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.

Response to "Nazis =/= Monsters"

Original post here

I've been pondering this subject on and off for quite a while now, and I think that a sustained effort to prove that is is never OK to dehumanize human beings under any circumstances, even petty criminals or mass murderers.

First off there are very real practical objections to why you should never treat a criminal as only a criminal. By putting a murderer into prison you strip him of everything he has besides being a murderer and is reminded of his social role as villain every moment of his life. As a criminal he is not given attention in his role as a normal member of society, and as it is being proven in progressive mental institutions, it is far more effective to treat the part of the person that is not sick than to constantly remind them of the part of them that is wrong. It encourages exactly the wrong part of a person to grow and develop.

A more philosophical consideration is that to treat someone with as much dignity as that person acted with  against another person is just forcing the state or community giving out justice to stoop to the same level as them.

A system of justice, whether domestic, or in response to genocide and war, has the dangerous propensity of perpetuating the desire for revenge. By using the state as an instrument of revenge it legitimizes acts of revenge both big and small throughout society and in daily interactions. If revenge wasn't a legitimate means of emotional release we would be forced to pursue options that wouldn't perpetuate cycles of physical and emotional violence.

The model of enlightened compassion for criminals would lead to a more humane system of justice. I am absolutely not suggesting we pardon all crimes, but we would be forced to see justice in a more reasonable light. That is, as a way society regulates itself so we are able to maintain the furthest extent of our freedoms without compromising those of others. Criminals that made a mistake or can be rehabilitated should be rehabilitated, if criminals are a danger to other's rights and freedoms they should be segregated from the general population. Revenge and the hatred it engenders should never be a part of it.

Prohibition Anyways

Can a state realistically achieve a functional prohibition on certain substances? Is it desirable to make the attempt anyways? (Q&A 2)

I think the first question I ask is almost rhetorical. Prohibition as clearly not eliminated addictive substances in the past, and it is clear to all involved that prohibition will never be perfect.

Should we try to prohibit use despite this? One of the critiques of cannabis legalization is that society actually saves itself a lot of expense and trouble by suppressing use of cannabis. If it as legalized there would be huge issues with productivity, psychosis, and addiction recovery. That seems to follow, if you can do the numbers out and if you think productivity is a big societal priority. However, if that logic follows, why don't we attempt to legally suppress alcohol for the same reasons? 

This whole debate depends on how people run the scenario of legalization in their heads. In my mind, even if all banned substances where legalized, there would still be a huge stigma and a vast majority of the population would avoid using addictive substances. If you think that legalization would lead to an ever growing proportion of the population becoming addicts, then clearly legalization is a bad idea. 

Peripheral and Essential Moral Charicteristics

Where is the line between an act such as cloning-to-produce-children become morally wrong in itself or morally wrong due to peripheries? What distinguishes a periphery from what is central to a moral action? (Q&A 1)

In the cloning debate in class there was a lot of talk about what was peripheral to the idea of cloning, especially when we where discussing the possible health effects. Are effects of a morally considered action therefore peripheral and something else essential? But an action is a thing producing results, so the results define the action.

Maybe the difference between an essential and a peripheral quality of an action is weather the effects of the action must necessarily make certain results. If human cloning necessarily has negative health effects then that would be essential to the action of cloning. If ill health effects can be avoided, then they are a peripheral quality of the action of human cloning.

Then the only essential quality of cloning to produce a person is creating a human clone. We can solve all the peripheral qualities of that action as they come up, but the action of cloning itself doesn't seem to be challenged much at all.

Under Grad Research Conference

Ok, I admit I signed up for this class to have a lot of debates about meta-ethics, which has been marked off limits since the begining of the course. I also wish I had gone to see the philosophy presentations last Thursday at the undergraduate research conference because JonDavid told me of a really interesting presentation.

When it comes to morality, I don't think there is any objective basis to be found in nature or in the way humans are that will tell you how to behave morally. Morality is based entirely on what sort of outcomes you want to produce through your actions, the pretense that morality is an objective truth or at all universal is only used to motivate those who do not act moral because of reason reason.

Apparently Jacob Wheeler's presentation was about his attempt to find an objective basis for morality. Failing that, as he necessarily would, he concluded that we need to hold onto morality because of its utility as a regulative idea.

Response to "Film Transgressions"

Raanan's original post here.

It is likely many parents, or so-called advocates, where only shown that scene out of context, or else just heard about it out of context. Also, it seems many advocates for public morality are very willing to exploit each instance of content, which could be debatable, to the extreme.

This reminded me very much of the ransom put on the writer of The Satanic Verses by the government of Iran. Several passages could be taken from the text and look like an attack on Islam, but the larger work is not a critique of Islam and is in fact wide ranging and dreamy. Despite this, the Iranian government decided to ruin the life of this poor author, who had to live in hiding for years, because of a few disembodied passages.

Race Beyond Crime and Punishment

Are there other ways to deal with race besides different practices regarding punishment and discrimination? (Q&A 2)

While it is clear that racism and the social segregation of race is supported institutionally through patterns of criminal punishment, the roots of racism must be deeper than the economics of impoverishment and crime. Why is it we are trapped in this rut? I know I wont be able to fully answer this question.

I'm sure one reason that racism is still popular among poor whites is one of the same reasons it became popular in the first place. That is, that it is an accepted way to boost your ego, racism says that you are innately better than those people over there, and that is understandably an ego boost. It is unsurprising then that in my experience the upper middle class at least makes a nod at being anti-racist, and people from less financially secure backgrounds tend to be occasional racists. This might also be especially true because people living closer to poverty live in the same areas as impoverished blacks, and have more contact with racist concepts that are more readily replicated because of regular contact with blacks.

Responding to 'The Men's Center'

Brandon's original post can be found here

When reading this post I thought of an analogy that had been bugging me since I started looking for colleges. There are so many Black Student Unions, which are fine, but a White Students Union would clearly be racist.

I don't know if this fully explains it, but the logic behind oppressed groups banding together shares the logic of the classical Marxist proletariat organizing itself against its opporessor. However in the case of the proletariat the oppressors are just thrown off and cease to exist. If you attempt to do the same thing with race or gender you will never be able to achieve the same sort of result.

I fear that there are at least two competing logic in the politics of race. One is integration, where the cultures of the different race communities do not have to dissolve but cannot be separate. The second, more dominant, is the new separate but equal, except this time around it is not institutionally supported by racist government policy but by the way the black and white communities segregating themselves from each other mutually. It fits in very well with rhetoric of multiculturalism, which the listener understands as multiple separate cultures living together. I think the logic of the second is driving black student unions, and the logic of separation and difference might explain certain strains of feminism.

Discussing the Death Penalty Beyond Race

Is the death penalty wrong for reasons beyond race? (Q&A 1)

The last few chapters have been very focused on race. While the issue of the death penalty should probably be addressed partially due to issues relating to race, I think it should be approached from a different angle.

The death penalty is wrong simply because we don't want murder in our society. Even when justice is the justification for the killing it provides a legitimate means through which a person can be killed. If the state is justified in killing in response to a killing, isn't a citizen? Or at least a citizen could think this while trying to justify his actions in an unstable state.

Punishment vs. Rehabilitation & Norway

Considering we're reading allot of material dealing with crime and punishment it should be worth while to look at prison. I subscribe to a sort of utilitarian theory of justice, justice should produce the best social outcomes possible for the greatest possible structural good. My working assumptions therefore assume that rehabilitation should be the goal of the prison systems (Which we are utterly failing to do in the US, with privatizing prisons and stigmatizing past inmates so they re forced back into crime).

Even with my admittedly liberal leanings I was shocked to discover that Norway had such success with rehabilitation. I assume, and this is an important assumption, that the reason rehabilitation has failed so utterly in the US is because it has never been attempted with such single mindedness like it was tried in Norway. We have always tried to sorta rehabilitate and always punish, and this approach has lead to some pretty sorry outcomes (the US has the highest number of prisoners in proportion to its total population than any country (yup, even including the anti-democracy guys: Russia, China, and Iran))

This is a very good article about a Norwegian low security prison.

A Quote Misattributed to Mark Twain

"The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak." - Not Mark Twain

The quote above, commonly misattributed to Mark Twain, is in response to to censorship. Like the quote suggests, it does seem true that the argument for censorship boils down to its enforcement to prevent the moral, or other sort of, corruption of minors. There are socially accepted views which should be established in minors and there are those that should be kept from them. In this day and age I doubt there is much support for moral censorship in regard to adults.

It seems that there are two child rearing philosophies that would put parents on one or another side of the child censorship debate. One was already sketched above, that children need to be protected from deviant views. The other, which could be cautiously deemed the 'liberal' approach, assumes that people can think from a vantage point beyond particular belief systems, and should develop this impartial mind set. In contrast with the first view on child rearing, it would actually encourage a child to explore diverse belief systems so he can become intelligently impartial.

Personally I have serious doubts that any human can be impartial or not hold any socially motivated views. Despite this, however, second theory of child raising hopefully results in a certain consciousness of other viewpoints which I believe is a positive one. Censorship for minors, unless you are attempting to impose ideological purity, is unnecessary and theoretically damaging for an open society.

My CRITO Essay - After Some Research

I suppose I'm not really surprised, but after some research (as suggested by prof. DKJ), it seems there is a tradition of 'Animal Abolitionism.' This view advocates the abolition of animal ownership as a central tenet of a moral relationship with animals. It's proponents include Tom Regan and Gary Francione.

In the end I think I agree with the conclusions of this particular school of thought. In order to truly have a moral relationship with animals, we need a paradigm shift more fundamental than providing for the welfare of owned animals. We need to change the way we think of animals.

Responding to "Double Standards"

There seems to be a huge degree of reluctance about dealing with or discussing the societal discrimination against men, and for good reason. There is the risk of such a discussion becoming the rear guard sexism that crops up in such places as Esquire magazine. Also, I'm sure no one would deny, women deal with inequality far more often than men, and that struggle therefore seems more pressing. I am not, however, advocating that issues men deal with in society should not be dealt with, but I can see why the topic is often avoided.

Avery's original post can be found here.

My CRITO Essay

In my essay I explore the topic of an earlier post: why it is immoral to own animals. My argument rests on the premise that humans, sentient animals, and objects comprise the three foundational categories of moral things. In a sort of broad way these categories dictate the ways we should interact morally. There is a certain way for humans to interact with each of these categories.

While it is clear that animals cannot interact with us the way we can interact with other humans, they are sentient beings and deserve certain moral considerations. Thus it would be improper to 'own' an animal, because ownership is a certain human relationship with an object. Animals are not objects, and thus morally require a different sort of relationship.