Everything is Part of the Commons?

How much can be considered part of the commons?

Like I said in my last post about the commons, being held in common is the natural state for an object to be in. Everything is therefore naturally part of the commons, and by extension everything is capable of being enclosed. As shown with the attempt to enclose 'intellectual property' (which is an attempt to privatize ideas and artistic and technological achievements) the actual regulation of property is far more iffy. Because companies have such a hard time controlling their so-called 'property' on the internet, many things that can be reproduced without being stolen (i.e. movies, music, books, ect.) have naturalistically reverted to being part of the commons.

Wealth is Morally Unacceptable

I don't wealth in general, I'm not advocating general poverty, but in our final CRITO paper I am attempting to assail wealth's inevitability and more importantly it's moral desirability. Disparities in wealth may well be necessary for our our current economic system, but wealth necessarily causes immoral decisions to be made and thus I hope to prove that we should attempt to at least criticize personal wealth if not eliminate it. That last bit isn't in the scope of my paper (I can hear a collective sigh of relief).

Some reasons I think hoarding personal wealth is immoral is because it stops the flow of capital that could be spent improving general productivity and life quality, it enforces class stratification, it is structurally opposed to equality from birth (due to the huge advantage it confers onto those who are born into a wealthy class), and it is fundamentally corrosive to democracy by arbitrarily giving private interests unequal power to order public affairs.

Effectively Sharing the Commons

When have the commons been effectively shared without being enclosed? (Q&A 1)

The commons are most effectively shared when the groups that are involved in sharing the common are available to communicate with each other. Even before the tragedy of the commons is played out, in which the people sharing the commons fail to act to their mutual benefit, communication can allow these multiple players to work out how it is in their mutual advantage to cooperate.

The commons is in fact the basic mode shared human resources exist in. Private appropriation is a far more artificial treatment of a resource. For example, when a group of people share a house the resources there-in are naturally held in common, no matter who technically owns it. It is merely human that that group establishes rules and procedures to govern the use of bathrooms, the oven, the sink, and so-on, in order for these things to be most effectively used. The commons that are natural resources should also be treated in this way. And while it would be similarly bizarre and detrimental if a person not living in the house controlled the use of it's resources, it would also be detrimental if an external player owned and controlled the commons that is naturally at the disposal of any other group.

Effects of Moralizing

Well I think I may have been effected by all this moralizing. During the last class while discussing torture I wanted to convey that we should never bend our morals, torture is not OK, it should never be legitimized.

After class Brandon cornered me about vegetarianism. I am convinced by the arguments for vegetarianism, animals are sentient beings deserving not to be killed because they have particularly tasty flesh. I kept dragging my feet on the whole thing though. We'd discussed it before, and after that class it felt particularly hypocritical to keep dragging my feet. We've also discussed how frustrating it is that people don't seem to respond to rational argumentation. 

So I've taken the leap, I plan to be a pescatarian this summer and become a full vegetarian when school starts up (I wouldn't want to eat any Aramark fish anyways). 

Rehabilitation as a Radical Solution

Could rehabilitation be a radical alternative to the current state of justice in the US? How is it not a continuation of the old justice and importantly different?

I contend that rehabilitation is just as much a radical alternative to punishment as restitution is. In fact rehabilitation is the natural opposition and has been the long standing alternative to our system of retributive justice, it has simply never been implemented.

Retributive justice assumes the innate morality of punishment proportional to the crime committed. Beyond this theory sounding rather childish in practice ('you hit me I will hit you back'), it obstructs the proper use of a system of justice, which is to regulate human behavior according to the generally accepted ideal of what society should be.

We clearly can not agree on everything, some things need to be deliberated upon, but these things are not the issue here. Murder, rape, and theft are prime examples of things we agree need to be curbed. The retributive system of justice has absolutely no solution except blindly hitting back. A system of rehabilitation dissuades people who have commit crimes from committing them again. It does not propose that the criminally insane, who cannot be rehabilitated, do not exist. These need to be segregated from the population. Rehabilitative justice promises to eliminate criminality to the furthest extent possible.

You may have noticed I have posted about this sort of system of justice about three times now, I think I will make it the subject of paper. I feel like I still have not located why people accept the retributive theory of justice. Without this I don't think I can mount a serious critique, any thoughts?

Waiving Rights

Could a population consent to be subject to torture? (Q&A 1)

I doubt that a population has the right to waive it's rights unless it does it unanimously, which is nigh impossible. Even though I accept rights are human concepts not innate to our beings, we must act as if they are, and guard them as if they are. I don't think it should ever be possible for a ruling body to waive the rights of it's subjects, similarly I do not think that such a thing can be democratically decided.

Torture

Here it is: no. no no no. NO NO NO. NOOOOOO!!!!

We haven't talked about it in class yet but I suppose it's up for discussion on the blogs. Beyond the purely emotional reaction as worded so eloquently above, I have deeply seated objections to the legitimate use of torture of the death penalty.

I will use a term that seems unphilosophical but in fact gets across exactly why I object. This term is 'barbaric.' The act of torture is barbaric in precisely the way that the more sophisticated Roman civilization thought the human sacrifice of Druids in Britain was barbaric, because it was incompatible with their civilization and they had found a better way to live. The metaphor goes even further and shows how we have plenty of atrocities beyond torture that we have very few qualms with, the same way the Romans carried out mass murder and genocide but for some reason found human sacrifice barbaric. But I digress.

We don't want torture to ever be acceptable, and as in my last post, I disagree with legitimizing it as a means to extract information because it could lead to the far more dangerous means to extract revenge. In effect, legalizing torture in any situation would be a hugely regressive policy.