because it is convenient for the filesharer or saves him or her some money
Then you may just as well call it “insurance fraud”, or “tax evasion”, or “turnstile jumping”.
In a universe where you didn’t begin off with the assumption that copying things can be considered “theft”, because the companies have a vested interested in presenting it as theft, I doubt it’d ever even cross your mind that copying something can be reasonably compared to stealing it.
E.g. did you ever ask whether JKR has the right to mention the name of “Merlin”? Or whether Disney has the right to use Hercules or Aladdin as characters? Did it occur to you to call such things theft—merely because it was convenient and saved money for these people/companies to copy such names/stories?
I doubt it’d ever even cross your mind that copying something can be reasonably compared to stealing it.
It did, long before companies started trying to present it as such within my hearing.
Did it occur to you to call such things theft—merely because it was convenient and saved money for these people/companies to copy such names/stories.
The theft comparison isn’t really my point. My point is that it’s wrong to break the law for personal gain. None of these are cases of that kind of activity. It may be that the law itself is wrong, but that doesn’t itself make it okay to break that law, especially when your breaking of it is aimed purely at saving you some money and not in any way at undermining the law.
That’s a good question. I guess I would say the same thing about speeding, but not about consensual sodomy. In the latter case, I think it’s still immoral to break the law so as to engage in sodomy, but that this is just outweighed by the importance of being able to freely engage in a sex life of one’s choosing and with consenting adult partners. With speeding and with filesharing, the immorality of breaking the law is weighed against in the first case convenience (unless it’s an emergency) and in the latter case saving one’s money. Neither of these seem to me to overcome the moral problem of breaking the law.
ETA: The point about speeding is a good one. We generally understand people to be responsible for bad but unintended outcomes only so long as what they’re doing is bad in the first place. So while we think speeding is commonplace and no great evil, we do get quite worked up when someone speeds and kills someone else as a result. The killing, wholly unintended, is their fault. I think this is a sign that we do consider speeding to be a bit immoral. If the same thing happened to someone who was driving in a perfectly legal way, we wouldn’t ascribe to them any responsibility for the deaths.
I’m not sure I can come up with any similar accidental consequence of filesharing. Maybe the collapse of a publishing company? But this couldn’t be the result of any one person’s activity.
So, if someone were to say they endorsed some instances of illegal filesharing because, while they agreed that it was immoral to break the law, they believed that this immorality was outweighed by the importance of being able to freely distribute and obtain information of one’s choosing, your conclusion would be that their reasoning was sound as far as it went, but that they were not correctly estimating the relative importance of those two things.
I do think that would be a reasonable tack, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince me that the relative importance of free access to information outweighs the legal violation. Two things give me pause though: first the information one wishes to access is, in the cases Anubhav is describing, simply those books about which one is curious. Nothing life and death there. I can see why one has a right to, say, some of the information Wikileaks might distribute, but I don’t see why one has a right (or whatever) to any information one wants. Certainly not the intellectual products of other people.
Second, one already has access to that information. It just costs money. The point isn’t that one is gaining access to information one otherwise couldn’t get, but rather that one is saving money in doing so.
I know people over the internet who fileshare philosophy books because they live in poverty, or in countries without academic institutions or libraries, or because they live in countries with oppressive governments. Filesharing in these cases doesn’t strike me as particularly immoral, or rather, its immorality seems to be outweighed.
But in the case of someone who fileshares a book when they could (even with some hardship) pay for it and has (politically) free access to it, this is immoral.
So, if someone countered your defense of sodomy in Texas pre-2003 by arguing that, first, there is nothing life or death about the desire to have particular kinds of sex and they don’t see why one has a right (or whatever) to any kind of sex one wants, and, second, that one already has access to sodomy, one merely has to move to a state where it’s legal, and that therefore committing sodomy in Texas pre-2003 was in fact net immoral, what would be your response?
BTW, at about this point I feel somewhat obligated to state my own position on these sorts of issues, which is roughly speaking that violating the law is not in and of itself immoral, but neither is enforcing it. Which is to say, when I violate the law, I move myself into a position where it is potentially moral to imprison me, confiscate my property, reduce my future potential for valuable years, or even kill me. (There are other considerations that affect whether that potential is actualized.)
That said, I’m not trying to argue in favor of that position here, and you can feel free to ignore it if you wish. I just feel socially obligated to get my own cards out on the table.
I should perhaps also say that I was routinely violating U.S. anti-sodomy laws prior to 2003 and would continue to be doing so if those laws were still in place in my state of residence. Not that those things are actually relevant at all, but they seemed worth saying anyway.
So, if someone countered your defense of sodomy in Texas pre-2003 by arguing that, first, there is nothing life or death about the desire to have particular kinds of sex and they don’t see why one has a right (or whatever) to any kind of sex one wants, and, second, that one already has access to sodomy, one merely has to move to a state where it’s legal, and that therefore committing sodomy in Texas pre-2003 was in fact net immoral, what would be your response?
I would say first that the freedom to have a sex life of one’s choosing is a life and death matter (not literally of course). I mean that this freedom is of great moral significance, and its curtailment is justifiable only under extreme circumstances (what these could be, I cannot imagine). I’d be happy to defend that if pressed, though I doubt you disagree. I’m sure we would agree that this is not merely a case of breaking the law so as to take pleasure in something, and that a case like this (like consuming drugs illegally) is quite different from the case of sodomy.
Second, having to move to a different state doesn’t constitute free access. If we understood free access that way, we would lose track of what it meant to say that a government is oppressive with respect to such access.
I think breaking the law is immoral as a rule. This can be offset if the law itself is unjust or impractical, or if extreme circumstances produce an exception. I think breaking the law is immoral because the polity and its stability and coherence isn’t just a practical good but a moral one. Or rather, I think the polity is one of the major conditions that make moral goods possible. It seems uncontroversial to me to say that we have special moral relationships with our country as a whole and with our fellow citizens, relationships which we don’t share with just anyone. As a US citizen, I bear some responsibility for the actions of my government. I rightly feel shame at our policies about torture. But I bear no responsibility for the actions of the Chinese government. I rightly feel angry that they torture people, but would not rightly feel ashamed.
ETA: on the morality of breaking/enforcing the law: I take it we would agree that these stand and fall together. If breaking is wrong, enforcing is at least morally significant, and if enforcing is morally significant, so is breaking the law. Executing someone for jaywalking or filesharing, even if it’s consistant with the law, is deeply evil and unjust. If you accept this and the above premise, this implies that breaking the law is likewise morally significant.
I agree that the stability and coherence of the polity is a practical good, and that it is a moral good. (I suspect that I don’t agree with the line you’re drawing between those goods, but it’s irrelevant in this case.)
I agree that the aggregate cost of individuals complying with particular laws (or of being punished for their violation) can in certain cases exceed the collective benefit of enforcing that law. In those cases, I would not consider it a moral good to either enforce or comply with such a law.
I probably don’t agree with your reasons for asserting the “special moral relationships” between, for example, me and my country, but I agree with you that in practice I probably have more ability to influence U.S. policy than that of other countries of similar power, and that ability weighs into my moral relationship to U.S. policy.
I don’t endorse feeling ashamed about things I cannot influence.
I agree that if enforcing a law in a particular context is morally significant, breaking that law in that context is also morally significant. (It’s not clear to me that equation holds across contexts.) Ditto for (breaking a law is wrong) → (enforcing that law is morally significant)
I agree that executing someone for jaywalking or filesharing is wrong. (Also “deeply evil and unjust,” if you like, though I’m not sure what those terms add beyond emphasis.)
I agree that jaywalking or filesharing in a context where those actions can lead to my execution is morally significant, and that I can infer that conclusion from the above claims (as well as from general principles).
I agree that the aggregate cost of individuals complying with particular laws...
I agree with a weaker version of your conclusion: if a law is impractical, disobeying it is permissible. But the cost in terms of respect for the law produced by widespread disobedience should be factored in. Laws lean on each other. Also, I didn’t say (and wouldn’t say) that it’s of itself a moral good to comply with the law. Only that it’s a moral bad to break it. Second, there’s a question of how to respond to impractical laws: are they personally impractical? Then violating the law seems more permissible. If they are personally quite practical but only impractical in aggregate, I think the appropriate response is probably more like political activism.
CR laws may be impractical in aggregate, but the presence of CR laws along with their widespread violation is, I expect, very much more impractical. If the practical situation is ‘no CR laws’, then violating them is not an appropriate response.
I agree with you that in practice I probably have more ability to influence U.S. policy than that of other countries of similar power, and that ability weighs into my moral relationship to U.S. policy.
Well, suppose the president of the US had the power, by imposing sanctions, to limit or prevent some injustice in Iran, like the execution of political prisoners. I think we would agree that this act is of moral significance, but also that it would have to be weighed against the interests of the US, etc. On the other hand, if the president discovered that his or her own government were executing political prisoners, he would be in extreme moral dereliction for not putting a stop to this almost regardless of practical consequences. So a president might have the power to influence such a situation in both cases, but he or she bears much more acute moral responsibility for the actions of his or her own government.
So I don’t think it’s the case that moral responsibility comes down simply to an ability to affect some situation. Does that seem like a reasonable argument?
I don’t endorse feeling ashamed about things I cannot influence.
Perhaps this will seem sophistical, but don’t you only feel shame at things you cannot influence, namely things in the past? If I murder someone, I ought to feel ashamed. But I cannot change the fact of the murder. And before the fact, I cannot feel ashamed of it, since it hasn’t happened.
I think we should agree that enforcing a law is always morally significant: enforcing it against an innocent person is always or for the most part immoral, and it is made permissible only by the breaking of a law. So the relationship between the breaking of a law and its enforcement is on some level a moral one, and for every question of enforcement, there is a morally significant question of guilt.
So if the law isn’t personally as well as in aggregate impractical (CR law isn’t in the cases we’re discussing) and the breaking and enforcing of laws is always morally significant, then I think we’re at least closer to the conclusion that breaking CR laws for personal gain is immoral.
I agree that the cost in terms of respect for the law produced by widespread disobedience should be factored in when deciding whether to comply with a law.
I am confused by how you can say that the “stability of the polity” is a moral good, and that compliance with the law contributes to the stability of the polity, but that compliance with the law is not a moral good.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “personally impractical” as opposed to “impractical in aggregate,” but in any case, I would say that if the law is a bad law in aggregate, then an individual response is appropriate to the degree that it has an expected value of removing that law and low expected costs. Political activism is sometimes an excellent example of this… and sometimes not. Widespread violation of the law is sometimes an excellent example of this… and sometimes not. (Indeed, sometimes they are one and the same. And sometimes not.)
I disagree that the president of the U.S. has more moral responsibility for policy A than policy B if her ability to influence the policies is the same, and the moral wrong of the policies and the influencing of them is the same, just because policy A is a U.S. policy. I think the intuitive rightness of that idea stems from the presumption that her ability to influence a policy for a given degree of moral wrong is higher for U.S. policies.
I’m not sure what “acute” moral responsibility is.
I do in fact often feel ashamed about things I cannot influence, including things in the past. I don’t endorse it. But I also often feel shame about my present (and anticipated future) willingness to do certain things, and insofar as that shame reduces my likelihood of doing those things and I reject doing those things, I tentatively endorse that shame.
I agree that enforcing a law is morally significant. Enforcing a law against an innocent person is a confused idea (roughly corresponding to attacking someone in an unjustified way under the mistaken belief that I’m enforcing the law) but I agree that it’s usually a moral wrong.
Widespread violation of the law is sometimes an excellent example of this… and sometimes not. (Indeed, sometimes they are one and the same. And sometimes not.)
Can you argue that CR violation, in the form of filesharing, is a good example of an appropriate response to an impractical or immoral law?
Well, I’ve asked Anubhav the same thing, and I suppose I should wait and hear his case, since it’s his suggestion I’m arguing against. Thanks for the discussion.
That’s nutty. It’s like saying the dictionary authors are the ultimate authority on language. You’ve got the causality the wrong way round.
The only convincing argument for following the law for me is that the rule of law is important and we can only maintain it if people respect the law. But that is instrumental in creating the kind of society we want. You get close to suggesting this but undermine yourself by then claiming that the rule of law “isn’t just a practical good but a moral one.”
If following the law were moral, you should be proposing more laws like “everyone has to breathe” so that we can all be more moral. Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
As a US citizen, I bear some responsibility for the actions of my government. I rightly feel shame at our policies about torture. But I bear no responsibility for the actions of the Chinese government. I rightly feel angry that they torture people, but would not rightly feel ashamed.
That’s… very odd. You should remove US citizenship from your self-identity so that you can think more clearly about this. The US is torturing people, China is torturing people, both are very bad. You perhaps have more ability to affect US torture and should therefore pay more attention, but they are not a different kind of responsibility.
If you don’t like torture, do what you can against it. Don’t just excuse yourself because you don’t count the entities involved as part of your personal identity.
That’s nutty. It’s like saying the dictionary authors are the ultimate authority on language. You’ve got the causality the wrong way round.
That strikes me as an extremely inapt analogy. Dictionary authors have little no authority in language because they are not a condition on the possibility of language. I think it’s reasonable to say that the polity is a significant (if not necessary or sufficient) condition on the possibility of morality.
If following the law were moral, you should be proposing more laws like “everyone has to breathe” so that we can all be more moral. Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
You’re reading me as saying “obeying the law, whatever it says, is a moral good”. I didn’t say or imply this. I said that violating the law is a moral bad. So the above doesn’t follow.
Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
Assuming not everyone is law-abiding, yes.
You should remove US citizenship from your self-identity so that you can think more clearly about this.
I can’t. My self-identity isn’t entirely up to me. If I murder someone, I can’t just decide that this act is no longer a part of my self-identity and thereby become innocent of it. I did something evil and nothing can ever make that go away. It’s mine forever. If I’m lazy, or stupid, or brave, I can’t just decide to cease being these things (ETA: not just by fiat anyway, I’d have to make substantial changes to my life). The fact is that my life, both in practical and in moral terms, is the life of a US citizen. Most everything I do is conditioned on the existence and quality of the government and citizenry. My citizenship is also the condition for my enjoyment of very important moral goods, like the possibility of loyalty and a participation in justice.
So even if I could remove US citizenship from my identity (I can, in suppose, by officially renouncing my citizenship) I wouldn’t. Being a citizen is a great, great good. Take it from someone who spent a fair amount of time without being a citizen of anywhere.
But all this is a little astray. My point is just that its immoral to ignore or violate the law for one’s personal gain. If you disagree with that, then my much more specific claim about why probably won’t convince you. I’m afraid if you don’t think breaking the law has any moral significance, I have no immediate way to argue for the immorality of filesharing. Or theft.
If you don’t like torture, do what you can against it. Don’t just excuse yourself because you don’t count the entities involved as part of your personal identity.
I don’t want to ignore your point here, it’s an important one, but it’s not relevant to this particular discussion. If I’m mistaken in that, please let me know.
That strikes me as an extremely inapt analogy. Dictionary authors have little no authority in language because they are not a condition on the possibility of language. I think it’s reasonable to say that the polity is a significant (if not necessary or sufficient) condition on the possibility of morality.
So you would cease to be a moral person if the law went away? I don’t understand. Maybe you mean that the world would be morally much worse off without law? I agree with that, but that doesn’t imply that the law is the source of morality or whatever. It’s still instrumental and hopefully following from morality, not the other way.
You’re reading me as saying “obeying the law, whatever it says, is a moral good”. I didn’t say or imply this. I said that violating the law is a moral bad. So the above doesn’t follow.
Ok, so we should remove the laws that people tend to violate a lot, to reduce the moral badness in the world. I guess if you think that law is our morality, this would still be a bad idea because changing your morality is a bad idea (the gandhi kill pill argument).
I can’t.
Yes you can. Sorry, I didn’t mean like give up your citizenship, I meant keep it out of your self image, because people are irrational about things in their self-image.
For example: I live in canada, I have an american and canadian citizenship, I enjoy the benefits, I do not think of myself as canadian or american because then I would not be able to think clearly about the differences between me and the countries of which I am part. I also do not consider my gender, age, race, or name to be part of my identity.
Have you ever talked to chinese citizens about the actions of the chinese government? You may have noticed that many are unable to differentiate between criticism of the chinese government and criticism of the chinese people. This is because the propaganda conflates the two. Avoid that.
But all this is a little astray. My point is just that its immoral to ignore or violate the law for one’s personal gain. If you disagree with that, then my much more specific claim about why probably won’t convince you.
I agree that violating the law is bad, but not intrinsically immoral the way murder is. Violating the law is bad because of the consequences for the rule of law, and because the law is often parallel to morality.
I’m afraid if you don’t think breaking the law has any moral significance, I have no immediate way to argue for the immorality of filesharing. Or theft.
Leave yourself a line of retreat. In the absence of law, would it be bad to steal? If not, why make the law in the first place?
Stealing is bad because it is bad for the person you stole from and creates the wrong kind of society. No law required.
Not all sharing is illegal or even of the controversial sort. I torrent my operating system images, and I have license to those. I share images on the internet that are public domain works.
Copyright Infringement I am unsure on. I’ve seen plenty of evidence, if you have more, please share it with me.
Whatever you think, don’t try to justify a law by appealing to the fact that it is law. That is circular. If there is some other argument why in a counterfactual world without a law, it would be a good idea to create it, appeal to that instead of the circular part.
Do you understand why I don’t think talking about the current laws is a good idea in a moral discussion?
not relevant to this particular discussion.
Maybe not. You were making mistakes in your reasoning because of your identity, so I brought it up.
Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
Assuming not everyone is law-abiding, yes.
If I murder someone, I can’t just decide that this act is no longer a part of my self-identity and thereby become innocent of it. I did something evil and nothing can ever make that go away. It’s mine forever.
There is a difference of philosophy here. I will state my position on these matters:
Ideas like Punishment, Responsibility, etc are social protocols instrumental in maintaining a valuable society. They may even be built in at the hardware level, but they are not intrinsic moral values the way “don’t hurt people” is. We are now smart enough to come up with better solutions to the problems that they solved.
Punishment is about getting people to follow rules that are a good for everyone when there is individual profit in defecting. Game theory, specifically iterated prisoners dilemma and so on, implies that punishment of defectors is a very good strategy for maintaining a beneficial relationship in many circumstances. It turns out that our ancestral environment was one such situation, so we have the idea of punishment built in at an instinctual level. There are situations where punishment is not the best solution, so taking it as a given is stupid.
For example, let’s say we find out that some murders are not calculating defections, but failures of self control and lack of education. Let’s further suppose that there is a two -week course that a murderer can take that has a 98% success rate in making them productive members of society, never to murder again. Let’s say that Bob is such a murderer. What do we do with him? We can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping him in degrading prison, after which he will still be a murderer, or we can put him thru our two week course for a couple thousand dollars, after which he will be a productive member of society. What to do? Do we decide that punishment is the moral thing to do, or do we decide there are more important things than following obsolete tribal-politics hueristics?
Responsibility is another evolutionary and social hack to kick you into action when you have the ability to affect something morally important. It is not a moral primitive. We now have utilitarian decision theories and associated philosophy that does a much better job at improving the world.
You brought up responsibility in the context of murder and torture. Once you factor out punishment, as demystified above, and ability to affect things, the people starving to death all over the world are just as important as the person you save or kill right here. Once you factor out your ability to change things, the people being tortured by foreign powers are just as important as those being tortured by the government you live under.
This is what I mean when I say not to excuse yourself from tragedies outside your identity. Minimize your identity and feel responsible for all the tragedy in the world, not just that which “you” cause.
I think you and I have a problem of miscommunication. These claims are not my claims, and do not follow from anything I’ve said:
-The law is morality.
-You would cease to be moral if the law went away.
-It is morally good to obey the law.
I do agree that we should reconsider laws that people tend to violate a lot: widespread violation is good evidence for the impracticability of a law. But it would be senseless to remove violated laws to decrease the moral badness in the world, because the laws exist in the first place for the good of the polity and its citizens.
Yes you can. Sorry, I didn’t mean like give up your citizenship, I meant keep it out of your self image, because people are irrational about things in their self-image.
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity. I can work to change, but I can’t change by fiat.
Do you understand why I don’t think talking about the current laws is a good idea in a moral discussion?
Not really. I take it you would say that nothing vouchsafes the morality of current law, so we cannot look to law for moral principles. In a certain way I agree with this, but I think this view underestimates the relationship between the law and our moral lives. It is in virtue of living in a polity that we can be moral beings. If there were no polity, we might still be capable of morality (especially if we were raised in a polity) but in a very limited way. Very, very important things like courage and loyalty and honesty and justice would be curtailed or closed off to us.
Punishment is about getting people to follow rules that are a good for everyone when there is individual profit in defecting.
This is, I think, not a good view of justice, specifically in that it involves a contempt for the criminal. It is not okay to lock people away in a little box, or cause them pain, or take their freedom, or anything like this for the sake of changing their behavior. Manipulating people by causing them to suffer is torture, and that’s not what (I hope) our justice system is up to. We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty). Punishment isn’t aimed at some further end, like torture or coercion.
Thanks for taking the time to present your views on the subject, I found them as interesting as they were different from my own. What makes ‘don’t hurt people’ an intrinsic moral value?
I do agree that we should reconsider laws that people tend to violate a lot: widespread violation is good evidence for the impracticability of a law. But it would be senseless to remove violated laws to decrease the moral badness in the world, because the laws exist in the first place for the good of the polity and its citizens.
My statement about removing laws that people violate was intended to be obviously absurd. I don’t think it is a good idea to do it (at least not for that reason).
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity. I can work to change, but I can’t change by fiat.
Disagree. Identity is a matter of where you carve the world, which you should do in whatever way works best. It happens that people are not capable of reasoning as rationally about things that they identify with. It seems perfectly reasonable to say “am I not capable of thinking rationally about this category (things I identify with), and it does not provide enough value to make up for that, so I ought to simply delete it.” It’s a mind hack, for sure, but I think it is fully possible and the right thing to do.
Not really. I take it you would say that nothing vouchsafes the morality of current law, so we cannot look to law for moral principles. In a certain way I agree with this, but I think this view underestimates the relationship between the law and our moral lives. It is in virtue of living in a polity that we can be moral beings. If there were no polity, we might still be capable of morality (especially if we were raised in a polity) but in a very limited way. Very, very important things like courage and loyalty and honesty and justice would be curtailed or closed off to us.
You seem to at least understand what I meant. I’m afraid I don’t yet understand your position. Could you explain in more detail why some form of law is necessary for morality (if I even have that right)?
This is, I think, not a good view of justice, specifically in that it involves a contempt for the criminal. It is not okay to lock people away in a little box, or cause them pain, or take their freedom, or anything like this for the sake of changing their behavior. Manipulating people by causing them to suffer is torture, and that’s not what (I hope) our justice system is up to. We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty). Punishment isn’t aimed at some further end, like torture or coercion.
There is no contempt for the defector. Punishment is simply a sad duty that we must credibly pre-commit to to maintain social order. Torture is unnecessary and morally expensive. People often overestimate the amount of punishment needed to deter defectors (as opposed to other types of crime that must be handled with other methods).
We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty).
That is exactly what I disagree with. Why should we punish them? What benefit is there from spending our resources to hurt them, if it’s not the game-theoretic determent?
What makes ‘don’t hurt people’ an intrinsic moral value?
I’ll retract that. ‘Don’t hurt people’ may not be morally intrinsic, but it’s much, much closer than punishment, which we (or at least I) now know is derived (but only in some cases) from other principles. I can’t think of anything much more universal than ‘don’t hurt people’, but I’m sure it reduces somewhere. The point I was trying to make was that punishment is not as fundamental as some other principles, and should be abandoned in favor of them when that is the dilemma.
Identity is a matter of where you carve the world, which you should do in whatever way works best.
Isn’t this a prescription for the happy psychotic, who carves the world up in such a way that he is always maximally happy? I take it we should carve the world at the joints, whether this is good for us or not, and whether we like it or not. If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a ‘mind hack’. You cannot by any force of will decide to believe something you believe to be false and you must believe everything you believe to be true. You have no control whatsoever over what to believe. I cannot adjust my self-identity without coming to the (I think false) belief that I am not really a US citizen. You might convince me that this actually isn’t a part of my self-identity, but only by convincing me that it never was.
Could you explain in more detail why some form of law is necessary for morality (if I even have that right)?
Well, I called it a ‘significant condition on morality’ and I suggested that it may well be (I don’t know) a necessary or sufficient or necessary and sufficient condition. I doubt I can be persuasive here, since we disagree on the subject so broadly. Being good is hard. Being good means being generous with people, and this requires some modest wealth. It also means being courageous. Being just requires an association with people, and in any significant number, this requires leadership and law. Being civil, kind, etc. requires friendship, and this likewise requires associations and mutual interests, and all these practically depend upon the law. Courage is the belief that your life is worth something, such that it would be better to die than live a life of terribly low moral quality. Courage therefore means a willingness to die for the sake of the above moral goods. And perhaps most generally, being good means doing great good things with your life, and this requires powers and wealth vastly beyond the capacity of a single human to provide. Being good requires leisure, because it requires reflection and deliberation, and leisure can only be provided under the conditions of a polity, among friends, in safety, etc.
What benefit is there from spending our resources to hurt them, if it’s not the game-theoretic determent?
My point is that punishment is not for the sake of any benefit at all. It’s a manifestation of anger, which is the rational response to wrongdoing. If we are not angry with the wrongdoer, we are treating them like an animal or a small child. Anger, and so its manifestation, is a form of respect for the capacity in the criminal to do good. The last thing justice is about is using suffering and imprisonment to manipulate people.
I’ll retract that. ‘Don’t hurt people’ may not be morally intrinsic, but it’s much, much closer than punishment, which we (or at least I) now know is derived (but only in some cases) from other principles.
If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a ‘mind hack’. You cannot by any force of will decide to believe something you believe to be false and you must believe everything you believe to be true. You have no control whatsoever over what to believe. I cannot adjust my self-identity without coming to the (I think false) belief that I am not really a US citizen.
You are misunderstanding the nature of self-identity. It is not a fact about the world that you have to get right, it is a cognitive category that causes you to go insane about anything that is in it. The fact that you have a US citezenship does not mean you should put “Actions of the US” in the “I should be insane about these” category. If you truly believe that mind-hacks don’t exist, I don’t know how you intend to deal with biased cognitive machinery.
The reason we don’t talk about politics around here is precisely because people have politics as part of their identity, and are therefore incapable of reasoning about it. The more general form of “don’t think about politics” is “don’t identify with stuff”.
The fact that you have a US citezenship does not mean you should put “Actions of the US” in the “I should be insane about these” category.
I promise never to do this.
The reason we don’t talk about politics around here is precisely because people have politics as part of their identity, and are therefore incapable of reasoning about it.
From what does the ‘therefore’ follow? Is this an empirical claim?
I’ve observed this phenomenon a lot, and it explains quite a bit. If you can show me some evidence you have about this that I don’t, that would be cool.
My point is that punishment is not for the sake of any benefit at all. It’s a manifestation of anger, which is the rational response to wrongdoing. If we are not angry with the wrongdoer, we are treating them like an animal or a small child. Anger, and so its manifestation, is a form of respect for the capacity in the criminal to do good. The last thing justice is about is using suffering and imprisonment to manipulate people.
This is all wrong. The rational thing to do is whatever is best by your values, which does not necessarily mean getting mad at people and hurting them.
This was my impression of your presentation of your view too. We should both be extremely suspicious of our ability to evaluate the correctness of a view to which we object so deeply that we cannot find enough common ground to have an argument. I think I’ll tap out but I’m happy to discuss these things and so if you want to discuss these topics further, start a discussion topic or send me a message. Thanks for the discussion.
There is obviously some huge inferential distance here. I’ll try to come up with lower-level build up for my position. You should to. Agreeing to disagree is unacceptable.
Are you asserting that it’s unacceptable to agree to disagree in situations where the estimated time and effort for coming to agreement is higher than the estimated value of coming to agreement? If so, can you expand on why?
Just in general it shouldn’t happen. I think some cases aren’t worth it if it is sufficiently difficult, as you suggest. This may be one of those cases.
On the other hand, I think formulating a coherent explanation of punishment is a useful thing to do, because there are so many people who make the mistake of assuming that it’s fundamental.
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity
I would say, rather, that changing my identity the way nyan_sandwich suggested would be similar to changing how I navigate through the territory by changing the map I use… which seems like a pretty good idea to me, if the map I’m currently using doesn’t get me where I want to go.
Then you may just as well call it “insurance fraud”, or “tax evasion”, or “turnstile jumping”.
In a universe where you didn’t begin off with the assumption that copying things can be considered “theft”, because the companies have a vested interested in presenting it as theft, I doubt it’d ever even cross your mind that copying something can be reasonably compared to stealing it.
E.g. did you ever ask whether JKR has the right to mention the name of “Merlin”? Or whether Disney has the right to use Hercules or Aladdin as characters? Did it occur to you to call such things theft—merely because it was convenient and saved money for these people/companies to copy such names/stories?
It did, long before companies started trying to present it as such within my hearing.
The theft comparison isn’t really my point. My point is that it’s wrong to break the law for personal gain. None of these are cases of that kind of activity. It may be that the law itself is wrong, but that doesn’t itself make it okay to break that law, especially when your breaking of it is aimed purely at saving you some money and not in any way at undermining the law.
Just to be clear… would you say that speeding, or consensual sodomy in Texas prior to 2003, are wrong in essentially the same way?
That’s a good question. I guess I would say the same thing about speeding, but not about consensual sodomy. In the latter case, I think it’s still immoral to break the law so as to engage in sodomy, but that this is just outweighed by the importance of being able to freely engage in a sex life of one’s choosing and with consenting adult partners. With speeding and with filesharing, the immorality of breaking the law is weighed against in the first case convenience (unless it’s an emergency) and in the latter case saving one’s money. Neither of these seem to me to overcome the moral problem of breaking the law.
ETA: The point about speeding is a good one. We generally understand people to be responsible for bad but unintended outcomes only so long as what they’re doing is bad in the first place. So while we think speeding is commonplace and no great evil, we do get quite worked up when someone speeds and kills someone else as a result. The killing, wholly unintended, is their fault. I think this is a sign that we do consider speeding to be a bit immoral. If the same thing happened to someone who was driving in a perfectly legal way, we wouldn’t ascribe to them any responsibility for the deaths.
I’m not sure I can come up with any similar accidental consequence of filesharing. Maybe the collapse of a publishing company? But this couldn’t be the result of any one person’s activity.
Mm. OK.
So, if someone were to say they endorsed some instances of illegal filesharing because, while they agreed that it was immoral to break the law, they believed that this immorality was outweighed by the importance of being able to freely distribute and obtain information of one’s choosing, your conclusion would be that their reasoning was sound as far as it went, but that they were not correctly estimating the relative importance of those two things.
Yes?
I do think that would be a reasonable tack, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince me that the relative importance of free access to information outweighs the legal violation. Two things give me pause though: first the information one wishes to access is, in the cases Anubhav is describing, simply those books about which one is curious. Nothing life and death there. I can see why one has a right to, say, some of the information Wikileaks might distribute, but I don’t see why one has a right (or whatever) to any information one wants. Certainly not the intellectual products of other people.
Second, one already has access to that information. It just costs money. The point isn’t that one is gaining access to information one otherwise couldn’t get, but rather that one is saving money in doing so.
I know people over the internet who fileshare philosophy books because they live in poverty, or in countries without academic institutions or libraries, or because they live in countries with oppressive governments. Filesharing in these cases doesn’t strike me as particularly immoral, or rather, its immorality seems to be outweighed.
But in the case of someone who fileshares a book when they could (even with some hardship) pay for it and has (politically) free access to it, this is immoral.
OK.
So, if someone countered your defense of sodomy in Texas pre-2003 by arguing that, first, there is nothing life or death about the desire to have particular kinds of sex and they don’t see why one has a right (or whatever) to any kind of sex one wants, and, second, that one already has access to sodomy, one merely has to move to a state where it’s legal, and that therefore committing sodomy in Texas pre-2003 was in fact net immoral, what would be your response?
BTW, at about this point I feel somewhat obligated to state my own position on these sorts of issues, which is roughly speaking that violating the law is not in and of itself immoral, but neither is enforcing it. Which is to say, when I violate the law, I move myself into a position where it is potentially moral to imprison me, confiscate my property, reduce my future potential for valuable years, or even kill me. (There are other considerations that affect whether that potential is actualized.)
That said, I’m not trying to argue in favor of that position here, and you can feel free to ignore it if you wish. I just feel socially obligated to get my own cards out on the table.
I should perhaps also say that I was routinely violating U.S. anti-sodomy laws prior to 2003 and would continue to be doing so if those laws were still in place in my state of residence. Not that those things are actually relevant at all, but they seemed worth saying anyway.
I would say first that the freedom to have a sex life of one’s choosing is a life and death matter (not literally of course). I mean that this freedom is of great moral significance, and its curtailment is justifiable only under extreme circumstances (what these could be, I cannot imagine). I’d be happy to defend that if pressed, though I doubt you disagree. I’m sure we would agree that this is not merely a case of breaking the law so as to take pleasure in something, and that a case like this (like consuming drugs illegally) is quite different from the case of sodomy.
Second, having to move to a different state doesn’t constitute free access. If we understood free access that way, we would lose track of what it meant to say that a government is oppressive with respect to such access.
I think breaking the law is immoral as a rule. This can be offset if the law itself is unjust or impractical, or if extreme circumstances produce an exception. I think breaking the law is immoral because the polity and its stability and coherence isn’t just a practical good but a moral one. Or rather, I think the polity is one of the major conditions that make moral goods possible. It seems uncontroversial to me to say that we have special moral relationships with our country as a whole and with our fellow citizens, relationships which we don’t share with just anyone. As a US citizen, I bear some responsibility for the actions of my government. I rightly feel shame at our policies about torture. But I bear no responsibility for the actions of the Chinese government. I rightly feel angry that they torture people, but would not rightly feel ashamed.
ETA: on the morality of breaking/enforcing the law: I take it we would agree that these stand and fall together. If breaking is wrong, enforcing is at least morally significant, and if enforcing is morally significant, so is breaking the law. Executing someone for jaywalking or filesharing, even if it’s consistant with the law, is deeply evil and unjust. If you accept this and the above premise, this implies that breaking the law is likewise morally significant.
OK. Thanks for clarifying; this was helpful.
For my own part:
I agree that the stability and coherence of the polity is a practical good, and that it is a moral good. (I suspect that I don’t agree with the line you’re drawing between those goods, but it’s irrelevant in this case.)
I agree that the aggregate cost of individuals complying with particular laws (or of being punished for their violation) can in certain cases exceed the collective benefit of enforcing that law. In those cases, I would not consider it a moral good to either enforce or comply with such a law.
I probably don’t agree with your reasons for asserting the “special moral relationships” between, for example, me and my country, but I agree with you that in practice I probably have more ability to influence U.S. policy than that of other countries of similar power, and that ability weighs into my moral relationship to U.S. policy.
I don’t endorse feeling ashamed about things I cannot influence.
I agree that if enforcing a law in a particular context is morally significant, breaking that law in that context is also morally significant. (It’s not clear to me that equation holds across contexts.) Ditto for (breaking a law is wrong) → (enforcing that law is morally significant)
I agree that executing someone for jaywalking or filesharing is wrong. (Also “deeply evil and unjust,” if you like, though I’m not sure what those terms add beyond emphasis.)
I agree that jaywalking or filesharing in a context where those actions can lead to my execution is morally significant, and that I can infer that conclusion from the above claims (as well as from general principles).
I agree with a weaker version of your conclusion: if a law is impractical, disobeying it is permissible. But the cost in terms of respect for the law produced by widespread disobedience should be factored in. Laws lean on each other. Also, I didn’t say (and wouldn’t say) that it’s of itself a moral good to comply with the law. Only that it’s a moral bad to break it. Second, there’s a question of how to respond to impractical laws: are they personally impractical? Then violating the law seems more permissible. If they are personally quite practical but only impractical in aggregate, I think the appropriate response is probably more like political activism.
CR laws may be impractical in aggregate, but the presence of CR laws along with their widespread violation is, I expect, very much more impractical. If the practical situation is ‘no CR laws’, then violating them is not an appropriate response.
Well, suppose the president of the US had the power, by imposing sanctions, to limit or prevent some injustice in Iran, like the execution of political prisoners. I think we would agree that this act is of moral significance, but also that it would have to be weighed against the interests of the US, etc. On the other hand, if the president discovered that his or her own government were executing political prisoners, he would be in extreme moral dereliction for not putting a stop to this almost regardless of practical consequences. So a president might have the power to influence such a situation in both cases, but he or she bears much more acute moral responsibility for the actions of his or her own government.
So I don’t think it’s the case that moral responsibility comes down simply to an ability to affect some situation. Does that seem like a reasonable argument?
Perhaps this will seem sophistical, but don’t you only feel shame at things you cannot influence, namely things in the past? If I murder someone, I ought to feel ashamed. But I cannot change the fact of the murder. And before the fact, I cannot feel ashamed of it, since it hasn’t happened.
I think we should agree that enforcing a law is always morally significant: enforcing it against an innocent person is always or for the most part immoral, and it is made permissible only by the breaking of a law. So the relationship between the breaking of a law and its enforcement is on some level a moral one, and for every question of enforcement, there is a morally significant question of guilt.
So if the law isn’t personally as well as in aggregate impractical (CR law isn’t in the cases we’re discussing) and the breaking and enforcing of laws is always morally significant, then I think we’re at least closer to the conclusion that breaking CR laws for personal gain is immoral.
I agree that the cost in terms of respect for the law produced by widespread disobedience should be factored in when deciding whether to comply with a law.
I am confused by how you can say that the “stability of the polity” is a moral good, and that compliance with the law contributes to the stability of the polity, but that compliance with the law is not a moral good.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “personally impractical” as opposed to “impractical in aggregate,” but in any case, I would say that if the law is a bad law in aggregate, then an individual response is appropriate to the degree that it has an expected value of removing that law and low expected costs. Political activism is sometimes an excellent example of this… and sometimes not. Widespread violation of the law is sometimes an excellent example of this… and sometimes not. (Indeed, sometimes they are one and the same. And sometimes not.)
I disagree that the president of the U.S. has more moral responsibility for policy A than policy B if her ability to influence the policies is the same, and the moral wrong of the policies and the influencing of them is the same, just because policy A is a U.S. policy. I think the intuitive rightness of that idea stems from the presumption that her ability to influence a policy for a given degree of moral wrong is higher for U.S. policies.
I’m not sure what “acute” moral responsibility is.
I do in fact often feel ashamed about things I cannot influence, including things in the past. I don’t endorse it. But I also often feel shame about my present (and anticipated future) willingness to do certain things, and insofar as that shame reduces my likelihood of doing those things and I reject doing those things, I tentatively endorse that shame.
I agree that enforcing a law is morally significant. Enforcing a law against an innocent person is a confused idea (roughly corresponding to attacking someone in an unjustified way under the mistaken belief that I’m enforcing the law) but I agree that it’s usually a moral wrong.
Can you argue that CR violation, in the form of filesharing, is a good example of an appropriate response to an impractical or immoral law?
In the general case? Not convincingly.
Well, I’ve asked Anubhav the same thing, and I suppose I should wait and hear his case, since it’s his suggestion I’m arguing against. Thanks for the discussion.
That’s nutty. It’s like saying the dictionary authors are the ultimate authority on language. You’ve got the causality the wrong way round.
The only convincing argument for following the law for me is that the rule of law is important and we can only maintain it if people respect the law. But that is instrumental in creating the kind of society we want. You get close to suggesting this but undermine yourself by then claiming that the rule of law “isn’t just a practical good but a moral one.”
If following the law were moral, you should be proposing more laws like “everyone has to breathe” so that we can all be more moral. Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
That’s… very odd. You should remove US citizenship from your self-identity so that you can think more clearly about this. The US is torturing people, China is torturing people, both are very bad. You perhaps have more ability to affect US torture and should therefore pay more attention, but they are not a different kind of responsibility.
If you don’t like torture, do what you can against it. Don’t just excuse yourself because you don’t count the entities involved as part of your personal identity.
That strikes me as an extremely inapt analogy. Dictionary authors have little no authority in language because they are not a condition on the possibility of language. I think it’s reasonable to say that the polity is a significant (if not necessary or sufficient) condition on the possibility of morality.
You’re reading me as saying “obeying the law, whatever it says, is a moral good”. I didn’t say or imply this. I said that violating the law is a moral bad. So the above doesn’t follow.
Assuming not everyone is law-abiding, yes.
I can’t. My self-identity isn’t entirely up to me. If I murder someone, I can’t just decide that this act is no longer a part of my self-identity and thereby become innocent of it. I did something evil and nothing can ever make that go away. It’s mine forever. If I’m lazy, or stupid, or brave, I can’t just decide to cease being these things (ETA: not just by fiat anyway, I’d have to make substantial changes to my life). The fact is that my life, both in practical and in moral terms, is the life of a US citizen. Most everything I do is conditioned on the existence and quality of the government and citizenry. My citizenship is also the condition for my enjoyment of very important moral goods, like the possibility of loyalty and a participation in justice.
So even if I could remove US citizenship from my identity (I can, in suppose, by officially renouncing my citizenship) I wouldn’t. Being a citizen is a great, great good. Take it from someone who spent a fair amount of time without being a citizen of anywhere.
But all this is a little astray. My point is just that its immoral to ignore or violate the law for one’s personal gain. If you disagree with that, then my much more specific claim about why probably won’t convince you. I’m afraid if you don’t think breaking the law has any moral significance, I have no immediate way to argue for the immorality of filesharing. Or theft.
I don’t want to ignore your point here, it’s an important one, but it’s not relevant to this particular discussion. If I’m mistaken in that, please let me know.
EDIT: sorry for the length /EDIT
So you would cease to be a moral person if the law went away? I don’t understand. Maybe you mean that the world would be morally much worse off without law? I agree with that, but that doesn’t imply that the law is the source of morality or whatever. It’s still instrumental and hopefully following from morality, not the other way.
Ok, so we should remove the laws that people tend to violate a lot, to reduce the moral badness in the world. I guess if you think that law is our morality, this would still be a bad idea because changing your morality is a bad idea (the gandhi kill pill argument).
Yes you can. Sorry, I didn’t mean like give up your citizenship, I meant keep it out of your self image, because people are irrational about things in their self-image.
For example: I live in canada, I have an american and canadian citizenship, I enjoy the benefits, I do not think of myself as canadian or american because then I would not be able to think clearly about the differences between me and the countries of which I am part. I also do not consider my gender, age, race, or name to be part of my identity.
Have you ever talked to chinese citizens about the actions of the chinese government? You may have noticed that many are unable to differentiate between criticism of the chinese government and criticism of the chinese people. This is because the propaganda conflates the two. Avoid that.
I agree that violating the law is bad, but not intrinsically immoral the way murder is. Violating the law is bad because of the consequences for the rule of law, and because the law is often parallel to morality.
Leave yourself a line of retreat. In the absence of law, would it be bad to steal? If not, why make the law in the first place?
Stealing is bad because it is bad for the person you stole from and creates the wrong kind of society. No law required.
Not all sharing is illegal or even of the controversial sort. I torrent my operating system images, and I have license to those. I share images on the internet that are public domain works.
Copyright Infringement I am unsure on. I’ve seen plenty of evidence, if you have more, please share it with me.
Whatever you think, don’t try to justify a law by appealing to the fact that it is law. That is circular. If there is some other argument why in a counterfactual world without a law, it would be a good idea to create it, appeal to that instead of the circular part.
Do you understand why I don’t think talking about the current laws is a good idea in a moral discussion?
Maybe not. You were making mistakes in your reasoning because of your identity, so I brought it up.
There is a difference of philosophy here. I will state my position on these matters:
Ideas like Punishment, Responsibility, etc are social protocols instrumental in maintaining a valuable society. They may even be built in at the hardware level, but they are not intrinsic moral values the way “don’t hurt people” is. We are now smart enough to come up with better solutions to the problems that they solved.
Punishment is about getting people to follow rules that are a good for everyone when there is individual profit in defecting. Game theory, specifically iterated prisoners dilemma and so on, implies that punishment of defectors is a very good strategy for maintaining a beneficial relationship in many circumstances. It turns out that our ancestral environment was one such situation, so we have the idea of punishment built in at an instinctual level. There are situations where punishment is not the best solution, so taking it as a given is stupid.
For example, let’s say we find out that some murders are not calculating defections, but failures of self control and lack of education. Let’s further suppose that there is a two -week course that a murderer can take that has a 98% success rate in making them productive members of society, never to murder again. Let’s say that Bob is such a murderer. What do we do with him? We can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping him in degrading prison, after which he will still be a murderer, or we can put him thru our two week course for a couple thousand dollars, after which he will be a productive member of society. What to do? Do we decide that punishment is the moral thing to do, or do we decide there are more important things than following obsolete tribal-politics hueristics?
Responsibility is another evolutionary and social hack to kick you into action when you have the ability to affect something morally important. It is not a moral primitive. We now have utilitarian decision theories and associated philosophy that does a much better job at improving the world.
You brought up responsibility in the context of murder and torture. Once you factor out punishment, as demystified above, and ability to affect things, the people starving to death all over the world are just as important as the person you save or kill right here. Once you factor out your ability to change things, the people being tortured by foreign powers are just as important as those being tortured by the government you live under.
This is what I mean when I say not to excuse yourself from tragedies outside your identity. Minimize your identity and feel responsible for all the tragedy in the world, not just that which “you” cause.
I think you and I have a problem of miscommunication. These claims are not my claims, and do not follow from anything I’ve said: -The law is morality. -You would cease to be moral if the law went away. -It is morally good to obey the law.
I do agree that we should reconsider laws that people tend to violate a lot: widespread violation is good evidence for the impracticability of a law. But it would be senseless to remove violated laws to decrease the moral badness in the world, because the laws exist in the first place for the good of the polity and its citizens.
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity. I can work to change, but I can’t change by fiat.
Not really. I take it you would say that nothing vouchsafes the morality of current law, so we cannot look to law for moral principles. In a certain way I agree with this, but I think this view underestimates the relationship between the law and our moral lives. It is in virtue of living in a polity that we can be moral beings. If there were no polity, we might still be capable of morality (especially if we were raised in a polity) but in a very limited way. Very, very important things like courage and loyalty and honesty and justice would be curtailed or closed off to us.
This is, I think, not a good view of justice, specifically in that it involves a contempt for the criminal. It is not okay to lock people away in a little box, or cause them pain, or take their freedom, or anything like this for the sake of changing their behavior. Manipulating people by causing them to suffer is torture, and that’s not what (I hope) our justice system is up to. We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty). Punishment isn’t aimed at some further end, like torture or coercion.
Thanks for taking the time to present your views on the subject, I found them as interesting as they were different from my own. What makes ‘don’t hurt people’ an intrinsic moral value?
My statement about removing laws that people violate was intended to be obviously absurd. I don’t think it is a good idea to do it (at least not for that reason).
Disagree. Identity is a matter of where you carve the world, which you should do in whatever way works best. It happens that people are not capable of reasoning as rationally about things that they identify with. It seems perfectly reasonable to say “am I not capable of thinking rationally about this category (things I identify with), and it does not provide enough value to make up for that, so I ought to simply delete it.” It’s a mind hack, for sure, but I think it is fully possible and the right thing to do.
You seem to at least understand what I meant. I’m afraid I don’t yet understand your position. Could you explain in more detail why some form of law is necessary for morality (if I even have that right)?
There is no contempt for the defector. Punishment is simply a sad duty that we must credibly pre-commit to to maintain social order. Torture is unnecessary and morally expensive. People often overestimate the amount of punishment needed to deter defectors (as opposed to other types of crime that must be handled with other methods).
That is exactly what I disagree with. Why should we punish them? What benefit is there from spending our resources to hurt them, if it’s not the game-theoretic determent?
I’ll retract that. ‘Don’t hurt people’ may not be morally intrinsic, but it’s much, much closer than punishment, which we (or at least I) now know is derived (but only in some cases) from other principles. I can’t think of anything much more universal than ‘don’t hurt people’, but I’m sure it reduces somewhere. The point I was trying to make was that punishment is not as fundamental as some other principles, and should be abandoned in favor of them when that is the dilemma.
Isn’t this a prescription for the happy psychotic, who carves the world up in such a way that he is always maximally happy? I take it we should carve the world at the joints, whether this is good for us or not, and whether we like it or not. If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a ‘mind hack’. You cannot by any force of will decide to believe something you believe to be false and you must believe everything you believe to be true. You have no control whatsoever over what to believe. I cannot adjust my self-identity without coming to the (I think false) belief that I am not really a US citizen. You might convince me that this actually isn’t a part of my self-identity, but only by convincing me that it never was.
Well, I called it a ‘significant condition on morality’ and I suggested that it may well be (I don’t know) a necessary or sufficient or necessary and sufficient condition. I doubt I can be persuasive here, since we disagree on the subject so broadly. Being good is hard. Being good means being generous with people, and this requires some modest wealth. It also means being courageous. Being just requires an association with people, and in any significant number, this requires leadership and law. Being civil, kind, etc. requires friendship, and this likewise requires associations and mutual interests, and all these practically depend upon the law. Courage is the belief that your life is worth something, such that it would be better to die than live a life of terribly low moral quality. Courage therefore means a willingness to die for the sake of the above moral goods. And perhaps most generally, being good means doing great good things with your life, and this requires powers and wealth vastly beyond the capacity of a single human to provide. Being good requires leisure, because it requires reflection and deliberation, and leisure can only be provided under the conditions of a polity, among friends, in safety, etc.
My point is that punishment is not for the sake of any benefit at all. It’s a manifestation of anger, which is the rational response to wrongdoing. If we are not angry with the wrongdoer, we are treating them like an animal or a small child. Anger, and so its manifestation, is a form of respect for the capacity in the criminal to do good. The last thing justice is about is using suffering and imprisonment to manipulate people.
In virtue of what is it closer?
You are misunderstanding the nature of self-identity. It is not a fact about the world that you have to get right, it is a cognitive category that causes you to go insane about anything that is in it. The fact that you have a US citezenship does not mean you should put “Actions of the US” in the “I should be insane about these” category. If you truly believe that mind-hacks don’t exist, I don’t know how you intend to deal with biased cognitive machinery.
The reason we don’t talk about politics around here is precisely because people have politics as part of their identity, and are therefore incapable of reasoning about it. The more general form of “don’t think about politics” is “don’t identify with stuff”.
I promise never to do this.
From what does the ‘therefore’ follow? Is this an empirical claim?
Yes. The hidden empirical premise is that people can’t think straight about things they identify with. They get defensive and go into politics-mode.
See paul graham’s take.
I’ve observed this phenomenon a lot, and it explains quite a bit. If you can show me some evidence you have about this that I don’t, that would be cool.
This is all wrong. The rational thing to do is whatever is best by your values, which does not necessarily mean getting mad at people and hurting them.
This is so wrong I don’t know how to tackle it.
This was my impression of your presentation of your view too. We should both be extremely suspicious of our ability to evaluate the correctness of a view to which we object so deeply that we cannot find enough common ground to have an argument. I think I’ll tap out but I’m happy to discuss these things and so if you want to discuss these topics further, start a discussion topic or send me a message. Thanks for the discussion.
There is obviously some huge inferential distance here. I’ll try to come up with lower-level build up for my position. You should to. Agreeing to disagree is unacceptable.
Anyways, it will be a while.
Are you asserting that it’s unacceptable to agree to disagree in situations where the estimated time and effort for coming to agreement is higher than the estimated value of coming to agreement? If so, can you expand on why?
Just in general it shouldn’t happen. I think some cases aren’t worth it if it is sufficiently difficult, as you suggest. This may be one of those cases.
On the other hand, I think formulating a coherent explanation of punishment is a useful thing to do, because there are so many people who make the mistake of assuming that it’s fundamental.
I suppose. Mostly I think those people should read a good book on animal training.
Then again, I think everyone should read a good book on animal training.
Everything you said here points to law being instrumental, so I’ll assume that you agree.
I would say, rather, that changing my identity the way nyan_sandwich suggested would be similar to changing how I navigate through the territory by changing the map I use… which seems like a pretty good idea to me, if the map I’m currently using doesn’t get me where I want to go.