Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
Posted May 6, 2011 19:04 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)In reply to: Ethics and morals. by RogerOdle
Parent article: Interview with Linus Torvalds (LinuxFR)
Your point about voting being unethical as theft is good, but you need to work on the terminology. By definition, you can't take someone's property by voting -- you can't take it at all. Property is what a person exclusively controls. (Legal property, in particular, is what the law permits someone to control). To the extent that I can take my neighbor's money by voting for a tax (and then availing myself of services paid for by that tax), that money was never my neighbor's property.
You should say you think voting is unethical because it reduces individual property. But then I think it would be more in line with your definition of moral, because only God could say individual property is good. Our society is replete with rules saying some community property is good, so things that are inconsistent with individual property should be plenty ethical.
Posted May 6, 2011 20:19 UTC (Fri)
by RogerOdle (subscriber, #60791)
[Link] (6 responses)
They say that private property is property you hold and manage for the sake of society. This is not true. Private property is your property to use for whatever purposes suit you. That is the definition. If you use it for the sake of society then that is your business. Public property is property that is owned and controlled by the community. The concept in law "in fee simple" means that property has only one legal owner/controller. Private property means that you and only you control the property. The state only controls your private property indirectly by controlling you to the extent that it can not allow you to use your property to harm someone else or otherwise violate their rights. This is prohibitive power which differs from affirmative power where the state tells you what you must do with your own property. The state can not assert affirmative authority over your personal property if it is your personal property. In fact they do just this proving that the people who run the state do not actually believe in personal property and that they believe that your role in life is to do what they say.
Where is the line drawn? The ancient principal that good fences make good neighbors is ignored these days. Instead we have mudslinging politics and angry people. Civilization slides down hill until is crashes and crumbles. Arguments about ethics only leads to angry resentment and hurt feelings because wisdom is not more powerful or effective than emotion. We can know by wisdom what the right thing to do is but the beast of emotion will make us do the wrong thing anyway. Wisdom rules when we have little self interest. We make the most irrational decisions when we have the most self interest. It is at those times when we use rationality to sooth our consciences for the rash decisions we have made.
Posted May 6, 2011 22:33 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (3 responses)
You start off with "The terminology that is lacking is the definition of personal property" and then go on to make a bunch of claims about personal property without having defined it. That's confusing.
Or maybe your point was to define personal property such that those claims are all true. In that case, you're describing a kind of moral property, and I think what you describe isn't mathematically possible. I don't think we can divide up the world in a way that each person has complete control of a piece of it unimpeded by what someone else does with other pieces.
Taking land as the easiest example: If Jim and Mary nominally own tracts of land and Mary stops Jim from building a 3-story house on his land, then I suppose you would say Mary is taking Jim's property. But if Jim builds the house and as a result Mary can't see the ocean any more, wouldn't you also have to say Jim has taken Mary's property?
(For purposes of legal property, we always define one or the other of those as a property violation — and it really doesn't matter which — so that the system is self-consistent).
Posted May 7, 2011 0:28 UTC (Sat)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
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That's easy--they're both violations. The trick to an *enforceable* system of property rights, however, is that it's the first violation that counts. Responding in kind is not a violation. Ergo, if Mary used force against Jim to coerce him into not building the house, Mary is at fault. However, if Jim builds the house, violating Mary's property rights, then it is not a violation for Mary to seek restitution, by force if necessary, provided said force is proportional to the damage. (Note that "proportional" can be argued a number of different ways--in kind, cost to make whole, etc.--and any one of those ways would provide sufficient justification.)
The one exception where preemptive force would be justified is when both non-coercive prevention and after-the-fact restitution are unlikely to work; this condition can be summarized as "imminent threat of irreversible harm". That does not apply in this situation, since any harm would be reversible, e.g. by demolishing the new house.
Posted May 7, 2011 23:50 UTC (Sat)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
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That doesn't solve the logical inconsistency. Assuming being "at fault" means Mary can't get away with it (has to pay damages or go to jail or something), then Jim is taking Mary's property. And if Mary takes restitution by force when Jim builds his house, Mary is taking Jim's property. This is using the proposed definition of "property" wrt land as being able to do anything you want with the associated tract of land. My point is that it is not possible for both Mary and Jim to be able to do whatever they want with "their" tracts of land. Such "property" cannot exist.
Incidentally, I wasn't thinking of force; I was thinking of zoning regulations. Zoning is one way that one's neighbors excercise ownership over one's nominal property. And they essentially do it by voting.
Posted May 8, 2011 4:28 UTC (Sun)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
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The original definition ("Private property is your property to use for whatever purposes suit you.") was sloppy. If this is to be taken as a universal principle, it must be subject to the condition that one respects the same right for others; otherwise, as you say, there is a contradiction. A more formal definition would be "Private property is your property to continue using as it has been used in the past, and in new ways subject to respect for existing property claims by others."
> Incidentally, I wasn't thinking of force; I was thinking of zoning regulations.
Zoning regulations are meaningless without enforcement. Or, put another way, there is no problem with zoning regulations *unless* they are enforced. You are welcome to call an area "residential" or "commercial" or "industrial"--even to encourage such partitioning via voluntary agreements. The issue is specifically with forcing others to comply involuntarily.
Posted May 6, 2011 22:59 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (1 responses)
Well, here you don't get to define terms. "In fee simple" has always been a legal term, defined only by law. And it originates in the English land division system of the middle ages, right? So it definitely doesn't mean that the property has only one legal owner/controller, because a lord would hold land in fee simple, and that land was incontrovertibly still under the control of the duke, baron, and king above him, under the principle of eminent domain. (I probably got the hierarchy wrong, but you get the idea).
Today, when we vote to rezone land someone owns in fee simple so he can't do what he wants (or even much of anything) with it, that's the very same eminent domain at work, albeit in democratic instead of monarchical form.
Posted May 11, 2011 21:07 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Formally, for all other forms of title, the state (or, in some jurisdictions, the Crown) *is* the ultimate owner. That doesn't mean men in jackboots will come and take it away from you tomorrow, but it does mean they can tax you for it, pursue criminals onto your land, and so on.
Posted May 6, 2011 20:38 UTC (Fri)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (4 responses)
That is one definition, and not a very typical one. Under that rule possession isn't just 9/10 of the law--it's 100%. Congratulations, you've just defined away any possibility of theft. What the thief controls, the thief "owns".
A better definition is that one's property is that which others have no right to prevent one from using, subject to the same rights of others regarding their property. By convention, and to minimize conflict, this right is granted to the first user (homesteading), and one valid use of one's property is to voluntarily transfer this right to another (contract).
> To the extent that I can take my neighbor's money by voting for a tax..., that money was never my neighbor's property.
You're assuming that "property" means "legal property". So far as that goes, local law may not recognize private property at all. Not everyone shares the concept of property as a natural law (i.e. one which enforces itself, albeit in a somewhat more lax manner than the physical laws), but most do ascribe a more... concrete meaning to the term "property" than whatever the law might happen to say at the moment. Consider the concept of "confiscatory taxes"--if the rates are high enough, even the average person understands that taxes represent the seizure of what someone has rightfully earned for his/her own use, even if the tax is perfectly legal.
It is true that one cannot claim a moral or ethical imperative for private property without reference to a particular system of morality or ethics. There have been attempts to define universal ethics on praxeological grounds, but I personally prefer to sidestep the issue entirely: so long as you only respond to violations of your property rights in kind, it doesn't matter whether the other party shares your morals or ethics; any *proportional* response is automatically consistent with *their* effective morality and ethics, as demonstrated by their own actions. As such, they are in no position offer a rational objection.
Posted May 6, 2011 22:51 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (3 responses)
OK, I wasn't precise enough, but I think this is definition everyone uses. I meant "can't" to be relative to whatever system of property you're talking about. If it's legal property, than "can't take it" means it would be illegal to take it (or the government will force you to give it back, or whatever). For moral property, it would mean that you can't take it without being evil. For de facto property, it would be as you say: 100% possession.
Those are the three kinds of property I think we've been discussing. They're all valid in my book, but you have to use it consistently. For example, if you're talking about a legal election, you have to talk about legal property. So no, you can't take someone's property by voting because anything you can "take" was your property to begin with. Likewise, if you're talking about the peasants rising up and voting to take control of the land they farm from an oppressive king, that's a moral vote to repossess moral property which was morally the peasants' to begin with, so no property is taken.
Posted May 7, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sat)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (2 responses)
That's a perfectly reasonable analysis from the legal point-of-view, but the fact that the election is legal does not mean one can only analyze it from a legal perspective. From the perspective of natural law (or moral property rights, if you will), the election, however legal it may have been, had no effect on moral property rights. Speaking from that point-of-view, it is perfectly valid to say that people held a legal election and then, on the basis of that vote, proceeded to take others' property immorally for their own use. It is also reasonable to say that since the entire purpose of the vote was to determine whether or not to act immorally, the vote itself is immoral--by voting on this topic (or at least in favor) one is seeking permission to act immorally, or asking someone else to do so.
I understand that you may not agree with the moral code used in this example, but that isn't really the point. The legal, moral, and (though rather pointless) "de facto" aspects of property rights all apply to any situation simultaneously. You don't choose one based on the context and ignore the rest. Legal actions have moral and practical dimensions, and vise-versa.
Posted May 8, 2011 0:11 UTC (Sun)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (1 responses)
You appear to be reading something rather different from what I wrote, because I didn't offer any analysis at all. I'm just defining terms and parsing sentences. And "was" is what I meant. By definition, if you're talking about a legal election and legal property, whatever the public can take by voting was the public's to begin with (eminent domain); the election merely exercises that ownership. There's no theft.
But you should be clear which one you're talking about in any given sentence, and especially avoid switching off from one to another mid-sentence. I also believe "moral property" is a pretty useless concept -- as I said in the beginning I'd rather someone say he favors highly individualized legal property than say he believes moral property is highly individualized and he is against laws that let you steal people's moral property. They both say the same thing, but the former makes it a clearer what the belief is. Maybe just because legal property is by far the most commonly discussed kind of property.
Posted May 8, 2011 4:59 UTC (Sun)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
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True. However, we weren't talking about legal property or legal theft. We were speaking of moral property and moral theft in connection with a legal election. Ergo, this definition is irrelevant.
> But you should be clear which one you're talking about in any given sentence, and especially avoid switching off from one to another mid-sentence.
I agree. However, there is no "switching off" occurring here. The entire statement was a moral statement, which just happened to refer to an legal election, i.e. one which is accepted by the law. It is not an error to refer to legal concepts like elections in a moral context. By example:
De facto: Those holding the vote have a near-monopoly on the use of force (police, military, etc.) Ergo, direct resistance to enforcement of the vote is futile.
Legal: The law permits ownership/control of property to be transferred to "the public" based on the outcome of a vote. Ergo, the property now legally belongs to the public. (It is still not inaccurate to say that the property was "taken" from its former private owner; the vote does not rewrite history. It merely makes the taking legal.)
Moral/Ethical: By my moral code, and my ethics as a libertarian, a vote (however legal and/or enforceable) has no effect whatsoever on the actual, moral ownership of property unless the owner voluntarily submits their property to said vote. Ergo, removing the property from the owner's control following the vote is (morally) an instance of theft, and thus wrong, again by my moral code. As such, I choose not to participate.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
Taking land as the easiest example: If Jim and Mary nominally own tracts of land and Mary stops Jim from building a 3-story house on his land, then I suppose you would say Mary is taking Jim's property. But if Jim builds the house and as a result Mary can't see the ocean any more, wouldn't you also have to say Jim has taken Mary's property?
... if Mary used force against Jim to coerce him into not building the house, Mary is at fault. However, if Jim builds the house, violating Mary's property rights, then it is not a violation for Mary to seek restitution, by force if necessary, provided said force is proportional to the damage.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
The concept in law "in fee simple" means that property has only one legal owner/controller.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
By definition, you can't take someone's property by voting -- you can't take it at all. Property is what a person exclusively controls.
That is one definition, and not a very typical one. Under that rule possession isn't just 9/10 of the law--it's 100%.
Ethics and morals.
Ethics and morals.
For example, if you're talking about a legal election, you have to talk about legal property. So no, you can't take someone's property by voting
because anything you can "take" was[n't] your property to begin with.
That's a perfectly reasonable analysis from the legal point-of-view,
The legal, moral, and (though rather pointless) "de facto" aspects of property rights all apply to any situation simultaneously. You don't choose one based on the context and ignore the rest. Legal actions have moral and practical dimensions, and vise-versa.
Ethics and morals.