4 ms·

On the other hand, there are people who will dump toxic waste into my groundwater and my air unless the men with guns are willing to deprive them of life or lib

by frig 17y ago

On the other hand, there are people who will dump toxic waste into my groundwater and my air unless the men with guns are willing to deprive them of life or liberty for failure to cease said dumping. Any time you calmly and rationally keep asking for more and more evidence that the toxic waste you're poisoning my kids' water and air with isn't all that bad, or is a net benefit for humanity even if my kids seem ever-the-more sickly for it you're causing irreparable harm. I feel such a profound imposition of your will -- convince me I'm not poisoning you! -- over mine is something that doesn't deserve polite speech and I don't care if it makes you uncomfortable. This is really the conflict that's going to play out all over the next century, regardless of how climate-change specifically plays out: - libertarian-minded types like to think we live in a world where it's possible to swing a fist without hitting someone's face - if that world ever really existed, it's gone now: anytime you light a fire you're blowing smoke in my face It's the difference between the morality of the home and the morality of the bus station: - in your home you're surrounded by walls and only people who want to be there (usually) are present, so do as you wish - in the bus station you're cheek-by-jowl with hundreds to thousands of other people, and the only thing that makes it bearable is a shared belief in restraint The abstraction of "your resources" is just another leaky abstraction: - there's no platonic book of property titles; you can't really call God on the phone and confirm that "your resources" are actually "yours, to do with as you wish" - you can't really (as an individual) exert enough force to make everyone respect your "ownership" over "your resources"; the fact that you can act as though they're unambiguously yours depends on the willingness of hundreds of millions of people to leave you and "your resources" alone - even if everyone agrees "your resources" are yours, you -- and your resources -- are not off in some private pocket universe when you use your resources; you -- and your resources -- are embedded in the same material reality everyone else is, and every action you take -- including any use you make of your resources -- will impact other people - it's not realistic to expect people to sit idly by if you and your use of "your resources" are harming them; since "your resources" staying "your resources" depends on everyone else being willing to leave you alone, it's not smart to use "your resources" in a way that blows smoke in their face or pisses in their drinking water - historically people have been more willing to treat certain resource usages as "not harming them" (eg: smokestacks, dumping industrial byproducts into riverwater, etc.); this is less and less true with time, and there's no sign of a slowdown in that trend - every time so far that a particular set of negative environmental externalities has been identified the producers of that externality have either voluntarily agreed to cut back, some kind of nominal regulation (looks good, may not actually do anything) has been imposed, or some actually-strong regulation has been put in place; it's obvious which way the wind is blowing, here Regardless of how "climate change" pans out, this is the future: - on the one side, people who strongly believe they're being directly harmed by actions you're taking; any calm, rational request for evidence that your actions are actually harmful is asking for them to endure more harm, and to what end? Why does your claim on "your resources" -- which ultimately depends upon their consent, as you yourself can't do squat to hold onto "your resources" should they lift that consent -- trump their well being? What justifies such self-sacrifice? Why would it ever be your place to tell me how much smoke in my face I ought to be willing to put up with? - on the other side, people taking actions they've been taking in the past will want to continue taking them. Sometimes they will probably have a reasonable case for continuing to take those actions, and sometimes they won't; in any case, they're at a disadvantage: --- direct appeals to the fact that you're using "your resources" aren't going to resonate with your accusers (even if they rouse sympathy in those who fear they're next); not only are "your resources" only "yours" until the people you're arguing with decide they aren't, but you're insisting on upholding an abstraction that's looking ever-the-more leaky --- direct appeals to how much harm you're causing (or not) are also going to fall flat; it's not really your place to tell other people how much harm you can cause them before they have a right to complain, and so for this to work at all you need to appeal to some kind of mutually-accepted arbiter; that mutually-accepted arbiter is going to be ultimately more beholden to everyone-else-but-you (you are one, they are many) I'd like to as much as possible preserve the notion of "your resources" and some kind of private sphere in which one can act freely (without looking over one's shoulder) but that's not going to happen if you take the abstraction for granted, and ignore the reality (what you're asking for is leeway and the presumption from other parties that you're not harming them enough for them to take action...that's an exceedingly fragile base).

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Sorry for the interjection, but it seems you guys are almost breaking out in reasonableness. On the other hand, there are people who will dump toxic waste into my groundwater and my air unless the men with guns are willing to deprive them of life or liberty for failure to cease said dumping. And if you define a ton of arsenic as "toxic waste" I don't think anybody would argue with you about the need for protection from your neighbor's actions. But if you define a few parts per billion, or something that has a .01% chance of causing my death from cancer, or something that the community is currently hysterical about, (such as second-hand smoke) then I think we do have a problem. There's plenty of room for reasonable thinking in the middle of the road here. The problem is that the middle of the road keeps moving. Nobody used to care if you dumped used motor oil in your backyard. Or if you smoked in public. Or if your lawn mower spewed smoke. The goalposts keep moving. This trend cannot continue indefinitely. There is some reasonable middle ground. In my opinion, however, we've crossed that middle ground a long time ago. Decisions about what private property rights to infringe on are not made any more based on scientific, reproducible cause-and-effect principles that have a high degree of causing me harm (And I'll stick with my .01% number for this discussion). Instead the ground keeps changing based on current politics. Private property should not be based on political whims -- that's the whole point of the Bill of Rights: that some principles have been proven to be the bedrock of successful societies. It's no more debatable than whether 1+1=2 I can't emphasize enough that the notion of private property is critical for successful societies. It's a lesson history shows us very clearly. My ownership of something does not depend on my fellow citizens allowing me to own it. Certain principles are innate, endowed by our creator, whatever-your-favorite-language. Inviolate. It's the entire basis of western society. I'm not trying to argue at extremes again -- obviously I can't dump a ton of arsenic in my backyard. But to believe that it's natural for global health concerns to intrude more and more on personal property is to say that people are going to stop being people at some point and simply be cells performing in a larger organism. I don't see that happening any time soon. The human animal simply won't fit into the little box that you'd like them to fit into.
- frig 17y ago
  Oh, agreed -- I'd like to see the notion of "private property" well protected moving forward. I just think the way its strongest advocates operate is going to do much more harm than good (in, eg, the same way the Republicans slagging every last Democratic policy proposal with "that's socialism" is doing plenty to make socialism look harmless and appealing in the modern era). But, you have to be realistic: - if you accept a libertarian notion of self-ownership, then it follows that, eg, I ought nought to have you blow smoke in my face unless i consent to it (b/c you're tampering with my property, no)? - now, as a practical matter people agree to overlook certain things (eg: your campfire is infinitesimally smokifying my air here back in town, but it's so negligible that I ought not to care about it; very literally the stress of worrying about it is worse for me than your smoke is) - it'd be nice if you can adopt a universal standard for when your (infinitesimal) actions are something I have to ignore - but unless you already have that agreement you're back into coercing people; it does seem useful to you, I'm sure, to think that "since I've scientifically shown that my blowing smoke in your face doesn't actually harm you, so I'm going to keep doing it", but now you're not that far removed intellectually from eg eminent domain "I've demonstrated that demolishing your home in order to finish this expressway is manifestly for the economic benefit of the entire city -- including you -- so even though normally I'd like to respect your property rights in this patch of land today I say 'tough luck!'" - this is why the boundaries of private property are always ultimately a political problem: usually people are looking out for their own interest, as they choose to define it; to get someone to deliberately sacrifice their own perceived self-interest requires either force or politics; force works but is undesirable and doesn't scale, either, so you're left with politics This is where the folk libertarianism (along with any naive or simplistic approach to being pro-property-rights) is going to flounder in the new century, if present trends continue: - you can't pretend your actions "don't effect other people until they do"; the reality is that "your actions effect everyone else, but sometimes (usually, even) everyone else agrees to pretend as if they don't" - you look like a hypocrite if you on the one hand want to maintain absolute say over how you use your own resources but on the other hand want to force other people to accept your decisions about which uses of their property (their bodies, their air, etc.) they need to just man up and take; you also look stupid if you can't see this point - you also look politically and rhetorically dumb when you speak casually about what risk-of-harm to others you're comfortable ignoring (and would expect other people to ignore); it's rather obvious that, eg, DanielBMarkham is fine with, say, some action of his having a .001% odds of giving his neighor's kid asthma (picking at random) -- DanielBMarkham is not his neighbor's kid, after all -- but step outside the space of just "thinking in words" and you'll see why that's not a winning pose (it's made worse by the way that risk-of-harm is low-and-diffuse but harm is typically severe-and-concentrated). What I'm trying to drive home is that everything you've said is valid, but you're not going to change minds with that argument (at most you'll make people aware of a particular danger if you carry something to its logical extreme). I think the best long-term approach is to focus more on design and infrastructure (eg: intelligent garbage processing, products designed from start-to-finish to neatly decompose into recyclable components -- this is called "reverse logistics", fyi) rather than trying to directly win the political war over where the lines ought to be drawn. If you can get to where people can continue doing what they do now but with far less externality production, then you will easily be able to keep the lines drawn mostly where you'd want them to be (at least for most actors). The issue here is that to get to where it's safe to be mindless again is not going to happen promptly (if at all) without some kind of directed regulatory push; that is not only nontrivial -- and dangerous -- but also unlikely barring some other political shifts.

by frig 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Sorry for the interjection, but it seems you guys are almost breaking out in reasonableness. On the other hand, there are people who will dump toxic waste into my groundwater and my air unless the men with guns are willing to deprive them of life or liberty for failure to cease said dumping. And if you define a ton of arsenic as "toxic waste" I don't think anybody would argue with you about the need for protection from your neighbor's actions. But if you define a few parts per billion, or something that has a .01% chance of causing my death from cancer, or something that the community is currently hysterical about, (such as second-hand smoke) then I think we do have a problem. There's plenty of room for reasonable thinking in the middle of the road here. The problem is that the middle of the road keeps moving. Nobody used to care if you dumped used motor oil in your backyard. Or if you smoked in public. Or if your lawn mower spewed smoke. The goalposts keep moving. This trend cannot continue indefinitely. There is some reasonable middle ground. In my opinion, however, we've crossed that middle ground a long time ago. Decisions about what private property rights to infringe on are not made any more based on scientific, reproducible cause-and-effect principles that have a high degree of causing me harm (And I'll stick with my .01% number for this discussion). Instead the ground keeps changing based on current politics. Private property should not be based on political whims -- that's the whole point of the Bill of Rights: that some principles have been proven to be the bedrock of successful societies. It's no more debatable than whether 1+1=2 I can't emphasize enough that the notion of private property is critical for successful societies. It's a lesson history shows us very clearly. My ownership of something does not depend on my fellow citizens allowing me to own it. Certain principles are innate, endowed by our creator, whatever-your-favorite-language. Inviolate. It's the entire basis of western society. I'm not trying to argue at extremes again -- obviously I can't dump a ton of arsenic in my backyard. But to believe that it's natural for global health concerns to intrude more and more on personal property is to say that people are going to stop being people at some point and simply be cells performing in a larger organism. I don't see that happening any time soon. The human animal simply won't fit into the little box that you'd like them to fit into.

frig 17y ago
Oh, agreed -- I'd like to see the notion of "private property" well protected moving forward. I just think the way its strongest advocates operate is going to do much more harm than good (in, eg, the same way the Republicans slagging every last Democratic policy proposal with "that's socialism" is doing plenty to make socialism look harmless and appealing in the modern era). But, you have to be realistic: - if you accept a libertarian notion of self-ownership, then it follows that, eg, I ought nought to have you blow smoke in my face unless i consent to it (b/c you're tampering with my property, no)? - now, as a practical matter people agree to overlook certain things (eg: your campfire is infinitesimally smokifying my air here back in town, but it's so negligible that I ought not to care about it; very literally the stress of worrying about it is worse for me than your smoke is) - it'd be nice if you can adopt a universal standard for when your (infinitesimal) actions are something I have to ignore - but unless you already have that agreement you're back into coercing people; it does seem useful to you, I'm sure, to think that "since I've scientifically shown that my blowing smoke in your face doesn't actually harm you, so I'm going to keep doing it", but now you're not that far removed intellectually from eg eminent domain "I've demonstrated that demolishing your home in order to finish this expressway is manifestly for the economic benefit of the entire city -- including you -- so even though normally I'd like to respect your property rights in this patch of land today I say 'tough luck!'" - this is why the boundaries of private property are always ultimately a political problem: usually people are looking out for their own interest, as they choose to define it; to get someone to deliberately sacrifice their own perceived self-interest requires either force or politics; force works but is undesirable and doesn't scale, either, so you're left with politics This is where the folk libertarianism (along with any naive or simplistic approach to being pro-property-rights) is going to flounder in the new century, if present trends continue: - you can't pretend your actions "don't effect other people until they do"; the reality is that "your actions effect everyone else, but sometimes (usually, even) everyone else agrees to pretend as if they don't" - you look like a hypocrite if you on the one hand want to maintain absolute say over how you use your own resources but on the other hand want to force other people to accept your decisions about which uses of their property (their bodies, their air, etc.) they need to just man up and take; you also look stupid if you can't see this point - you also look politically and rhetorically dumb when you speak casually about what risk-of-harm to others you're comfortable ignoring (and would expect other people to ignore); it's rather obvious that, eg, DanielBMarkham is fine with, say, some action of his having a .001% odds of giving his neighor's kid asthma (picking at random) -- DanielBMarkham is not his neighbor's kid, after all -- but step outside the space of just "thinking in words" and you'll see why that's not a winning pose (it's made worse by the way that risk-of-harm is low-and-diffuse but harm is typically severe-and-concentrated). What I'm trying to drive home is that everything you've said is valid, but you're not going to change minds with that argument (at most you'll make people aware of a particular danger if you carry something to its logical extreme). I think the best long-term approach is to focus more on design and infrastructure (eg: intelligent garbage processing, products designed from start-to-finish to neatly decompose into recyclable components -- this is called "reverse logistics", fyi) rather than trying to directly win the political war over where the lines ought to be drawn. If you can get to where people can continue doing what they do now but with far less externality production, then you will easily be able to keep the lines drawn mostly where you'd want them to be (at least for most actors). The issue here is that to get to where it's safe to be mindless again is not going to happen promptly (if at all) without some kind of directed regulatory push; that is not only nontrivial -- and dangerous -- but also unlikely barring some other political shifts.