Комментарии к колодцу Феруэлла

ВВП на душу населения 1990-2015гг

13.3.1: Can you give an example of a chain of reasoning where some government violation of a right is so radically different from the situation that led the right to exist in the first place?

Let's take for example the right that probably dominates discussions between libertarians and non-libertarians: the right to property. On the individual scale, taking someone else's property makes them very unhappy, as you know if you've ever had your bike stolen. On the larger scale, abandoning belief in private property has disastrous results for an entire society, as the experiences of China and the Soviet Union proved so conclusively. So it's safe to say there's a right to private property.

Is it ever acceptable to violate that right? In the classic novel Les Miserables, Jean Valjean's family is trapped in bitter poverty in 19th century France, and his nephew is slowly starving to death. Jean steals a loaf of bread from a rich man who has more than enough, in order to save his nephew's life. This is a classic moral dilemma: is theft acceptable in this instance?

We can argue both sides. A proponent might say that the good consequences to Jean and his family were very great - his nephew's life was saved - and the bad consequences to the rich man were comparatively small - he probably has so much food that he didn't even miss it, and if he did he could just send his servant to the bakery to get another one. So on net the theft led to good consequences.

The other side would be that once we let people decide whether or not to steal things, we are on a slippery slope. What if we move from 19th century France to 21st century America, and I'm not exactly starving to death but I really want a PlayStation? And my rich neighbor owns like five PlayStations and there's no reason he couldn't just go to the store and buy another. Is it morally acceptable for me to steal one of his PlayStations? The same argument that applied in Jean Valjean's case above seems to suggest that it is - but it's easy to see how we go from there to everyone stealing everyone's stuff, private property becoming impossible, and civilization collapsing. That doesn't sound like a very good consequence at all.

If everyone violates moral heuristics whenever they personally think it's a good idea, civilization collapses. If no one ever violates moral heuristics, Jean Valjean's nephew starves to death for the sake of a piece of bread the rich man never would have missed.

We need to bind society by moral heuristics, but also have some procedure in place so that we can suspend them in cases where we're exceptionally sure of ourselves without civilization instantly collapsing. Ideally, this procedure should include lots of checks and balances, to make sure no one person can act on her own accord. It should reflect the opinions of the majority of people in society, either directly or indirectly. It should have access to the best minds available, who can predict whether violating a heuristic will be worth the risk in this particular case.

Thus far, the human race's best solution to this problem has been governments. Governments provide a method to systematically violate heuristics in a particular area where it is necessary to do so without leading to the complete collapse of civilization.

If there was no government, I, in Jean Valjean's situation, absolutely would steal that loaf of bread to save my nephew's life. Since there is a government, the government can set a certain constant amount of theft per year, distribute the theft fairly among people whom it knows can bear the burden, and then feed starving children and do other nice things. The ethical question of "is it ethical for me to steal/kill/stab in this instance?" goes away, and society can be peaceful and stable.

13.3.2: So you're saying that you think in this case violating the right will have good consequences. But you just agreed that even when people think this, violating the right usually has bad consequences.

Yes, I admit it's complicated. But we have to have some procedures for violating moral heuristics, or else we can't tax to support a police force, we can't fight wars, we can't lie to a murderer who asks us where our friend is so he can go kill her when he finds her, and so on.

The standard I find most reasonable is when it's universalizable and it avoids the issue that caused us to develop the heuristic in the first place.

By universalizable, I mean that it's more complicated than me just deciding "Okay, I'm going to steal from this guy now". There has to be an agreed-upon procedure where everyone gets input, and we need to have verified empirically that this procedure usually leads to good results.

And is has to avoid the issue that caused us to develop the heuristic. In the case of stealing, this is that theft makes property impossible or at least impractical, no one bothers doing work because it will all be stolen from them anyway, and so civilization collapses.

In the case of theft, taxation requires authorization by a process that most of us endorse (the government set up by the Constitution) and into which we all get some input via representative democracy. It doesn't cause civilization to collapse because it only takes a small and extremely predictable amount from each person. And it's been empirically verified to work: as I argued above, countries with higher tax rates like Scandinavia actually are nicer places to live than countries with lower tax rates like the United States. So we've successfully side-stepped the insight that stealing usually has bad consequences, even though we recognize that the insight remains true.

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