what game you're playing. In other words, you don't consent to an association unless you can reasonably expect that your counterparts want to cooperate with you, not just abuse your goodwill.

This looks to you like “escalating” standards of consent because your notion of consent was weaker and narrower than mine to begin with.

so no privacy? That seems incompatible with consent for data privacy.

I think you can consent to transactions with parties you don’t trust.

@jlou You can consent, of course, but fraud and obfuscation are violations of consent.

Transparency is already held as a meaningful value at an instutitional level. Conflicts of interest, especially undisclosed ones, are already frowned upon. For some types of transactions, information trumps privacy. I'm not proposing any sort of escalation of consent here.

No fraud obviously can’t be a complete assumption because the inalienable rights argument entails that the employment contract is fraud from a moral standpoint.

Just because you don’t know every detail of your counterparty’s business doesn’t mean you can’t consent to a transaction. I agree transparency is an important value, but it only becomes relevant to consent when the information is relevant to the consent. Obviously, agreed on conflicts of interest being a problem.

@jlou (I'm very confused by the first paragraph.)

Of course we're talking about information relevant to consent. We're not talking about omniscience or anything like that. Conflicts of interest are relevant to consent. Voting manipulation schemes are relevant to consent.

@magitweeter It isn’t vote manipulation if selling your voting rights is allowed. Hostile takeovers are allowed today with alienable voting rights.

The first point is very important. Validity = voluntary and non-fraudulent. Why would non-fraudulent have to be listed separately if it were included in voluntary?

The employment contract treats de facto persons as non-persons. A person can’t fulfill the contractual role of a non-person no matter how much they consent.

@jlou 1a) This has nothing to do with selling your voting rights; 1b) a lot of nonconsensual things are allowed today, so what? Present-day institutions are not, in any meaningful way, founded on consent. That's why i criticize them.

2) That's your framing, not mine. Your question to answer, not mine.

3) Framed differently: a labor contract that doesn't meet a standard of consent is invalid, no matter how much one party claims the other consented to it.

1a. Of course, it does.

1b. I agree that various institutions’ today could be non-consensual. There’s a moral question about that. There’s also a rhetorical question about how to frame these arguments for heavily propagandized people. In both cases, taking the stronger stance that some contracts are invalid even with fully-informed consent is best.

I agree that the concentration of institutional power under capitalism and the historical distribution of wealth under capitalism is non-consensual. The argument about consent vs coercion arguments is strictly focused on criticisms of wage labor that try to argue it is non-voluntary to rule it out. I think those are flawed. A focus on inalienable rights is a better philosophy to critique wage labor specifically.

@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