Adrian Selby

"but it won't hack it in modern times when everybody seems to be angling for ways to cheat on their contract obligations"

I'm not sure that 'everyone' does. Perhaps in the minutiae of our social contracts this is true, but broadly speaking, very many people conform I would have thought. Or else states would fail. I wonder whether scientific facts might show how these ways of cheating the system are actually detrimental to individuals for example, for their own well being and the survivability of their genes. I don't know, but I'm interested to see some links to very recent books dealing with the subject, so thanks for that.

Adrian

August Spies

Hey MadMorgan, I was just reading your formal debate over private property. Good interesting stuff, though obviosly I agree with moon.

I agree with a lot of what has been said, what do you guys thing about the contradictroy nature of rights theory?

by which I mean: The common rights given are something like Life, Liberty, Security and Property. However, clearly to have security you must give up some liberty. And in modern society to have security means paying taxes to a goverment, IE giving up property.

It obvious to see where this type of problem manifests itself in modern society. Libertarians argueing taxation is a crime because it violates ones rights to property for example. Does this really represent a contradiction in rights theory? (I think so) or merely a human rights conflict?

And What does it meant to have "a right to liberty and security" when the only people who really are free to do what they want with their time or be secure in their lives are those with large amounts of property?

"But most societies do have some sort of mechanism for directing the behaviour of its members, and particularly, for curbing anti-social behaviour. "

I totally agree, any society must have something there to curb anti-social behavior. I guess the question is if rights theory is the best framework to do that in?

Bill

The problem you recognize is due to the definition of these broad rights as "inalienable" rights: life, liberty, security, property, and presumably, "pursuit of happiness." I think that you grasp the real essence of the problem when you say this: Isn't it rather interesting that the folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence were all fairly wealthy white males? There weren't any women or blacks who were represented in that Congress, and the Declaration wasn't written with the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" by black slaves or women in mind.

And it isn't an accident, either. The MAGNA CARTA in England was a document created of the barons, by the barons, and for the barons to use against the concept of the divine right of kings. I doubt that any of those barons ever gave a single thought to the pesants working their own fields when they wrote about the rights that the King must observe. It took centuries before those same rights were held to apply to the common people.

All of this should demonstrate that theories of rights evolve over time. I've seen people write with indignation at the thought of Mohammed marrying a 9-year-old girl (which he did at about age 42). But at about that same time, under English Common Law, a child as young as 7 could contract for marriage, although exactly like Mohammed's bride, the marriage would not be considered to be binding until the girl was sexually mature enough to consumate the marriage with her new husband. There is no reason to castigate Mohammed for his marriage as this was the sort of morality practiced in the world until very recently. Even in the United States, the model penal code provided that the "age of consent" was age 10. It wasn't raised up to 18 until the Victorian era influenced lawmakers to start ratcheting the age of consent up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today, most of us are raised to feel repulsion at the thought of a 40-something man marrying an "innocent" 9-year-old girl. But that is an aspect of morality that would not have been raised in the mind of anybody before about a century or so ago.

What we need is not a rights theory, but a moral theory. (More about this, below.) No, it is not. Most modern thinkers regard the concept of "rights" as only a part of the equation. Another part is "duties" (something drawn from Kant, and other places).

But it is also clear that rights and duties are relative and situational. For instance, a criminal in prison doesn't have a right to "liberty." So, in addition to rights and duties, you still need some sort of overarching theory of how rights and duites, rewards and punishments, are all related to each other in some systematic way so as to create a complete moral framework for a civilization.

That is more or less what I've been advocating here, anyway....

== Bill

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

Well, I find that interesting. Cheating on your social obligations puts you in a weaker position, because you can't then complain when someone cheats you. There's a guy in Australia called Mark "Chopper" Reed, who used to make a living by standing over other criminals. They were easy targets for him, because they weren't going to complain to the police.

If you are prepared to take the risks involved, then it must be worth your while to cheat on your social obligations. If you could get everything you wanted and needed by working within the bounds of social responsibility, then you wouldn't need to act so cynically. That some people do choose to act cynically, suggests to me that society (or, if you like, the state) isn't living up to its side of the social contract.

This is the way I see the social contract. You agree not to fulfil your own needs by hurting or exploiting others, and in turn, society agrees to provide you with socially acceptable avenues for fulfilling your needs. It works both ways.

That's probably the way to go. It seems clear to me that human beings, for the most part, do have standards. Rather than arguing from the top down, saying that there is an "absolute" set of moral standards which we should attempt to impose upon people, it would be more profitable to look at the ethical and moral standards people hold already, and look for a biological/evolutionary basis for them.

This is probably getting a bit off topic, but I've always found the U.S. law in this regard rather strange. I would have thought that most people become sexually active well before the age of eighteen. So you have a law on the statutes that just about everyone will end up breaking.

Where I am, the age of consent (for heterosexual sex at least) is 16. Of course, there are still some people who will break that law, but at least it doesn't set the bar so high that most people will break it.

phaedrus

Umm, was really looking for a a case about what makes locke's version palpable. Anyways i guess bentham's words will apt until you offer an arguement in favour of locke.

John Hancock

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle
Thanks very much. I've always thought of rights as something one is obligated to fight for (both in self-interest & the betterment of society as a whole).

The concept of govermental coersion to fulfill this obligation had always seemed suspect to me. Still in all, compellation to be involved within ones ledgislative processes appeals to me.

Martin Buber

Bill

You need to understand the distinction between "cheating" and "getting caught cheating." Almost nobody who decides to cheat believes that they are very likely to get caught. Where it gets to be a serious "moral acid" is when the system is so complex that the liklihood of getting any serious consequences from cheating are so low as to make it silly for even honest people to not cheat. Here, of course, I'm talking about the infamous Internal Revenue Code of the United States of America. I figure that this code is more like a poker game, where I try to reduce my taxes as much as possible by categorizing my income and expenses in ways that end up minimizing my tax payments. This sort of a system becomes a "moral acid" because, as I said, it trains even honest people to cheat in circumstances where the liklihood of serious consequences is virtually non-existent. Once you begin compromising your basic moral values, it becomes easier and easier to cheat in other circumstances.

If you insist on framing things as a "social contract," then yes, the state has clearly broken its side of the pledge by making it way too hard for even honest people to be honest. But the tax code has been used for various "social incentives" for so long now that it isn't likely to change anytime soon. There are any number of "sacred cow" provisions in the tax code, like the deductability of home mortgage interest, that keep large sections of our economy running smoothly, and which would have major disrupting consequences if they were repealed. People do react to these sorts of incentives, and in general, they react far better to them than the government plans. But The Law of Unintended Consequences operates here as well. In many cases, the incentives actually motivate people to do something that is entirely at odds with what the government had in mind in the first place. And one of those "unintended consequences" is "cheating" on taxes by the majority of American taxpayers. That "cheating" is, in turn, part of the "moral acid" that is dissolving Western Civilization.

== Bill

John Hancock

Yes Bill;
I completely agree that cheating on one's taxes is a "a moral acid" (huh I like that description).
The decay like with a dead fish begins at the head. Then the acid spills over the masses. Of course, the head is ahead in rottenness. The wealthier are given more opportunity to cheat. This is part of the "Golden Rule in goverment": "Thems that's got the gold, rules."

Martin Buber

August Spies

"The decay like with a dead fish begins at the head. "

killer line

August Spies

Bill:

However, "social contract" theory is clearly obsolete for our modern times. We can clearly do better, even without a comprehensive moral theory based upon scientific facts.

Would you mind giving a rough outline of what you think would be the best framework for us today?