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Comment by jerfelix | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am misreading what you are saying, but I didn't say taxation was immoral. I said it's immoral for me to vote to impose a tax on someone else.

There's nothing inherently immoral about taxation, and certainly if I wanted to vote to impose a tax on myself, that wouldn't be immoral.

You make some interesting points, but it's exactly the "sanctioning by society" that I am questioning. Actually, what you may mean by "society" is "the majority". If everyone in a society agreed to something, then fine, you are not forcing someone to do something. But if not, then it's not "sanctioned by society", but rather sanctioned by a subset of society.

The US Constitution was written to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

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> Maybe I am misreading what you are saying, but I didn't say taxation was immoral. I said it's immoral for me to vote to impose a tax on someone else.

The distinctions you're making only make sense in the context of radical individual libertarianism. "We" are imposing a tax on "our" members as a condition for belonging to "our" community. If I vote for a millionaire tax, and strike it rich tomorrow, I'm subject to the tax too.

> If everyone in a society agreed to something, then fine, you are not forcing someone to do something. But if not, then it's not "sanctioned by society", but rather sanctioned by a subset of society.

Again, that's a pointless distinction. Society inherently operates through collective action, and collective action is inherently majoritarian. Organized society only exists because the majority forces the physically strong to respect arbitrary concepts like "property rights" and the "right to life." Society does this for the greater good, but make no mistake that there are a lot of people who are worse-off under this system (Zuckerberg isn't one of them--think the big burly moving guy who occupies a very different place in our society than he would in the state of nature).

> The US Constitution was written to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

No, it was not. The Constitution put in some safeguards to protect individuals from the majority, but most of those protections aren't even in the main text but rather in the Amendments. Article I of the Constitution is an elaborate exercise in defining the metes and bounds of majoritarian rule through a Congress elected directly or indirectly by the majority. Most of the founders were not radical individualistic libertarians, but rather people who believed strongly in the rule of law and the institution of government (the Constitution was a reaction to the Articles of Confederation which was deemed too weak of a government!). It was framed by people who regularly invoked the language of the collective (the first words are "We the People"), and were from a legal tradition where absolute sovereignty was vested in the government.

Your argument that there's no such thing as "rights" and that they are arbitrary concepts is false.

Yes, they are protected by the government by force and it's possible for someone to violate your rights.

This does not mean the rights are arbitrary. The right to life is a fundamental good agreed upon by pretty much every culture and civilization in the world. No one sanctions arbitrary killing.

You are starting to move into the world of moral relativism which is a false moral philosophy.

Even the utilitarian philosophy relies on some fundamental ideas about what is good and should be promoted.

Look at animal society for an idea of what "rights" are natural. Now, that does not mean that different sets of rules aren't more or less useful than others. But that doesn't make them any less arbitrary. You can pick parameters that optimize the lift of a wing, but that doesn't make those parameters "natural" or "god-given." Whatever "truth" exists in those parameters is defined entirely by the desired outcome.

"Right to life" and "right to property" are socially useful fictions, encoding rules that optimize in some way desired social outcomes. They are useful only to the extent that they further those outcomes. The metes and bounds of those rights are defined socially. We might argue, internally, that some configuration of those rights would lead to outcomes that we as a society think are desirable, or that some configuration is incompatible with other configurations, but whether they are morally "right" or "wrong" is a socially constructed fact.

I'd only look to animals for ideas of where rights come from if I saw no distinction between the humans and animals.

There is evidence that suggests humans are born with moral intuition. There is a natural aversion to killing others (that can be overcome by conditioning) which suggests there is at least one natural law. There is also research suggesting that human babies have a sense for fair play and justice. I'll have to cite this at some point; I believe I read it a Malcom Gladwell book.

You also still haven't explained how society decides what is desirable and what is not. If you keep asking why, it will eventually lead to a natural right or fundamental good.

Aversion doesn't necessarily have to reflect an underlying natural law. In the case of killing, indiscriminate attempts to kill would threaten personal fitness, because there is a good chance the attacker could be killed in turn. This risk becomes more prevalent as tribes and societies develop to increase the fitness of their members. Indiscriminate killing within ones tribe would threaten group fitness, and so a viable groups members would need to kill the indiscriminate killer to increase chances of their own survival. Groups that do not act in this way suffer a big fitness penalty, and would not last very long.

Fit humans will not kill others of their tribe, but one merely has to look at the vast history of warfare to realize that there is no similar aversion or restriction on killing outside of one's tribe.

I think the problem with

"We" are imposing a tax on "our" members as a condition for belonging to "our" community.

is that you are forced to belong to community, you can't leave the community with your property.

You can leave the community with the property you entered with: your own body. Why should you be allowed to leave the community with the property you acquired in and under the protection of the community, without following the community's rules?

Zuckerberg can leave the U.S. every bit of property that is truly "his", that he didn't earn but-for the highly-organized society that created the wealth that is his "property."

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