recent Chinese military history

CSGnet Archive CSG2006
21

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.0757 MDT)]

Richard Kennaway (2006.08.16.2347 BST) –

For example, as a corrective to
the idea that he, and I, are raving fundamentalists to whom the slightest
whiff of Gummint is the touch of Satan, he writes on problems of
libertarianism and his answers in chapters 41 and 42 of his book,
“The Machinery of Freedom”. Those chapters and some
others are on the web at

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freedom

Just a few words on this. I started chapter 41, and encountered some
discussions about what libertarians think, or might think, about rights.
Here’s a sample:

···

========================
**One solution to this problem is to reject the idea that
natural rights are absolute; potential victims have the right to commit a
minor rights violation, compensating the owner of the gun afterwards to
the best of their ability, in order to prevent a major one. Another is to
claim that natural rights are convenient rules of thumb which correctly
describe how one should act under most circumstances, but that in
sufficiently unusual situations one must abandon the general rules and
make decisions in terms of the ultimate objectives which the rules were
intended to achieve. A third response is to assert that the situation I
have described cannot occur, that there is some natural law guaranteeing
that rights violations will always have bad consequences and that
committing one rights violation can never decrease the total of rights
violations.
All of these positions lead to the same conclusion. Under some
circumstances rights violations must be evaluated on their merits, rather
than rejected a priori on conventional libertarian natural rights
grounds. Those who believe that rights violations are always undesirable
will be sure that the result of the evaluation will be to reject the
violation, but that does not mean that they can reject arguments to the
contrary without first answering them. Any such argument claims to
provide a counterexample to their general theorem, and if one such
counterexample is true the general theorem must be false.
=========================**At about this point I suddenly saw what Friedman is doing in
this chapter. It’s a paradox. He’s talking about rights. and trying to
persuade the reader that what he is saying is reasonable or acceptable
for a libertarian, while going overboard about property rights is
unreasonable. But if something is really a “right”, what does
persuasion have to do with it? Or even reason? If I have a right, then I
have it, and I don’t need to persuade anyone else or myself that I have
it. It’s like having fingers. You can’t reason me into, or out of, having
fingers.
So what is really going on here? Friedman is examining certain proposals
about the nature and extent of property rights, and is offering his idea
to other people apparently in the hope that they will adopt them. But how
do “rights” come into that? Does a right exist only if I am
persuaded that it exists? Isn’t talking about rights in the way Friedman
does an effort to determine what they “really are?” If we
can all look at the rights and see that his description of them is
correct, then nothing depends on persuasion or logic or verbal reasoning.
All we have to do is look.
Of course we can’t all look at the rights in the same way we can all look
at a mountain. The rights are simply whatever we accept as rights. The
whole point of Friedman’s treatise is to persuade people to agree on a
definition of rights, and agree that as libertarians they will uphold and
affirm those rights. Not only that, it is implied that they will agree to
let logical reasoning determine whether they accept those rights,
treating logic as if it were an external compulsion: if you can prove it
logically, you must agree to abide by the results.

All in all, therefore, it seems to me that Friedman is proposing a rather
elaborate system concept and trying to persuade people to accept it and
support it. By referring to what he is proposing as “rights”,
he is implying that they exist independently of the acceptance of those
they govern, and furthermore that they apply even to people who have not
accepted them. That’s the point of the supposedly rigorous logical
reasoning: the appeal to logic is, in fact, a form of coercion. If
something is logical you have to accept it. Can you be argued into having
a right? Is it even necessary, if there is such a thing as a right? If I
say I have a right, do you have to agree that I have it?

My view is that all social principles are matters for negotiation and
have force only to the extent that they are accepted. Does that make me
more of a libertarian than libertarians? No, because I don’t put any
limits on what people can agree to. How could I? I have no way of
enforcing limits even if I wanted to. If people decide that coercing
others is the way to get along, then that is how they will behave. All I
can do about that is try to persuade them that there are better ways. I
can’t say they are objectively wrong; only that I think they are working
against their own interests in the long run even if they’re better off
now. If I can’t persuade them of that, they will go on as they
are.

The coercive nature of talk about rights becomes obvious when you see
people arguing over them. I think of Charleton Heston standing up in
front of the NRA and saying that the goverment will infringe on his right
to bear arms only over his dead body. I don’t think he had any awareness
of how belligerent and dangerous he looked at that moment – how
rightfully nervous anyone would be at thinking of him in possession of a
gun. Not that he is necessarily a libertarian.

This view is why I look for the reasons that people allow repressive and
coercive governments to exist. There must be something about them that
placates the victims, so the majority of victims actually perceive that
they are better off than before. Since there is no “right” way
to govern or be governed, what other explanation is there? People know
when they feel they are better off – who can tell them they don’t feel
that way? You can argue yourself blue that they really aren’t better off,
but you can’t change their feeling that they are. It’s what they
perceive, not your logic, that matters.

With that understanding, we can stop thinking Cuban Cubans are crazy for
wanting Castro to get well, or that German Germans were crazy for
pointing with pride to the way the Third Reich got the trains to run on
time. People behave according to the way they perceive, what they want to
perceive, and what they accept as true. There is nothing wrong with them
when they do that; on the contrary, they are showing that they are
perfectly normal human beings. This is what I didn’t fully grasp when I
wrote B:CP. Even when people do bad things to each other, chances are
that they’re perfectly normal human beings. If people punish others for
doing things that are agreed to be criminal, they do it because they
really believe that punishment will have some good effect.

That was supposed to be a “few words,” but words have a way of
multiplying. I guess they’re attached to each other, so when one comes
out, it pulls others after it. That must be it.

Best,

Bill P.

22

[Martin Taylor 2006.08.18.11.10]

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.0757 MDT)] to

Richard Kennaway (2006.08.16.2347 BST) --

This is just a minor comment on your nice post, and not on its main thrust.

This view is why I look for the reasons that people allow repressive and coercive governments to exist. There must be something about them that placates the victims, so the majority of victims actually perceive that they are better off than before. Since there is no "right" way to govern or be governed, what other explanation is there?

In a word, "power".

People acting in coordination can exert more power in a particular direction than can a bunch operating independently. "Leaders" can control the means of communication, to prevent coordination among the opposition (remember how Jarewzelski came to power in Poland). Those in power are likely to control more mechanical force multipliers than can the rabble or malcontents. And so forth. Being in power is a good start toward staying in power. You only have to have a moderately large cadre of people to take it as in their own interest to support you, and then you can coerce the opposition individually with very little chance that they can coordinate enough power to counter yours.

The "victims" don't have to perceive they are better off than before. They just don't have to be able to coordinate the control actions that might do something about the situation.

Incidentally, this applies just as much to the power of corporations against consumers as it does to the power of political strongmen -- perhaps more so.

Martin

23

[From Richard Kennaway (2006.08.18.1603 BST)]

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.0757 MDT)]
So what is really going on here? Friedman is examining certain proposals about the nature and extent of property rights, and is offering his idea to other people apparently in the hope that they will adopt them. But how do "rights" come into that? Does a right exist only if I am persuaded that it exists? Isn't talking about rights in the way Friedman does an effort to determine what they "really are?" If we can all look at the rights and see that his description of them is correct, then nothing depends on persuasion or logic or verbal reasoning. All we have to do is look.

Friedman does, in fact, believe that rights are objectively existing, perceptible things. It by no means follows that all we have to do is look, and we will see what they are. That is not true of the physical world; neither is it true of the world of morality.

However, Friedman does not argue for objective rights or rely on their existence, in "The Machinery of Freedom" or his other works, preferring to make practical arguments instead, that is, arguments that some rule will lead to practical results that the reader is likely to find desirable or undesirable. Arguments of the sort you advocate:

If people decide that coercing others is the way to get along, then that is how they will behave. All I can do about that is try to persuade them that there are better ways.

Or as Friedman puts it in chapter 42:

So one reason to base my arguments on consequences rather than justice is that people have widely varying ideas about what is just but generally agree that making people happy and prosperous is a good thing. If I argue against heroin laws on the grounds that they violate the addicts' rights, I will convince only other libertarians. If I argue that drug laws, by making drugs enormously more expensive, are the chief cause of drug-related crime, and that the poor quality control typical of an illegal market is the main source of drug-related deaths, I may convince even people who do not believe that drug addicts have rights.

  �A second reason to use practical rather than ethical arguments is that I know a great deal more about what works than about what is just. This is in part a matter of specialization; I have spent more time studying economics than moral philosophy. But I do not think that is all it is. One reason I have spent more time studying economics is that I think more is known about the consequences of institutions than about what is or is not just--that economics is a much better developed science than moral philosophy.

So he argues, for example, that a hunter lost in the woods who must find shelter or die, and breaks into an unoccupied hut, should not be penalised, beyond compensating the owner after the fact. The argument is: the hunter's life has been saved, at the cost of a minor coercion of the owner -- do you, the reader, not agree that this is a desirable thing to do? And is not hard-line adherence to the principle of non-coercion therefore undesirable? It is up to the reader whether he is persuaded, of course.

Philosophical digression, no need to read it:

As background, here is Friedman's position about morality in greater detail. (This is gleaned from occasional hints in his publications, but more substantially from some of his postings to a Usenet newsgroup on science fiction.) I don't necessarily agree or disagree with it; but this is my understanding of what it is.

The raw data from which we can eventually arrive at agreement about the physical world is our physical sensations.

The raw data from which we can eventually arrive at agreement about the moral world is our moral sensations.

These moral sensations are the perceptions of "right" and "wrong" that we have in particular situations (or when contemplating hypothetical ones, such as the hunter in the woods). Not the general moral principles that we may assert, but the moral sensations themselves. The existence of these is as ineluctable as our sensations of heat and cold, light and dark. Except for a very few aberrant individuals, we all have them. We get from them to moral principles in the same way as we get from physical sensations to physical principles: by directed observation, experiment, and reasoning.

Despite the variability of individual perceptions, there is a remarkable degree of consistency among the moral systems that all cultures throughout history have arrived at. These consistencies are the objective moral truths that humanity has discovered.

If that seems a surprising claim, see the final section of C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man", which is probably on the web somewhere. Lewis lists the common features of ethical systems from the major cultures throughout history, calling it collectively "the Tao". I have seen David Friedman cite it, apparently with agreement, although unlike Lewis he is an atheist by conviction. (In that book, Lewis does not say where he thinks the Tao comes from, but elsewhere he writes that it is the voice of God within us, telling us how He wants us to behave.)

But what "are" rights? According to Friedman, the moral sphere is simply something that exists, just as do the physical sphere and the sphere of abstract objects studied by mathematics. Speculation about what any of these worlds "really is" and why it exists at all is a recreation that should not detract from our experience that they do, in fact, exist. We clearly have perceptions of all three kinds, and it is our task to make sense of them. To turn away from any of them upon a philosophical notion that it cannot exist is an error.

To sum up his view: rights are objectively existing, perceptible things which require work to discover the truth of. Like the facts of the physical world and of mathematics, they are neither obvious nor undiscoverable.

But as I said, he does not rely on any of that to persuade the reader of his views about how people should deal with each other, but instead draws out practical consequences of this or that rule and invites the reader to consider whether he, the reader, finds these consequences desirable.

So much for Friedman's view of morality. What alternatives are there? I can think of three.

1. Morality can be discovered by a priori reasoning. The Tao is the body of theorems of morality. Some philosophers have attempted this, but I believe with no succcess. Getting an ought from an is, or from nothing at all, is not possible.

2. Morality is what God wants us to do. It is axiomatic that we ought to do it. (Some say that He wrote it in a Book; others, that He wrote it in our hearts.) The Tao is what mankind has discovered of God's will. This is C.S. Lewis' view.

3. There is no such thing. "Right" and "wrong" mean nothing more than "I like" and "I don't like". There is nothing that anyone ought to do, or ought not to do. The Tao exists because we are all more or less similarly constituted, and to that extent want similar sorts of things. The commonality of moral views, such as it is, is no more to be wondered at than the commonality of our colour vision.

Number 3 appears to be your view when you are writing about your view. I am not sure it is your view when you are in the middle of making judgements. It seems to me that both it and Friedman's view are consistent with observation.

-- Richard

···

At 08:52 -0600 18/8/2006, Bill Powers wrote:

--
Richard Kennaway, jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk, Richard Kennaway
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.

24

[Martin Taylor 2006.08.18.13.37]

[From Richard Kennaway (2006.08.18.1603 BST)]
So much for Friedman's view of morality. What alternatives are there? I can think of three.

1. Morality can be discovered by a priori reasoning. The Tao is the body of theorems of morality. Some philosophers have attempted this, but I believe with no succcess. Getting an ought from an is, or from nothing at all, is not possible.

2. Morality is what God wants us to do. It is axiomatic that we ought to do it. (Some say that He wrote it in a Book; others, that He wrote it in our hearts.) The Tao is what mankind has discovered of God's will. This is C.S. Lewis' view.

3. There is no such thing. "Right" and "wrong" mean nothing more than "I like" and "I don't like". There is nothing that anyone ought to do, or ought not to do. The Tao exists because we are all more or less similarly constituted, and to that extent want similar sorts of things. The commonality of moral views, such as it is, is no more to be wondered at than the commonality of our colour vision.

I can think of a fourth, which makes more sense to me than do 1 to 3.

4. Morality consists of patterns of learned ways of controlling perceptions relating to the behaviour of other people. Those patterns that have been evolutionarily stable in relatively closed societies (the societies have not self-destructed yet) constitute the morality (and customs and manners) of that society. The distinction between morality and customs and manners relates to the levels of the perceptions controlled, though by virtue of the likelihood that severe impacts on other people are more likely than gentle one to disrupt the society, the major elements of morality often concern matters of life and death as well as of fairness in property transactions.

According to 4., all social animals will have forms of morality, meaning ways to determine correct behaviour, such as formation of a pecking order, sexual rights, acceptable forms of punishment for deviance, etc.

If 4 is correct, morality could be quite different in different societies, but the moral principles within one society should be likely to lead to less conflict within the society than would those principles with minor changes. But when people from societies with different moral principles interact, conflict, perhaps severe, is to be expected. Moreover, it will be hard for people on either side of that conflict to comprehend why those on the other side can conceive of behaving the way they do.

I think we observe the effects suggested in the last two paragraphs, which follow directly from proposition 4, but which seem hard to accommodate within the frame of propositions 1 to 3 (although if there are many different Gods, ithe observations could be accommodated by proposition 2).

Martin

25

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.19.55 MDT)]

Richard Kennaway (2006.08.18.1603 BST) –

Friedman does, in fact, believe
that rights are objectively existing, perceptible things. It by no
means follows that all we have to do is look, and we will see what they
are. That is not true of the physical world; neither is it true of
the world of morality.

Right, I agree. I was more or less referring to that fact. If rights were
objective – if there were ANYTHING we could observe “outside”
that is objective – then we could just look (etc.) and we would all
perceived it. But there is nothing of that nature.

However, Friedman does not argue
for objective rights or rely on their existence, in “The Machinery
of Freedom” or his other works, preferring to make practical
arguments instead, that is, arguments that some rule will lead to
practical results that the reader is likely to find desirable or
undesirable. Arguments of the sort you advocate:

If people decide that coercing
others is the way to get along, then that is how they will behave. All I
can do about that is try to persuade them that there are better
ways.

Or as Friedman puts it in chapter 42:

So one reason to base my
arguments on consequences rather than justice is that people have widely
varying ideas about what is just but generally agree that making people
happy and prosperous is a good thing. If I argue against heroin laws on
the grounds that they violate the addicts’ rights, I will convince only
other libertarians. If I argue that drug laws, by making drugs enormously
more expensive, are the chief cause of drug-related crime, and that the
poor quality control typical of an illegal market is the main source of
drug-related deaths, I may convince even people who do not believe that
drug addicts have rights.

Well, I havent’ got to chapter 42 yet. I would not completely agree with
DF if he puts it exactly as you do. Instead of saying that people agree
that making -people prosperous and happy is a good thing ( which – the
agremeent, that is - – may be true), I would prefer that they say they
have the aim of making other people prosperous and happy, and take
responsibility for having that aim. That may or may not prove to be a
good thing. What they consider to be “happiness” and
“prosperity” might clash severely with what someone else means
by those terms. And anyway, if we try to be precise, I’d rather we didn’t
speak as if there were objectively good things. That asserts what we
cannot know.

However, quibbling aside, speaking in terms of consequences suits me a
lot better than using the fuzzy idea of “rights.” At least that
takes us another step away from reification, although we then have to
discuss consequences in much the same way. There are consequences I
prefer, and consequences I will take considerable trouble to avoid, but I
know of no way to decide that any consequence is objectively good or bad
for everybody. I certainly have my own opinions, but they are mine and no
one else’s.

[Freidman:]A second reason to
use practical rather than ethical arguments is that I know a great deal
more about what works than about what is just. This is in part a matter
of specialization; I have spent more time studying economics than moral
philosophy. But I do not think that is all it is. One reason I have spent
more time studying economics is that I think more is known about the
consequences of institutions than about what is or is not just–that
economics is a much better developed science than moral
philosophy.

So he argues, for example, that a hunter lost in the woods who must find
shelter or die, and breaks into an unoccupied hut, should not be
penalised, beyond compensating the owner after the
fact.

Why “should” he even do that? As soon as you talk about
“should,” you’re objectifying again.

The argument is: the
hunter’s life has been saved, at the cost of a minor coercion of the
owner – do you, the reader, not agree that this is a desirable thing to
do?

Of course I do. Obviously you desire it, and so do I, so that makes it
demonstrably desirable. But is it objectively desirable, so that anyone
would desire it? That I doubt. Does it have an inherent quality of
desirableness? Surely you jest.

And is not hard-line
adherence to the principle of non-coercion therefore undesirable?
It is up to the reader whether he is persuaded, of
course.

And there is the rub. Everything depends on obtaining agreement.If nobody
desires something, evidently it is undesirable. But that is the only way
to tell. The principle of non-coercion expresses a preference. Mainly, I
have a hunch, it expresses a preference that the person recommending this
principle has for the way he is to be treated by others.
The first rule is, don’t coerce ME. But any intelligent person must
realize that others will not observe this principle unless you agree to
apply it to them, too. So you put it as a general moral proposition: it
is wrong to coerce people. Now you’re talking, the others say, because
they recognize this as an agreement by you not to coerce them. We shall
all adopt this moral precept, and at least when we are alone together,
none of us will be coerced. Especially not me.
Of course then someone thinks, but what if I need to coerce
someone – say, to save my life? Oops. Maybe I agreed to this moral
principle too quickly. This brings out the lawyer that is in all of us
(at the ninth or logic level). The person says, “Well, what exactly
do you mean by coercion?” And off we go into verbal logic (which is
quite different from formal self-consistent logic). The person argues
that when the irresistible need-to-survive forces you to take actions
that are not intended primarily to coerce someone else, that is not
coercion, but simply an accident for which no one is morally responsible.
So it’s OK to break into your neighbor’s cabin, which is the conclusion
you had in mind because you did it last week. It’s easy to use logic to
steer toward the conclusion you want – you just pick your premises and
definitions carefully.

···

At 08:52 -0600 18/8/2006, Bill Powers wrote:

=============================================================

The raw data from which we can
eventually arrive at agreement about the physical world is our physical
sensations.

Well, yes, if you’re thinking of HPCT.

The raw data from which we can
eventually arrive at agreement about the moral world is our moral
sensations.

I guess I must be one of those psychopaths, then, because I don’t have
any moral sensations. I certainly have opinions and strong preferences
about moral principles, and I would like to get others to adopt similar
ones, but I don’t have any sensors that detect morality in the world
around me. I don’t think that such things are known to science, either.
Morality is a set of preferences I have, and I know that they are
different from the preferences that some other people I know have. So are
these other people, or am I, defective in some way? And how do you tell
which of us is defective?

These moral sensations are the
perceptions of “right” and “wrong” that we have in
particular situations (or when contemplating hypothetical ones, such as
the hunter in the woods). Not the general moral principles that we
may assert, but the moral sensations themselves. The existence of
these is as ineluctable as our sensations of heat and cold, light and
dark.

Darn, I’ve packed my dictionary and I’ve forgotten what ineluctable
means,

but somehow, I don’t think that if a sensation of heat is ineluctable, a
sense of moral value is the same. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that
perception of moral qualities occurs at a considerably higher level in
the brain than perception of heat.

It has just occurred to me that you might be pulling my leg. But no, you
wouldn’t do that. Would you?

Except for a very few
aberrant individuals, we all have them. We get from them to moral
principles in the same way as we get from physical sensations to physical
principles: by directed observation, experiment, and
reasoning.

No, no, the aberrant individuals are the ones who think they have them.
Even if they’re in the majority. The majority once thought the earth was
flat, but they were wrong. No matter how many people think they can sense
morality, they are wrong. They can’t. So there.

Seems to me that this is a rather profitless way of approaching this
subject.

Despite the variability of
individual perceptions, there is a remarkable degree of consistency among
the moral systems that all cultures throughout history have arrived
at. These consistencies are the objective moral truths that
humanity has discovered.

If that seems a surprising claim, see the final section of C.S. Lewis’
“The Abolition of Man”, which is probably on the web
somewhere. Lewis lists the common features of ethical systems from
the major cultures throughout history, calling it collectively “the
Tao”. I have seen David Friedman cite it, apparently with
agreement, although unlike Lewis he is an atheist by conviction.
(In that book, Lewis does not say where he thinks the Tao comes from, but
elsewhere he writes that it is the voice of God within us, telling us how
He wants us to behave.)

I’m not particularly surprised, since I think there are some natural
paths to moral principles that arise from experience – but not because
we have morality sensors at the level of heat sensors. I gave an example
earlier in this post: I will agree not to coerce you if you will agree
not to coerce me, so we can invent a moral principle saying that coercion
is bad. We are both protected from coercion by adopting this principle,
at least when nobody else is around. Of course we can detect when this
principle is being violated and that bothers us, as you can see from the
actions we take to correct the error. It stands to reason that many
people would discover this way of avoiding being coerced.

But what “are”
rights? According to Friedman, the moral sphere is simply something
that exists, just as do the physical sphere and the sphere of abstract
objects studied by mathematics.

That’s pretty hard for me to swallow. Unless you’re just saying what I
say, which is that there is a level of organization in human beings that
controls for principles remaining true (or false). There is a subset of
principles that deals with human relations, and the system concept
resting on that subset is called “moral philosophy.” I hope
Mary Midgley would agree. But I can’t see anything that forces all people
to have the same moral principles.

Speculation about what
any of these worlds “really is” and why it exists at all is a
recreation that should not detract from our experience that they do, in
fact, exist. We clearly have perceptions of all three kinds, and it
is our task to make sense of them. To turn away from any of them
upon a philosophical notion that it cannot exist is an
error.

Sez who? But rather than counter with the opposite assertion, I’d rather
just say that I think the HPCT framework has a place for all these things
you’re talking about. They’re all part of the same world, the world of
experience, and they are all phenomena of hierarchical perception and
control.

So much for Friedman’s view of
morality. What alternatives are there? I can think of
three.

  1. Morality can be discovered by a priori reasoning. …2.
    Morality is what God wants us to do. …
  1. There is no such
    thing. “Right” and “wrong” mean nothing more
    than “I like” and “I don’t like”. There is
    nothing that anyone ought to do, or ought not to do.
    …

Number 3 appears to be your view
when you are writing about your view. I am not sure it is your view
when you are in the middle of making judgements. It seems to me
that both it and Friedman’s view are consistent with
observation.

To say “nothing more than” is always an untruth. There is a
great deal more to my system of morality than just consulting my
reactions to see if I like or dislike something. To me, moral questions
concern how we can get along with one another in a realistic and fair
way, so that each of us, myself very much included, can be free of a
whole list of evils that beset human relations. The detailed moral
principles I have learned and worked out, sort of, are subordinate to the
system concepts I have tried to form, concepts of the kind of world where
any person can be happy, loved, and loving, as well as curious and in
touch with the natural world. I recognized long ago that wishing that the
world would adjust to suit me alone is an impossible dream – this
happened, I think, around the time that I realized that someone else’s
happiness was at least as important to me as my own – the pangs of love
shifted the center of the universe away from me onto someone else.
Several times. All right, many times.

Probably the biggest difference I have with Friedman,. and perhaps with
you, is that I don’t need any external justification for my way of
dealing with morality. I’m as capable of understanding the problems as
anyone is, and I know I can’t transmit my experience directly to anyone
else: everyone has to get there alone. I don’t need an external authority
to back me up, or permission from anyone, to think as I do. Nor can I
appeal to external authority – not even the authority of logic – to
make people agree with me. I have no authority over anyone.

Best,

Bill P.

26

[Jim Dundon 08.19.06.1320edst]

···

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.0757 MDT)]

That was supposed to be a “few words,” but words have a way of multiplying. I guess they’re attached to each other, so when one comes out, it pulls others after it. That must be it.

  • Is this a new theory of behavior? :-] If so what shall we call it.*
  • I thought behavior was the control of perception, Maybe we control for the pulling out of words , but that sounds metaphorical. Few is metaphorical with words as a quantity. Attatched here is metaphorical. Pulls is metaphorical. And words “multiplying”?*

Wow!

  • Embodied earthy metaphors. *

I like it.

best

Jim D

27

[From Bjorn Simonsen (2006.08.20.13:30 EUST)]

Richard Kennaway (2006.08.18.1603 BST) –

Friedman does, in fact, believe that rights are

objectively existing, perceptible things. It by

no means follows that all we have to do is look,

and we will see what they are. That is not

true of the physical world; neither is it true of

the world of morality.

Thank you Richard Kennaway for presenting the
URL to David Friedman. And thank you for motivating Bill to comment your and
David Friedman’s arguments. I have had a wonderful time reading both of your e-mails.
I also appreciated Martin’s 4. Alternative. This is CSG on it’s best.

Let me go back to your comments above.

I agree that Friedman does believe that
rights are objectively existing, perceptible things. But I don’t think you
should have written “I agree that Friedman does, in fact (my italics), believe that rights are objectively
existing, perceptible things.

In his http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/My_View_of_Oughts.html
he writes “My ( very tentative (my italics),) conclusion is
that the normative universe, like the physical universe, exists.”

From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.19.55 MDT)

Right, I agree. I was more or less referring to that

fact. If rights were objective – if there were

ANYTHING we could observe “outside” that is

objective – then we could just look (etc.) and

we would all perceived it. But there is nothing

of that nature.

I am not sure if I understand you correct. I
read your statement above as if rights are not objective because you can’t
sense them.

Neither I know
any sensing organs that are able to observe “rights”. But if we have such
sensing organs, we wouldn’t experience the “rights” directly. We would
experience them as perceptions “inside us”. We would experience the “rights” “inside
us” in the same way we experience a stone.

I think David Friedman ask the same
questions that you are asking when he writes: “If you take the sixth sense analogy seriously, the next step is to ask
why you believe the other five senses. ………”.

Look at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/My_View_of_Oughts.html , the first sections.

I think as I think you think. If we find
out how “rights” can be sensed the “rights” still would be perceptions (“inside
us”). We will never experience anything out there directly.

Everything we perceive is an inside representation
of something we think is out there or of an imagination. That is of course also
a perception, and I am sure other people have other perceptions.

I like the way you think two or more
people can agree to wish to perceive the same experiences or imaginations. That
is the only way two or more people can control the same perceptions in the same
way. Some people agree and other people
don’t. So is the world.

bjorn

28

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.20.1205 MDT)]

  Bjorn Simonsen (2006.08.20.13:30 EUST) --

I am not sure if I understand you correct. I read your statement above as if rights are not objective because you can't sense them. Neither I know any sensing organs that are able to observe "rights". But if we have such sensing organs, we wouldn't experience the "rights" directly. We would experience them as perceptions "inside us". We would experience the "rights" "inside us" in the same way we experience a stone.

By "objective" I mean "existing as part of the world outside our skins." A
more PCTish way of saying that would be "belonging to our models of an external reality," since the world outside our skins exists only in the form of imagined models.

I think David Friedman ask the same questions that you are asking when he writes: "If you take the sixth sense analogy seriously, the next step is to ask why you believe the other five senses. ��..".
Look at Some Problems with Ayn Rand's Derivation of Ought from Is , the first sections.

An interesting section. I see that the problem he is addressing is "normative propositions," which in PCT is pronounced "reference signals" (or perhaps "verbal descriptions of reference signals" since he talks about propositions). Without the idea of a reference signal and its role in control processes, normative propositions are indeed hard to understand. But of course since we do have the concept of a reference signal, we can flatly reject the following:

Let me suggest an analogy that I find informative. Think of moral intuitions as playing the same role in our knowledge of normative propositions that sense data play in our knowledge of positive propositions.

I think that is a very confused picture of norms, or reference signals. We describe norms (principles, subset moral precepts) in words, but to put them into practice we must first translate the words into a perceived principle, and then generate a reference signal with the appropriate magnitude: a high magnitude for perceptions we "should" maintain, and a low magnitude for perceptions we "should not" maintain.

This means we must already have some remembered experiences to which the words point, pick the one that seems the closest, and then select a particular degree of that perception as a target. What kinds of experience, at the principle level, do the words "safety first" point to? That refers to a principle, though not a moral one. I get a sort of aura of caution, peering around carefully looking for problems, being kind of tense, being alert. I can certainly set that up as a way to be and try to be that way. I don't know if it actually makes me any safer, but that is what the words remind me of.

That sort of exploration of the concept of normative statements doesn't jibe at all with the idea of just looking an "intuition" of morality the way we look at a sensation. I think the attempt to draw a parallel between sensing morals and sensing other things is misguided.

However, Friedman is not wholeheartedly arguing that morals exist outside us.As he says, you have to look at all the senses.

Now apply the same approach to moral reality. Replace sense perceptions with moral judgements--not grand theories such as "you should never violate rights" but "perceptions" such as "in the following well described situation, person X acted wrongly." Checking with other people you find, pace the ethical relativists, a very high degree of agreement. The disagreement either involves the sort of situation that, on consideration, you find morally difficult or (far more often) disagreement about the assumed facts, not the judgements.

He clearly accepts the difference between sensing and knowing what is outside us. But because he thinks of "ought" statements as describing inputs, he confuses target states with perceptual signals. All you have to do is realize that an "ought" statement describes an internally-generated reference signal, and the confusion disappears. Then the whole idea of a "normative universe" simply goes away. Morals aren't perceptions, they're reference signals. Descriptions of morals are perceptions because they exist as words. But that's something else.

Best,

Bill P.

P.S. Note that while a principle perception can be described in words, or pointed to by words, it does not exist as words. When I described my meanings of the words "safety first", I did not describe words but images and feelings which were not words. In those images and feelings I can see that thing I call a principle; I can tell when that principle is exemplified by my present perceptions and when it is not. But I perceive that without the aid of words. That's one reason that principles are sort of fuzzy.