Brainpolice : Ethics, Consent

What Is Democracy? Part One: Democracy Is Slavery

Brainpolice — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 05:57:00 GMT

This is part one in a three part series: democracy is slavery, democracy is impossible and democracy is liberty.

Democracy Is Slavery

By the phrase "democracy is slavery", I refer to the tyranny that inevitably arises from the principles of majoritarianism and communalism. One standard definition of democracy is rule by the majority. Rule by the majority is fundamentally in opposition to the liberty of the minority, and the individual is of course the greatest minority of them all. The logical implication of the principle of majoritarianism, viewed as an ethic, is that superiority in numbers justifies decision-making over others. The group with the largest amount of people in it may control and subjugate all other groups, all other individuals not within it. To use a common phrase that accurately describes majoritarian democracy, it reduces to "might makes right". Majoritarian democracy creates a master-slave relationship in which the masters outnumber the slaves. The range necessary for a group to become a majoritarian ruling class could be anywhere between 51% and 99% of a given population.

Numerical majoritarianism, a subcategory or altered version of majoritarian democracy, is somewhat different in that no true majority is actually required. One does not have to exceed 50% in numerical superiority in order to rule over others. The numerical majority could theoretically be constituted by anywhere between 1% and 49% of a given population. In practise, it actually reduces to a minority ruling over a majority in terms of the overall population of those involved. Numerical majoritarianism creates a master-slave relationship in which the slaves outnumber the masters. The more groups that are involved, the smaller the numerical majorities may potentially get, and conversely the larger the dominated or subjected group may potentially get. Most examples of democracy in action are cases of numerical majoritarianism, although democracies could be said to vary between exercises of both pure and numerical majoritarianism interchangably depending in the particular situation in question.

Democracy is slavery because the minority, most importantly the individual, is forced into an association with and subjected to the decision-making power of the majority that they did not explicitly consent to. I define slavery quite simply as involuntary servitude and forced association, a state of affairs in which one or more individuals imposes decision-making from above upon one or more individuals against their explicit consent. Under democracy, whatever positive obligations that the majority wishes to impose on the minority must be lived up to regaurdless of the consent of the minority. The majority exercises decision-making power over social and economic life of others. Certainly a man is no less a slave if they have a multitude of masters rather then one master. While in monarchy the individual has one ruler or is the subject of a tiny familial or noble aristocracy, in democracy the individual has more of a plurality of rulers. The majority exercises shared or quotal rulership over the subjected individual. Democracy increases the amount of rulers. It could conversely be said that it reduces the amount of subjects as compared to monarchy, but this does not solve anything and the subjects are only reduced by the creation of more rulers.

It is important for one to realize that, as a principle seeking to justify authority and decision-making, majoritarian democracy, wether it be constituted by true majorities or numerical ones, is blind or neutral to the logical or ethical nature of the preferences of the majority in question. It justifies whatever decision is made by the majority, regaurdless of wether or not is right or wrong based on any independant ethical criterion and regaurdless of wether or not it makes any sense at all. In an exercise of majoritarian democracy, anything from murder to theft to rape to kidnapping could theoretically be given sanction, so long as the group approving of or engaging in such actions constitutes a majority. To reduce majoritarianism to the absurd, using the principle of majoritarianism on a small scale, if there are two men and a woman and the men want to have sexual intercourse with the woman and she does not, the two men are allegedly justified in raping her. Or, to use a large-scale example of the absurdities resulting from the principle, 51% of a population may allegedly legitimately murder the other 49%.

Majoritarian democracy fails the criterion of universality in ethics because the respective majorities and minorities are not held to the same basic standard of ethics. It functions as a defacto justification for the majority or group being able to get away with doing that which the individual or minority may not do. In short, the majority is exempted from being subject to the same ethical criterion and responsibility as everyone else. This is logically inconsistant if ethical principles and rights are supposed to apply to all individual human beings, if the individual is our standard of sovereignty. Using the law of universality as our criterion, even if it is one individual against everyone else in the world, it still is not just for even everyone else in the world to enslave, plunder or murder the individual. "The community", "the majority", and the deceptive phrases such as "the will of the people" and "the public good" cannot legitimately be invoked to justify tyranny. These terms function as obfuscations and illegitimate apologetics for the subjugation of people.

Utilitarianism could be seen as being linked to democracy in terms of the old and common maxim "the greatest good for the greatest number". Using this as a criteria for ethics could be used to justify majoritarianism because the precise definition of the term "good" is left up in the air so that whatever the majority happens to consider to be "good" is sanctioned. Afterall, the majority is "the greatest number". The majority may certainly benefit and gain utility, wether it be in a purely psychological and emotional sense or in terms of material and physical well-being, prosperity and survival. But the criterion for justifying it is arbitrary and inconsistant, especially when terms such as "happiness" are employed. The means toward obtaining the utility are not taken into proper consideration. The end of utility or happiness for the majority is used to justify the means. What is not addressed is that there is a burden of proof on the majority to justify their means. The burden of proof always lies with those who assert authority, and a mere numbers game does not constitute a sufficient justification for authority. If explicit consent is used as a criterion for the burden of proof, then democracy and utilitarianism cannot ethically legitimize anything at all. It functions as little more then majoritarian hedonism. In the absence of explicit consent, democracy as a general principle is nothing but an arbitrary apologetic for slavery.

The idea that one has a right to participate in and have decision-making power over other people's private relationships against their explicit consent is fundamentally contradictary to the concept of individual sovereignty and free association. A sovereign individual is one who is free from the imposition of 3rd parties of people, including majorities. Noone else has an abstract entitlement to decision-making over the individual and the private relationships that they enter into. Only the individual has legitimate authority in decision-making over their own person. The only alternative to individual sovereignty or self-ownership, as Murray Rothbard once pointed out, is either for another individual to exercise decision-making over their person, which would create a master-slave relationship in which one person rules over another, or for the collective or everyone to exercise quotal ownership or decision-making over eachother's person, which would create an absurd scenario in which everyone attempts to own a quotal share of everyone else. Since this is practically impossible to realistically enforce, the communalist alternative, in practise, reduces to the first alternative of individual rulership, only in the name of the community or collective. Democracy is somewhere in between the two extremes of individual rulership and the mutual and universal slavery of everyone to eachother. Democracy is as close to the communalist ideal that a society can get, reducing to some combination of pure and numerical majoritarianism in which there is a mixed and somewhat dynamic network of master-slave relationships.

Re: Moral vs Hierarchical obligations

Brainpolice — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:23:00 GMT

The following is a response to this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoXjrlxDSL4

Dear Mr1001Nights,

Unchosen positive obligations are indeed slavery, which should be obvious because the obligations are not chosen. In claiming or bestowing unchosen positive obligations onto other people, you are the authority that must face a burden of proof. The person who claims that others have unchosen positive obligations to them is the one who must prove that others owe some kind of debt to them. In the absence of any objectively definable debt previously accured, the claim is absolute hogwash. To claim an abstract positive right to the servitude of others is to claim authority over them by definition. By all accounts, someone who must fulfill unchosen positive obligations is engaging in involuntary servitude. Involuntary servitude is slavery. Who exactly will enforce these unchosen positive obligations? Obviously everyone is not going to just willingly fulfill them, and when we really start to think more deeply about it, it is impossible for everyone to universally fulfill such positive obligations due to geographical problems and the availability of resources. So some individual or body of men is going to have to enforce these positive obligations, especially for those who resist and refuse to fulfill them. Hence, your system already requires a heirarchy from the get go.

Positive and negative rights inherently contradict eachother because negative rights implies that one is free from unchosen positive obligations imposed by others. The only obligation they could be said to impose is for others to leave one alone. Positive rights bestow an obligation onto people to serve others. Positive rights lead to claims of entitlement to the labor of other people. The enforcement of positive rights onto someone who is unwilling to serve others inherently constitutes theft or extortion from that individual. If Joe has an abstract "right to food", and Jack has food but doesn't want to give it up, their in order for Joe's alleged "right" to be fulfilled, either Joe himself or some agent or 3rd party acting on Joe's behalf must confiscate the food from Jack. Jack has no choice not to serve Joe and pony up the good.

By all accounts, in the type of society envisoned by market anarchists, there is nothing to stop you from joining together with your fellows who all agree to such positive obligations and to form a community by which you all strive to fulfill them. This would be perfectly fine because all of the people involved actually chose the obligations and believe in them. On the other hand, if someone in this society decides that they no longer favor such obligations, and they do not have any debt withstanding, they are free to opt out of your community and flock elsewhere. I don't know why it's so hard for you to understand that your type of society is only one possibility out of many that may co-exist in an anarchy, not some monolithic model that everyone must abide by. Luke12000 and others have tried to point this out endlessly to no avail. There is no reason why your ideal society cannot exist as one option out of many within a larger framework. Market anarchists are not imposing their preferential society on you, so it would only make sense to mutually extend the same "tolerance" back in the other direction.

The problem with the wage slavery arguement is that it applies to any society no matter what system or lack thereof is in place. No matter what system is in place, including socialism, resources are still scarce and material well-being still requires labor. Things must be produced, they do not just fall down like mana from the sky. It is therefore disingenuous to imply that "work or starve" only applies to a so-called "capitalist" society when it still applies no matter what type of organization a society is constituted by. "Work or starve" or "act or die" is not a human created set of choices, it is imposed by the necessities of nature itself. Humans must act in order to achieve the ends they desire. No social or economic or political system can make it so that some kind of production is not required for survival and material well-being. Put frankly, people can't just sit on their asses all day and expect to have prosperity and material wants, because these things must be produced. What system is in place is rather irrelevant to this fact. This reveals an interesting paradox: your ideal society can exist within a free market, but a free market cannot exist within your ideal society.

Another part of the problem with the wage slavery arguement is that it uses a nonsensical definition of coercion. In my understanding, coercion requires human agency, usually realized as a threat of force. But the wage slavery arguement implies that someone taking no action at all, specifically someone simply not giving their stuff or a piece of it to someone else, "coerces" that person into an unwanted circumstance. Noone actually physically forced you to work. Noone actually imposed starvation on you through their human agency. The negative circumstances created by a lack of productive action is simply a fact of life. Production requires human cooperation. One is perfectly free not to cooperate and not to produce, but in the absence of any mechanism that forces them to not cooperate and not produce, the negative circumstances that may come about as a consequence of this is truly no fault but their own, or, put somewhat more lightly, outside of their control and imposed by the inadequacies of nature. In either case, the wage slavery arguement is nonsensical in that it equates the inedequacies of nature to coercion.

As far as the concept of solidarity goes, human beings inherently are not in a state of absolute solidarity. Rather, human beings are incredibly diverse. Each individual is unique unto themselves. Uniformity in traits and preferences runs contrary to how we work as human beings. People have their own identities as individuals and their own self-interest. Self-interest, however, does not negate all cooperation. To the contrary, as psychological egoism demonstrates quite well, people cooperate out of mutual self-interest. It is an error to assume that everyone's self-interest inherently clashes at all times. It is in people's rational self-interest to cooperate and associate with eachother and engage in a generally peaceful manner. What I see as being amazing about organic society is that cooperation flourishes despite people's vast diversity and disagreement. An anarchist society is pluralist, not a uniform model for all of mankind. Market anarchism, when one actually understands it, is the exact same thing as anarchism without adjectives because it provides a framework by which multiple types of societies can co-exist.

Have a nice day.

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.