Indigenous Rights

I was just reading about Avatar (sorry, I haven't watched it yet) and I was reminded of The Man's propensity to wipe out or enslave any new people he comes in contact with. Supposing that the next decade or two will see the rise of White Flight to some Third World country, and supposing that the white settlers will try to set up some libertarian regime in the New New World, I would like to make clear some things about indigenous modes of subsitence which not everyone will find as legitimate under an individual rights framework but which I consider to be fully legitimate under individual rights.

Water sources and waterways that are used collectively are more than likely owned collectively. This doesn't make me a socialist or a tree hugger. Individuals have the right to homestead, and they have the right to homestead in groups. If a water source is used in a way that excludes other uses of it (for example, drinking excludes pollution), then it is appropriated for a particular use. And in the case that this use is made by many people in general (which is most of the time), the water source is owned by the "unorganized public". No local official has the authority to just declare whole waterways the property of some corporation. You would need the consent of the owners for that to be legitimate, and in the case of rivers, the "owners" are every single person who regularly drinks from, boats in, swims in, plays in, and fishes in that river. I'm not saying privatization is always and in all places illegitimate. I'm just saying that transfer of title is illegitimate without the consent of the owner, and in the case of rivers that's pretty hard to get.

Indigenous people and concerned settlers have the right to coerce people to stop polluting. Most environmental "reform" I see provides ways for companies to basically buy licenses to pollute. And unfortunately, I've heard a few self-styled libertarians show support for arrangements like these when they speak in favor of people being free to do whatever they want to anybody and anything else, so long as they compensate for damages. If you have a right to remain whole in your person and things, then you have a right not just to demand compensation for aggression against you, but you also have a right to use a certain amount of force to stop the aggression. We have no reason to suppose that the deformed baby sold his right to bodily integrity by being conceived to a woman who was a member of a group whose officials received money in "compensation" for dumping. If you want to buy "dumping rights", you have to follow a procedure similar to the one mentioned above. And if you didn't get dumping rights under that kind of procedure, then you don't have a right to pollute (which is basically dumping on other people's property, and in some cases amounts to poisoning people), and anyone who wants to has the right to force you to stop.

Land that is frequently and regularly used collectively is more than likely owned collectively. Again, this doesn't make me a socialist or a tree hugger. It's just that the labor of the "unorganized public" appropriates land just as legitimately as individual labor, and that the right of access connected to first use is held by each individual first user and bequeathed to each subsequent user. This means, basically, that each indigenous person is a co-owner of regularly-used open land. (Which, quite frankly, looks to me like the more "natural" method of land appropriation and ownership - personal homes and gardens aside, since humans first settle land "together" and first use resources together.) Since every user of the land is "naturally" an owner of it, frequently-used open land cannot legitimately be sold by anyone who is not expressly given that permission by every single person who has gathered food in that land. If that permission is not given by every single owner, then the purchase is void. If you did not buy land according to the method prescribed here, then any use of "your" land that deprives individuals of resources they traditionally had access to is an act of theft, and the deprived indigenous people have a right not just to demand compensation from you, but also to force you to stop using "your" land that way.

Just wanted to set some things straight here. Didn't want to see libertarian property theory used to justify the next ethnocide, genocide, or mass subjugation...

"Well you choose to live here, so..."

You've heard the argument before, and you yourself have probably made it before. In short, it says that since you "choose" to live here, you agree to the government and laws here, and all of the obligations the government prescribes apply to you because you agreed to them by contract.

Now, we all know that those who make this argument don't pretend that the U.S.-born among us made that "choice" when we were born. Nobody chooses where they get born. And all of us know that the "choice" wasn't about where we'll grow up. We all know that nobody chooses where they get raised. So already we can see that it makes a pretty weak case for government's authority over young children.

The argument only makes one bit of sense when it refers to an in-action. By not leaving, we choose to stay - so the argument goes. Of course, this assumes that finding a new country to live in is as easy as finding a new apartment to move into. If you want to make that case, go ahead and try.

The difficulty of trying to shop for governments aside, there is one major downside to trying to make this kind of argument. Once you make this argument, you remove the grounds for any authority-based criticism you have of government. You can't argue about Constitutional limits to government because - well - you choose to live in this country! Don't like the way this government does things? Find another country! The government can take your property whenever it wants, because you voluntarily assent to that authority by staying on land within its borders. Don't like it? Well you chose it! You can't argue about wars, abortions, or taxes. By not leaving, you agree to the actions that this government takes, and if this government finds you guilty of terrorism and decides to kill you, well then you have the procedural duty to die because that's the obligation you take on by not leaving.

If government authority is to make any sense (and I don't think it makes any), then it has to be based on something other than your "voluntary" agreement to live under it. No one gets complete and arbitrary authority over you when you just happen to be on their territory. When I was a Junior in college I believed government gets its authority not from consent of the governed, but by its protection of and respect for its subjects' rights. I was of course presuming that government can possibly respect people's rights by forcing them to patronize it...

Addendum to "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage"

Ted Olson's recent article, though well written, lacks the "get off my lawn" sentiment that the conservative movement is once again starting to show. Some of his arguments simply shouldn't resonate with Small Government Conservatives. He refers to Lincoln at least twice, as if Lincoln had anything to do with a small government, and he writes at length about "the value of strong families, lasting domestic relationships, and communities populated by persons with recognized and sanctioned bonds to one another", as if it's any of Government's business to engineer society. And, he misses some major arguments that SHOULD resonate with Small Government Conservatives.

The first argument that he should have brought in is freedom of religion. Conservatives view Separation of Church and State as a wall meant to protect the religious sphere from Government intrusion. Matters of God should not be matters of Government, and any act of Government to regulate, oversee, or restrict religious activity is an unjust denial of the individual's right to follow his or her own conscience. And, needless to say, Conservatives view marriage as a God-ordained institution. If marriage is a sacred journey, then it too should be protected against the intrusions of Government. Just as a preacher should be free to preach without having to get the Government's permission, so too should a couple be free to marry without having to get the Government's permission. This means, of course, that Government should get completely out of the marriage business, just as it should get out of a whole lot of other businesses. There should be no such thing as a marriage license.

Now, this particular argument doesn't work on all Conservatives, since not all Conservatives view marriage as a matter of God. But there is another argument that is just as "get off my lawn" as the former, and which can resonate with secularists. This argument is the personal and family freedom argument. The religious sphere isn't the only sphere that should be protected from Government. Every aspect of personal life should be safe from Government's eyes and fingers. Conservatives frequently talk about a man's rights to live his own way, to build his cabin where he wants to, to send his kids to whichever school he thinks best, or to teach them at home, to decide on his own or with his wife what they and their kids will eat and wear and how they will travel and how they will pass their time together, etc. We should be free to live our lives without having to grovel for Our Illustrious Overlords' sufferance. As in the former argument, this argument concludes by demanding that Government get out of the way - completely.

The patriot should demand not marriage equality (equality is just another word for a guillotine) but marriage freedom. Of course, I say should, because I have no idea if and only a little confidence that the "Tea Party" movement actually will adopt the "get out of my bedroom" plank. Some Tea Partygoers might be convinced by the arguments above, some might blink and stutter, and others will be reminded of how much they loved the government when their guys were in charge. Whether they start advocating marriage freedom will be an indication of how much they actually believe in personal freedom and Government restraint.

Stay "tuned" for more on Marriage Freedom...

When Corporal Punishment is Justified

This is something I've been thinking about since I wrote the second entry of my Sex and Right series. I often think of slavery and beating as horribly evil, and I sometimes describe them as being inherrently evil. But I do think slavery is morally justified in some situations (sans the slavery "contract"). And I think that beating can be justified when the victim and perpetrator agree that that's the best punishment.

First, the pragmatic reasons. Some people would really like to get on with their life without being locked in a labor camp, or having a criminal debt looming over their head. Having an alternative to monetary compensation available to the perpetrator would be nice. Also, the cost of keeping prisoners is quite high. I imagine that mere market forces would keep the number and size of prisons quite small. And, people who absolutely do not want to be in prison would not be productive workers, and would live as leaches on the justice system (which is pretty much how prisoners live today).

Now, the rights-based reasons. The whole purpose of justice is to restore complete sovereignty to the victim by "making right" the crime against her. Any act of justice that is carried out has to take into account her will - it is she who has been victimized, and it is she who has rights over the perpetrator. (This gets complicated when she isn't the only victim.) Yes, there is an upward limit to what she can do to the perpetrator. But I don't think there is any downward limit. If she's a pacifist, she can order him released and cancel his debt, or she can declare his debt cancelled from the moment she's victimized. If she's merciful, she can settle for a debt that is much lower than the cost imposed on her by the crime. Or, she can settle for some kind of non-monetary compensation.

I'm actually unsure whether beating the perpetrator without his consent fits above or below the upward limit of what the crime victim can request. But I am sure that if the perpetrator favors getting beaten over having to pay an overwhelming sum of money, and if the victim is willing to accept his welts and yelps as payment in full, then we have an agreement.

I don't see any reason why this shouldn't also apply to civil cases. If someone is found negligent, and they are unwilling or unable to pay monetary damages, and the plaintiff is willing to settle for welts and yelps, then welts and yelps it shall be.

Sex and Right, Part 4; Or, Raping Babies with Pickets

So here's the low-down. The post-objectivist anarchist who answers to the Youtube username XOmniverse recently posted a video where he calls deontology "authoritarian" and says "duty is an anti-concept." In the comments section I asked "is it safe for me to assume that you mean *positive* and not negative duties when you say "duty is an anti-concept"?

His response was "No. I mean all duties. Yes, this means I don't accept the non-aggression principle in a deontological sense."

Good evening, this is Mr. I.R. Sage responding to XOmniverse’s latest Rational Ethics video.

Rational self-interest is a refreshing way to approach personal morality. When you’re talking about doing things with yourself or with others who freely consent, rational self-interest accounts for pretty much every moral consideration that needs to be made. But it doesn’t account for every consideration that needs to be made regarding force against others, and so I think rational egoism makes an inadequate political morality.

Rational egoism’s virtue is that it doesn’t label things as just wrong. And this is also its weakness. Many things that we normally consider to be flat-out wrong – for example, raping babies with a picket – are, according to rational egoism, unadvisable at worst.

Rational egoist political morality posits rights by advising that one who wishes to live happily in society should act with regard to those who can affect one’s own reality. So it quickly acknowledges the rights of the strong and well-connected. But those who do not have the power to affect other people’s reality have no moral status unless they are given it by those who do have the power to affect reality.

Under rational egoism, raping babies with pickets is immoral only in those communities where those who can affect your reality consider it morally repugnant to rape babies with pickets. Thankfully, most people in America today do consider it morally repugnant to rape babies with pickets. But babies aren’t always given moral status. Just consider ancient Phoenician societies, where sacrificing babies was considered legitimate under some circumstances.

Under rational egoism, then, political morality is relative to cultural sentiment. If a certain class of individuals is not accorded rights by broader society, there is no way (that I know of) for rational egoism to condemn abusing those individuals.

Individual sovereignty is a funny word to use under rational egoism. Individual sovereignty makes sense only with a charitable and dogmatic presumption of the other’s rights. But under rational egoism, the only ones you have a “rational ought” to grant rights to are the ones who (a) are conducive to your own happiness, (b) can make your life miserable, or (c) already are granted rights by broader society. The rational egoist, then, can only talk about the rights of some individuals.

Egoist political morality fuzzes the difference between things that are wrong just because other people think so, and things that are wrong just because. Under Egoism, raping babies with pickets is wrong only for the same reason that burning the flag is wrong – there may be some people who, shall we say, may affect your reality in a way that is not conducive to your happiness if they see you doing it.

Of course, the wrath of others may be a burden worth bearing if the controversial act is a necessary means to greater happiness. And sometimes, the wrath of others is the very thing that brings happiness. Since egoist morality is relative to what would bring you ultimate happiness, it seems to justify some grotesque things. If what would bring you ultimate happiness is to kill yourself and as many other people as possible in the most spectacular way possible, then a 9-11-type act would be the moral thing for you to do, under rational egoism. The only reason that a rational egoist can give to persuade you otherwise (short of a death threat, that is) is to suggest that the happiness you would get from spectacularly killing yourself and others would be less valuable than the contentment of a long, peaceful, productive and moderate life.

But that sounds like a hard prediction to make. Whether the happiness got through one act is better than the happiness got through another act depends on the preferences of the subject. In short, I doubt we can know for sure that the intense pleasure of going down in flames is always less than the pleasure of a temperate life. Since this prediction can hardly be made, the rational egoist has no principled reason against mass-murder suicides.

Maybe I’ve grossly mischaracterized rational egoism a la Xomniverse. If I have, please point out where I misunderstood. But from what I see right now, rational egoism as a political morality can’t condemn raping babies with pickets. Neither can it condemn terrorism or totalitarianism.

A Problem with the "Good" News

Nothing I will say here is novel, but some things that have been said many times before need to be said again and again. And unfortunately, I am too much of a coward to say them to the people nearest to me.

After I left my parents' church, my mom asked me if I'm saved. The easiest answer is yes, when I was four I asked Jesus into my heart, and thanks to eternal security I'm under the Blood no matter what I do. But that answer is misleading. If I really wanted to state my beliefs about salvation, I would have explained why I think the Evangelical view of salvation is - to put it politely - problematic, and - to put it bluntly - morally bankrupt.

In a nutshell, the Evangelical view of salvation is: (1) all humans inevitably commit sin, (2) the just penalty for any sin is eternity in hell fire, (3) Jesus paid the price for all sin by dying on the cross, but (4) no one is covered by that payment unless they somehow ask for that coverage.

I have no problem with (1). I am a firm believer in sin nature - not only of human beings, but of the biological order in general. My problem is with (2). It implies we can be owned by someone (or somethree?) else.

When you own something, you have the morally justifiable right to do with it as you please. Unless of course, you're renting or borrowing, in which case your ownership exists by the permission of the proprietor, who really owns it and has the ultimate right to do with it as he pleases (though the government likes to pretend that it is the ultimate owner of everything).

According to Evangelicalism, the pre-mortem individual is renting or borrowing himself from God, who ultimately and rightfully owns everything and everyone. Upon your death, immediate jurisdiction over you returns to God, who - according to Evangelicalism - may rightfully do to you whatever pleases Him. If it were God's pleasure that all the dead be sent to a holding facility where they have to recompense for their misdeeds as a condition for being released into paradise, then God could have designed things that way. But according to the Evangelical, He didn't. And He didn't need to.

The kind of justice that God chose is the condemnation of everyone who committed any sin to an eternity in hell fire. If you are under the Blood, or too young to talk, you are an exception. By default, everyone who is old enough to talk is condemned. Everyone who lives a completely normal and wholesome life without praying the Sinner's Prayer is condemned to an eternity in hell fire. Their completely normal and wholesome life included white lies, lustful thoughts, some unwarranted anger, etc., which were not covered by the Blood and which earn damnation. Even the boy whose only sin was to glance down his teacher's blouse when she bent over his desk is damned. If he dies before asking Jesus into his heart, he goes to hell - for looking down his teacher's blouse. According to the Evangelical, this is the policy that God chose to enact. And He has the right to choose this policy rather than another.

If God has a right to do to a soul one thing and not another, then He owns it. This amounts to property in humans. It's more extreme than a plantation owner deciding whether you'll pick cotton in the field or dust furniture in the house.

I've heard some people use Lockean slavery/punishment theory to justify God's right to damn souls. The Lockean theory is this: if A aggresses against B, then B has a degree of rights over A. If A makes an attempt on B's life, B has complete property rights over A, and may confine him indefinitely, put him through forced labor, or kill him. According to "Lockean Evangelicalism" (sorry I don't have a better term for it yet), God has rightful jurisdiction over human souls because humans aggress against God by sinning against Him. There are two big problems with this.

For one thing, the victim's rights over the aggressor are proportional to the severity of the aggression. You only have the right to do something drastic to somebody if they did or were going to do something drastic to you. It's very hard for my fallible human mind to imagine how an infinitely powerful, beautiful, majestic, everlasting and unchanging God can be harmed at all, much less be so drastically harmed by someone that He has the right to retaliate as drastically as damning them to an eternity in hell fire.

For another, what is and isn't aggression is completely up to God to decide, since Evangelicalism defines sin exactly as whatever offends God. If God commands that everyone's heads be covered with tea cozies while in church, and a guy's tea cozy falls off, then that man displeased God, and thereby aggressed against Him. At the moment the man's kippah fell off his head, the title to his soul transferred from him to God (if it wasn't already transferred). If God gains complete and ultimate ownership over people's souls by merely being offended by them, then this isn't any different from God completely and ultimately owning everybody in the first place.

There's no beating around the bush. Evangelical soteriology assumes a justification of slavery. It claims that God has a right to treat souls in the severest way imaginable, and that it is only by God's Grace (that is, His discretion) that some are spared such abuse. He has rights over you whether or not you give them, and the only thing you can do to be dealt with lightly is to perform such-n-such action that He demands, which - luckily for everyone - is a little prayer that can be recited in less than a minute. Too bad this prayer doesn't occur to everyone spontaneously.

All this would have been much shorter had I written "God doesn't exist, there is no heaven, and there is no hell." But that doesn't convey what I think is most important to say. Religion is at its core a matter of right. It is not a matter of fact. One of the reasons I rarely call myself an atheist is that those who do call themselves atheists spend so much time and energy talking about natural selection, laws of physics, and the scientific method, it's as if they would immediately become born-again Christians and faithfully attend fundamental Baptist churches if God reveals His existence to them. Atheists who spend all their time on Science vs. Supernatural ignore that there are moral issues to be addressed. My bone to pick with conventional Christians isn't God's supposed existence. It's God's supposed authority. And until we pick apart the issue of God's supposed right to do things to us, we leave open the idea that someone may rightfully do things to us against our consent.