Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

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By that definition, the couple is "doing violence" against me by operating the car, as it damages the environment, which is an asset that I control via democratic means (compare and contrast one-person-one-vote of a democracy to one-share-one-vote of traded companies) and benefit from by living in.

And likewise, you're being so reductive that the same logic also makes the state and the law "just people", as the courts are made of judges and lawyers who are people, likewise the police and the bailiffs are people, the banks may be increasingly automated but they're also still people, and so on.

But then, we have the government by consent, at least to the same degree we have employment by consent; not just by elections, but also e.g. "if you don't like Brexit, move to Germany" as someone said to me, oblivious that I already had — but not everyone has that option in practice even if they do on paper, just as not everyone is in charge of their employment opportunities in practice even if they are on paper.

You're on to something—this is one of the reasons why trying to color things as ethically-fine or ethically-bad purely based on whether you can find a way to associate them with violence is a dead end. It's violence all the way down when you start looking. Now, it actually can be helpful to analyze things in those terms, but not if it ends at "I found a way that it's violence, so now it's ethically bad, period, end of story". It's as if nuance and context are vital for actually making sense of things. Literally covered in Book I of Plato's Republic, but no shortage of people online using that (very selectively, always, because, as noted, it goes off the rails immediately if you apply it consistently) as the core guiding principle of their political philosophy, such as it is.

Of course the state is also just people. All organizations are comprised of individuals. The law is not an organization, so it's not itself people. The law is a statement made by people.

Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.

Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.

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