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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – UK government overreaching again But the proposed UK law would go beyond just FaceTime and iMessage to encompass all Apple products.
Earlier in January, civil liberties groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Open Rights Group and Privacy International, put out a joint briefing opposing parts of the bill.
The groups said they were concerned the proposed changes would “force technology companies, including those based overseas, to inform the government of any plans to improve security or privacy measures on their platforms so that the government can consider serving a notice to prevent such changes”.
They added this would be “effectively transforming private companies into arms of the surveillance state and eroding the security of devices and the internet.”
– Zoe Kleinman
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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It would be nice if Apple told the Home Office that they will stop selling their products and services in Britain if this legislation passes, and would be even nicer if they joined Google and Microsoft in doing so. If they followed through on that threat then the government would have about a week to reverse course before the houses of parliament were burned down.
People love their iPhones a LOT more than they love politicians, and a lot more than they care about child porn.
The advantage to Apple and others is they’d only have to make that stand one time and then every other government would be afraid to do the same thing (apart from China, of course). Do I think they will do it? More likely they’ll do a backroom deal in a smoke filled room.
What on earth is going on? The Government is massively unpopular, with a General Election coming up. You’d think some headlines along the lines of ‘Tories reject sinister plans to monitor Facebook Messenger’ would be just what they need.
Dr Sean Gabb, my old opponent (we argued about various things – some of which he was correct about and I was wrong, and vice versa) was very good on the decline of the Common Law and Civil Liberties – and how even Conservative politicians seemed to have no understanding of (let alone belief in) these principles. Although his own philosophy, which he shared with these politicians (see below), was very much part of the problem.
But then no one in the establishment, regardless of party, has any understanding of the Common Law in the sense that (for example) Chief Justice Coke or Chief Justice Sir John Holt would have understood this terms.
It is not just judges who describe “all lives matter” as a “racist trope” who have no grasp of the old principles of law – it is everyone in the establishment, their understanding of “law” is a command (order, edict) designed to promote the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.
The Common Law is not about commands from the elite and its purpose is not utilitarian (“let justice be done even if the world burns” is hardly a utilitarian sentiment – a Common Law judge would have no part of, for example, the doctrine that an innocent man should be convicted of murder in order to stop riots in American cities, for the modern establishment it is a “no brainer” that he should be) – but the modern establishment (including the legal establishment) are steeped in Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham.
It is much the same among the American elite – when they read such things as the Bill of Rights (which is derived from Common Law which is, in turn, derived from natural law) their reaction is to consider it, to use a term of George Orwell, “crime-think”.
Barbarus you assume that policy is made by elected politicians trying to please the voters so they are reelected.
If only that were so.
Some years ago I had someone in a discussion group explain to me that rights only existed because they were granted and enforced by government, which of course is at the heart of legal realism. I pointed out that if he believed that he could not possibly understand either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, both of which assumed that rights were prior to government. I don’t think he even grasped what I was saying.
@William H. Stoddard
I pointed out that if he believed that he could not possibly understand either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, both of which assumed that rights were prior to government.
The DoI and Constitution (or at least the “rights” therein) are really an encapsulation of what the colonials thought of as “the rights of Englishmen” that had, at that time, been evolved through seven hundred years of societal negotiation, encapsulated both in English law and custom. They didn’t come out of nowhere. Rights, like morality more broadly, aren’t something coming down from on high on tablets of stone, rather it is an evolved set of memes, cultural beliefs, conventions and laws that society creates over a long period of time. The Constitution and bill of rights are unusual because, unlike most nations at the time, the USA had definite starting point, and a tabula rasa from which to start, and a printing press to distribute them. But what was written on there was still the distilled wisdom that was thought of as “the rights of Englishmen” from the Magna Carta through the 1689 Bill of Rights passed as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution, and many stops in between.
It always makes me laugh when people want to put up the ten commandments on the wall of a courthouse, because out of the ten only two are illegal in America (and a third is illegal under some circumstances), in fact several of them the constitution guarantees us the right to break them freely.
Do rights exist outside of an enforcement mechanism? Sure, in the minds of people and in the cultural memes a society has. But if, fifty years from now, nobody thinks that the right to free speech is valid, and if it is washed from our cultural zeitgeist, will it still exist? Does it have an existence outside of those things? I don’t think so.
BTW, fun fact, at this time the English alphabet was changing so that the s character changed from a long S medially (looking like an uncrossed f) to a short s. You can see this in these two documents where the long S is used in the DoI and the short in the Consitution.
Fraser: That position is valid if you believe that ethics is purely a belief system, that cannot be judged to be true or false, right or wrong, sound or unsound, except by its own internal self-approval—whether a personal belief system, as in subjectivism, or a cultural one, as in the cultural relativism that Nietzsche helped to make prevalent. But I don’t believe that, any more than I believe it of medicine, or engineering. If you want bridges to stand up, or doctors to cure diseases or keep people healthy, or ethics to show you how to have a life of eudaemonia, some things work and others don’t, and some cultures recommend things that don’t work and achieve bad results.
Now, it’s true that if you washed sound engineering practices from the cultural Zeitgeist, you might no longer have that kind of engineering. But you would not achieve a different sort of engineering; you would achieve technological failure—as we are having demonstrated with green energy, for example.
Plato already addressed this in the Euthyphro, and I think he had the right of it.
@William H. Stoddard
Fraser: That position is valid if you believe that ethics is purely a belief system, that cannot be judged to be true or false, right or wrong, sound or unsound, except by its own internal self-approval
I’m not really sure I said that. Any evolutionary system, and ethics is an evolutionary system, does not at all live in a vacuum. It lives in the real world and it operates on a fitness principle just as biological evolution does. There are no ethical systems (or none that last long) that advocate against having children. There are no successful ethical systems that advocate against property. Some people tried that and it failed, just like the mammoth or neanderthals.
Ethics is a confused mix of a lot of different influences, and for sure there is a lot of damaging influences, including from strong men or religious manipulation. But even they are subject to the realities of ethics-meets-the-real-world. The ethics and beliefs of the Heaven’s Gate cult are no longer extant because of a rather large disconnection with reality.
Ethics responds constantly to the environment we live in. Wokeism, for example, only exists because free markets have been given sufficient free reign to make a very wealthy society. And as a consequence idle dilettantes can survive and have voice, something that is very new in human society.
It reminds me a lot of Islamist terrorists using modern weapons of war that their primitive societies could never produce. The irony of some shaggy haired Gender Studies student spouting off about the evils of capitalism on his iPhone while sipping his Starbucks is so pregnant with irony one wonders his head doesn’t explode. (Apologies for assuming xir pronoun.)
Fraser: Also the religious nutjobs decrying the evils of modernity that produces guns, yet also using those very evils of modernity to slaughter their neighbours.
Barbarus,
Quite the contrary I’m afraid. Sunak has no intention of winning the next election and will quite possibly slink off to his California penthouse and let some numpty take the drubbing. He is currently trying to do as much harm as possible in the time available as per his masters’ wishes.
Barbarus:
What on earth is going on? The Government is massively unpopular, with a General Election coming up. You’d think some headlines along the lines of ‘Tories reject sinister plans to monitor Facebook Messenger’ would be just what they need.
As with the current government’s attempts to regulate AI, and Sunak’s desire to impose New Zealand-like bans on sales of cigarettes to young people and adults, this is a sort of displacement activity. As governments default more and more on their core functions of protecting life and property from internal and external assault, they resort to this sort of “regulatory theatre”. It gives the impression of activity. It is also a function of how legislators/officials are always looking for something to do. It is how they gain budgets, staff, power and prestige.
Resisting this stuff is hard, as you probably know, because of a sort of Precautionary Principle. “Better that the internet/phones should be rendered open and privacy removed than one child/whoever be harmed by seeing nasty things.”
I don’t think there are any principled, genuinely liberal politicians in the UK, and precious few in the mainstream media.
Simplest explanation for it all? The Karens have taken over.
Of course, this same impulse has been a constant thread in British politics since, like… Forever. Remember how the BBC got founded? Why the gun control policies came in?
Basically, the British powers, whoever is in charge at any given time, are completely uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might have a dissenting view from their own, and the capacity to do something about it. Thus, instead of a thousand different radio stations “doing their own thing”, the UK had to have the bureaucratized and “safe” BBC put into place, controlling it all. Same with television… How long did the BBC reign as a monopoly?
Gun control was the same basic impulse, being carried out yet again with regard to “dangerous knives”. The Karens can’t comprehend that the real problem isn’t “dangerous weapons”, but the dangerous minds wielding them. They think that if they just ban the bad old guns, then violence will cease, somehow… Never mind that people were successfully bashing each other over the head with sticks and stones long before the advent of guns or knives, and that the only way to really prevent violence is to do away with people, entirely.
I’d say congratulations to the “rest of the people” in Britain for finally having put the precise wrong people in power over them, and then in acquiescing to their ever-increasing usurpation of personal rights. In the name of “safety”, usually.
Which, considering the sort of people you’ve also put in charge of “health and safety”, maybe wasn’t such a good idea. When the local fire brigade watches someone drown because the people on-scene weren’t either equipped or documentably trained to perform water rescues, you may have more than a minor problem in your culture.
Sad to observe, from the outside, but the antecedent trends have been there since at least the 1890s. You acquiesced to all of the gradualism going on around you, until now you find yourselves hemmed in like domesticated animals, unable to resist the machinations of the Karens.
Not sure what it will take to break the cycle, but I suspect that the Britain of 2100 will look nothing like the Britain of 1950 or even 2000…
You mean like what the FBI and CDC did with Twitter?
Except that was censorship, not surveillance, but still government co-oping private business.
Kirk had it exactly when he wrote, “Simplest explanation for it all? The Karens have taken over.”
This is most certainly true of the US. And we can go further. The “Karen” phenomenon of a couple of years ago was really nothing more than the modern incarnation of New England Puritanism. Secularised, of course, but Puritan in its working out none the less.
There is a class of people, both in the US and the UK, who know, to an amazingly fine level of detail, exactly how every one of us should live. And they are not shy about sharing their opinions and condemnations.
What we see today in the US is really the working out of the modern form of New England Puritanism.
What we see in the UK is a related but not identical idea of, for lack of a better term, Puritan Patricianism, the idea that our betters know best, with all the contempt and scorn of Normies that entails.
Frasier Orr @2:39am,
“…if, fifty years from now, nobody thinks that the right to free speech is valid, and if it is washed from our cultural zeitgeist, will it still exist? Does it have an existence outside of those things? I don’t think so.”
The connection between “washed from the cultural zeitgeist” and “existing” seems not well established. I suppose it depends what you mean by “existing”. If you mean “is it extant in the culture, in society”, then no, certainly it can cease to exist. If you mean, “is it part of our nature”, part of the natural order”, then I think it exists whether it’s being manifested or not.
To me “washed from the cultural zeitgeist” means suppressed, not eradicated.
@GregWA
If you mean, “is it part of our nature”, part of the natural order”, then I think it exists whether it’s being manifested or not.
Thanks for encapsulating the essential point so very well Greg.
TBH, I think this idea of natural rights is mostly bogus. I don’t think history supports these ideas as part of the natural order, rather that are largely originating in the Western Enlightenment. I don’t think ancient people felt they had a right to say what they thought, or a yearning to be free of oppressions. For sure, sometimes the oppressors went too far and the serfs rose up in revolution. But revolutions are usually mainly about bread and taxes, not about abstract ideas like freedom of speech or liberty.
I think they are ideas that have developed mostly in the past five hundred years, and thank god that they did. But if you read ancient books, like the Bible for example, slavery isn’t an issue, it is just one of those things that seemed a part of the natural order. People get up in arms about whether the Bible advocates for slavery. But if you read it it really doesn’t. It doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other. Slavery is, to use your expression, just part of the natural order as far as they are concerned. Like the fact that only women can have babies, or children are irresponsible, or Kings deserve riches. Like death and taxes it is just the way the world is, and these “intellectuals” from the enlightenment were rebels with new ideas shaking things up, not traditionalists maintaining the natural order.
Frasor Orr – your reasoning is that of a moral relativist, and that always leads to tyranny. It always leads to tyranny because it means there are no objective standards to judge the state by – so nothing the state does is wrong because it decides what “right and wrong – just and unjust” mean, the mental universe of Thomas Hobbes. It is much like “Voluntarism” in theology which holds that “good and evil” are just whatever God declares to be “good” or “evil” without any objective moral reason to judge them – a doctrine (a doctrine that whatever scripture seems to say is automatically right and wrong – because there is no other way to judge moral questions) rightly rejected by both Christian Scholastics and Jewish Talmudists. “God says…” is not, in-its-self, a moral argument. Indeed the “God” of this form of false theology is much the same as the “Sovereign” (be that one person or a group) of the false political philosophy of Mr Hobbes.
As for basic natural rights, stemming from natural law, in this land – stating them is one thing, enforcing them is quite another.
Slavery is an obvious example – it was denounced in Westminster Hall (which still stands) as a violation of natural law back in the time of Henry the First, but centuries later there were slaves. Even in Roman times it was understood that slavery was against natural law (the Roman excuse of “the law of all nations” was basically the “they do it to us – so we can do it to them” excuse, classic bad legal reasoning), and the “natural slave” argument of Aristotle in Ancient Greece was undermined, by Aristotle himself, when he freed his own slaves in his will. Yet there remained vast numbers of slaves in the Ancient World (although, modern research indicates, a rather smaller proportion of the population than was once thought).
In the 16th century there were repeated judgements against slavery in English courts – just as there were in the early 1700s (Chief Justice Holt) – yet there continued to be slaves, because it is one thing to pass a judgement and quite another to make it stick. Right up to the Mansfield Judgement of 1774 (about 600 years after the Westminster declaration).
Nor is this ancient history – as Covid “lockdowns” and “Hate Speech” laws show that basic rights are under threat right now.
So “there are no objective moral rights – it is just a matter of changing conventions over time” is not helpful (to put the matter politely) in limiting the power of the state.
As for what you say about the Bible – read First Book of Samuel, Chapter Eight and use your moral reason to extrapolate from that, and other parts of the Bible, to other matters (and other people). As the ancient Talmudists (just like some ancient pagan philosophers) grasped – if we claim moral liberty for ourselves, we must (in logical good faith) defend it for other people – including people we ourselves hold in bondage.
As Tolkien pointed out (drawing as much from secular Oxford philosophers such as Harold Prichard and Sir William David Ross as from his own religious background) – basic moral justice and injustice are not one thing in one century and another in another century (although there may be vastly more injustice in one century than another), they are not one thing among men and other thing among “elves and dwarves”, and it the task of a person to discern justice and injustice as much “in the golden wood” as “in your own house” – for they remain the same.
Jews tried to solve the contradiction between natural liberty under natural moral law and slavery – with the seven year rule, not always applied and itself a bit of a dodge. One that went into the American colonies (which were very Old Testament based) indeed the court cases that legalised such things was life-long slavery and being born-into slavery were very controversial – and rightly so as they were clearly bad legal reasoning by compromised judges (to put it bluntly – the judges had been bought).
Even Roman judges (including the highest one – the Emperor) were very uncomfortable when the legal implications of their “law of all nations” legal dodge (basically legalising slavery even though they knew it was against natural law) were shoved in their faces.
For example, “you fed this man to your fish?” – “yes he was my slave and he broke a valuable vase” – “No – you must not do that!” (that happened under Augustus – and it was Augustus who could not tolerate it).
“You castrated this man?” – “yes eunuchs are fetching a good price – and he is my slave” – “No – you must not do that!” And that was Domitian – not a nice man, but things had gone too far even for him, hence the law against castrating slaves.
“You sold this girl to a brothel?” “yes she was my slave – what is the problem” – “No – you must not do that!” – various laws and judgements, under various Emperors.
The implication was clear – the legal excuses for slavery break down when the moral consequences of the principle are shoved in your face.
When the Christians objected to such things as gladiatorial shows or throwing unwanted babies on rubbish heaps to be eaten by rats, they were NOT making a new moral discovery – deep down pagan Romans had always known that such things were morally wrong (there had always been people who had did not go to “the games” just as there had always been people who did not abandon babies on rubbish heaps – and everyone knew that the people who did not do these things were better, or less bad, than people who did – after all there had been a time when “the games” did not exist in Rome and when there was no formal slave market, every educated person knew these things had opened in the first Punic War), but they lacked the strength of moral will to end them.
Just as today the people who murder babies or who castrate little boys or sexually mutilate little girls know (yes – they know) they are behaving wickedly. The rise of vicious (and legalised) crimes in society is not a “change in morality” – it is a rise of evil, and, in the end, moral evil is always a CHOICE.
Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and the rest were wrong – with effort (sometimes great effort – that is true) we can do other than we do, that we do evil things does not mean that they are not evil or that we can not (with effort) stop doing these things.
Although, yes, it is a lot easier if people around us stop doing these things.
It is like a public vote or discussion – each person knows that what is being done is evil, but they fear to oppose it. But let one person stand up against it and it becomes easier for other people to also stand against it, and one is also ashamed to not come to their aid.
“I can not just leave that human being standing alone against the mob”.
When King Louis X, in the Middle Ages, ended slavery in France and broke the back of serfdom (whether there were any serfs after him is contested) no one thought he was inventing a new morality, because people already knew these things were evils (they had always known) – and nor was it anything to do with new technology changing the “mode of production” and this in turn changing the “ideological superstructure” (Marxist claptrap) – it was not a matter of “serfdom replacing slavery” – because he (like others before him – for example in a few Italian city states) attacked both.
He was not even remembered for this – he was remembered (if he was remembered at all) as “Louis the Quarrelsome” because of his habit of getting into arguments with people (I believe he died at the age of only 26).
It is sometimes said that Saint Patrick preached against slavery because he himself had been a slave – but that was not true of King Louis the Tenth – or many others.
And the moral decline, indeed moral collapse, of the last 60 years or so is not a “new morality” either. It has been seen in history before – this is not the first collapse, civilisations (cultures – societies) have often fallen before.
Prime Minister Grey freed more slaves than anyone in history before him – but hardly anyone remembers him because it is held (and understandably so) that he was just ending an evil that should have been ended long before, indeed should never have been allowed in the first place.
If you had told Lord Grey he was “inventing a new morality” he would have rejected that notion as the nonsense that it is.
Software engineering experts are going round telling everyone to make changing your software so easy you can do it hundreds of times a day. The result is engineers waiting impatiently for 45 minutes (!!) before software gets from written by an engineer to being used by real customers. Engineers chat to themselves about how they can reduce this awfully long delay to 10 minutes or even less (faster is better: less risky, quicker to fix etc).
Current security and privacy gurus are going around telling software people to build security and privacy work into their everyday working practices, the ones outlined above, that result in hundreds of changes per day for a decent sized organisation. There are even games that engineers play together so that they can get relaxed and super creative and do this work more frequently and involve more non-expert people in the work.
More people, more changes, more and more frequently, with less rigorous planning and more doing – that’s how this work is going at the moment.
So, hooking the surveillance state approval processes into that 10 minute delivery process hundreds of times a day, even for a small percentage of the releases would be jarring, to say the least.
Then there are demarcation problems. If I add validation to check a number is a number, because I need a number and because I don’t want Bobby Tables creeping his name into a numeric input, is that a security change, or just making my software work properly? Do I need to stop and consult a lawyer before writing [0-9]+?
This is a totally stupid idea.
When we say “Defend the poor and the fatherless, do justice to the afflicted and needy” (psalm 82:3 Old Testament) what do we mean by the word “justice”?
“Defend” is straightforward – when a man sees the someone who can not defend themselves (“the weak” is an alterative translation of the Hebrew) attacked it is our duty to come to their aid – even at the cost of our own lives, we all know that (and have always known that – even long before the thousand year old House of Grey existed) – even if we can not find moral courage to do it.
But what is “justice”? Is justice “to each his own” or is justice some “fair distribution”?
This is not a new conflict or dispute – it was well known to the Ancient Greeks. And the churches have always had that dispute within them as well – in any century one can find thinkers on both sides of this divide (most famously the opposition of Aristotle to the doctrines, on this matter, of his own teacher – Plato).
Tragically our society is now dominated by the “fair distribution” “Social Justice” doctrine – spread, ironically enough, by the very rich, who seem to fail to grasp that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet.
@Paul Marks
Frasor Orr – your reasoning is that of a moral relativist, and that always leads to tyranny. It always leads to tyranny because it means there are no objective standards to judge the state by – so nothing the state does is wrong because it decides what “right and wrong – just and unjust” mean
This is an “is” vs “ought” thing. I am not saying that morality and ethics “ought” to be this way, I am just saying that it “is” this way. I am also not at all saying that the government gets to decide what is right and wrong, in fact that is the opposite of what I am saying.
Let me offer an example from religion. Three hundred years ago if you stood up in a church and said that black men were inferior to, and should be subject to the white man, all around the church you’d see nodding heads. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you stood up in a church and said that women were inferior to men and subject to them and should stay in their place, again the church would murmur in agreement, even most of the women would. Fifty years ago if you stood up in a church and said that “a man who lieth with another man as with a woman is an abomination” murmurs of agreement, a few “praise Jesus”s and maybe a “string up the homos” from the back corner. In each of these cases not only would you get a murmur of agreement, but the preacher up in the pulpit would imbue his sermon with Bible verses to support this, explaining this is how God wants it. It is, he’d tell us, the natural order of things.
Of course today nobody would advocate the first two positions, and the latter they’d avoid talking about, or at best tell us to “hate the sin, love the sinner.” Of course this is great progress, and we should be thankful for it.
But the question is why. Why has the Church so dramatically changed its position on these matters? Did they have a latter day Council of Trent to adjust their doctrine? Did an archeologist dig up a new Pauline Epistle, and a new heavenly truth befell us (presumably with special glasses to read it.)
No, of course not. What actually happened is that people changed their minds, in many cases brave men and women hazarded their lives to convince people that the former way of thinking was wrong. People argued, convinced, cadjolled, campaigned, shamed and in some cases died in great numbers to change the mind of the people, the cultural zeitgeist. And when they did they placed massive pressure on the church who, while slow to respond, eventually realized that if they did not genuflect to this new morality they’d quickly be out of business.
And what of the state? Exactly the same thing here. The state is not a leader in morality, they are a follower. Consider Joe Biden, a man who clearly has no principles beyond his own self aggrandizement and self enrichment. He is the perfect encapsulation of what “politician” means. Is he a moral leader? No, on the contrary he moves with the winds of change. He jumps in front of the parade and spits vehement condemnation of a view he himself espoused five minutes ago.
So, no, it is not the state that sets right and wrong, it is the culture and the people who, over time, change, develop, improve and sometimes make worse, the ideas of what is right, wrong, evil, good, moral and immoral. It is a process of evolution that, just like evolution, adapts to the circumstances it finds itself in. And then the institutions of that state while trying to influence that moral development, ultimately have to follow this moving and changing cultural belief system.
And this is ultimately a good thing. Morality should be defined rationally, by people thinking and debating it, by adapting it to today’s reality. How much better is that than some immovable, unchallenged petrified ideas which nobody can question, challenge or change?
What folks like Fraser miss with regards to “natural rights” is that those rights have nothing to do with anything created by man, whether that is government, custom, or other attempt at constraint.
The “natural right” of self-defense is one of the best places to explore this… It doesn’t matter what you come up with to attempt restraints on this, it still exists. You may have that sow of yours “safely” penned up, but when your stupid ass ventures into the pen in order to remove one of her piglets…? That’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”, and you’re about to experience the sow’s “natural right” of self-defense against you. If you’re lucky, you won’t wind up eaten, into the bargain.
What the Founders observed was that attempting to lay restraints on these “natural rights” is counter-productive. You can shut down speech, but all you are really doing is cutting yourself off from the opinions and thoughts of others, who likely outnumber you. Just as a practical matter, that’s an extremely stupid policy for anyone, from parent in a family setting to a monarch atop a hereditary absolutist throne. You really cannot act as a leader or even a mere manager, without taking into account the opinions and beliefs of the led or the merely managed.
Same with everything in the Bill of Rights. Those aren’t there because they were magnanimously “granting” those rights to the populace, they were there to serve as a warning line for future government. Don’t go past these; dragons dwell there.
I think that Fraser and others that think the way he do has framed these issues erroneously. The “rights” aren’t really individual rights so much as they are things that the government should not be trifling with, if it wishes to stand. “Violate” those rights? You’re going to lose the consent of the governed, and once that is gone, good ‘effing luck keeping a lid on things.
I recall having a very similar conversation with friends of mine who were serving Seattle Police Department officers. They told me I was nuts, that the city couldn’t survive without them and their services… Well, guess what? The city turned out to be very capable of doing away with their sort of service, and the reality is that it likely committed a very long and drawn out form of suicide-as-applied-to-a-metropolis. I see Seattle becoming Detroit-by-the-Sound before long, and I further anticipate I-5 being routed around the cancer that it will become. Many of the businesses that were in Seattle are in the process of moving out, if only because none of their potential clientele are willing to risk going to their showrooms. As the tax base departs, less and less of Seattle’s vaunted budgetary excesses will be possible, so I see that change might come from that. I doubt it, however: The city is too crucial to Democrat control of the state, so they’ll do whatever it takes to keep the place afloat and voting for them.
TLDR; “natural rights” are merely common-sense recognitions of the limits that nature places on government. You can deny the right to free speech and self-defense all you like, but when push comes to shove? People are going to follow their instincts, say what they like, and kill who they must… In order to survive. And, last I looked, it wasn’t really all that smart to try and force any organism into a corner where it can’t escape, because even then, the mouse is dangerous to a cat.
Fraser Orr – I agree with you that morality should be reasoned and that there can be mistakes in reasoning. Mistakes in moral understanding.
But I suspect you are making a fundamental mistake – instead of saying that people can be mistaken about what is morally right or wrong (although far more often they know – but do not find the courage to do the right thing, people can YES also make genuine mistakes in moral reasoning), you imply that moral right and wrong can change.
It is difficult to overstate just how bad such an error would be. Moral right and right do not change any more than any other basic laws of the universe do – when a scientific theory is refuted it does not mean the universe has changed (reality is not subjective), it means we had a false understanding of the universe (the universe itself remains exactly as it was – it has not changed at all).
It is the same with right and wrong – someone can make a sincere mistake of moral understanding (although it is more often the case that they pretend to not know – out of fear of the consequences to themselves, or out of the pleasure of doing evil under the mask of doing good), and it is also true that someone can come to a moral understanding of something which they sincerely (truthfully) did not have before – but what is morally right and morally wrong have not changed at all (the person has just come to understand what they did not understand before).
In these times of moral collapse, which may well lead to the collapse of society (indeed it may well already be collapsing), it is especially important to remember this.
By the way, as I often point out, I have a lot of evil in me – when I talk or write about the evil in others I, sadly, know what I am talking about.
I know why the evil do the things the evil do – only too well. I feel much of what they feel – this is no mistake in moral understanding, indeed part of the pleasure of inflicting suffering and death on the innocent is knowing that it is evil to do so.
Giving in to such temptations is in no way a new morality – it is just evil, which has been around for ever.
As for doing evil under the mask of doing good – that is common indeed, and always has been.
@Paul Marks
Moral right and right do not change any more than any other basic laws of the universe do
Just as Greg before you, I applaud you for framing the dispute so very concisely and clearly. However, I entirely disagree with you. Right and wrong absolutely do change, and moral laws bear almost no resemblance to the basic laws of the universe. The force of gravity is a law of nature, and it is the same today as it was in ancient China, as it was in Tenochtitlan, as it is on the Jovian moon Ganymede. We can determine with absolute certainty what it is through empirical evidence.
What experiment determines what is moral or not? What has been considered moral and immoral has drastically changed throughout human history. In truth there is very little commonality between the moral codes of most of human history. And one should not be surprised by that because morality is not an absolute law, a force of the universe, it is a decision that societies make in the best interest of their societies. It is, by its very nature both subjective and circumstantial.
For most of human history a woman found unchaste on her wedding day was a fallen woman. The Bible even suggests she be stoned to death on her father’s doorstep. And in past that made a lot of sense for reasons I am sure you are aware of. Today, that is not at all considered even fleetingly immoral. For most of human history children worked in the fields at dangerous, tiresome and mundane jobs. Today, any family who did that would be called up before CPS before they could spell CPS. In the past killing someone who killed your loved one was considered perfectly reasonable, as was engaging in a duel with someone who had dishonored you or your wife. Examples of the changing moral web throughout history are far too numerous to list. And an analysis of each often reveals the very real circumstantial reasons they were appropriate. Moreover, actions determined either moral or immoral and that were so throughout all of history and all societies are very few in number.
It seems rather parochial to me to think that the things we think are moral, in the society, time and circumstances we have can be applied retroactively to people in very different circumstances than we.
If morals are absolute, where do they come from? We understand where the law of gravity comes from. We understand why the sun burns hot, and how long it will do so. We can measure these things with our instruments and our records. What instrument measures morality? What units do we measure wrongness in? Where does this absolute morality you seem so sure of come from? Instead we chart our morality through heuristics, laws, religions, contradictory memes, social pressures, conventions and institutions.
One thing I do know is that humans have a an inborn desire to have an absolute measure of wrong and right. I think in a sense that is where your need for there to be absolute objective morality comes from. We humans seem to NEED it. I think there are complex biological causes for that that we can discuss. I think the design of our brains also lead us to certain preferred general directions that moral codes tend to go. But since that need is satisfied by the many different version of moral code that humans have created over history, it not an indication that there is an absolute onto which we are tuned.
I certainly understand people are very uncomfortable with the idea that right and wrong are not absolute. But people are very uncomfortable with the idea of a heaven devoid of God or an afterlife of utter destruction, or that the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper. But our discomfort doesn’t change the plain record of history or the process of reason.
@Fraser Orr
I think that the ideas about what is right or wrong change, but that does not necessarily mean that what is actually right or wrong changes. Just like how ideas about physical reality have changed. Lots of people have believed that without sacrifice the sun wouldn’t rise or rain would not fall. I don’t think that moral laws are like the laws of physics though, because I don’t think they are testable in the same way.
I guess it depends on what you mean by morality. If you mean ideas of right and wrong, they do certainly seem to be subjective and circumstantial. But if you mean what is actually right or wrong, I don’t think that’s true. If a society believes P to be wrong, “Is P wrong?” is a meaningful question. That is, “wrong” does not mean “what society believes to be wrong”.
What experiment determines modus tollens? Or the validity of proof by contradiction? I don’t think there is one. Maybe morality is like that. There is certainly some a priori knowledge.
I’m not sure that this follows even if morality (and not just perception of morality) is subjective. If you think something is wrong, how is it inconsistent to apply that to other people? Just like how if you think pink is an ugly color, you can criticize someone for choosing to paint something pink.
I think you might be using “morality” to mean ideas about what is right or wrong rather than what is right or wrong. If so, that is certainly subjective.
@Colli
Thanks again for some very interesting points. Although I don’t particularly agree with it, I certainly respect the quality of your presentation. If you don’t mind I’ll comment in a different order:
I think you might be using “morality” to mean ideas about what is right or wrong rather than what is right or wrong. If so, that is certainly subjective.
But what is the difference between the idea of right and wrong and actual right and wrong? Right and wrong ARE ideas. If you look at a chemical reaction, say H2+0 you can measure the position of the nuclei, the shape of the resulting electron clouds, the release of energy, the change in momentum. You cannot measure the moral justification of it though. Morality is not some feature of the universe, it is, by its very nature, an idea. And ideas live within a network of assumptions, cultural mores, beliefs and peer pressures.
Consider this. Joe, a tough biker dude, and Kevin a nerdy guy with great romantic skills, are competing for the affections of, and sexual access to Lucy. Lucy is falling for all the charming talk from Kevin. Is Joe justified in killing Kevin, his sexual rival, to gain access to Lucy? Although in many privative human societies I think this would be tolerated, even admired, I think in most societies in the past 1000 years it would be reviled.
Now imagine Joe is an alpha Chimpanzee, Kevin a beta Chimp, though with superior grooming skills, and Lucy a chimp in raging estrus. Is it justified for Joe to kill Kevin? This happens all the time, and is a natural part of simian behavior. I think most would prefer not to see it on TV, but recognize it as, if not moral, at least not immoral behavior.
If things are right and wrong in an objective sense, it isn’t clear why this action is sometimes ok and sometimes not. The subject of animal morality is actually an interesting one, and worth reading about. I think it tells us a lot about where our morality comes from — rooted in instinct, refined by the use of language, reason and societal constraints. Instinct is a sort of objective thing — a property that you might be looking for for your right and wrong, but instinct is VERY far from morality. And the thing that sets it apart is rational discussion and societal agreement. In a sense, a large part of morality is designed to constraint or contain instinct.
Now let me mention your comparison with propositional logic, and perhaps mathematics and logic more broadly. These too are also human constructed systems. Logic is a human created system, but it is created in such a way that it works in two important ways — it is internally consistent and it is useful in the real world. Whether math is discovered or created is a big topic in mathematics, but there are many different possible mathematics, and we chose one, and agree to one, because it is internally consistent and proves useful.
Let me give you an example. It is widely known that you can’t divide by zero. But why? I listened to an interesting video on the subject that I’d recommend, and the conclusion is we absolutely can create an arithmetic where dividing by zero is possible, it is just that that arithmetic isn’t actually useful.
OK, apologies, I am drifting too far off topic. My point is that rationality is human constructed system that is designed to be internally consistent and useful in the real world. We can reason within it given the basic axioms and get a mostly solid and internally consistent system, Godel notwithstanding. And if we chose it well it is useful, if not perfect, in the real world. Morality is exactly like this. We can construct an idea of what we want to rules governing interpersonal interactions should be, refine it, reason with it, and eventually come up with a system that is relatively internally consistent and useful in the real world.
Of course here when I talk about design in both morality and mathematics, I am using it in the same sense that the human immune system is well designed. I’m not at all suggesting that there is a designer, just that the evolutionary processes that these systems went through brought us to one where the fitness function was used to select among competing designs.
And it is worth pointing out that, like evolution, morality gets stuck in these weird wells of contradiction which don’t make much sense outside of an evolutionary process. Much like the optic nerve goes into the retina backwards in mammals or simians can almost, but not quite, make their own Vitamin C. So too in morality, why is it OK to eat cow meat but not horse meat? Why is it, in our modern society of birth control and equal treatment of the sexes that a woman who has a lot of sexual partners a slut, but a man who has a lot of sexual partners a stud?
The Godel aspect is actually an interesting tangent on this, but I have blathered on long enough already. Though I’m going to add a second comment to expand on something you said that I didn’t touch here.
@Coli
Lots of people have believed that without sacrifice the sun wouldn’t rise or rain would not fall. I don’t think that moral laws are like the laws of physics though, because I don’t think they are testable in the same way.
I wanted to comment on this separately because I think it reminded me of an interesting case in the study of morality. It is to compare two societies that killed their children, the Aztecs and the Spartans.
As you mention the Aztecs killed some of their children (along with many others) because they believed to do so was necessary to make the sun come up the next day.
The Spartans though killed some of their children for a completely different reason. When a child was first born it was examined for defects, missing limbs etc. that would mean that it would not be an effective warrior. Those they killed by exposing them on a hillside. (The decision was a bit more general than missing limbs, but I’m going to ignore that since it clouds the main point.)
This shows two different forms or moral reasoning. On the one hand the Aztecs belief that the Sun would not come up tomorrow was objectively wrong. Gravity not bloodletting makes the Sun come up. The Spartans though killed weak children because they felt it diluted their core goal as a society — to become an impregnable warrior society. And, in a sense, they may have been right about that, repugnant though both the killing of babies and the goal of being a warrior society might be to us.
So certainly some moral positions are wrong for objective reasons, but others are much more subjective in nature — what does a society want to be, and from that it makes its moral code.
I think it is important also to recognize that much though we look back in horror at the actions of both these societies killing their babies, I don’t doubt at all that the members of that society were not consumed with guilt or moral doubt. In fact I don’t doubt that they would have thought NOT killing those babies was immoral — a threat to their society, people and whole way of life.
It is probably worth pointing out that we kill our babies for a different reason — inconvenience or health risk to the mother. Obviously in western societies there are VERY different moral views on that matter.
@Fraser Orr
Thanks. I appreciate that from someone whose posts I find thoughtful and interesting.
Sorry, I wrote that poorly. I meant ideas about right and wrong vs. the correct ideas about right and wrong (i.e. what is actually true about right and wrong). I gave the example of sacrifices to show how people can have differing ideas about physical phenomena as well. Another one is the theory that acids must contain oxygen. This was held by a number of people at one time (indeed, the word “oxygen” was made up to mean “acid-former” and in German, oxygen is called “Sauerstoff”). Both of these theories are false though, and no longer widely held.
An idea about right and wrong could be like an idea about what color is ugly or whether something is funny (subjective) or it could be like an idea about the truth of a theorem or the nature of acids (objective). What I was saying was, supposing that right and wrong is objective, ideas about what are right or wrong can still be false or change. Just like how ideas about the nature of acids have changed. If you use “morality” to mean ideas about right or wrong, then morality changes. But if you use “morality” to mean what is right or wrong, then the ideas about what is right and wrong are not morality. This sounds like some sort of definitional word game, but I’m just trying to get clear what I am saying so that we are not talking about different things. I’m using “morality” to mean what is actually right and wrong, not people’s ideas about right and wrong. So “the laws of morality” would be like “the laws of gravity”. The laws of gravity are objective, but people can have different ideas about what the laws of gravity are.
I guess a better example would be mathematics, since, as you point out, morality is not a physical phenomenon. You can’t measure it or test against it in the same way. So suppose there is a theorem T. T is true or false, objectively. Its truth does not depend on what people think about it. But people can have different ideas about whether T is true or false, and those ideas can change over time (for instance, if there is a proof of T or counterexample). If there is some statement about morality, that could be true or false, but people’s ideas about whether it is true or false can change (probably not as rapidly as with mathematics, because people tend to think less rationally about morality).
Yes, I think that people see that as amoral. Like a ball rolling down a hill.
If morality is objective then it doesn’t depend on the person observing it. However, some action could be right or wrong based on who was performing the action. It would just have to be right or wrong independent of the observer. So if morality is objective, then it could still be wrong for a person to do something that it is not wrong for a chimp to do.
It is indeed interesting, thanks for the links. I think that moral knowledge ultimately comes from our intuition, like all other knowledge. And this intuition is similar to a chimp’s instincts. But the difference between a chimp and a human is that a person can reflect on his intuitions and instincts, check them for consistency and so forth. I think that this ability for self-reflection is effectively what consciousness is. A chimp might have some of that ability, but nowhere near the level of a human (as far as I can tell). For instance, if a chimp has two conflicting instincts, can it examine them and reject one in favor of the other?
I agree. What I was saying that was that logic is not derived from some sort of prior knowledge separate to intuition, but from our intuition. Suppose we had to discover logic. How would you go about that in such a way that did not use a priori knowledge? You point out that this system is consistent and useful, but how do we know those are good things to have in a system? It is obvious that they are, but I don’t think there is a way to test that fact. I think our knowledge of it relies on our intuition. So our moral knowledge of right and wrong could be similar. It could be that we can’t test it.
To digress, I think this sort of depends on whether you are talking about multiplication as a ring (integer-like operations) or a field (rational/real number-like operations) operation. If it’s a field operation, you can’t have a field with one element. But if it’s a ring operation then that’s fine.
That seems pretty reasonable. But if morality is like mathematics, isn’t it objective? Also, you still have a problem where you have to know that internal consistency and utility are good things to have in a system. Again, I think they are, but I don’t think that you can show that without appealing to intuition.
@Fraser Orr
Which sort of makes you wonder how they came up with that, doesn’t it? It isn’t like there are animals which feel an urge to do that. But it is probably one of the most evil things you could think of – killing someone in cold blood. Obviously they thought they had a reason, but they didn’t. They made that up. They didn’t really need to sacrifice humans or rip out their hearts or anything. So why did they make up this whole system of rationality to go with it? Why in the world did they want to rip out someone’s heart in the first place? The only conclusion I can come to is that whoever made this system was fundamentally evil, but also had some drive for rationality. I don’t think this is restricted to the Aztecs though. There are loads of similar examples throughout history in almost every place and time.
Perhaps. It is interesting to note though that the most militarily powerful societies today do not do that, and indeed, would find it extremely wrong.
I think these things are both key. It is important that killing babies is wrong, but that isn’t the sole reason we find their actions wrong. It seems like it is acceptable to do a wrong thing for some much larger gain. A classic example is if you could stop the deaths of billions of people by plucking out one hair of a person who does not want their hair plucked. It really does not seem like you should not pluck the hair. So we find the Spartans’ actions unacceptable not only because their means were wrong, but also their end.
This is very true. And if they did not have conflicting intuitions about the right or wrong of this action, it would be impossible to convince them that it was wrong. It would be like talking to a person who thought that systems should be inconsistent or not useful in the world. Also an example of how intuitions are shaped by a person’s environment.
@Colli
This article fell off the bottom of my browswer, which I always think is a sign that it is time to move on. I enjoyed crossing swords with you on it though, and no doubt it’ll come up again. Apologies for not going through your whole comment, because I think you make some interesting points.
But I thought I’d hit you back on this one:
I guess a better example would be mathematics, since, as you point out, morality is not a physical phenomenon. You can’t measure it or test against it in the same way. So suppose there is a theorem T. T is true or false, objectively.
But that isn’t true. A theorem is not true objectively in the sense I think you mean. A theorem is only true or false within its own context. For example, in one form of mathematics, the one I mentioned before where division by zero is allowed, then 1 = 2 is a theorem that can be proved true. It is objectively true within the constraints of that particular mathematics.
However, one rock is not the same as two rocks in the real world. So we chose to use a mathematics that give us useful results in the real world, and we refine our mathematics with that in mind. It is an abstraction, and, like all abstractions it leaks occasionally, but it is useful and so we use it. And in fact the very point of Godel’s incompleteness theorem is that the must by the very nature of mathematics be incomplete, which is to say, leak.
Morality is exactly the same. It is easy enough to construct a moral system that has results that are not to our liking, in fact many religions do. For example, a core principle in many Christian religions is that the Bible is the absolute standard for truth. This puts many Christians in the awkward position of believing the earth is only 6000 years old, or that some diseases are caused by demons. People accept this cognitive dissonance because the totality of what their religion offers them is on net positive.
So there are moral systems that have leaky abstractions too. What we do is adjust and refine them to better meet our needs in the real world — a world that is constantly changing, meaning that what is right and wrong within that system constantly changes too. Which is, after all the core of the point of discussion. Please refer by to my earlier point of the changing views of Christianity of black people, women and homosexuals.
You are of course correct that on top of any moral code is an additional layer of what people think about it, or how they align to it, but that doesn’t change the underlying subjectivity and adaptability that is necessary in any effective moral code.