As a Brit I was a little disappointed to discover in the last section of this post that your colleague's _name_ was Earl. The poem compensated me though.
This definition of government would seem to include any criminal organization that successfully taxes businesses or enforces a monopoly on some use of its territory, which I suppose means there would currently be thousands of governments in existence, with much overlap in territory. Is this intentional?
It would include a criminal organization whose activities are accepted by most of those involved, not necessarily in the sense of thinking they are legitimate but of not responding to them in the way they would respond to similar actions by others.
A mugger who doesn't get resisted because resisting him will get you killed, not merely because it costs more than the property he is taking is worth, isn't a government — the commitment is not to bear unlimited costs, just costs large relative to what is at stake.
If I understand this correctly, the key idea is that Schelling points influence one's predictions of others, viz that is it reasonable to believe that another will carry out a threat in defense of a salient status quo (eg, that you will go to great lengths to enforce your property rights), and not to believe that they will do so to promote some non-salient outcome (eg, that he will bear large costs if you don’t allow him to violate them).
Not sure. True, the salience of a would-be outcome /can/ ground expectations about the actions of others, but such expectations can be defeated. Threats are a case in point. By definition, a (sincere) threat is a commitment to perform a certain non-maximizing action should the other person "misbehave"—eg, your threat to call in the lawyers if he does not take back his trash. This means (i) that your neighbor already has reason to believe that you will /not/ really do so. For it is cheaper for you simply to pay him $5. He expects that you will be "rational" (= do whatever maximizes your expected-utility). Still, suppose it is maximizing for you to be the sort of person who /would/ call in the lawyers, since, if you were like that, then he might be deterred. Even so, (ii) your neighbor might still have reason to believe that you are /not/ really like this. For the degree of non-maximization involved in carrying out such a threat may exceed the degree of non-maximization of not making it in the first place—for example, if you threatened to blow both of you up if he did not take back his trash, or (more plausibly) if calling in the lawyers approached this level of cost. He expects that, if you are going to be "rationally irrational", then you will do this in a "rational" way, and, in this case, that would be by not making any such over-the-top threat, even if it would work (if only it could be believed).
Either way, it may not be reasonable to believe some threat, even if it is focused on a Schelling point. This will limit what costs you can accept in order to deter you neighbor (if he will be deterred only threats costly to you), and give him some scope to counter-threaten you (if you will be deterred from your initial policy by threats not-so-costly to him).
I'm not claiming that the mechanism always works perfectly, any more than territorial behavior in animals does. It doesn't have to work perfectly in either case to explain a good deal about the pattern of behavior.
I wonder if a more precise purely empirical description of “rights” in a society S at a time T would simply be the psychological question of what its members descriptively believe about the moral and legal constellation of “rights” questions. This inquiry is not at all normative—it is a purely empirical question of what certain people believe at a time. It is admittedly less tractable than an approach predicated on something like “Schelling points” but I bet it would more accurately model the descriptive question we’re trying to figure out.
If rights are just what others expect you to be "successfully committed to defend" then they aren't rights as we understand them, just recognitions of power.
Say we have a bully and a wimp. The bully is succesfully committed to defending his right to take the wimp's lunch money and the wimp is unwilling to infringe on that right, so he surrenders his money to the bully. But is the will of the stronger a right if it is an expectation backed by force? Is the only thing that prevents the bully's will from becoming a right a stronger power, like the school principal? Or is there a deeper principle here?
I'm pretty satisfied with my account of rights here: https://neonomos.substack.com/p/there-are-no-natural-rights-without. Rights derive from those principles that reasonable people would agree to behind a veil of ignorance. Those principles themselves are subject to a schelling point, since they are based on publicly shared perceptions of what free people would agree to.
So I partly agree with your account of rights, as they are based on public perceptions, but there are certaintly other features which provide rights with a moral element.
"If rights are just what others expect you to be "successfully committed to defend" then they aren't rights as we understand them, just recognitions of power. "
You are missing the relevance of the commitment strategy.
Consider the case of territorial behavior. A 12 pound animal marks his territory and a 15 lb animal doesn't come on it because, although he can probably win the fight, winning it will do more damage to him than it is worth.
The 15 pound animal marks his territory, and the 12 pound animal doesn't come on it.
This is still assuming roughly equal strength where fighting presents more costs than it’s worth.
But once this assumption is relaxed and we’re dealing with parties of dissimilar strength, then under the commitment strategy, the “right” transfers to the stronger.
"derive from those principles that reasonable people would agree to"
As I understand it, this picture of rights is not at odds with the one described by Professor Friedman, though the latter looks deeper, explaining the matter in terms of the individual decision making *from which emerge* societal norms. The individual is prior in the ordo cognoscendi to the society. In fact Prof. Friedman also refers to evolved instinct which is prior still! It seems to me that the view you refer to and the argument made here by Prof Friedman are resolved by considering the shared interest people have in supporting each other's 'rights'. If I'm your neighbour, my supporting your resistance to your other neighbour's attempt to extort you is part of *my* commitment strategy. It's a sort of extended phenotype, I guess. Assuming that the shared 'strength' of you and me outmatches that of the other neighbour, who may be stronger than each of us individually, peaceful equilibrium will be maintained.
This is why the Bill of Rights and a written constitution were such important landmarks in government (as was the Magna Carta - limits on the power of the ruler, and Hammurabi's Code before that - limits on the power of individuals). There's a strong aspect of "might makes right" in all human interactions, but it's bad for society and bad for most individuals in society for that to be carried out regularly. There's too many sources of power to properly gauge who is stronger at any given moment (military, economic, physical, psychological, etc.) and the cost of actually fighting it out is extremely high on all participants. It's better for each of us to refrain from imposing our power on others, in exchange for a reciprocal commitment from others not to use their power over us.
Free Speech is not a matter of the strongest forces in a society deciding what can or cannot be said, but recognizing that in the future the powerful forces might be reversed and no one wants to be on the side getting shut down - so we tolerate bad speech from our enemies even when we are strong enough to stop them. We call for them to commit similarly when they are powerful enough. When one side encroaches on the agreement, the rest of society can call foul. This doesn't always happen, if too many people are against the speech - which is why you can't use certain words on broadcast TV (legally) or call someone the n-word (socially, sometimes legally).
Interesting link, especially "What are rights? They are entitlements paired with duties." Long ago, before I had started reading this kind of stuff, I came up with my own "self-control", defined as "the right, and duty, to control self and property, regardless of the distaste of others or harm to self". Many years later, I discovered "self-ownership". I am a bit slow picking up on all this!
It seems to me that no matter how much I like my self-control, others like self-ownership, and yet others like other definitions, there is no single correct way to define natural rights, human rights, or any others.
Hernando de Soto has a description of property which I quite like -- "If you take a walk through the countryside, from Indonesia to Peru, and you walk by field after field -- in each field a different dog is going to bark at you. Even dogs know what private property is all about. The only one who does not know it is the government." -- but it is cute more than correct. Dogs know boundaries only because their human has taught them, with a fence or by walking it.
That's true for all rights. The garbage dumping neighbor had learned from growing up in America that dumping garbage is wrong. Perhaps if he had lived in a communal area, it would have been natural. The book "The Comanche Empire" describes the Comanches (my paraphrase) as coming from a nomadic culture with no pack animal bigger than a dog, where a good kill was expected to be shared because there was no food preservation and it would rot; it was morally correct to steal from a hoarder. Then they met the Spanish and had no concept of factories, mines, textile mills, capital investments, employees, or any of the infrastructure which made the firearms, knives, axes, pots and pans, cloth, and other goods they wanted; to them, the Spanish were hoarders, scoundrels, degenerates, and it was moral, even expected, to steal from them, even though these goods did not rot like a fresh buffalo kill. Then they'd come back the next day to trade the same goods they had just stolen.
What about the stone age tribes who abandon surplus babies, the elderly, and cripples? The tribe does not have the resources to take care of them.
The older I get, the more I am convinced that morality is relative. There is no universal definition.
How will we communicate with space aliens? Their morality may assume replicators and unlimited free quantum energy, and they will have forgotten what a life of scarcity is like. We assume a life of scarcity and might think unlimited plenty is properly taken from those strange hoarders.
"Dogs know boundaries only because their human has taught them, with a fence or by walking it."
On the contrary, dogs have a deeply engrained sense of territory, which is *why* it is possible and in fact very easy to teach them about specific boundaries. I remember walking down a long beach in the Philippines where lots of dogs run free. You'll walk for 100 meters or so with a dog following you curiously; then the dog will abruptly stop and reluctantly leave you, while another dog takes his place. That's because the former dog knows he's reached the limit of his territory.
This is where I make a distinction between foundational principles and formal rules. Foundational principles will be universal, and would apply across all conscious beings, including aliens.
These would include general prohibitions against theft and harm, and affirmative requirements for consent, along with reasonable exceptions (necessity, duress, etc.).
Formal rules meanwhile are relative and derive from the application of these general principles to a society’s circumstances. So principles applied to the Comanches will lead to different rules and property rights than they would in 18th century Spain. The general prohibition against theft would more often be circumvented for less wealthy societies that rely more on perishables than others. But that doesn’t mean that certain principles don’t exist, it just means that some principles are more applicable than others in certain circumstances.
You are arguing against yourself. How can you claim a prohibition against theft is general, then turn around and say different rules apply to the Comanche and Spanish, and make no allowance for the culture clash when they met? Which general prohibition applies -- the Spanish against theft, or the Comanche against hoarding?
Ditto for harm with stone age tribes who can't support twins or cripples or the elderly?
As a Brit I was a little disappointed to discover in the last section of this post that your colleague's _name_ was Earl. The poem compensated me though.
This definition of government would seem to include any criminal organization that successfully taxes businesses or enforces a monopoly on some use of its territory, which I suppose means there would currently be thousands of governments in existence, with much overlap in territory. Is this intentional?
It would include a criminal organization whose activities are accepted by most of those involved, not necessarily in the sense of thinking they are legitimate but of not responding to them in the way they would respond to similar actions by others.
A mugger who doesn't get resisted because resisting him will get you killed, not merely because it costs more than the property he is taking is worth, isn't a government — the commitment is not to bear unlimited costs, just costs large relative to what is at stake.
If I understand this correctly, the key idea is that Schelling points influence one's predictions of others, viz that is it reasonable to believe that another will carry out a threat in defense of a salient status quo (eg, that you will go to great lengths to enforce your property rights), and not to believe that they will do so to promote some non-salient outcome (eg, that he will bear large costs if you don’t allow him to violate them).
Not sure. True, the salience of a would-be outcome /can/ ground expectations about the actions of others, but such expectations can be defeated. Threats are a case in point. By definition, a (sincere) threat is a commitment to perform a certain non-maximizing action should the other person "misbehave"—eg, your threat to call in the lawyers if he does not take back his trash. This means (i) that your neighbor already has reason to believe that you will /not/ really do so. For it is cheaper for you simply to pay him $5. He expects that you will be "rational" (= do whatever maximizes your expected-utility). Still, suppose it is maximizing for you to be the sort of person who /would/ call in the lawyers, since, if you were like that, then he might be deterred. Even so, (ii) your neighbor might still have reason to believe that you are /not/ really like this. For the degree of non-maximization involved in carrying out such a threat may exceed the degree of non-maximization of not making it in the first place—for example, if you threatened to blow both of you up if he did not take back his trash, or (more plausibly) if calling in the lawyers approached this level of cost. He expects that, if you are going to be "rationally irrational", then you will do this in a "rational" way, and, in this case, that would be by not making any such over-the-top threat, even if it would work (if only it could be believed).
Either way, it may not be reasonable to believe some threat, even if it is focused on a Schelling point. This will limit what costs you can accept in order to deter you neighbor (if he will be deterred only threats costly to you), and give him some scope to counter-threaten you (if you will be deterred from your initial policy by threats not-so-costly to him).
I'm not claiming that the mechanism always works perfectly, any more than territorial behavior in animals does. It doesn't have to work perfectly in either case to explain a good deal about the pattern of behavior.
I wonder if a more precise purely empirical description of “rights” in a society S at a time T would simply be the psychological question of what its members descriptively believe about the moral and legal constellation of “rights” questions. This inquiry is not at all normative—it is a purely empirical question of what certain people believe at a time. It is admittedly less tractable than an approach predicated on something like “Schelling points” but I bet it would more accurately model the descriptive question we’re trying to figure out.
If rights are just what others expect you to be "successfully committed to defend" then they aren't rights as we understand them, just recognitions of power.
Say we have a bully and a wimp. The bully is succesfully committed to defending his right to take the wimp's lunch money and the wimp is unwilling to infringe on that right, so he surrenders his money to the bully. But is the will of the stronger a right if it is an expectation backed by force? Is the only thing that prevents the bully's will from becoming a right a stronger power, like the school principal? Or is there a deeper principle here?
I'm pretty satisfied with my account of rights here: https://neonomos.substack.com/p/there-are-no-natural-rights-without. Rights derive from those principles that reasonable people would agree to behind a veil of ignorance. Those principles themselves are subject to a schelling point, since they are based on publicly shared perceptions of what free people would agree to.
So I partly agree with your account of rights, as they are based on public perceptions, but there are certaintly other features which provide rights with a moral element.
"If rights are just what others expect you to be "successfully committed to defend" then they aren't rights as we understand them, just recognitions of power. "
You are missing the relevance of the commitment strategy.
Consider the case of territorial behavior. A 12 pound animal marks his territory and a 15 lb animal doesn't come on it because, although he can probably win the fight, winning it will do more damage to him than it is worth.
The 15 pound animal marks his territory, and the 12 pound animal doesn't come on it.
Which of the two has more power?
This is still assuming roughly equal strength where fighting presents more costs than it’s worth.
But once this assumption is relaxed and we’re dealing with parties of dissimilar strength, then under the commitment strategy, the “right” transfers to the stronger.
"derive from those principles that reasonable people would agree to"
As I understand it, this picture of rights is not at odds with the one described by Professor Friedman, though the latter looks deeper, explaining the matter in terms of the individual decision making *from which emerge* societal norms. The individual is prior in the ordo cognoscendi to the society. In fact Prof. Friedman also refers to evolved instinct which is prior still! It seems to me that the view you refer to and the argument made here by Prof Friedman are resolved by considering the shared interest people have in supporting each other's 'rights'. If I'm your neighbour, my supporting your resistance to your other neighbour's attempt to extort you is part of *my* commitment strategy. It's a sort of extended phenotype, I guess. Assuming that the shared 'strength' of you and me outmatches that of the other neighbour, who may be stronger than each of us individually, peaceful equilibrium will be maintained.
This is why the Bill of Rights and a written constitution were such important landmarks in government (as was the Magna Carta - limits on the power of the ruler, and Hammurabi's Code before that - limits on the power of individuals). There's a strong aspect of "might makes right" in all human interactions, but it's bad for society and bad for most individuals in society for that to be carried out regularly. There's too many sources of power to properly gauge who is stronger at any given moment (military, economic, physical, psychological, etc.) and the cost of actually fighting it out is extremely high on all participants. It's better for each of us to refrain from imposing our power on others, in exchange for a reciprocal commitment from others not to use their power over us.
Free Speech is not a matter of the strongest forces in a society deciding what can or cannot be said, but recognizing that in the future the powerful forces might be reversed and no one wants to be on the side getting shut down - so we tolerate bad speech from our enemies even when we are strong enough to stop them. We call for them to commit similarly when they are powerful enough. When one side encroaches on the agreement, the rest of society can call foul. This doesn't always happen, if too many people are against the speech - which is why you can't use certain words on broadcast TV (legally) or call someone the n-word (socially, sometimes legally).
Interesting link, especially "What are rights? They are entitlements paired with duties." Long ago, before I had started reading this kind of stuff, I came up with my own "self-control", defined as "the right, and duty, to control self and property, regardless of the distaste of others or harm to self". Many years later, I discovered "self-ownership". I am a bit slow picking up on all this!
It seems to me that no matter how much I like my self-control, others like self-ownership, and yet others like other definitions, there is no single correct way to define natural rights, human rights, or any others.
Hernando de Soto has a description of property which I quite like -- "If you take a walk through the countryside, from Indonesia to Peru, and you walk by field after field -- in each field a different dog is going to bark at you. Even dogs know what private property is all about. The only one who does not know it is the government." -- but it is cute more than correct. Dogs know boundaries only because their human has taught them, with a fence or by walking it.
That's true for all rights. The garbage dumping neighbor had learned from growing up in America that dumping garbage is wrong. Perhaps if he had lived in a communal area, it would have been natural. The book "The Comanche Empire" describes the Comanches (my paraphrase) as coming from a nomadic culture with no pack animal bigger than a dog, where a good kill was expected to be shared because there was no food preservation and it would rot; it was morally correct to steal from a hoarder. Then they met the Spanish and had no concept of factories, mines, textile mills, capital investments, employees, or any of the infrastructure which made the firearms, knives, axes, pots and pans, cloth, and other goods they wanted; to them, the Spanish were hoarders, scoundrels, degenerates, and it was moral, even expected, to steal from them, even though these goods did not rot like a fresh buffalo kill. Then they'd come back the next day to trade the same goods they had just stolen.
What about the stone age tribes who abandon surplus babies, the elderly, and cripples? The tribe does not have the resources to take care of them.
The older I get, the more I am convinced that morality is relative. There is no universal definition.
How will we communicate with space aliens? Their morality may assume replicators and unlimited free quantum energy, and they will have forgotten what a life of scarcity is like. We assume a life of scarcity and might think unlimited plenty is properly taken from those strange hoarders.
"Dogs know boundaries only because their human has taught them, with a fence or by walking it."
On the contrary, dogs have a deeply engrained sense of territory, which is *why* it is possible and in fact very easy to teach them about specific boundaries. I remember walking down a long beach in the Philippines where lots of dogs run free. You'll walk for 100 meters or so with a dog following you curiously; then the dog will abruptly stop and reluctantly leave you, while another dog takes his place. That's because the former dog knows he's reached the limit of his territory.
This is where I make a distinction between foundational principles and formal rules. Foundational principles will be universal, and would apply across all conscious beings, including aliens.
These would include general prohibitions against theft and harm, and affirmative requirements for consent, along with reasonable exceptions (necessity, duress, etc.).
Formal rules meanwhile are relative and derive from the application of these general principles to a society’s circumstances. So principles applied to the Comanches will lead to different rules and property rights than they would in 18th century Spain. The general prohibition against theft would more often be circumvented for less wealthy societies that rely more on perishables than others. But that doesn’t mean that certain principles don’t exist, it just means that some principles are more applicable than others in certain circumstances.
You are arguing against yourself. How can you claim a prohibition against theft is general, then turn around and say different rules apply to the Comanche and Spanish, and make no allowance for the culture clash when they met? Which general prohibition applies -- the Spanish against theft, or the Comanche against hoarding?
Ditto for harm with stone age tribes who can't support twins or cripples or the elderly?
There are no universal moralities.