Brainpolice : Discrimination, Philosophy

Liberty as a Lack of Unchosen Positive Obligations

Brainpolice — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:01:00 GMT

And a lack of a gaurantee of survival and flourishing

There are two fundamental ways in which liberty and rights can be defined. One definition of liberty is the freedom to use one's faculties in order to persue one's rational self-interest without infringement by others. This is a negativistic definition: you are free from the coercive, imposed or initiatory violent actions of others. This principle of liberty bestows no positive obligations on others to do certain things for you, only an obligation to abstain from doing anything to infringe on you. Consequentially, noone can legitimately murder, steal, extort, rape, enslave or you. The positivistic definition of liberty is that you are entitled to certain positive benefits, such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, daycare, and so on. This bestows positive obligations onto others. You have an abstract right to be provided with such material things and services by them. Consequentially, everyone must take certain positive actions with regaurd to the other. Based on this view of rights, it is easy to see why one would demand things such as universal healthcare, welfare, minumum wages and public housing.

In the negative view of rights, you have the right to persue such things in a voluntary manner without infringing on others or any others infringing on you, but noone else has a positive obligation to yield them to you without their explicit consent. You do not have a right to be served by others against their will. Unless there is some kind of voluntary contractual agreement previously made or some debt incurred, they have the right to refuse to yield such things. People may freely exclude others from their time, energy, labor and possessions. To use food as an example, noone may force you to buy food against your will and noone may force you to yield food against your will, but you are perfectly free to exercise your faculties in order to voluntarily trade for food or work for food or give your food away. You cannot just pop up at someone's doorstep and force them to empty out their refridgerator to feed you. In principle, even if you are starving to death, you still cannot steal from a store or rob someone at gunpoint in order to feed yourself.

These two views of liberty clash with eachother on a fundamental level. They are hopelessly irreconcilable. One must violate the other. If you have unchosen positive obligations to others, then your negative rights are being violated. If you do not enforce any unchosen positive obligations to others, then your positive rights are being violated. Positive rights, if consistantly and universally applied, imply that everyone is effectively enslaved to eachother in the name of providing anything from the necessities of survival to mere material wants. According to the philosophy of positive rights, survival, security, comfort and a potentially huge laundry list of non-essential special benefits are things that must be gauranteed by others. First and foremost, it puts survival above everything else. But in the philosophy of negative rights, you cannot rationally or sensibly achieve any of those others things (survival, security, health, knowledge, etc.) without first being free. By definition, you must be free to excerise your faculties in order to obtain such things in a manner that is in accordance with reason, morality and your fundamental nature. However, they are not an absolute gaurantee in life that you will survive or flourish by the provision of others.

The incentives of these two views of liberty are very different as well. In an atmosphere of negative rights, the individual has an incentive to exercise their faculties in order to find a way to provide for their survival, safety and happiness in part precisely because there is no way for them to legitimately expect others to provide such things for them for free and without any effort on the recipient's part. On the other hand, pure acts of giving are not necessarily disincentivized, but they must come about by a sheer act of will on the part of the gift giver. Negative rights is neutral to charitable acts. In an atmosphere of positive rights, self-motivation and self-reliance is disincentivized and one is given an incentive to sacrifice for the sake of everyone else. The individual's actions done to benefit themselves are viewed with distain while they are expected to simultaneously feed, clothe, shelter and associate with other people.

In the absence of unchosen positive obligations, the individual has an incentive to associate with others for the purpose of obtaining survival, security and happiness precisely because noone else is just going to deliver it to them for free on a silver platter. So such an atmosphere encourages social cooperation. In an environment of unchosen positive obligations, the incentive is not towards genuine participatory social cooperation so much as grudgingly made acts of sacrifice and social uniformity. Since such obligations were not explicitly consented to, it could not be said that the individual is necessarily willingly associating with and providing for others. They are in fact completely incapable of genuinely choosing to be "good" and benefit other people in such an environment. In contrast, in an environment in which one is simply free from others and has no unchosen positive obligations, the only way to be "good" and benefit other people is through a free act of will. By definition, you cannot be forced to be moral through coerced obligations, you are only capable of being moral as a consequence of the free choices that you make.

It is interesting to note where these different views relate to inclusion and exclusion among people. If you have no unchosen positive obligations, then you may freely include or exclude others from your property and not associate with them as you please. You have no obligation to hire someone, allow them onto your property, or be their friend against your explicit consent. On the other hand, there are natural incentives for you to consensually do such things to some degree, since you cannot survive or flourish while living as a completely isolated hermit. So while in theory you may be as exclusive towards other people as you like, you are going to have self-interested reasons for associating with others in a whole plethora of ways rangings from trade to labor to reproduction to common friendship. There is an extent to which exclusion of others may be harmful to your well-being, particularly as it relates to economic relations. On the other hand, if you do have unchosen positive obligations, then you will be forced to be inclusive even when it does not benefit you and you have no desire to act as such. As an act of servitude rather then consent born out of necessity and desire, you are obligated to associate with and hire and work for people whom you may dislike and distrust. Or, on the other side of the coin, you may be obligated to disassociate with, fire or not work with people whom you do like and trust, or at least see no compeling reason not to engage.

When it comes to universal application of principles, a world in which all unchosen positive obligations are met is a pipe dream of monstrous proportions. The resources, labor, knowledge and willpower necessary to accomplish such a feat simply does not exist. The unavoidable fact of scarcity makes this especially true. And of course it is simply physically impossible for every single person in the world to serve the other, especially not in an equal manner. A world in which the individual is free to exercise their faculties to the best of their ability without infringement by others, in contrast, does not require any positive actions and therefore is much more realistic in that it only requires a sheer act of abstaining from infringing on others and it does not make utopian demands of human perfection. Such a view is quite sober. It readily aknowledges that there will always be some degree of natural inadequacy in the world. Prosperity and security and happiness cannot rain down like mana from the sky. A free world is not a perfect one, it is only optimal. Some people may not suceed or flourish in a free world, but only as a consequence of their own actions, a lack of initiative or a lack of luck.

The Rational and Individualist Case Against Racism

Brainpolice — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:50:00 GMT

I'd like to state upfront that I am not an egalitarian, which is to say that I am fully aware of the fact that people are inherently unequal with respect to their mental and physical capabilities as individuals, and I despise the politically correct way in which racial questions are often treated in public discourse. I do not support affirmative action or any attempts to force people of different racial groups to associate with eachother. However, I intend to make a decent criticism and refutation of the ideology of racism itself as well as its goals.

Like all forms of collectivism, racism treats entire groups of people as if they were individual entities in themselves. But only individuals exist, think and act. Responsibility cannot reasonably be assigned uniformly to entire races or abstract concepts. In the same way that the entire caucasian race cannot be blamed for any particular blunders done by certain white people in the past, the entire negroid race cannot be blamed for any particular blunders that certain black people may engage in presently. The notion of ancestral guilt is morally bankrupt, for it assigns moral responsibility to certain individuals who took no part in the thing in question for merely being descended from those who may have engaged in the thing in question. The notion of collective guilt is morally bankrupt, for it assigns moral responsibility to everyone within a given group for the actions of particular individuals within that group.

Racial polylogism is the view that treats different racial groups as having different logical structures of the mind, while simultaneously ignoring the diversity within a given racial group. But in reality, perhaps barring the severely mentally handicapped, there is only one fundamental logical structure of the human mind. Individuals may indeed vary widely in their mental capabilities and how they apply their mental capabilities, but this in no way validates the premise that entire races have different logical structures of the mind than eachother, it only applies to individuals. In other words, even if one could scientifically prove that one race on average has better or worse intellectual capabilities, this essentially has no bearing on the individual members of such groups, who vary among themselves in the first place. And it would do nothing to change the fact that all human beings share the same fundamental characteristics that make them human.

All human beings have a rational self-interest or incentive towards certain basic things, the most fundamental of these being maintaining their own existance and the quality thereof. Each individual is self-aware and possesses the capacity to be rational. The defining feature that sets human beings apart from other animals is our rationality and the expanded capacity for moral choice and knowledge accumulation that it gives us. All people, no matter what their skin color is or any other such unique physical characteristics they may possess, have this capacity to one degree or another. When it comes to this basic capacity, noone, no matter what group identity is attached to them, can be reasonably characterized as sub-human. The biological differences between the races can essentially be reduced to little more than miniscule and superficial physical differences in appearance, and do nothing to counteract the fact that all such people share the same fundamental defining features of being a human.

Racial identity is in many ways an illogical collectivist mindset, for one is identifying themselves with an abstraction rather than as an individual. One is actually sacrificing their genuine identity and unique qualities in order to conform to an ideal and become more uniform with respect to others. Racial identity can lead to the idea that one must act a certain way and that one is entitled to certain privileges merely for being part of a particular group. Treating people differently in terms of rights merely on the basis of what racial identity group they belong to sets up a precedent in which different groups are granted a different set of rights. Thus, racist conceptions of rights may suffer from the fallacy of group's rights just as much as an egalitarian conception does. In practise, the only significant difference between the two is that they place different emphasis on which group gets more rights then the other.

Racists tend to rely on an extreme form of either biological or cultural determinism in order to defend their premises. They assume that one's race uniformly dictates one's ideas and behavior. While cultural marxists may tend to overemphasize nurture in explaining the behavior of people from certain racial or cultural groups, racists may tend to overemphasize nature in their attempts to explain such things. The cultural determinists are somewhat correct in pointing out that people are a product of their environment, although they unfortunately take this view to illogical extremes. But it cannot be denied that there are some biological and cultural differences among the tendencies of individuals belonging to different races. However, racists tend to make the mistake of assuming that correlation equals causation when dealing with statistical data about racial tendencies, and all of their attempts to prove the inherent inferiority of certain races have been debunked scientifically.

Many racists may have an agenda of separatism between races. Some may go so far as to envision a completely ethnocentric culture in which each racial group remains completely hermetically sealed from the other. Unfortunately for the racists, however, this would be counterproductive for them. Even if it were the case that one group is indeed superior to the other, it would still be more advantageous to trade and associate with them than to completely isolate from them. In economic terms, the theory of comparative advantage proves this beyond the shadow of a doubt. Discrimination generally does not benefit the discriminator in the long run, it hurts all parties involved. In economic terms, discrimination is suicidal, because either you're lowing the amount of customers or you're hiring a less qualified worker over a more qualified one, and therefore are accepting lower productivity. Racial discrimination is a suicidal buisiness practise in a modern society.

To add more insult to injury to the cause of the racists, it is physically impossible to have complete social isolation between the races. The history of mankind is in many ways a perpetual history of migrations between territories, and as time passes society naturally, albiet slowly, becomes more integrated. While white pride groups may tend to think of themselves as ethnically pure, in actual fact the history of Europe is full of the intermingling between different tribes, including ones that were originally from places far from Europe. In a profound sense, everyone is a "mut" on some level. The consequences of inbreeding have been shown to be negative, so it may very well be the case that evolution favors racial mixing. In either case, ultimately, racial separatists are trying to accomplish something that is impossible. It is impossible to manage to stop migration of foreign peoples in its track, and it is impossible to economically benefit while persueing a large-scale discriminatory buisiness practise. The movement of people of different ethnicities across land masses and the interbreeding of people of different ethnicities is to some extent inevitable, and will only intensify over time.

In conclusion, racism is not an ideology that has reason or evidence on its side and is ultimately self-defeating.