Freedom is not simple
arp242.net
arp242.net
Freedom != Liberty
This concept is easily over 200 years old. I appreciate the author's interest in the subject. It might be good to start much nearer to where others left off.
Either way, the article wasn't intended as a complete in-depth examination of the concepts of freedom and liberty (and the possible distinction between them), but rather offer some commentary on the state of the public debate surrounding these things as I see it.
I'd say it's beyond just every-day use; the second sentence of the Liberty wikipedia page is verbatim "It is a synonym for the word freedom."
Respectfully, habibi, your argument can be easily broken down because you conflate the two concepts in your piece, so you should expect push back on that aspect of it.
What the GNU philosophy advocates is that these freedoms are necessary to make sure YOU are free from corporations, governments, etc. What you keep conflating freedom with in the piece is with the liberty to do as you please. In the GNU argument, the liberty to do as you please with code is contingent on you being free from oppressive structures that are made by those who write it. A good example is why the press is able to do as they please being contingent on a government guaranteeing a "freedom of the press", i.e. freedom from their interference.
From the "Freedom or Power?" GNU argument:
"We believe you should decide what to do with the software you use; however, that is not what today's law says. Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms."
Hopefully, I was able to show you the connection between the two now.
EDIT: Grammar
"My neighbour's freedom to force their music upon me interferes with my need for sleep."
Or even,
"My neighbour's freedom to pollute my private property interferes with my private enjoyment of it."
Somehow it seems like an easier question to answer, now.
It's just different ways of describing the conflict between the need to sleep and the neighbour's loud music.
Your restated question doesn't pick up on this, you are just stating how someones liberty to do as they please interferes with your ability to do as you please on your property in a simpler format. No one is being freed from the other.
"My neighbour's freedom from interference when forcing their music upon me interferes with my need for sleep."
"My neighbour's freedom from interference when polluting my private property interferes with my private enjoyment of it."
Easy-peasy.
Freedom from something requires them to have power over you. Your neighbor really doesn't in the same way the government does, an invading foreign power, or, the way GNU argues it, the way corporations do with their software licensing and copyright.
These two things are not accidentally correlated.
Say I want to play my music loud at 4 AM. I'm probably not going to reason about other peoples' rights limiting mine, or whatever - not because I can't, but because I don't want to. I just want to crank up my music and rock out, I can't be bothered with philosophy right now.
But I fear that, if people will not restrain their own behavior, the only alternatives left are authoritarianism and chaos. And most people, after a taste of chaos, seem to prefer authoritarianism.
When we need authoritarianism, something is too big.
So, there's a sweet spot somewhere between perfect freedom/privacy and perfect accountability/justice. It shouldn't take authoritarianism to sort out but we need to fight hard for the right balance of norms and laws to adapt to changing technology. Should my neighbor be allowed to fly a drone at the level of my daughter's bedroom window? Is it acceptable to record my every move and identify my face in a private shopping mall?
I presume this is only during "quiet hours" at night? Or can you get your neighbor fined for woodworking at noon?
It doesn't seem to have time limits, but it does have actual numbers for the noise level.
I do woodworking in my garage and haven't had the cops called on me. I hear my neighbors doing it fairly frequently, too. We even have an HOA here, though it's pretty tame.
Yours is more concise.
Isn’t this just a version of the golden rule (do unto others...)?
"Indeed, the entire Free Software movement seems like a typical failure of appreciating these kind of trade-offs when it comes to freedom."
I find this extremely pretentious and very poorly argumented. I wish I could mod down this article. This looks like the beginning of an FSF smear campaign.
This is what the "Paradox of Tolerance" idea looks like, when taken to its logical conclusion. By simply tolerating this person's post, its ability to be tolerant is ultimately destroyed by the intolerant.
The second reason is indeed that I do plan to write some other things to point out some of the FSFs failings as I see them, both in their philosophy and some more pragmatical things, and the appreciation of the complexity of "freedom" is one of them.
I agree that as it stands it's not well argumented, but this will be an article on its own (soon™, although a kind of proto-draft is available as some comments I made at [1]). I have this kind of complex dependency tree in my head on what to write in what order.
I hate how you phrase this as a "smear campaign" though. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I do expect people to recognise I'm arguing in good faith, and "smear campaign" implies that I don't.
> I think you if target a specific organization or movement, you should put more effort into portraying their position fairly
I think that's not an unfair point. I have commented out this sentence until such a time I have written a more extensive article on it that can be linked. I also don't really want to focus on the details of specific examples with this, but rather on the bigger picture (I was very hesitant to include it as an example at all, as it's not a debate well known outside of the programming community; I may change my mind and remove it altogether).
Then try reading instead of typing, especially https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
> we should perform a cost-benefit analysis on behalf of society as a whole, taking account of individual freedom as well as production of material goods.
You cannot say in good faith that the essays fail to recognise or address the existence of trade-offs. Please take note.
>When people say “GPL increases freedom” then they’re right. When others say “GPL limits freedom compared to MIT” then they’re right too. It’s just a matter about which freedoms exactly we’re talking about, and for who.
I think it's pretty clear that the freedom the FSF is advocating for is freedom for the user primarily, and only secondarily for the developer. They're a political organization and this is one of their principles, and those who counter with effectively "but what about my freedom to restrict the user?" are missing the point.
You may disagree with the FSF's position on ideological grounds, but if you do so it's unhelpful to argue that something is "more" or "less" free without first establishing common definitions. You probably have different working definitions of "freedom" in that context at that point, and arguing without reconciling those is likely to result in the two parties arguing right past each other.
It seems that societally, we must decide where we draw the lines on things (ie. what is acceptable and reasonable vs what is not). The professor seemed to enjoy working us into a conundrum and then throwing that as the analysis.
The Form of Rights: The Hohfeldian Analytical System [1]
The Function of Rights: The Will Theory and the Interest Theory [2]
Interesting read, "Hohfeld's cube": https://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/65177fc7-9161-44a4-9a8e-1631...
[1] http://www.kentlaw.edu/perritt/courses/property/Hohfeld.htm
[2] http://core.ecu.edu/phil/mccartyr/1175docs/TheoriesofRights....
[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...
That said, a premise of the article is that freedom should be maximized for everyone. The reason many people are skeptical when the topic of freedom being relative is brought up may indeed be influenced by developments in tech. Because sadly, we had a long stretch of paternalism and restricting choice "for the benefit of all" (mostly corporate lock in). In that case, you are not maximizing freedom, even if there can be other kinds of arguments for said approach.
It is really important to discuss what you think freedom means before delving into an argument.
E.g. Your freedom to drink big gulp sugar drinks every day and sit around and become morbidly obese does decrease other people’s freedom when they are paying for your healthcare costs. (If you believe this is true, it follows and is also true that massively increasing your risk of STDs also decreases society’s freedom due to increased cost associated with an unhealthy populace.)
When people demand rights, they beg the question of first from whom, and second of what responsibility they must necessarily be taking on. When they demand freedom, they are rolling back the scope or domain of external authorities. Software freedom means using software without requiring permission. Freedom becomes an artifact of a private sphere of experience. This private sphere can be individual, it can be based on association, distance, or any number of other dimensions, but the existence of a private domain is the necessary condition for freedom. Rights on the other hand, are a public phenomenon, in that they are artifacts of an externally governed domain.
In this model, freedom is something outside the scope of governed rights, over which there is neither a guarantee or oversight. Freedom has a scope, and it can only exist within a perimeter that secures it from the external rights and privileges granted by authorities. All freedom is a limit on the sovereignty and dominion of external authorities, which is what makes it so provocative. It's also why "the rights of man," and "human rights," were so controversial initially, because they require a universal authority to enforce them.
The question of whether my exercising freedom may infringe on someones rights or their privileges becomes clearer when we measure it against whether it interferes with their responsibilities. When rights collide, the law is the tool we use to reconcile them. When freedoms collide, typically we either resort to negotiating rights, or defer to the principle of freedom and move on. When freedom collides with rights, we tend to negotiate an exception or set a precedent. But when freedom collides with privilege, neither can bear co-existence with the other.
This models why some people think others' freedom is privilege (because it is not a function of prescribed rights or responsibilities), and that rights and privileges for others breach their freedom (by expanding the domain of authority with imposed or without commensurate responsibilities). Hence playing loud music at 4am in a neighbourhood is a rights violation, and not an exercise of freedom, because it does not occur in a private domain, which is the necessary condition of freedom.
The anime is also available on Netflix in most countries, if you prefer that format.
It can be built on by applying the economics concept of "externalities" - i.e. side effects (positive or negative) from a particular action such as the exercising of a right or freedom.
To get us closer to a perfect world, we need to start measuring the value of externalities (arguably not always easy to get right but possible to estimate) and to whom this gain or loss in value occurs so that they can be compensated by the externality creator(s).
I agree with the author that most people do not consider the negative externalities of a particular freedom being exercised.
We should require our legislators to more clearly articulate and value externalities from a given policy and identify groups it creates negative externalities for, and how they should be compensated (or why they do not deserve to be compensated).
That would be identity politics 2.0 and the end of nation states. Not only lawmakers targeting different groups of society to pass legislation, but also identifying (highly subjectively) other groups to be compensated for 2nd and 3rd-order effects introduced by that legislation.
> That would be identity politics 2.0 and the end of nation states
Still seems like a massive leap in rhetoric. The truth is that this sort of compensation already exists in the united states. For example: eminent domain, which requires a just compensation for government acquisition of private land. Another example, many cities require some form of compensation from a real estate developer to the surrounding community in exchange for a permit to undergo a big construction; for example, funding a public park or some such.
Neither of these examples seem like "identity politics 2.0" much less the end of nation states. You can argue it's ineffective public policy, but again its a massive leap in rhetoric you took with your earlier post.
True. That's why targeted taxes (eg carbon taxing) are often a good idea. However, if we as a society vote to do things that seriously harm a subset of society, then we as a society are partially responsible for that harm.
> In case of taxing only A, the cost would be prohibitive and could discourage A from wanting to do its thing in the first place.
I think it's entirely reasonable to price externalities into the cost of an action.
I wonder if this could be a potential remedy for the issue of modern legislation paralysis:
We have lots of modern problems, we often know what are some effective solutions to these problems, and are unable to implement any of them because every solution imposes some kind of externality upon a group with sufficient political power to lobby against it.
For example: building dense housing and public transit in a boom town. It's generally agreed that this is the only sustainable end state (more housing with public transit to offset traffic) and yet we end up with total paralysis on every front: In the rich neighborhoods, nobody wants development to disturb their idyllic suburban life. In the poor neighborhoods, nobody wants a flurry of investment dollars to drive up prices and push out renters. Nobody who drives wants tax dollars on transit, and nobody who uses transit wants tax dollars building more highways. The cycle continues.
That's kind of the point of this thread, that perhaps by offsetting externalities at a legislative level, we can help build democratic legitimization to problems that are widely recognized but lacking even incremental solutions.
Obviously you disagree we should even be trying to build more housing or transit, and that's great for you but not really relevant. My post is approaching the issue that there are very large factions of interest groups that collectively do believe we need more housing and transit, but individually cannot agree on where (or should i say, in whose backyard), by whom, and how, it gets built.
I think the general consideration for this approach is far too narrow. Cities are the least sustainable places humans live in. So the premise is already restricted on properties of the labor market, the main draw for people moving towards cities in the first place. Here the assumption is true, since there are certain requirements for proximity and infrastructure. But I doubt housing policies should be based on that perspective alone.
Especially now, since we noticed that huge parts of the labor force in administrative roles can just as well work remotely. So I believe the perspective to be too narrow. Problems like pollution, congestion, food production, noise and yes, satisfaction are factors that already got externalized before any discussion even began.
I think any housing policies should be mindful of demand, but also examine why the demand exists and if the might be better alternatives. I think many people like "greener pastures" if they weren't forced to compromise with their need for infrastructure.
You have these institutions to evaluate the will of voters and implement it as best as they can after careful evaluation.
Then, there's the freedom that's intertwined with responsibility. We can, without regulation, do things for ourselves and our communities. Free and Open Source Software is a good example of the work-product of that kind of freedom.
Sexual freedom between "consenting adults" is in fact an example of freedom intertwined with responsibility.
My point: considering "freedom" as a standalone concept leads to all kinds of category confusion.
How is that the case?
Libertarianism and the free software movement are two social movements that have very little in common except the word "freedom."
Libertarian philosophers like Hayek, and even those who would describe themselves as anarchists like Rothbard, do not advocate a lawless society. They accept the bottom-up process of building up common and constitutional law through court precedent and reject the top-down imposition of laws by fiat.
To your specific points, American society has already worked out which "freedoms" impinge on others' freedoms over the course of 200+ years of constitutional law, building on many more centuries of British common law. The idea that a single person can sit at a desk and calculate "trade-offs" between civil rights enshrined by law and enjoyed by large groups of people over many hundreds of years would be absurd to a libertarian, though commonplace today. Who is allowed to make such a decision, and why?
The free software movement emerged as a defense of pre-existing collaboration networks between academics from the threat an attempted corporate takeover in a very specialized area of computing at a specific point in time, i.e. OS development in the 1980s.
I find that few developers understand the forces the original software freedom movement was fighting against, although such forces are stronger than ever. This is only because the software freedom movement so thoroughly wiped out its opposition within its own limited domain that those looking from the outside can't understand the point of it anymore. Perhaps that's what true victory looks like in the historical record; when the opposition is not only defeated but silent, the victors look like a bunch of loud extremists going on and on about something irrelevant.
According to lore, Stallman started the movement due to a closed-source appliance (a printer) he used and which he wanted to improve. Closed devices continued to be and are still the norm, so I don't see how the opposition was defeated, let alone wiped out.
The opposition that was wiped out was closed-source, proprietary operating systems for the PDP-11.
It may seem an insignificant footnote to us, but if we look at everything built on Unix -- Mac OS, Linux, practically the entire internet -- the battle was universe shaping for computing.
Despite the huge influence, the moral and legal arguments made by free software proponents fall on deaf ears in 2020. My view is that those arguments don't have the same meaning outside of the specific context they arose in. Stipulating that people who extend your open source software make their extensions open source is meaningless in the context of 10,000,000 JS libraries that take a developer a few weeks to create, all are delivered in plaintext anyway, and all intended to run on Google Chrome or Safari.
It's more meaningful in the context of an operating system designed to run on 100s of computers and interface with 1,000s of peripherals, most of which are not known to the OS developer, which the OS developer wouldn't even have access to if they knew about it, and would take said developer months or years to support if they did have access to it. The GPL and other legal tools were developed for that context, and they succeeded to a revolutionary degree in that and to evaluate them in a different context is to miss the forest for the trees.
One of the best accounts of the movement I've read is "Open Sources." Highly recommend it!
A bit earlier in the article:
> Things like freedom or speech or religion can infringe on other people’s freedoms. If I say that all Jews should be kicked in the face whenever you see one this limits Jewish people’s freedom live a life without fear of being kicked in the face.
No, no. You already made the typical mistake. If I kick a jew in the face, I infringe on their freedom to live a life without actually getting kicked in the face. But if I say jews should be kicked in the face, I infringe on their freedom to live a life without fear of getting kicked in the face - a freedom, you may note, that libertarians don't actually believe in, because anyone with a smidgen of security mindset can see that it's completely exploitable.
For instance: you say your freedom to have consensual sexual relationships with whomever you want doesn't infringe my freedom, but what about my freedom to be free of fear about the gay agenda? What about my fear about the breakdown of society? My fear of the decline of traditional marriage?
Fear, as opposed to outcomes, does not need to be rational or grounded in reality. Once you acknowledge a right to be free from fear, you are able to justify any tradeoff. I say - no! There is no right to be free of fear. Everybody has the right to be safe, but nobody has the right to feel safe. Adjusting your feeling to reality is everyone's own responsibility. We must not allow people to abdicate the responsibility for their own feelings and create a guilt of others not to cause upset. A free society cannot and must not take responsibility for fears - only for outcomes. Always for outcomes! No jew should ever be kicked in the face, we are completely agreed. But society's obligation to protect Jewish rights ends at their cranium. What happens inside people's heads is nobody's business but their own - for good or for ill.
(Which is of course not to be understood as arguing against mental health services. One must be mentally healthy to be mentally responsible - if and exactly if.)
The only marriage you have the right to be concerned about is your own, if any. If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married. It’s that simple.
The whole “traditional marriage” mindset stems from religion. When forced upon others by law it’s just another way to limit individual freedoms. It’s disgusting and has to stop.
I much prefer my position that freedom and fear do not intersect.
I like your idea that freedom and emotion are orthogonal. A lot of the problem we're having with "culture wars" right now is the blurring of the line between the two. I think separating the two ideas might help solve a lot of issues from "cancel culture" to "war on Christmas" and "safe spaces" and maybe even gun control. You can hate/fear/boycott a comedian who offends you but you aren't owed their head on a platter. It's OK to think that your being a Christian/Vegan/Cosplayer is sacred but you shouldn't expect everyone to cater to your belief.
=> "You do not have the right to fear the decline of traditional marriage." Particularly relevant if you think, for instance, the gay agenda would be corrosive to your own marriage, due to what I am told is widespread sublimated homosexuality, or the dating life of your children, due to similar reasons. Regardless, I believe telling people that their fear is invalid doesn't tend to be a crowd-pleaser. Instead, I take the more extreme but also I think more defensibly liberal position that their fear is irrelevant, because reducing fear is not a legitimate policy goal of a well-functioning state. A state should reduce the referent of a fear, if such a referent exists.
A state should not engage in sociology - it should not strive to shape the emotions of its citizenry. Such an endeavour is corrosive to the control mechanism of democratic feedback, because it decouples citizens' reaction from reality.
"Any proxy measure that becomes a policy target ceases to be a good proxy measure."
Things related to substances, sex acts, pornography, religion, obscenity, gambling, even vaping seem to be common victims nowadays.
And when there is some progress in something, it seems that it's not for the right reason (that simply there is no rational basis to restrict some freedom for some arbitrary/subjective concept of "the greater good"), but for the reason that the people that are negatively affected by it became numerous and loud enough to not ignore.
Forcing Steve and Stan to find wives and raise kids is just the 50AD version of "your rights end where the community's ability to survive the next famine begins". Remember, there was a lot more suffering back then so people not being able to marry and live with who you want mostly didn't make the short list of problems these people had.
Of course, over the past 1000yrs things changed. Famine mostly isn't an issue. Modern families don't need to pump out a bunch of kids to ensure they will have enough labor to work the fields when half of them die before age 5. We have ubiquitous written communication so that Steve and Stan can write their wills and their families won't feud over who gets the farm when they both meet an untimely end in an ox drawn cart accident.
So while disallowing homosexual marriage seems nonsensical to us now they were actually optimizing for something 1000yr ago when the legacy code was written (written by people with information that mostly only consisted of what could be observed in a human lifetime no less).
Traditional marriage as in "pegs minus holes = 0" doesn't really make sense as a sticking point in the modern world. "Traditional marriage" as in "for life unless something exceptional happens" is still accepted as the gold standard for child rearing (or all the public health experts and sociologists are wrong). So we definitely shouldn't trivialize marriage and unless something changes we should probably continue to have public policy carrots/sticks that keep child rearing parents together.
This seems to be a non-sequitur and not based in any historical fact. The only viable "community enforcement method" in that situation would have been excommunication, which would not have solved any problems of famine and probably would have exacerbated them.
Ostracizing them works too. Excommunication is basically the religious equivalent to capital punishment. No need to jump straight to that for petty stuff and first offenses.
> which would not have solved any problems of famine and probably would have exacerbated them.
Deterrence. They wanted people to keep it in the closet and live just like everyone else.
The broader goal of religion is to get everybody to partake in a system of practices that the society knows works (and if you read history you'll see that the definition of "works" expands as societies become richer and more secure). Work hard, have a family, be honest, don't screw your neighbors wife or steal his stuff, and all that other stuff that basically every religion tells people to do. It's basically all about stability and the closer to the edge a society is the less tolerance they're gonna have for things that cause problems and/or deviance from what works.
I hope that 'public policy' isn't more 'penalize single-parent households' because that is sure not a positive thing. It's part of the problem.
We don't have anything better than a stable marriage for raising kids hence the usage of the phrase "gold standard" since it is the current ideal. Some cultures have more/less community involvement in child rearing than European/Christian cultures and some cultures have marriages of more than two people but pretty much every society (i.e. I can't think of any exceptions) has some sort of marriage system.
>I hope that 'public policy' isn't more 'penalize single-parent households' because that is sure not a positive thing. It's part of the problem.
I agree there's no need to make their life harder
Curious choice of year, since that's about when emperor Nero married his former (male) slave.
From my amateur reading of history, your theory isn't very well supported; multiple ancient societies had no bans of same-sex couples, which only became widespread later (at least in the West).
Why not? Or, more precisely, who judges what's "real and tangible" and what actually happens and what's "unproven at best"?
Can you say "Kick Jeff Bezos in the face"? If Jeff Bezos hasn't been kicked in the face, it doesn't actually happen (or hasn't happen yet, much like "the breakdown of society" or "alien invasion triggered by homosexuality" or whatever someone might believe).
Okay, you say, but that's one person, we're talking about groups here. Can you say "Kick North Sentinel Islanders in the face"?
Next up: how large has the group have to be to be protected, and how large is too large ("Kick humans in the face?"), and how often does it need to happen (in total, or relative to the size of the group?), and how long will it be effective? And how bad must the theoretical effects be?
You'll end up with plenty of definitions and rules, and, I believe, will decide on a case-by-case basis in the end, mostly guided by personal sympathy.
When stated this way, at least so directly, it's not surprising to me that more people aren't right-libertarians. Of course, when you have hard and fast principles, and trade only in 'thick' concepts, then you can get exploitable concepts (as you rightly point out), but we have institutions for dealing with that - the legislature and the judiciary, and there need not be a law that applies (practically speaking) in every circumstance. In society, we don't have to always be on a slippery slope.
Here's a good paper on the vacuity of the pure harm principle, as you seem to espouse, in lawmaking: https://digital.sandiego.edu/lwps_public/art17/
>Fear, as opposed to outcomes, does not need to be rational or grounded in reality. Once you acknowledge a right to be free from fear, you are able to justify any tradeoff. I say - no!
The core question is whose reality? That of the victim or the perpetrator? However, if you'd like to talk about reality, it's not at all difficult to imagine psychological harms or even PTSD triggered by something as 'unreal' as fear, which has very real outcomes. Every industrialized country in the world has some legislation against, for example, sending threatening letters, despite the fact that their only outcome is 'fear'. This is usually known as a law against assault. The dichotomy between 'mental harms' and 'physical harms' with regard to the law (and 1A jurisprudence) is on extremely shaky metaphysical grounds[0]:
>An immunization I choose to have may (momentarily) hurt me physically, but it does not constitute a harm if I have chosen to be immunized. And defamatory statements that damage my reputation may harm me even if they cause me no physical or even psychological injury (as in the case in which I don't find out about them).
[0] http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...
What I want to mean, but I can't devote to much time to, is that 'freedom' is a topic that is really difficult, full of struggles, and also, that it has been known to be difficult to tackle since antiquity and has produced an enormous corpus of interesting literature.
That said, it just seemed to me that the article fell into a typical mistake early on, of confusing the map and the territory- fear and harm- and from there weakening its own position by requiring the addition of special case rules and self-contradiction: fear of facepunching, but not fear of the gay - what makes one valid and the other invalid? And if it's real plausibility, why not just direct the right at the real thing that makes it plausible, and thus turn the fear into a justified expectation open to empirical argumentation? It seemed like the argument would vanish down a rabbit hole for little benefit.
You're asking this question with some knowledge that there is some difference in the minds of people between the two matters. Therefore, we can draw a difference, we just may not have a philosophical grounding to express the difference rigorously. I can see how that's a problem, but it does not stop consideration of the principles. Even if the difference is arbitrary, we can't escape arbitrary reasoning in our moral and legal systems.
The difference from my perspective is that I'd be more inclined to protest a law criminalizing gay people for (using your example) having sex in private than I would be someone arguing in a public forum that Jews should be punched in the face.
Is my decision arbitrary? Maybe. Does it rely on a judiciary and legislature that agrees with my ad-hoc principle in order not to run away with it? Yes. That's not necessarily a problem. It's not much to ask people to think beyond pure abstraction of high-minded principles.
You (or some other citizen) may disagree with me and come to the opposite conclusion I have, or not. That's fine. I'll vote for my principle, and you can vote for yours.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you: do you think that if you were to take a representative sample of the population of a Western European country or the US, they'd be just as opposed to regulating fear caused by gay people having sex in private and fear caused by someone coming up to a Jewish person and saying that all Jews should be kicked in the face?
>but one fear is the same as another fear.
From what perspective? If it's a subjective perspective, we'd have to turn to psychological studies. If it's an objective perspective, there's no way of knowing that at all, since fear is inherently subjective.
>I think there is a relative and vital material difference, it just cannot be reduced to a quality of the fear in itself.
I agree, but this is precisely the problem with the harm principle. You can overload 'harm' with (what I consider to be) a silly harm, such as causing fear of the 'gay agenda' because gay people have sex in private, and a more serious harm, causing fear of being punched in the face.
My point is only this: the idea that only contact, physical harms are in the domain of society's lawmakers is highly suspect. If lawmakers are granted the power to regulate mental harms (and in some cases they already are in most countries including the U.S.), we can have a discussion (or at least a preference, if not all parties can come to a rational well-grounded principle) on which of those harms can be regulated - and in my view, in most Western societies, the people would be much more likely to say that the Jewish face punching situation is much more serious or deserving of regulation than the gay agenda situation.
> Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you: do you think that if you were to take a representative sample of the population of a Western European country or the US, they'd be just as opposed to regulating fear caused by gay people having sex in private and fear caused by someone coming up to a Jewish person and saying that all Jews should be kicked in the face?
I think there would be significant policy disagreements, but I think those policy disagreements would overwhelmingly cash out in whether they considered the relevant fear valid or not, which comes down to the fear-reality relation I mentioned.
> I agree, but this is precisely the problem with the harm principle. You can overload 'harm' with (what I consider to be) a silly harm, such as causing fear of the 'gay agenda' because gay people have sex in private, and a more serious harm, causing fear of being punched in the face.
Right, but you can't do that in my extremist formulation because it specifically doesn't acknowledge fear as harm. I'm sure it can be abused, but you have to try at least a bit harder than that. :)
> My point is only this: the idea that only contact, physical harms are in the domain of society's lawmakers is highly suspect. If lawmakers are granted the power to regulate mental harms (and in some cases they already are in most countries including the U.S.), we can have a discussion (or at least a preference, if not all parties can come to a rational well-grounded principle) on which of those harms can be regulated - and in my view, in most Western societies, the people would be much more likely to say that the Jewish face punching situation is much more serious or deserving of regulation than the gay agenda situation.
My point is this: overwhelmingly, most fears the state should address can be justified by appeal to a harm that is not fear in itself. And the remainder tend to be the source of the most explosive controversies of the culture war - precisely because by making the reduction of fear a policy goal in itself, we have opened the door to appeasing hysteria, with all the perverse incentives this implies.
This statement would not pass the Ideological Turing Test [1]. Freedom is doing what one wants as long as it does not impinge on the ability of others to do the same; "live and let live". The grey areas and trade-offs live in interpreting Golden Rule [2] violations. Violations implemented to further The Greater Good [3] also complicate matters.
Each political preference, be it progressive, conservative, or libertarian, tends to apply the Precautionary Principle [4] to what they view as ruinous behavior (oppression/exploitation, individual decadence, and government overreach respectively). Each group is blind to their own application of the Precautionary Principle that different outgroups view as a Golden Rule violation.
[1] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
The issue is that someone has to make these decisions and libertarians don't think the government is the group to do it.
The most important institutions in human society — language, law, money, and markets — all developed spontaneously, without central direction. Civil society — the complex network of associations and connections among people — is another example of spontaneous order; the associations within civil society are formed for a purpose, but civil society itself is not an organization and does not have a purpose of its own.
Government is the big hammer and when you start using government casually instead of letting people decide at their own direction that's when you start running into massive problems. Because the government could give you what you want one day but then with that same power take away everything the next.
The basic premise of their philosophy is that the government does a poor job of growing and distributing food; creating and enforcing law is not an easier task than growing potatoes, therefore, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to assume that the government would do a great job at that. And indeed if you look at modern society, the most glaring examples of inequality are in policing, the justice system, and in k-12 education, all of which are government-controlled.
Whatever aggregate enforces law is, ipso facto, the State.
Perhaps; but I don't often see it recognized in Libertarian discourse and writings. This is possibly a failing on my part on reading the right kind of libertarian things.
It's hard to write something generic about an entire ideology since it's always comprised of different views and priorities; and no matter what you write it'll do an injustice to some views. I've added the word "often" to emphasize this a bit.
most of libertarianism is trying to cope with this core flaw, not living that glorious individualist life.
liberty as one of many (sometimes contradictory) values (and the academic lines of inquiry therein) is fine. a whole ideology based on the supremacy of that one value is simply unworkable. we're social creatures, not just a collection of coincident individuals.
Libertarians believe in collective reason over centralized authority.
Here's a good run down.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/key-concepts-li...
I can’t imagine a Libertarian worldview that isn’t aware of the fact that actions that impinge of the rights and freedoms of others need to be limited, and enforcing those laws are one of the few genuine responsibilities of the government. To pretend otherwise is a total straw man.
I think you would get a lot out of it.
You have a right to your intellectual property and do with it as you wish. If people don't wish to use software because of the license (and potentially the cost of obtaining a license) they are free not to use it.
It really is that simple.