59 replies to this topic

[A941]

What do you think about animal rights?
-What do you think about Specieism?
-What do you think about the ethics of Peter Singer?
-Is eating meat right?

[woly]

In a nutshell, eating meat is perfectly moral because animals have no rights at all. Rights are only relevant to a species that has the capability of a volitional consciousness.

[Athanasios]

I lean much more toward a Kantian view rather than Utilitarian. Utilitarianism in practice is easily broken with horrendous results. The lines at which one starts or stops any moral action seems to be largely arbitrary, the rewards have diminishing returns and, in policy, corruption and manipulation leads to tyranny of majority at best. I always thought I would likely be in the minority with this stance here at ImmInst but who knows.

So with that in mind, I agree with Peter Singer in quite a few of his arguments but usually not to the degree or method of application. Likewise, I think animal's pleasure and pain should not be outright dismissed but humans are exceptional and should not be of equal consideration. It is hard to get good accurate information on Singer due to media influence, so I am not sure where the line of disagreement is drawn.

I do think it is alright to eat meat. I do think that animal treatment could be better in some industries and still be quite viable.

I am adding this paper 'Kant on the moral standing of non-human animals' to provide another viewpoint. A clarification of my position is essentially laid out on pages 9 and 10:

PDF via Google docs:
http://docs.google.c...23nstrTiTlwDJDg

Plain HTML:
http://74.125.113.13...O...hl=en&gl=us

PDF download:
http://ecophilosophe.....f Animals.pdf

Edited by cnorwood, 31 March 2010 - 03:57 PM.

[Alex Libman]

What do you think about animal rights?

I am a vocal opponent [2] of "animal rights" on the grounds that there in no rational basis for them, as there is a rational basis for Human Rights, and that attributing (or withholding) rights on the basis of arbitrary emotion has very dangerous consequences.

-What do you think about Specieism?

I am very much against it. It's a very large universe out there, and new species of Rational Economic Actors may be created even on this planet due to genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, brain virtualization, long-term consequences of divergences in human evolution, etc. Any living entity that can reason, pull its own economic weight, and respect the rights of others is worthy of self-ownership.

-What do you think about the ethics of Peter Singer?

He is a psychopath that (in a pragmatic analysis of the consequences of his ideology) can make the likes of Hitler seem harmless in comparison.

-Is eating meat right?

I am a strict vegan for health and tax resistance reasons - I only consume nutritionally-desirable plants that can be grown by agorists in New Hampshire. I also consider animal products to be a very inefficient use of agricultural resources that would be far less popular without all the subsidies and propaganda benefits the meat, dairy, and fishing industries receive from the state.

I recognize the right of other self-owning entities to own animals that are incapable of self-ownership as absolute property with no legal restrictions of any kind (though public opinion and ostracism would create some level of disincentive against the extreme forms of cruelty).

I consider human use of animals for their emotional satisfaction to be a moral flaw to some degree, no matter if it's benevolent or sadistic. (But note that my argument against pet ownership is mostly satire.)

Edited by Alex Libman, 31 March 2010 - 05:57 PM.

[Athanasios]

Alex, in this context is your economic actor equivalent to a moral agent?

[JLL]

In a nutshell, eating meat is perfectly moral because animals have no rights at all. Rights are only relevant to a species that has the capability of a volitional consciousness.

I agree.

Though this leaves the question of whether it's moral to eat people who are not rational actors, such as braindead people or newborn babies.

[Alex Libman]

Alex, in this context is your economic actor equivalent to a moral agent?

Possibly, depending on whose standards of morality -- objective or otherwise -- you are willing to go by. If your moral values are those of apes then you will find that apes are "moral agents" and humans aren't. To be perfectly honest, the stench of Kant on this thread is so unbearable that I am assuming the worst...

Of course moral values constrained by evolutionary pragmatism will inevitably recognize the value of the things that facilitate civilization: materialism, empiricism, free competition of ideas (i.e. libertarianism), rational self-interest, individual self-ownership (i.e. capitalism), and so on.

A "moral agent" may decide that suicide-bombing you in the name of Allah or Stalin is a moral thing to do. A "rational economic actor" is naturally bound by the Non-Aggression Principle - a natural "social contract" that all "rational economic actors" are subject to on the basis of their self-interest.

Though this leaves the question of whether it's moral to eat people who are not rational actors, such as braindead people or newborn babies.

You can eat anything that you can own as outright property (with the guardianship of children and sick people being a substantially different concept). This includes your own body, or you can voluntarily transfer the ownership of a part or whole of your body to somebody else (i.e. consenting cannibalism - something that libertarians probably shouldn't ever bring up, not even as a thought experiment, but we just can't help ourselves).

As explained on the other threads [2], all potential rational economic actors have a Right to Life and the Right to Emancipation, while other aspects of full self-ownership (Rights to Liberty and Property) are deferred to their parents / guardians until they reach maturity. A person who loses one's sanity as an adult can become a dependent of a spouse or another contractually-empowered individual or charity (and that's something reasonable people should plan ahead for), and even a mostly-brain-dead person (ex. Terri Schiavo) has a hypothetical potential of regaining her self-ownership if a miraculous scientific break-through can suddenly be made. But this doesn't apply to animals, because no species of animals known to modern science other than us humans has the neurological capacity to possibly achieve the sentience quotient necessary to be a rational economic actor.

Of course a pre-human from X generations in the past would have rights that we should recognize if we somehow managed to meet through time travel (the rough value of X is still up for debate), as would a species hybrid who is sufficiently human. The standards for emancipation (i.e. Rights to Liberty and Property) should be the same as they are for human beings, and I would agree that we should err on the side of inclusiveness when it comes to recognizing the Right to Life. If Nim Chimpsky could manage to tie at least a few words together then an argument for his species' Right to Life could be logically considered, but "tickle me nim play" can be simple conditioning and imitation. If the scientists he was "communicating" with were small enough, he could just bite their heads off instead without awareness of any moral wrongdoing.

Edited by Alex Libman, 31 March 2010 - 10:02 PM.

[eternaltraveler]

Don't you think some PDAs would cater to those who have different views on how rights should be assigned including toward non-human animals in an Anarcho-Capitalist society?

[Alex Libman]

We are talking about alleged "animal Rights" here, with Rights being a stone-cold legal concept that should be based on empirical evidence. When someone allegedly violates someone else's Rights then it is a very serious accusation - the "violator" may be deprived of his own Rights to liberty and property (and possibly even life itself if he resists arrest). If you can assign rights to animals because of irrational emotions, then so can anyone else. What gives your belief that animal have rights any more objective validity than someone else's belief that they have the right to force you to obey Hitler, or Stalin, or Allah?

Rejection of "animal Rights" does not mean preventing other people from treating their animals as if they had the same social status as human beings, which is their prerogative. You can crown your kitten the emperor of your house and require that all visitors to your home bow to His Feline Highness accordingly, but that obligation will come from your Property Rights, not any actual "rights" of the kitten. It would be equally your right to put that kitten in the blender if you change your mind - I'm not saying that wouldn't be a terrible thing to do, but not a crime in the legal sense.

You can even move into a charter city where all residents are obligated to treat animals as equals -- any human who fails to play with their pet to its satisfaction is given 10 lashes and a night in the doghouse, and "murdering" a pet gets you the guillotine -- but that would be a voluntary contractual commitment and not an actual law that you can impose on anyone who didn't sign on for it.

[eternaltraveler]

We are talking about alleged "animal Rights" here

no, we are talking about how someone other than yourself could and do derive "rights" from different a different objective foundation than the foundation upon which you draw (I infer one of evolutionary advantage for said society=right?), or more practically, someone could draw upon any foundation whatever (which is the situation today). Said person could strive their best to enforce what rights they perceive objective or not.

It is absolutely irrelevant how "right" your philosophy is. How do you make it work when the very basis of your assumption, PDAs will naturally enforce it, is completely ridiculous. PDAs would naturally enforce whatever it is people decided to pay them to do. Since most people like kittens and children and don't care about objective reality, PDAs would likely punish those who put kittens in blenders and rape their children.

Your system requires the majority to be rational actors. They are not. Many without significant neural modifications are not even capable of being so (with significant neural modifications a hamster is also capable of being so, why not give rights to hamsters based on this potential, or at least place them under a similar protectorate status as children?).

Further, how can you claim absolutely anything at all to be a "crime in the legal sense" when there is no such thing as law aside from what people pay PDAs to enforce and some whimsical philosophical abstractions?

What gives your belief that animal have rights...

I said nothing about my belief.

Edited by eternaltraveler, 01 April 2010 - 02:29 AM.

[eternaltraveler]

btw, welcome to imminst.

[shifter]

How we treat animals also says something about our own character.

I saw a clip of animals in China living in atrocious conditions, then one by one being bashed and then being skinned alive for their fur. Even after they were completely skinned, and tossed on a pile of the previous animals who had been skinned, it was still alive for several minutes before dying. Meanwhile the people involved were having a good laugh whenever the animal resisted.

It would have been next to no trouble to give them adequate housing and stimulation, then give them a lethal injection or another 'humane' way of killing them that is instant and painless before commencing the work. They would probably also have much higher quality skins and fur. But I guess they get off on the misery and pain of others.

If people think animals should not have any rights and the above is acceptable practice, then I feel sorry for them. They may be 'lower' on the food chain, but just like us they have emotions and feelings. If some people are happy torturing them, then I say they have no empathy, possess psychotic tendencies and are disturbing.

And yes, I think its ok to eat meat. We can get what we desire from animals without causing them suffering. And the better the life the animal has led, the better quality product we get in the end whether its meat, wool, fur, milk, eggs etc

[Alex Libman]

How we treat animals also says something about our own character. [...]

You stop short of saying that humans should have their rights violated (confiscation of property, fines, jail, etc) over how they treat their animals, but unfortunately that's where most people will take an argument such as the one you've made. That is a classical example of the magical thinking that is promoted by the modern pro-government religion: the legislative bureaucrats just need to wave a magic wand, and, WHAM, instant Utopia!

The reality is completely opposite: prohibitions have enforcement costs (the first being human liberty), added business overhead costs, the cost of taking otherwise productive members of society and throwing them in prison at tax-victim expense, unintended consequences, moral side-effects (because you stifle the culture of dealing with bad people by non-violent means, like ostracism), and, most important of all, the slippery slope of ever-more-unbound government force!

This question remains unanswered - if your (or the popular vote's) compassion for animals gives them "rights", thereby taking away from the empirically-verifiable Natural Rights of humans, then why can't other people use their emotions and arbitrary whims to impose their subjective standards upon you? What if the majority of people in your city / province / country / continent / planet vote that volcano gods have rights and therefore you must be sacrificed to them for the common good?

Edited by Alex Libman, 02 April 2010 - 08:28 AM.

[EmbraceUnity]

You stop short of saying that humans should have their rights violated (confiscation of property, fines, jail, etc) over how they treat their animals, but unfortunately that's where most people will take an argument such as the one you've made. That is a classical example of the magical thinking that is promoted by the modern pro-government religion: the legislative bureaucrats just need to wave a magic wand, and, WHAM, instant Utopia!

You said putting a cat in the blender would be terrible. If it is terrible surely there must be a reason. Oh right, because they are feeling creatures. Real utilitarians see government as a tool that either helps or harms wellbeing of conscious creatures, depending on the situation. If you argue that laws against cruelty to animals are "holding us back" through terrible enforcement costs, then I'm not so sure I want to know what sort of civilization we are being held back from. One could just as easily argue that laws against cruelty to people are holding back individual liberty. Indeed many types of cruelty, such as harassment, are actually a-ok with "anarcho-capitalists."

[Alex Libman]

(Replying to an earlier post than the one to which I replied in my previous post.)

no, we are talking about how someone other than yourself could and do derive "rights" from different a different objective foundation than the foundation upon which you draw (I infer one of evolutionary advantage for said society=right?), or more practically, someone could draw upon any foundation whatever (which is the situation today). Said person could strive their best to enforce what rights they perceive objective or not.

People who impose their ideas about law on others by force (ex. a gang of Communists coming to "liberate" your property because they think they're entitled to) are criminals unless the lawfulness of their actions can be empirically verified. This naturally leads to a scientific consensus about universal human rights, also known as the Non-Aggression Principle.

Given free competition of ideas (which is what Anarcho-Capitalism is all about), you may initially end up with a split between different voluntary organizations (ex. charter cities, churches, schools of jurisprudence) taking different positions on "animal rights", with people like myself avoiding any legal recognition of such nonsense. Over time, societies that treat animals as property will experience greater economic and especially scientific growth, due to the importance of animals in scientific experiments. The extremist Buddhist cults would experience the greatest drawbacks - they wouldn't even be able to till the soil for farming or build foundations for any buildings for fear of hurting an innocent little earthworm. Some schools of jurisprudence may decide that jailing Michael Vick is a-OK, but if he's smart Michael Vick would live in a place where his dogfighting will be legal, to the further economic benefit of the freer society. Successful ideas (i.e. individual liberty) will spread over time, and the "animal rights" communes will shrink as more and more rational people will choose to leave them.

It is absolutely irrelevant how "right" your philosophy is. How do you make it work when the very basis of your assumption, PDAs will naturally enforce it, is completely ridiculous. PDAs would naturally enforce whatever it is people decided to pay them to do. Since most people like kittens and children and don't care about objective reality, PDAs would likely punish those who put kittens in blenders and rape their children.

Believing that PDA's (Private Defense Agencies) are somehow immune from the meritocratic laws of the marketplace is no different than believing that teaching students that 2 + 2 == 5 would have no consequences for the career of a kindergarten arithmetic teacher. Sure, you might find a few stoner couples somewhere that would hire you, but if they apply the same reasoning skills in all other aspects of their life then they probably wouldn't be able to pay you much. People who hire PDA's are the same way - there'll be a lot more money chasing after the enforcement of good laws that promote economic growth than stupid "laws" that diminish it.

And you must also remember that PDA's live or die on the basis of their reputation - one wrong move and a billion-dollar corporation can find itself financially ruined, nearly-universally ostracized, and surrounded by all the competing PDA's who stand to benefit from their mistake. This will lead to people running the PDA's being very, very careful about the laws they sign on to defend. Would you do business with a company that put Michael Vick in prison for a victimless act that he never contractually promised to not engage in? If you do, then idealistic people like me will ostracize you (or the company you work for until they fire you), and maybe even volunteer some money to raise public awareness of your folly - as competition leads to ever-thinner profit margins most businesses can't afford this kind of a hit. Sure, some "animal rights" nuts would be willing to spend their money to counterbalance our boycott, but frankly most people (and the wealthiest people) in the world will care more about their freedom than they will about punishing Michael Vick - punishing a person for a victimless crime creates no wealth, but it creates an effect of encroaching tyranny. Maybe the same people who want to outlaw dogfighting will want to outlaw meat or boxing next! Thus you fill find freedom-loving individuals fighting for liberty on all fronts (ex. I hate pot, but I still want it legalized) while the prohibitionists will be fragmented into countless different interest groups over what they want to see banned.

Your system requires the majority to be rational actors. They are not.

No, the system I am trying to replace (democracy) makes that assumption. My system is governed by economic laws that reward functional advantage, not demagogues who are able to manipulate voters the best. Even if the majority of people initially support "animal rights", enforcing them will still create economic disadvantages that will make the endeavor self-defeating. Economic reality matters - especially when you can't "tax" people by force in order to get your way!

[...] with significant neural modifications a hamster is also capable of being so, why not give rights to hamsters based on this potential, or at least place them under a similar protectorate status as children? [...]

Because the potential to be a rational economic actor isn't inherent in a hamster any more than it is in every human sperm cell (you know the Monty Python song), or on every blank storage device that may hypothetically store an AI program that is worthy of self-ownership someday, etc. That potential is inherent in a human child, on the other hand, because a human child is very likely to become a rational economic actor if only his negative Rights are protected. A society that fails to attribute the Right to Life and the Right to Emancipation from the point of a likely rational economic actor's survival viability (which at our present level of technology still requires physical autonomy, that is birth) will experience horrendous levels of infanticide and child abuse, likely to a point of complete madness and social collapse. A society that tries to recognize the "potential rights" of every single-celled organism will experience an even greater competitive disadvantage. If someone is able to create a rational economic actor that is based on a hamster then it gains its rights once all of its essential ingredients, not just the ordinary hamster, are in their proper place.

Further, how can you claim absolutely anything at all to be a "crime in the legal sense" when there is no such thing as law aside from what people pay PDAs to enforce and some whimsical philosophical abstractions?

How can you claim the same when in your system there is no such thing as law aside from what power-hungry power monopolies (governments) choose to legislate and enforce, and some magical rituals whereby those governments claim to get their "divine right" to rule from the fraction of the populace that chooses between usually 2 nearly-identical choices every 4 years, with no way to legally enforce any campaign promises after the politicians are elected?

There is no indisputable "god's law", only different human systems for defining laws, and my system is better than your system, which I claim on the basis of the arguments I have made (and will continue to make) throughout this forum, and which I am looking to put to the test by moving to a more libertarian society (if your government ever allows us to establish one, whether it's here in New Hampshire, on the high seas, or anywhere else).

Edited by Alex Libman, 02 April 2010 - 10:30 AM.

[Alex Libman]

You said putting a cat in the blender would be terrible. If it is terrible surely there must be a reason.

Because I subjectively believe that each blender has a soul / feelings, and they fill icky when you do it. (Hey, it's still April Fools Day in Samoa!)

I believe it is terrible in the same sense that extreme anal fisting is terrible, or that Scientology is terrible, or those eating contests where grown men wolf down like 60 hot dogs as fast as they can on national television - bleh! But it doesn't mean I want to outlaw those things... People have a right to be stupid, disgusting, and even sadistic - just as long as they don't violate the rights of other rational economic actors (i.e. human beings). You don't have to like it, you don't have to be friends or do business with those people, but initiating aggression against them is a line that you must not be allowed to cross.

Oh right, because they are feeling creatures.

Once again, you can't base a system of rights on an appeal to emotions. What makes your emotions more valid than the emotions of a person who really truly feels his God wants him to punish abortion doctors, or gay people, or transhumanists?

Putting kittens in blenders is contrary to most people's aesthetics, but outlawing it is demonstrably worse, for the reasons summarized above - and you need to spend more time reading up on all the harmful economic side-effects of such regulation if you don't yet understand it.

You also need to come to terms with the fact that human beings have achieved hegemony over this planet, and all other animals that exist only do so because we allow them to exist. It is human beings that transformed this planet and all creatures on it, especially domesticated pets, which simply cannot exist in the numbers in which they already do without humans tilling the soil and growing a thousand times more calories per acre than a cat would otherwise be able to access. We could just let cats breed indefinitely until this planet is nothing but just a giant kitten factory, but what's the point? We allow cats to exist for human benefit, and we largely pay for their existence. All species fought hard in the evolutionary struggle - we won, and they chose to be domesticated by us. Some tiny minority of humans putting cats in a blender is the price that cats must pay for their continued existence. There may be cats on hundreds of terraformed planets, moons, and space-stations someday - all thanks to man!

If, on the other hand, a human being was as small and helpless as a mouse, then the things cats would do to us would be just as bad as the blender.

Real utilitarians see government as a tool that either helps or harms wellbeing of conscious creatures, depending on the situation.

There are no "real utilitarians" - it is a very vague concept that is defined differently by different schools of thought, whether they choose to embrace that term explicitly or not. What makes my "utilitarianism" better than yours is that it is based on empirical principles, economic analysis, deductive reasoning, and long-term thinking. Your idea of utilitarianism thus-far seems to be based on demagogic logical fallacies in the name of attaining people's trust. "Utilitarians" like you murdered millions of animals in the Roman Colosseum in order to buy the loyalty of the mob, and now as the mob's tastes have changed you are willing to apply the same violence in the opposite direction. And remember that no government in Western history was more passionate about "animal rights" than the Nazis!

If you argue that laws against cruelty to animals are "holding us back" through terrible enforcement costs, then I'm not so sure I want to know what sort of civilization we are being held back from.

Alright, you are free to "not know" if you so choose - bury your head in the sand in a charter city that prohibits all the things you don't like. Other people will be free to join you in your "animal rights" "utopia", but you cannot enforce your subjective laws to others any more than Osama bin Laden can enforce his subjective laws on you. I believe that the only people who'll join your society will be emotional hippies who hug trees for a living and you won't be able to create an economy stable enough to feed your pets or build enough jails for all the "animal rights" violators, much less afford the high-tech medical products built outside your city due to the need to conduct animal experiments in scientific research - but, hey, I could be wrong. May the better system win!

One could just as easily argue that laws against cruelty to people are holding back individual liberty. Indeed many types of cruelty, such as harassment, are actually a-ok with "anarcho-capitalists."

Some forms of harassment are in the form of Speech and therefore do not constitute a violation of the alleged victim's negative Rights, while some forms of harassment are physical and do - you'd have to be more specific in whatever point you were trying to make. A society that initiates aggression against people for saying offensive things simply cannot have the checks and balances that are necessary to decentralize power, criticize bad ideas, proliferate good ideas, and it is a short and slippery slope to a stagnant tyranny where only a handful of "orthodox" ideas are "inoffensive" enough to be permissible. A society that permits unlimited free speech is still able to recognize a person's right not to listen, filter out the undesirable information (which future technology can make ever-easier), create discussion environments where baseless accusations can be analyzed and debunked, and ostracize blow-hards with a history of too much verbal diarrhea, or at least keep them away from children and polite society.

We define Natural Rights very explicitly and defend each of them on solid epistemological grounds, including how each Right balances with all others. An alleged "right" that is not based on reason is in reality a violation of a Right that does exist, and the overwhelming majority of violations of Human Rights happen with made-up rights as the excuse (ex. Jews were put in concentration camps in the name of "Germany's right to racial purity", or some such nonsense).

Edited by Alex Libman, 02 April 2010 - 11:59 AM.

[shifter]

well here is the video.




If you believe these people are productive members of society entitled to the 'human liberty' to torture and murder these animals like that then you can have your opinion (free world), that doesn't mean I have to agree with it (again free world).

Stopping short of saying I think they should be punished was only because China doesn't give a shit about animal welfare so nothing can be done in reality of what goes on over there. That doesn't mean I would want my nation to follow Chinas example. Personally I think people who do torture and kill animals for fun should be fined and thrown in jail. I don't care how 'productive' he is for society. Quite frankly I wouldn't want him part of my society anyway.

You may believe that its the human race who has exclusivly dictated the way we have our planet today but animals (especially domesticated pets), have also gradually changed humans way of thinking over the thousands of years. Whether you like it or not, the human-animal relationship may be more symbiotic than you know.

Giving a child a pet, and teaching it to treat it with care, love and respect, will have a positive effect on that child's learning, social skills and development. Not to mention he probably will be a much better member of society for it. Children who torture say, kittens, kill and have (or taught to have) no respect for lower animals will have much more chance of ending up as the scum of society we could do without.

In the end, all you can do is be a realist. No one will notice if you put a cat in a blender, but ask yourself what kind of person would derive pleasure from such an act and whether you would want to call someone like that a friend.

So after watching that clip on youtube, you tell me, could they have done what they did a BETTER way? Would you rather the animals live a decent life and then killed without pain or instantly? Or is it perfectly acceptable practice and those are the sorts of people who would love to hang out with because as humans we are superior and it is our RIGHT to do whatever the hell we want with other animals and no one should impose on our liberties to have fun even if by having fun we do so by being cruel to animals in the most barbaric manner.

I'm not saying we cant or shouldn't have fur coats and the like, but we can do much better in our methods of obtaining them.

How we treat animals also says something about our own character. [...]

You stop short of saying that humans should have their rights violated (confiscation of property, fines, jail, etc) over how they treat their animals, but unfortunately that's where most people will take an argument such as the one you've made. That is a classical example of the magical thinking that is promoted by the modern pro-government religion: the legislative bureaucrats just need to wave a magic wand, and, WHAM, instant Utopia!

The reality is completely opposite: prohibitions have enforcement costs (the first being human liberty), added business overhead costs, the cost of taking otherwise productive members of society and throwing them in prison at tax-victim expense, unintended consequences, moral side-effects (because you stifle the culture of dealing with bad people by non-violent means, like ostracism), and, most important of all, the slippery slope of ever-more-unbound government force!

This question remains unanswered - if your (or the popular vote's) compassion for animals gives them "rights", thereby taking away from the empirically-verifiable Natural Rights of humans, then why can't other people use their emotions and arbitrary whims to impose their subjective standards upon you? What if the majority of people in your city / province / country / continent / planet vote that volcano gods have rights and therefore you must be sacrificed to them for the common good?

[Traclo]

Because the potential to be a rational economic actor isn't inherent in a hamster any more than it is in every human sperm cell (you know the Monty Python song), or on every blank storage device that may hypothetically store an AI program that is worthy of self-ownership someday, etc. That potential is inherent in a human child, on the other hand, because a human child is very likely to become a rational economic actor if only his negative Rights are protected. A society that fails to attribute the Right to Life and the Right to Emancipation from the point of a likely rational economic actor's survival viability (which at our present level of technology still requires physical autonomy, that is birth) will experience horrendous levels of infanticide and child abuse, likely to a point of complete madness and social collapse. A society that tries to recognize the "potential rights" of every single-celled organism will experience an even greater competitive disadvantage. If someone is able to create a rational economic actor that is based on a hamster then it gains its rights once all of its essential ingredients, not just the ordinary hamster, are in their proper place.

You seem to provide two arguments here for the distinction between children and animals (however the two are blended so as to be difficult to pick out):
1. Children are different from animals (have rights) because they have the inherent potential to become rational economic actors.
2. Not protecting children will result in 'horrendous levels of infanticide and child abuse' which would be a competitive disadvantage.

My main problem with 1 is the definition of inherent.

You say it is the point where by protecting only their negative rights they will become rational economic actors. I'm sure you can see the problem with this. If we accord only negative rights to children, the youngest (or even the majority) of them will certainly die. Consequently, by your definition of inherent, it should be within our rights to treat young children as we have seen animals being treated (i.e. that youtube video).

I believe that you try to circumvent this problem by then assigning the 'right to life' to these children based on their 'inherent' potential. That is all well and good, but I think that you do a bit of a bait and switch here. If I were to only assign the negative 'right to life' to these children (i.e. I were to not actively kill them) they would still end up dying and are thus not covered in your definition of inherent. If however you mean that I must then actually help them live, you are assigning a positive right to them and not only negative ones, and consequently your argument begins to fall apart at the seams.


Now to deal with the second argument you propose as a reason for why children and animals should be treated differently. You claim that not having them treated differently will cause 'horrendous levels of infanticide and child abuse, likely to a point of complete madness and social collapse'.

Quite apart from the emotionally charged language you use this argument is mostly superficial. Madness and social collapse are certainly not inherent outcomes of child abuse and/or infanticide (see many works of fiction for plausible situations where these occur without the projected consequences, The Giver being one) and thus are simply products of a current social conditioning. In fact if we were to rid ourselves of this social conditioning then there would be a distinct competitive advantage to infanticide and child abuse (so long as it had a goal). Thus by your own model of utilitarianism we should work towards removing these social pretenses and work towards a world where the advantages of infanticide etc. are properly being leveraged.


Consequently I believe that both of your arguments about the distinction between children and animals fail and your position is untenable. My personal position is similar to your own but in the opposite direction. I would accord rights to both children and animals on the very basis that there is no real concrete difference between the two (edit: obviously I mean concrete differences between some higher animals and human children and not animals in general... I don't actually think ants deserve rights ). If however you find a flaw in my reasoning, a misinterpretation of your definitions or you have a new argument, then please respond.

Edited by Traclo, 02 April 2010 - 11:30 PM.

[eternaltraveler]

my system is better than your system

I'll get to the rest in a few days when I have time.

Reguarding the above you have absolutely no idea what my system is, or even, if it is very much in line with your system. I haven't addressed it (though if you did research into my previous postings you'd find something). You've made numerous other assumptions about my beliefs in this post and in an earlier one which are incorrect thus far. I advise against making assumptions about my beliefs. Thus far my questions have mostly centered around how you think your system could actually be implemented (and did point out some reasons why I dont think it can be; this is quite distinct from not thinking it should be)

To ask more directly. Do you think evolutionary advantage for a society = right?

[Alex Libman]

well here is the video. [...]

Sorry, your appeal to emotions doesn't change the facts according to which attributing Rights to any presently-existing animals other than humans is illogical and harmful. That isn't to say that your emotions are completely invalid, just that they don't justify violating other people's Property Rights with impunity. You could use those appeals to emotion to convince people to contribute to animal welfare through other means, like donating to animal charities, ostracizing people and businesses that abuse animals, and so on.

For example, a society that cares about animals can pretty much eliminate the abuse of most pets by economically pressuring all pet stores, veterinarians, neighborhood associations, etc to only do business with "licensed pet-owners". A license would be optional, and it would entail contractual obligations to abide by a certain standard of animal welfare, submit to periodic checks from qualified animal welfare charities, etc - as well as not to transfer ownership of your pets to anyone who doesn't have a compatible license. That system would be particularly easy to apply to all zoo, safari, and circus animals, because much of the public would boycott businesses that aren't contractually obligated to take good care of their animals, and it would eventually spread itself to cover most household pets as well.

[...] You say it is the point where by protecting only their negative rights they will become rational economic actors. I'm sure you can see the problem with this. If we accord only negative rights to children, the youngest (or even the majority) of them will certainly die. Consequently, by your definition of inherent, it should be within our rights to treat young children as we have seen animals being treated (i.e. that youtube video). [...]

The negative Rights of a human child include not only the Right to Life but also the Right to Emancipation, which means no one may kill them or interfere with their ability to be rescued / emancipated from their parents / guardians. The Right to Emancipation is a multifaceted Right that can be violated in many ways: keeping the existence of the child or any impending dangers to its survival secret, interfering with the child's ability to achieve basic mental development, physically or psychologically harming the child so that he can't communicate with the outside world, and so on. It does not place any financial burdens on the parents, only very basic informational ones. As economic development advances, the costs of the most basic human essentials continues to decline (including a $100 laptop that can replace an entire education system!), while the amount of money people are able to donate to charity continues to increase. That creates an economic environment where any endangered child anywhere in the world will soon have a dozen charitable organizations in a bidding war for its rescue. Even the greediest person would see the value of rescuing a child, because a productive human can produce many times more capital in his lifetime than the cost of keeping a child alive through its infancy.

Sure, not every child will be healthy enough to achieve full self-ownership, but that risk is easily mitigated in the aggregate. A system of Natural Law that makes the essential assumption that a child will become a self-owning adult works, the alternative does not. Negative rights by their definition must be equal for all rational economic actors - they define not what others must do for you, but what others can't do to harm you with impunity. The Right to Property assumes that you will be able to acquire property and pay for its protection if necessary - if you fail to protect it and no one helps you then your claim to it is forfeit (just as you can't homestead the moon by simply pointing at it and saying "this is mine"). Likewise, the Right to Life assumes that you will be able to be born and live, that is until you die, when that Right stops being applicable. Any other animal, on the other hand, will never achieve the criteria of self-ownership, at least not without extraordinary intervention from an outside source (a scenario I addressed above).

Madness and social collapse are certainly not inherent outcomes of child abuse and/or infanticide [...]

A society that fails to come up with a rational definition of the Right to Life will face many problems that will put it at a competitive disadvantage. A society where people not presently fitting the criteria of rational economic actors (children, mentally ill, people under the temporary effect of powerful narcotics, unreformed criminals, prisoners of war, indentured servants, etc) can be killed with impunity will face not only population decline due to the deaths of children no one is allowed to rescue, but also deep psychological trauma as the result of some parents being total dictators over their children's lives, and countless other reasons as well. All checks and balances on insane asylums, work-houses, and prisons, would be non-existent! Any idea of a criminal justice system would be next to impossible!

[...] To ask more directly. Do you think evolutionary advantage for a society = right?

That might be an over-simplification, but essentially yes.

You must also recognize that Rights are a system of socially accepted consequences, not a list of commandments that you will burn in hell for violating the slightest bit. For example, you have your Right to Property, but if we're on a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean and you've horded all the food / drinking water / medicine then I may choose to violate your Right by force to make sure no one starves to death and then plead guilty and pay restitution once we are safe on shore. (See also: Ayn Rand on emergencies [2].)

Edited by Alex Libman, 03 April 2010 - 09:01 PM.

[Traclo]

You raise some interesting points, but I think ultimately you skirt the issue I was trying to address.

My main contention is that you have provided no convincing rational basis to differentiate between animals and human children. The only manner of differentiation that you've provided thus far is that the possibility of becoming a rational economic actor is 'inherent' in human children while in animals this 'inherentness' is nonexistent. As I've already shown your attribution of 'inherent' to human children is fallacious, on the grounds that if only negative rights are provided for children the vast majority of them will die.

You mention two key negative rights: Life and Emancipation. If I do not actively kill the child (Life) the child will still die without additional support. If I provide any and all necessary information and do not hinder the child's development, but take no active part in raising the child it will still die.
Thus in order for a sufficiently small child to become a rational economic actor some positive rights are required. However there is no rational basis to provide these rights to said children, and consequently your distinction between children and animals is a false one.

The negative Rights of a human child include not only the Right to Life but also the Right to Emancipation, which means no one may kill them or interfere with their ability to be rescued / emancipated from their parents / guardians. The Right to Emancipation is a multifaceted Right that can be violated in many ways: keeping the existence of the child or any impending dangers to its survival secret, interfering with the child's ability to achieve basic mental development, physically or psychologically harming the child so that he can't communicate with the outside world, and so on. It does not place any financial burdens on the parents, only very basic informational ones. As economic development advances, the costs of the most basic human essentials continues to decline (including a $100 laptop that can replace an entire education system!), while the amount of money people are able to donate to charity continues to increase. That creates an economic environment where any endangered child anywhere in the world will soon have a dozen charitable organizations in a bidding war for its rescue. Even the greediest person would see the value of rescuing a child, because a productive human can produce many times more capital in his lifetime than the cost of keeping a child alive through its infancy.

In order to combat this issue you point out that the financial burden of raising children to self-ownership is falling constantly. Granted. However this is a red herring. Having to deal with ANY financial burden is a positive right.

Second you bring up that charities will easily be able to cover these costs. Unfortunately this too is a red herring. The desire of current rational economic actors to raise children to a position where we must then accord them their full rights has no bearing on their previous situation of not having those rights.

Third you bring up the value that a raised child can provide. However the potential value of raising a child has nothing to do with according children rights different from those of animals. Animals may also have potential value beyond the cost of raising them.

Finally you restate your 'inherent' hypothesis:

Any other animal, on the other hand, will never achieve the criteria of self-ownership, at least not without extraordinary intervention from an outside source

However restatement of the hypothesis does not an argument make. The truth is that you have not provided a convincing distinction between the intervention necessary for a child to reach self-ownership and the intervention that an animal would need. This idea of 'inherent potential' needs more support than you are currently providing. If you have other arguments that justify this concept I would be very happy to hear them.

[Traclo]

(My apologies, I would simply edit my previous response to add this but there seems to be a time limit)

Alex Libman,

I read some of your other posts and I hope to clarify why I see your position on animal rights to be ultimately unsustainable and self-contradictory.

You admit that in order for a child to survive and become a rational economic actor one of two following situations must exist:

1. The child must have their negative rights protected AND they must be subject to some form of charity (e.g. if left in a field they would die without the charitable intervention of another person)

2. Their positive right to life would need to be protected.

I have not seen you defend #2 so I assume you do not believe that it is a defensible position. Therefore I must assume that you take position 1 (as indeed I have seen you do).

The objection that is raised against position 1 is that given the exact same situation it is not unreasonable to expect an animal to become a rational economic actor. True, the degree of charity required to raise an animal to the position of a rational economic actor is much greater than that required for a child (we would need to use as of yet non-existent technology to cognitively enhance them). However the nature of the charity does not change (i.e. it is still a non-obligated action from a current rational economic actor).

How have you dealt with this objection?
You claimed that there is a difference between children and animals in that a child has an 'inherent' propensity to become a rational economic actor. This is highly plausible, provided you can give a sufficient definition of 'inherent'.

So then how did you define inherent?
I quote you here so that there can be no claim that I have twisted your words:

That potential is inherent in a human child, on the other hand, because a human child is very likely to become a rational economic actor if only his negative Rights are protected

Thus your definition of inherent is: If the organism could be reasonably expected to become a rational economic actor if ONLY his negative Rights are protected.

As should be clear now this contradicts your former position that a child also needs charity to survive. If you modify 'inherent' to include charity, then animals would be included in your own arguments for rights. If you keep it as it is then you have a contradiction in your own argument. If you contend that children can survive without some form of charity then you are fooling yourself.

What would need to be done for me to accept that children should indeed be accorded rights different from those of animals is for you to demonstrate a concrete difference between the nature of the charity necessary to produce a rational economic actor in a child and that which is necessary to produce one in an animal. (You cannot however claim that it is obligatory for a child and not for an animal, because making the charity obligatory would raise it to a positive right, in direct contradiction to your definition of inherent)

As I'm sure you'll admit the difference in degree of difficulty is not a solid basis on which to do this.

I eagerly await your (or anyone who holds that animals and children should be treated differently) response.

Edited by Traclo, 05 April 2010 - 08:16 AM.

[Alex Libman]

I believe I have already addressed all the points that you've just reiterated.

My main contention is that you have provided no convincing rational basis to differentiate between animals and human children.

Childhood is a temporary condition of a human being, who has roughly a 98.7% chance of reaching the age of maturity (and those odds will improve as medical science advances), and a roughly similar probability of having sufficient mental faculties by the time this age is reached (or possibly sooner). Any human society in order to exist more than 1 generation needs to be able to manage those risks, as well as the time-value of the investment it makes in its children.

An adult may choose to take a similar risk by getting really drunk or high on drugs, a state in which s\he would no longer qualify as a fully self-owning "rational economic actor" if it was permanent and irreversible. Do you honestly believe that a person passed out in a drunken stupor or under medical narcosis loses all of his Human Rights?! I believe that even a very damaged human mind (ex. Terri Schiavo) should retain the negative Rights to Life and Emancipation based on the small but unpredictable probability of her ever being able to regain some of her former faculties, until total and irreversible death can be verifiably documented.

But the odds of any non-human animal currently known to science becoming a rational economic actor is absolute zero.

As I've already shown your attribution of 'inherent' to human children is fallacious, on the grounds that if only negative rights are provided for children the vast majority of them will die. [...]

I disagree, though conducting sufficient econometric experiments to verify this would definitely be both immoral and illegal. You must remember that the child's negative Right to Emancipation requires transparency, which in this case necessitates proactive action on the part of the parents - there would probably be many reputable charities having a phone number to call or a Web-based form to fill out to trigger the process of having the unwanted child being quickly taken off your hands, and most people would know to contact such a charity if their neighbor happens to mention that she plans to abandon her child. Failure to inform others of your inability or unwillingness to take care of your child becomes no different than wrapping the child's head in plastic, with the restriction of information being equivalent to restricting the flow of oxygen to its brain.

That does not guarantee that someone else will want to pay to save the life of this child, but the cost of providing bare-bones survival for a small human being is incredibly low and falling. I think that there would be a massive outpouring of support for simple emotional reasons, but even if the level of human altruism somehow drops to zero - there will still be strong economic incentives to save the life of a child, in fact I can't think of a more rewarding investment anyone can possibly make! For-profit orphanages can use the economy of scale to lower the cost of raising a child to just a few dollar a day, complete with a cheap laptop and Internet access for education, video cameras for cheaper means of adult supervision, and, yes, spanking is still the most cost-effective way to get the children to behave and do their homework on time. Child labor alone could make enterprises like this cost-effective, but the orphanage inheriting the Rights of the parents (possibly including something I call the Parents' Tax) and influencing that child's ideology can be more profitable still. Of course those are just the most dismal scenarios, but it just goes to show you that the helplessness a human being experiences in his childhood is just a small gap that the rest of human society can very easily fill.

In order to combat this issue you point out that the financial burden of raising children to self-ownership is falling constantly. Granted. However this is a red herring. Having to deal with ANY financial burden is a positive right. Second you bring up that charities will easily be able to cover these costs. Unfortunately this too is a red herring. The desire of current rational economic actors to raise children to a position where we must then accord them their full rights has no bearing on their previous situation of not having those rights.

I agree that children do not have a positive right to be ANY involuntary financial burden to anyone, and if the parents refuse to take care of them, communicate the situation to others, and no one is willing to step in before the child dies then no one should be prosecuted for that death. But I don't think these kinds of tragedies can happen very often in a modern information-driven capitalist society.

Third you bring up the value that a raised child can provide. However the potential value of raising a child has nothing to do with according children rights different from those of animals. Animals may also have potential value beyond the cost of raising them.

Human children are very likely to grow up, attain self-ownership, pull their economic weight, and compensate their childhood debts in the form of a "Parents Tax" or as part of a flexible gift economy - animals cannot.

However restatement of the hypothesis does not an argument make. [...]

It does, because you have failed to understand it.

[Traclo]

Maybe you began your post before I had submitted my second one, which is a refinement for why I think there is a contradiction in your argument, and seeing as you have not mentioned it, I hope you will address it.

Quickly though:

Childhood is a temporary condition of a human being, who has roughly a 98.7% chance of reaching the age of maturity [...] But the odds of any non-human animal currently known to science becoming a rational economic actor is absolute zero.

This is entirely irrelevant.
Those are stats for children that are properly taken care of (not just provided their negative rights). The probability that a child would reach maturity if ejected from the womb into an open field (barring charity, a non-negative right which was addressed in my previous post) is virtually zero.

Do you honestly believe that a person passed out in a drunken stupor or under medical narcosis loses all of his Human Rights?!

This is a separate issue. Maintenance of human rights vs. acquisition of those rights are completely different.

I agree that children do not have a positive right to be ANY involuntary financial burden to anyone, and if the parents refuse to take care of them, communicate the situation to others, and no one is willing to step in before the child dies then no one should be prosecuted for that death.

Consequently they would require charity to reach maturity. Without it they are virtually certain not to become rational economic actors. See my previous post for why I think the charity between making an child a rational economic actor and making an animal one is only a difference in degree, and not in nature.

Human children are very likely to grow up, attain self-ownership, pull their economic weight, and compensate their childhood debts in the form of a "Parents Tax" or as part of a flexible gift economy - animals cannot.

All this provided they are given more than simply their negative rights.

It does, because you have failed to understand it.

No sorry, restating a hypothesis does not make an argument, regardless of my understanding of it. Arguments given in support do.

Until you give a reason why the charity necessary for animals and children to become rational economic actors is qualitatively different, or you show why 'inherent potential' is a meaningful term (both covered in my previous post, that you missed) then your position remains unsupported.

Edited by Traclo, 05 April 2010 - 10:47 AM.

[Alex Libman]

I read some of your other posts and I hope to clarify why I see your position on animal rights to be ultimately unsustainable and self-contradictory.

You admit that in order for a child to survive and become a rational economic actor one of two following situations must exist:

1. The child must have their negative rights protected AND they must be subject to some form of charity (e.g. if left in a field they would die without the charitable intervention of another person)

2. Their positive right to life would need to be protected.

I have not seen you defend #2 so I assume you do not believe that it is a defensible position. Therefore I must assume that you take position 1 (as indeed I have seen you do).

The objection that is raised against position 1 is that given the exact same situation it is not unreasonable to expect an animal to become a rational economic actor. True, the degree of charity required to raise an animal to the position of a rational economic actor is much greater than that required for a child (we would need to use as of yet non-existent technology to cognitively enhance them). However the nature of the charity does not change (i.e. it is still a non-obligated action from a current rational economic actor).

That is correct, I believe in the first position (negative rights). Whether a child abandoned by its parents is helped by a charity, another family, a greedy for-profit orphanage, a pedophile, or whether the child manages to survive on its own, its capacity to become a rational economic actor nonetheless exists based on its genetic code and the hardware that is in the process of self-development inside of its skull.

How have you dealt with this objection?
You claimed that there is a difference between children and animals in that a child has an 'inherent' propensity to become a rational economic actor. This is highly plausible, provided you can give a sufficient definition of 'inherent'.

So then how did you define inherent?
I quote you here so that there can be no claim that I have twisted your words:

That potential is inherent in a human child, on the other hand, because a human child is very likely to become a rational economic actor if only his negative Rights are protected

Thus your definition of inherent is: If the organism could be reasonably expected to become a rational economic actor if ONLY his negative Rights are protected.

As should be clear now this contradicts your former position that a child also needs charity to survive. If you modify 'inherent' to include charity, then animals would be included in your own arguments for rights. If you keep it as it is then you have a contradiction in your own argument. If you contend that children can survive without some form of charity then you are fooling yourself.

Once again, you are misunderstanding the meaning of positive vs negative Rights. Libertarian rejection of most or all positive Rights doesn't mean outlawing charity and investment in human capital (the aforementioned for-profit orphanage scenario), which a modern wealthy society is almost sure to want to engage in. If it's not forced, then it's not a positive Right!

What would need to be done for me to accept that children should indeed be accorded rights different from those of animals is for you to demonstrate a concrete difference between the nature of the charity necessary to produce a rational economic actor in a child and that which is necessary to produce one in an animal. (You cannot however claim that it is obligatory for a child and not for an animal, because making the charity obligatory would raise it to a positive right, in direct contradiction to your definition of inherent)

Certainly - a human being is capable of pulling his economic weight after a number of years (in the Netherlands in 1600s kids as young as 6 were expected to work for the benefit of their parents / guardians, though a modern society would probably find it more prudent to invest more time into their education beforehand), and achieve self-ownership (Rights to Liberty and Property) a few years later. An animal is neurologically incapable of achieving this - the mental hardware to understand and respect the Rights of others just simply isn't there!

All emotions aside, the economic relationship between humans and animals isn't much different than the relationships humans have with cars, cute (but insufficiently intelligent) toy robots, or plants. The economic relationship human adults have with their children is a relationship that cannot be separated from the expectation that the child will grow up and become an adult someday.

As I'm sure you'll admit the difference in degree of difficulty is not a solid basis on which to do this.

You mean the hypothetical scenario of someone creating a "rational economic actor" with a hamster inside it? Like I said, that has nothing to do with a present-day hamster's capacity for self-ownership. Someone might someday create a "rational economic actor" around a seed of buckwheat, but that doesn't mean my breakfast this morning was an act of genocide!

Those are stats for children that are properly taken care of (not just provided their negative rights).

The point isn't whether it is 99% or 95%, as might be the case for children abandoned by their parents without violating their negative Rights, the point is that human children have a sufficiently probable potential of becoming rational economic actors, while all other currently-known animals have none. A system where risk mitigation is taken into account and likely rational economic actors are recognized as soon as possible (i.e. physical autonomy / birth) will have definite functional advantages over the alternatives.

The probability that a child would reach maturity if ejected from the womb into an open field (barring charity, a non-negative right which was addressed in my previous post) is virtually zero.

The sensationalist media and the public already goes ape with the so-called "missing pretty girl syndrome", and an "abandoned little baby syndrome" would be even more intense - especially when every reader / viewer of the news story can open up their checkbook / PayPal account and pitch in to help. The willingness and capacity to help would be even greater in a society that doesn't expect Mommy Government to solve all social ills, and isn't burdened by its wasteful and inefficient taxation.

This is a separate issue. Maintenance of human rights vs. acquisition of those rights are completely different.

The acquisition of all Rights does not have to be an individual test, only those Rights that the require sufficient mental and moral functioning of the subject (i.e. the negative Rights to Liberty and Property). The Rights to Life and Emancipation are acquired by simply reaching a state where you can achieve self-ownership if only those negative Rights are respected, that is being born a human being - or any other creature that is biologically programmed to learn and mature toward a sufficient level of mental functionality.

Until you give a reason why the charity necessary for animals and children to become rational economic actors is qualitatively different, or you show why 'inherent potential' is a meaningful term (both covered in my previous post, that you missed) then your position remains unsupported.

I have, on both accounts.

I've also explained that Natural Law / Human Rights exist on the basis of an essential epistemological axiom of "evolutionary pragmatism" - the societal ruleset that produces the greatest long-term economic benefit is one that is most desirable. The benefits of outlawing human infanticide should be self-evident, and I've listed some of the less obvious negative consequences such a society would have to face above. You need to recognize that a person claiming that animals have "rights" is making a moral proposition, and the burden of proof is on him. I am not required to prove that animals don't have rights, although I have effectively done that by showing the economic disadvantages a society that recognizes "animal rights" will have.

Edited by Alex Libman, 05 April 2010 - 12:26 PM.

[Putz]

"People with psychotic tendencies" that like to mistreat animals are no different from animals in their tendencies - it is wholly natural for an animal to "play" and extract pleasure out of weaker organisms. It's all natural desires, just as the man bashing a goat or a goat eating food. They have equal rights in the natural world. However, in civilization - our ethics deviate from the impulse equality of the natural world, for good reason. But it is not as serious of a problem as your empathic brain centers and societal conditioning may lead you to believe.

In the future animal tissue will be cloned factory style so even animal rights activists will start eating meat - no real animals harmed. At that point of time willful animal abuse will be a far greater crime. We are not yet at the technological level to establish morals on animal treatment - just as we are barely at the technological level to establish total high-tech healthcare for all. Our ancestors barely had the tech to fulfill the supposed moral on the right to food.

Edited by Putz, 07 April 2010 - 05:13 PM.

[Alex Libman]

[...] At that point of time willful animal abuse will be a far greater crime. [...]

Ah, so we're playing the "predict the future" game, now are we? Well, my prediction is that humanity will split between space-bound transhumanist John Galt types of people and a theocratic environmentalist dictatorship on Earth. At first the central government of Earth will try to bully our space-stations, but as they degrade ever-deeper into economic self-destruction their ability to harm us will diminish. Or, if they continue to try to enslave the rest of the universe, don't think we won't consider giving this little planet a really big nudge toward the sun. You can learn to live with the idea that some bad people somewhere far away are hypothetically free to put a kitten in a blender, or we will defend that right, and all the other Human Rights that are logically inseparable from it. Compromise is not an option.

[eternaltraveler]

as promised.

[quote][quote]Do you think evolutionary advantage for a society = right?[/quote]


That might be an over-simplification, but essentially yes. [/quote]
Thank you. Now that you've clarified how you define what a right is (evolutionary advantage for a society=right). I agree this is a good foundation on which to start. This is not how most people define what is a right. And of course it's a simplification. We need to simplify things for communication, but naturally life itself is quite complex.
[quote]This naturally leads to a scientific consensus about universal human rights, also known as the Non-Aggression Principle.[/quote]
well... I mostly agree with that as well. But parasites do exist in nature, and are quite successful evolutionarily.
[quote]Over time, societies that treat animals as property will experience greater economic and especially scientific growth, due to the importance of animals in scientific experiments[/quote]
Absolutely. But ones that differentiate between kitten blendering and scientific research might do just as well.

[quote]Believing that PDA's (Private Defense Agencies) are somehow immune from the meritocratic laws of the marketplace is no different than believing that teaching students that 2 + 2 == 5 would have no consequences for the career of a kindergarten arithmetic teacher.[/quote]
who on earth said anything about PDAs being immune to the marketplace? I said they will do whatever people pay them to do (ie, the marketplace).
[quote]there'll be a lot more money chasing after the enforcement of good laws that promote economic growth than stupid "laws" that diminish it.[/quote]
Most people, not being rational actors, may pay them to do things aside from enforcement of the non aggression principle. Parasitism can pay off for the parasite. Right now we have no evidence that an anarcho-capitalist society, once started, can be stable. Everything that's been close to it in the past has always moved away with time.
[quote]one wrong move and a billion-dollar corporation can find itself financially ruined, nearly-universally ostracized, and surrounded by all the competing PDA's who stand to benefit from their mistake.[/quote]
the problem is, you aren't defining a wrong move as what makes profit for the company. You are defining a wrong move as that which is wrong for the stability of the society. See above, parasites exist in nature and are successful.

[quote]Would you do business with a company that put Michael Vick in prison for a victimless act that he never contractually promised to not engage in?[/quote]
Maybe, as I prefer to extend a very limited version of the non aggression principle to animals for a very rational reason which you've overlooked in your good arguments for animal research (which I have done). Namely humans have a finite period left as the primary rational actors on this planet before we generate our successors. I'd really like it very much if they apply some limited version of their non aggression principle toward us.
One can make the argument that a human society that treats animals with some level of compassion without a good reason not too will be more likely to generate an AGI that will look at us as something other than carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms in a not very useful configuration (ie building material). If I were you I'd work very hard on finding a rational basis for such an arrangement so we can code it into the thing.
[quote]If you do, then idealistic people like me will ostracize you[/quote]
yes, but idealistic people like you are an exceedingly small minority and so your boycott would be all but completely unnoticed. The average persons IQ is 100. Pragmatism is much more useful I think than idealism.
[quote]but frankly most people (and the wealthiest people) in the world[/quote]
but you dont get to start with a blank slate. Some of the wealthiest people in the world today got there by being the best parasites.
[quote][quote]Your system requires the majority to be rational actors. They are not.[/quote]


No, the system I am trying to replace (democracy) makes that assumption.[/quote]
they both seem too unfortunately. Taking in mind you don't get to start with a blank slate.
[quote]My system is governed by economic laws that reward functional advantage[/quote]

believe me. I support a system wholeheartedly that rewards functional advantage. My only problems are I don't think such a system is stable, and I don't know how to start one (maybe if you get lucky after some calamity?). Please explain how it would be stable, and how to start it given the current reality.

[quote]Because the potential to be a rational economic actor isn't inherent in a hamster[/quote]
nor is it inherent in the genetic code of most people. The average IQ is 100. They require fundamental modifications in order to be so. It is a matter of degree.
[quote]A society that fails to attribute the Right to Life and the Right to Emancipation from the point of a likely rational economic actor's survival viability (which at our present level of technology still requires physical autonomy, that is birth) will experience horrendous levels of infanticide and child abuse.[/quote]
worked very well for the romans... Some naturally evolved animals feed some of their young to their other young. Why can't some rational economic actor decide some merely potential rational economic actor that they grew themselves is more useful as a hamburger? Couldn't the argument be made that would be better for society because those that tend to make hamburgers out of their young will tend to select their genes out.(I don't follow this logic myself, and if anything technology will very soon make this line of thinking obsolete).

Edited by eternaltraveler, 09 April 2010 - 04:40 AM.

[eternaltraveler]

How can you claim the same when in your system...my system is better than your system

i've already addressed this point (and paragraph) in my earlier post

since you've argued a bit against my imagined positions I guess I'll lay out my actual one. Simply put, I think an ideal system would be one very much like the system you describe (maybe a few different bells and whistles). I tend to call myself more libertarian than anarcho capitalist.

However I am by no means an idealist. I am a pragmatist. My primary goal is to cure aging and survive the near term so we have a few dozen centuries to figure out how to organize our government or non government of the future. And quite frankly the human race is facing some pretty serious challenges very shortly(relatively speaking of course) that we will have to face with governments very much as they are now as there is nothing like enough time to transition to anything else. Honestly we should spend more of our time gearing up for those challenges than just about anything else.

if your government ever allows us to establish one

it won't. If your plan requires this, it cannot work. Best bet is to get as many like minded individuals to another celestial body. Even the ocean going stuff will just result in the end with governments arguing for a little while on how they get to loot you before they come to an arrangement on even that.

[Alex Libman]

But ones that differentiate between kitten blendering and scientific research might do just as well.

And what all-powerful and infallible central institution will be trusted with the authority to decide the difference, and then to enforce those regulations? A society that makes universally-applicable legislative decisions based on emotional whims is an inherently unstable society. The "slippery slope" argument against government force is easy to ridicule from the short term-point of view ("on noes, we outlawed kitten blendering, here comes Sharia law"), but you have to look at issues from a long-term anthropological point of view. Even the most seemingly sensible animal regulations have the effect of benefiting large corporations that can better afford to comply with them (or bribe the enforcers), and hurt their smaller competition and potential competition by raising the barrier to market entry. Power does have a tendency to corrupt, and freedoms do tend to erode over time.

A society that limits universal laws to just the objectively essential ones, which can be defended empirically, will not have this problem, while it will still be able to discourage nasty behavior through market pressure and ostracism. I will not speculate whether those methods will be more effective or less effective at reducing the number of kittens put in blenders, but they certainly could be more effective. Legal systems based on centralized power can have blind-spots too, and the bad guys quickly learn how to use them (ex. the smart pedophiles getting jobs with Child Protection Agencies).

who on earth said anything about PDAs being immune to the marketplace? I said they will do whatever people pay them to do (ie, the marketplace). Most people, not being rational actors, may pay them to do things aside from enforcement of the non aggression principle.

You fail to see how the marketplace will make certain actions next to impossible. Take cannibalism, for example - critics of libertarianism love to bring up that consensual consumption of human flesh will be theoretically possible in a truly free economy. That is true, but what would be the cost? Only the world's richest people would be able to afford it, and those people have more people watching their purse-strings and more to lose if they are exposed and ostracized. A government-free society will still have its moral crusaders and its tin-foil-hatters, but their efforts would now be put to a more constructive use. A billionaire that simply refuses to be audited will have the "karma" of his businesses decline significantly, which over time means he won't remain a billionaire for long. And in a free society there's no such thing as a positive right to privacy - once someone blows the whistle the evidence can be taken from a live streaming cell phone camera feed and spread all over the Internets in seconds, and there would be nothing you can do except try to refute the accusations, or donate a lot of money to a lot of charities and otherwise fight to rebuild your karma rankings and regain public trust. Money loses value very quickly if no one is willing to do business with you, lest they become ostracized as well. The marketplace will simply provide a better alternative (ex. imitation human meat, Holodeck war games, etc) to satisfy those savage needs at much lower economic and social cost.

Those oversight mechanisms will be particularly targeted against private defense agencies (PDA's), which everyone will know is the greatest threat to the stability of a government-free society. Their movements will be watched constantly through public domain satellite feeds, independent publications, their competition, etc - pretty much everyone who does not work for a particular PDA will be incentivized to spy on it, and people that do work for a particular PDA will be incentivized to blow the whistle by organizations promising rewards and protection for whistle-blowers, who will be seen as the greatest of heroes by everyone except for their former bosses. The private defense market is inherently biased toward lower liability costs, which means less-lethal weapons will eventually prevail over old-fashioned projectile launchers, SDI-like systems instead of reprisal weapons, etc.

And what would a PDA have to gain by turning "evil" and trying to "take over the world"? One government can conquer another government and brainwash its sheep to obey a different shepherd, but once a society understands that the "divine right of governments" is bull then they will simply refuse to obey. Just look at how well a few thousand Talibantards are able to bleed the U.S. military for billions upon billions year after year - and that is the money a PDA would not be able to print or tax out of thin air! And a society with a gun (and even more importantly a generator / solar panel array and a fault-tolerant wireless P2P mesh Internet router) in every home will be able to put up particularly good resistance, especially if they train for such scenarios beforehand. It would take almost as many soldiers as there are civilians to keep an informed freedom-loving society enslaved, and those soldiers would demand quite a bit of hazard pay to harm innocent civilians knowing that the rest of the world is about to unite against them with righteous vengeance! And slavery does not make for a highly competitive economy - you can hold a gun to a person's head and force him to work at the productive level of a robot, but you cannot force an unwilling slave to think, innovate, and invent!

Finally, mega-PDA's will have an uphill battle in competing against market bias for more local solutions - a weapon in your own hands is always more handy and trustworthy than a weapon in someone else's, and multiply that effect by several billion people all over the world who would be free to own weapons (though insurance and other liability costs would encourage the high-tech less-lethal variety) and be raised from childhood to know how to use them. Why hire a security guard from a mega-corp when a local boy can do the job just as well and bring greater "karma" to the business? Centralization will be particularly feared when it comes to military robots, with all manufacturing plants watched very carefully to make sure they can't possibly be manufacturing "an evil robot army to take over the world". Given enough eyeballs, all would-be overlords are shallow!

Right now we have no evidence that an anarcho-capitalist society, once started, can be stable. Everything that's been close to it in the past has always moved away with time.

That is true, just like there was no evidence for stable heavier-than-air flight prior to late 19th century. It's hard to imagine an AnCap society without the modern level of telecommunications technology, and other upcoming innovations will make it easier still, while also making the alternative -- centralized government using this technology to become all-knowing and all-powerful -- far more dangerous to the human civilization.

And you must also remember that, unlike the socialists, we are not trying to force our ideas on anyone who doesn't want them. Their ideas are backed by violence, our ideas are backed by economic facts. Most AnCaps don't even vote! Our best strategic ideas involve building alternative societies through secession of privately owned land / seasteads / etc and demonstrating their advantages by growing organically and attracting ever-more brains and capital if we are successful. It won't be easy, because once the existing governments begin to see us as a threat to their power they will use or manufacture any excuse to blow us out of the water or at least blockade us, but public opinion will eventually limit the things they are able to do.

parasites exist in nature and are successful.

That depends on the types of parasites you are talking about. Ayn Rand went a bit overboard in trying to penalize parasites / "second handers" through over-the-top "intellectual property rights" and other such ideas, but Anarcho-Capitalists don't see non-violent altruism (including PR pressure that will encourage the rich to support private charity), information "piracy", and other "trickle-down benefits" as necessarily a bad thing, just the nature's way of leveling the playing field. Parasitism that involves involuntary property damage, on the other hand, always has a victim who is interested in obtaining restitution, and the rest of society is interested in helping him lest the criminal will victimize them next. If a human being is sufficiently smarter than a tapeworm, then he can simply defeat it through scientific innovation, and that applies as a metaphor to human parasites that mooch off human hosts as well.

yes, but idealistic people like you are an exceedingly small minority and so your boycott would be all but completely unnoticed. The average persons IQ is 100. Pragmatism is much more useful I think than idealism.

The market mechanisms within an Anarcho-Capitalist society are purely pragmatic, and they are also perfectly in tune with human psychology. People generally like to feel good about themselves and receive validation from others, and if they are commonly willing to pay thousands of dollars for luxuries just for the benefit of their reputation then popular consumer activist movements will swing their pennies just as well. As technology advances, ever-fewer people will base their opinion about you on the car you drive or the clothes you wear, and ever-more on how well you answer any accusations made about you on a reputation gossip site, or the automatically-calculated "karma" rating of your investment portfolio. If, on the other hand, people just don't care enough about Michael Vick to punish him through consumer bias, then Michael Vick simply does not deserve to be punished. His crime is victimless (only self-owning entities can be victims) and thus it only involves public opinion, which is naturally also the ideal gauge for how much he deserves to be punished.

Furthermore, the average IQ within an Anarcho-Capitalist society will be much higher than 100, especially at first as only the highly successful John Galt types will both be on the right side of history and able to afford a significant role in influencing it (ex. the first seasteads). Natural selection will lead to more competent people moving to freer economies sooner, and also to choose to live in less restrictive voluntary societies than the less intelligent people (there will always be plenty of voluntary governments / religions / communes for the less intelligent people to subscribe to if they want to be told what to do). Finally, what really matters is not the IQ of individual economic actors (one person one vote) but their economic influence (one dollar one vote), and money inevitably flows away from the less competent individuals and toward the more competent ones.

but you dont get to start with a blank slate. Some of the wealthiest people in the world today got there by being the best parasites.

Yes, but only due to government force (from slavery / feudalism to "intellectual property rights"), and that's precisely what I'm trying to move away from. As countless experiments in history demonstrate, trying to enforce artificial equality to punish the unfair privileges of the past simply does not work, while instituting a meritocratic system moving forward tends to redistribute wealth well enough. In absence of government force, money inevitably flows away from the incompetent and toward the more competent, with the latter being far more important. The descendants of a slave owner being able to hold on to some of his money in trust funds may seem unfair, but a newly-imposed system that tries to punish people for the sins of their fathers would be even worse, and very dangerous to future liberty. What's more important is that the descendants of slaves and other formerly oppressed groups have their negative Rights equally recognized from this point on, and how quickly they'll be able to catch up will then be entirely up to them.

And some level of "affirmative action" market bias in favor of formerly oppressed minorities will exist in an Anarcho-Capitalist society as well, just not through government force. When a boss sees a kid from a poor family and a kid from a rich family being equal in everything else, it would be purely rational of him to give the poor kid a promotion because he probably worked harder throughout his life to achieve this parity and will likely continue at this pace moving forward.

[...] nor is [the potential to be a rational economic actor] inherent in the genetic code of most people. The average IQ is 100. They require fundamental modifications in order to be so. It is a matter of degree.

First of all, you still misunderstand the term "rational economic actor". It doesn't mean being perfectly logical, like Mr. Spock, but it means being able to take responsibility for one's actions and exist without violating the Rights of others. A person choosing to waste his life on drugs may not seem very "rational" from the point of view that most people value their health and longevity far more than he does, but he is nonetheless a "rational economic actor" for as long as he's not harming anybody but himself - it's his life, to live or to throw away however he chooses. There is such a thing as mental retardation, of course, but it's quite rare (and will decline in frequency as prenatal medicine advances) and it currently seems to involve IQ levels of 50-70 ("mild mental retardation") or below. Furthermore, one's mental qualifications for full self-ownership (i.e. the inability to be emancipated from one's parents, or loss of the Right to Liberty and Property in later life) should be determined by functional criteria and not mere intelligence. Specially designed communities can cater to people with low IQ's and make it possible for them to function quite normally, while a super-intelligent person can still be a criminal - one's worthiness of freedom is all about one's ability to respect the Rights of others.

Negative Rights are not a matter of degrees, it's like pregnancy - either you are or you ain't. (Ownership of a body can be a matter of degrees if you are a conjoined twin, but ownership of a self-owning mind by definition cannot be.) The "should not be aggressed against" attribute applies once a certain minimum is reached, but it then applies equally to a sufficiently responsible human dimwit and a sentient being whose brain spans many galaxies, lest there be an even greater god-like entity elsewhere in the universe to aggress against it! That super-intelligent entity can talk down to us (just like a faster computer can emulate any slower computer) and we can discuss how this galaxy can be shared by all of us peacefully. Categories of self-owning entities ranging from slightly less intelligent than humans to "gods" can all agree to respect each-other's rights, but creatures below a certain level of intelligence simply cannot.

A society cannot function if Rights can be granted or taken away on a whim - there must be a rational and formal process to transparently document a person's crime or mental illness, and those conclusions must also be subject to future review, especially if the circumstances change. And it is the necessity of this process that requires all potential rational economic actors to have the Right to Life and to Emancipation - how can you receive a fair trial otherwise? Thus we need to have the presumption of innocence / capacity to be a "rational economic actor" whenever it is possible (i.e. all human beings), but it is not possible for organisms who lack the biological hardware to understand and respect the rights of others. You simply cannot explain to an ape that it needs to respect the Life, Liberty, and Property of others! You may be able to pay for its survival and have a device implanted in its brain to think on its behalf and discourage it from stealing other people's bananas and pooping on their front lawn, but that is not the same thing as the original ape being a rational actor in the economy.

[infanticide] worked very well for the romans...

Only by the standards of the time. Remember that Natural Law is not defined a merely a societal ruleset that keeps the civilization crawling along on some level, it is defined as the societal ruleset that produces the greatest long-term materialistic competitive advantage. A society whose laws are structured after the Roman Empire would not do very well in the modern age...

Some naturally evolved animals feed some of their young to their other young. Why can't some rational economic actor decide some merely potential rational economic actor that they grew themselves is more useful as a hamburger? Couldn't the argument be made that would be better for society because those that tend to make hamburgers out of their young will tend to select their genes out.(I don't follow this logic myself, and if anything technology will very soon make this line of thinking obsolete).

You cannot kill your children for the same reason you cannot just shoot some person for some imagined crime - justice requires due process in order to be recognized as valid, and due process requires transparency. The differences between human children and adults are merely chronological, resulting the Rights to Life and Emancipation just as chronological necessities in the application of justice create Rights like the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, etc. Parents / guardians don't own their children / dependents as absolute property, they merely share some of the ownership (i.e. Rights to Liberty and Property), and they will have to prove to the concerned parties (i.e. everyone who frowns on infanticide, murder of mental patients / prisoners, etc) that they did not commit murder. How do you prove that the child didn't deserve to live / be emancipated from them (i.e. under the condition of transferring custody to somebody else), especially given the superabundance of charities that would be willing to care of him instead?

Edited by Alex Libman, 09 April 2010 - 10:44 AM.