4 ms·

> There are good critiques of the concept and value of autonomy, and to what degree we have autonomy (beyond the metaphysical sense) in a capitalist market. Als

> There are good critiques of the concept and value of autonomy, and to what degree we have autonomy (beyond the metaphysical sense) in a capitalist market. Also, I'm not saying autonomy is irrelevant, I'm saying it's not the only thing that's relevant. Morality entails more than respecting autonomy. So that's the hurdle you need to cross in order to justify measures which violate other people's autonomy. You have to explain why it's ok to interfere in the relations between two consenting parties in order to impose your own values on people who do not share them. > The point is that you don't have to care for it to be exploitation. I'm asking you why it's a bad thing to have relations that you consider to be exploitation. Exploitation is a value-laden characterization, its not an objective feature of a relationship. > Perhaps not individually, but as a general trend in society it leads to a mass of people being in poor positions to bargain and a smaller number of people being in very good positions. "Less to offer == poorer negotiating position" is not a trend in society, but an identity that arises from the nature of negotiations. > I don't think that's a good thing, because it leads (very realistically) to some being at the mercy (speaking in terms of resources required to live or sustain a family) of others by virtue of factors beyond their control. The fact that someone needs resources to live is a brute fact of reality and applies to all systems. Aside from that, markets are an efficient method of allocating scarce resources and abandoning markets because of scarcity is like jumping off a bridge because you hate heights. > I've already mentioned the concept of the local maximum in employment; even if there are multiple reasonable options for employment all options are possible, it does not follow that any will be good options. No, just the best options available given material and social constraints. > This is the just-world fallacy; the market, as already clarified, does not necessarily produce just outcomes, and it's unclear why it should be thought it does. Because the market is a means for allocating scarce resources and unrestricted market transactions are Pareto improvements. Its not a fallacy to observe that a world with more justice is a more just world than a world with less justice. > Why does the market decide my entitlement? Should it, speaking in terms of economic systems, decide my entitlement? Because the market is not a thing-in-itself but a label we give to the collective actions of market participants, and your entitlement in the market is created by obtaining things in transactions with people who want to transact with you. If you don't care about ethics, then you don't care about entitlements. If you care about ethics, then you can see how you wouldn't be able to become entitled to something without the owner transferring the title to you, or coming into possession of unowned property. > For slaves, their masters decided their entitlement. Now it's a market which was created by a set of laws and property rights, and maintained as such. Is it really beyond question? Nothing is beyond question. Mutually reciprocal norms arise from a desire to avoid violence and a desire for the best deal possible. Arguments which challenge the equal rights of all human beings but do so obliquely are suspect so I'll ask you to proceed with this questioning. > The demand is useless if nobody will agree to it. When people don't agree to something but someone forces it on them we usually call it unethical. > Sure, I have a "goal to survive", but this seems to cheapen both the concept of goals in a goods economy and the idea of survival which supercedes all other goals to the point of being a biological impulse we are prepared to kill for. It's lower than any psychology or even any other need. It's a physical process. When we say somebody has no goals, we don't assume they are just okay with dying and would be apathetic if we killed them. This might be persuasive if humans were unable to choose goals that conflict with continued survival. Also characterizing the human need for food in order to survive and the economic need for a means of selling one's labor into one concept is misleading, as if one starves to death the moment one is fired or quits their job. Sure, you need a job. Just like the capitalist needs someone to work in his factory. After all, it is both of your livelihoods. Just don't presume that either of your needs is more important than another human being's freedom to decline a transaction. > The labourer and the capitalist have opposing interests (speaking class-wise). This is a Marxist fallacy which has caused an inestimable amount of sorrow. Individuals have interests, classes do not. > Better wages were never on the Marxist agenda. Yet self-proclaimed Marxists advocate for increasing the minimum wage. Hence my admonition to read more Marx.

claudiawerner 6y ago
>Exploitation is a value-laden characterization, its not an objective feature of a relationship. We can think of what characterizes exploitation using what we already know and our intuitions of what is and isn't exploitative. If a relationship fulfills those characteristics, we can say it's an exploitative relationship. >Aside from that, markets are an efficient method of allocating scarce resources This may be true, but there's no reason to think it's the most efficient, nor is there reason to think efficiency is the only goal that an economy (built for and by humans for human ends) should have. >Because the market is a means for allocating scarce resources and unrestricted market transactions are Pareto improvements. I don't care about Pareto improvements, I asked about justice. No philosopher (or anyone, really) defines justice with only the idea of goods allocation or Pareto improvement in mind. >Because the market is not a thing-in-itself but a label we give to the collective actions of market participants This is tautological; the market is ... actions of market participants. You outlined my entitlement in the market but didn't make a case as to why the market should manage such entitlements for everyone, especially under the fact that it is nigh-impossible to abstain from the market (or taxes, take your pick). Besides this, I don't really buy the idea that the market is simply "collective actions" - a space in which to create those actions must be made with private property laws and the protection of that property. Resources must be accumulated, sometimes by colonization. People and must be brought into the market, by force if necessary, by enclosure. The collective actions of buying, selling, and valuing are taught by other market participants to children. It's an institution, and one which (in its global form) highly historically specific - and just as goods are made by people, not handed like mana from heaven, markets were too, and our collective actions reproduce those market relations. Should those relations not be reproduced in a country for but a week, its market would collapse. I think this paper says it best: "Hayek’s observations on the nature of social evolution and spontaneous order are insightful and profound when used as a descriptive scheme for understanding how social institutions grow and change, but they do not convert effectively into normative guides. A wise lawmaker or judge seeking to follow Hayekian prescriptions is left with a vague and contradictory set of precepts. On one hand, it is unwise to alter long-standing social institutions by implementing rational abstractions of justice, but, on the other, it is necessary to do so because not all social orders that have spontaneously evolved are just ones. If the lawmaker or judge acts to alter a social institution, that action may be condemned as rationalistic constructivism when viewed at close range, but will appear as one experiment undertaken in the whole process of spontaneous order when viewed as part of the bustling dynamism of society as a whole. Spontaneous order is therefore in the eye of the beholder." (https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf) >Mutually reciprocal norms arise from a desire to avoid violence and a desire for the best deal possible. That may be true, but it's a historical and anthropological question as to whether this is how capitalism arose, and whether it is practiced in such a way today. Even philosophers sympathetic to libertarianism note the multiplier effect of injustices longer in the past which accrue as present injustices - and right-libertarians typically have no answer as to how to solve this. >I'll ask you to proceed with this questioning. I'm unconvinced that a rights-based account is the most just option for society's flourishing and indeed the flourishing of most individuals. I don't think the right to private property or the right to employ waged labourers has a sufficient case made for it, given that it results in widespread exploitation. The plight of the majority of the population needing to sell their labour-time to survive is failed by a rights-based account which can only say "you can employ people too, it's a right, you know!". >This is a Marxist fallacy which has caused an inestimable amount of sorrow. Individuals have interests, classes do not. Classes absolutely do have interests, and just as the market may demonstrate that product X sells at price Y through the collective actions of buyers and sellers, those same collective actions and bargaining which pulls like a tug-of-war rope between labour and capital continuously shows itself, whether at Google or in a coal mine or in a new minimum wage law. Society (and by extension classes) produce people and imbue them with position and skills. A child is born into a societal grouping before he or she is even individuated. Individuals have interests - and those are typically a superset containing class interests. >Yet self-proclaimed Marxists advocate for increasing the minimum wage. To be in line with Marx they'd do so in a parliamentary system only under the banner of a socialist party - and it's reasonable to think that Marxists tend to support socialist parties.

claudiawerner 6y ago

>Exploitation is a value-laden characterization, its not an objective feature of a relationship. We can think of what characterizes exploitation using what we already know and our intuitions of what is and isn't exploitative. If a relationship fulfills those characteristics, we can say it's an exploitative relationship. >Aside from that, markets are an efficient method of allocating scarce resources This may be true, but there's no reason to think it's the most efficient, nor is there reason to think efficiency is the only goal that an economy (built for and by humans for human ends) should have. >Because the market is a means for allocating scarce resources and unrestricted market transactions are Pareto improvements. I don't care about Pareto improvements, I asked about justice. No philosopher (or anyone, really) defines justice with only the idea of goods allocation or Pareto improvement in mind. >Because the market is not a thing-in-itself but a label we give to the collective actions of market participants This is tautological; the market is ... actions of market participants. You outlined my entitlement in the market but didn't make a case as to why the market should manage such entitlements for everyone, especially under the fact that it is nigh-impossible to abstain from the market (or taxes, take your pick). Besides this, I don't really buy the idea that the market is simply "collective actions" - a space in which to create those actions must be made with private property laws and the protection of that property. Resources must be accumulated, sometimes by colonization. People and must be brought into the market, by force if necessary, by enclosure. The collective actions of buying, selling, and valuing are taught by other market participants to children. It's an institution, and one which (in its global form) highly historically specific - and just as goods are made by people, not handed like mana from heaven, markets were too, and our collective actions reproduce those market relations. Should those relations not be reproduced in a country for but a week, its market would collapse. I think this paper says it best: "Hayek’s observations on the nature of social evolution and spontaneous order are insightful and profound when used as a descriptive scheme for understanding how social institutions grow and change, but they do not convert effectively into normative guides. A wise lawmaker or judge seeking to follow Hayekian prescriptions is left with a vague and contradictory set of precepts. On one hand, it is unwise to alter long-standing social institutions by implementing rational abstractions of justice, but, on the other, it is necessary to do so because not all social orders that have spontaneously evolved are just ones. If the lawmaker or judge acts to alter a social institution, that action may be condemned as rationalistic constructivism when viewed at close range, but will appear as one experiment undertaken in the whole process of spontaneous order when viewed as part of the bustling dynamism of society as a whole. Spontaneous order is therefore in the eye of the beholder." (https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf) >Mutually reciprocal norms arise from a desire to avoid violence and a desire for the best deal possible. That may be true, but it's a historical and anthropological question as to whether this is how capitalism arose, and whether it is practiced in such a way today. Even philosophers sympathetic to libertarianism note the multiplier effect of injustices longer in the past which accrue as present injustices - and right-libertarians typically have no answer as to how to solve this. >I'll ask you to proceed with this questioning. I'm unconvinced that a rights-based account is the most just option for society's flourishing and indeed the flourishing of most individuals. I don't think the right to private property or the right to employ waged labourers has a sufficient case made for it, given that it results in widespread exploitation. The plight of the majority of the population needing to sell their labour-time to survive is failed by a rights-based account which can only say "you can employ people too, it's a right, you know!". >This is a Marxist fallacy which has caused an inestimable amount of sorrow. Individuals have interests, classes do not. Classes absolutely do have interests, and just as the market may demonstrate that product X sells at price Y through the collective actions of buyers and sellers, those same collective actions and bargaining which pulls like a tug-of-war rope between labour and capital continuously shows itself, whether at Google or in a coal mine or in a new minimum wage law. Society (and by extension classes) produce people and imbue them with position and skills. A child is born into a societal grouping before he or she is even individuated. Individuals have interests - and those are typically a superset containing class interests. >Yet self-proclaimed Marxists advocate for increasing the minimum wage. To be in line with Marx they'd do so in a parliamentary system only under the banner of a socialist party - and it's reasonable to think that Marxists tend to support socialist parties.