Kennedy: We each are entitled to recover money from you. But if Hoppe takes $2500 from you do I have any more legitimate a claim against him than against the casino?

I don’t know. Sometimes people who accept stolen goods certainly are obligated to return them to the owners. Sometimes they aren’t. The question is which category this case falls under. Does Hoppe know where the money comes from? And what’s he accepting the money for? It seems like both of these may be relevant to whether or not the act of accepting it makes him an accessory to the theft or not.

Stefan: Who then has a ‘right’ to any of the remaining 3 clocks? Why shouldn’t it be first-come first-serve?”

I think it should unless the claimaints make some kind of contractual agreement with each other to the contrary, and I mentioned this above. My question for Kennedy is whether, in each given case, anybody at all can lay claim on a first-come first-serve basis, or whether the class of people who can lay claim on a first-come first-serve basis is limited to the people from whom the loot was taken in the first place.

Mugabe and the regime he commands are appalling. But what makes you think that the white farmers in Zimbabwe have any legitimate claim to the land they’re sitting on? Because the colonial government of Rhodesia stole it, fair and square?

Richard,

If I accept your claims of non-supervenience, it’s unclear to me that this demonstrates anything remarkable about natural laws. It would demonstrate nothing, in particular, about whether natural laws apply necessarily or only contingently to the stuff our world is in fact made of (lead, gold, atoms, quarks, matter, whatever). At the strongest it would demonstrate that there are possible worlds made of alien stuff that behaves according to correspondingly alien laws. But it tells us nothing about the modal status of “Lead does not transmute into gold just by being put into such-and-such a shape.” Since pretty much all of our natural laws are already expressed using natural kind terms, it’d be hard for world-descriptions that systematically exclude them to tell us anything about the natural laws.

Second, why should we accept that a “purely non-dispositional account of the world” is even possible? What sort of purely non-dispositional properties do you have in mind? As an exercise, just try describing what qualities water and XYZ have in common with each other, without mentioning any dispositional properties at all. (Transparency, tastelessness, odorlessness, wetness, etc. are all qualities typically mentioned here, but none of them will do for your purposes: they all involve dispositions. Water, for example, is odorless whether you’re actually sniffing it or not, and XYZ would still be transparent even when it’s dark.)

Stephen: RAD — re: slavery — that’s why I used the word currently.

Well, you also used the phrase “has ever seen,” which would seem to suggest that it’s currently the worst seen either now or in the past, but it could be topped by something even worse later. If this is just a matter of miscommunication, though, never mind.

Jake: I just don’t think that a ten year old should be able to go into a business and purchase drugs.

Take it up with the parents or the shopkeep, then, since they’re the ones other than the kid who have a stake in the matter. What’s this got to do with whether or not the government should have the power to regulate or prohibit drug sales ex ante?

Given that the antecedent conditions are never satisfied in the actual world, it seems that both (A) and its negation are consistent with the actual physical phenomena. Presumably (A) is false, but it could be true of a world otherwise identical to our own, couldn’t it?

In order to be certain that this is true, don’t you have to hold that members of natural kinds don’t have any of their dispositional properties essentially?

If members of natural kinds (say, lead) have dispositional properties (say, chemical stability) essentially, then it may very well turn out that (for example) any possible world where you have X-shaped lead is a possible world where that lead will not transmute into gold. There might be possible worlds where leaden stuff does that, but that would be a possible world with an alien substance, unknown in our world, not a possible world with lead.

It’s open to you to claim that members of natural kinds only have dispositional properties contingently. But that will require some argument; it’s certainly not obvious to me, at least, that certain chemical dispositions aren’t part of the essence of (say) salt or gold or lead, or that certain biological dispositions aren’t part of the essence of (say) slugs or tigers or bats.

Alternatively, it’s open to you to claim that falling under a natural kind can entail having certain dispositional properties, but deny that natural kind membership supervenes on the “totality of our world’s actual spatiotemporal properties,” i.e. you could have possible worlds with perfectly identical “actual spatiotemporal properties,” but have one of them containing lead and the other containing an alien substance that’s like lead except it transmutes under the right (as-yet unfulfilled) conditions. But you’d have to give me some pretty burly argument to convince me that natural kind terms aren’t part of the basic description of the properties of the world as we know it. I don’t know how you’d even begin constructing a complete description of a world without ever using a natural kind term. (“Well, you see, these two worlds are exactly identical in their physical properties. But in W1 there is water and in W2 there is not.” Well, then, they’re not exactly identical in their physical properties.)

Stephen: Disclaimers aside, the War on Drug Users is currently the greatest violation of civil liberties this country has ever seen.

… Chattel slavery?

Nigel: Jake, why regulate it?

Nearly all “legalize and regulate” arguments are more or less explicitly made from fear that a principled stance against drug regulation as such is going to make us look bad, not going to fly with the electorate, etc. Maybe that’s not Jake’s idea, but the appeal to people’s hand-wringing responses isn’t reassuring.

The problem with this sort of argument is that it treats public opinion and people’s reactions to a suggestion like some kind of inert mass that you have to move around, rather than conclusions that can (should) be changed by giving reasons. I think pandering to people’s terror of unregulated markets is a moral and strategic mistake posing as “reasonableness;” better to emphasize the principled

Ian, if you’re claiming that “We the People,” through the medium of the Constitution, authorize the government to act under the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and that the “We” in question is supposed to be each of us, and not just the royal “We” being pushed by some smaller group of people, then I offer myself as empirical evidence that your claim is false. I was never asked whether or not I consent to the terms of the Constitution, or authorize the United States government to act on my behalf under the powers enumerated in it. If I were asked, I would refuse to authorize it. The Constitution does not place effective limits on state power, and explicitly provides for moral crimes that I would not authorize anyone to commit on my behalf (e.g. at least some powers of taxation). So would-be governors aren’t authorized to exercise the powers enumerated in the Constitution by everyone subject to it. I (as well as many others) refuse to give my consent.

You could still claim that even if I refuse to give would-be governors my authorization, it’s still true that most people subject to the Constitution do authorize would-be governors to exercise Constitutional powers, either tacitly or explicitly. This seems to be what you suggest when you mention that not enough people disagree with it enough to sustain a popular revolution as a response to my question.

But that line of argument has two problems. The first is internal: it actually undermines strict Constitutionalism rather than justifying it. After all, most American subjects also tacitly and explicitly authorize the gov’t to exercise all kinds of unenumerated, extra-Constitutional powers. If your argument actually demonstrates the legitimacy of enforcing the written Constitution, then it leaves you with no defense against parallel arguments for enforcing any unwritten prerogative (for welfare, warfare, education, regulation, …) that can claim majoritarian backing.

The second problem has to do with the position of “individual dissenters” (in this case, me). It may be true that you can authorize the government to take authority over you, and in so doing you’ve agreed to the demands it places on you within a limited set of powers (e.g. that it has the rightful authority to take excise taxes from you if you authorize it to act under the terms of the Constitution). But it’s quite another thing to claim that you (or anybody else) can authorize the U.S. government to take authority over me, or to enforce its demands on me. I didn’t authorize it to do that, and your “authorization” means less than nothing when the authority in question is over other people: that’s not yours to give.

Ian C: “Individual dissenters must recognize the requirement for regulations of interpersonal behaviors. Where I draw the line is when the laws begin to regulate individual behaviors.”

I agree that’s where to draw the line; I deny that it has anything in particular to do with the Constitution. The Constitution explicitly enumerates powers that invade the individual behaviors of innocent people (e.g. forcibly extracting taxes on peaceful commerce). And even if the Constitution did strictly limit itself to recognizing people’s rights, and to authorizing the defense of those rights against the invasions of others, it still wouldn’t establish any new obligation of obedience or any special authority for its officers. The obligation to act according to justice already existed without the Constitution, and men in government uniforms have no unique power or authority to defend people’s rights that distinguishes them in prerogatives, status, or authority from us ordinary civilians.

Artus, authorization is something that people give or refuse to give; a dead scrap of paper “authorizes” a policy only in the analogical sense that it can serve as a medium to convey authorization from the people who issue it. So, to return to the question, who authorizes the government to do what it does when it acts within the powers enumerated by the Constitution (by, say, using force to take money in the form of tariffs or excise taxes, as enumerated in Article I Section 8)? Is it you? Ian? Gouverneur Morris? Somebody else?

Artus Register: Even in the rare moments when our government’s actions are within the confines of the Constitution, it isn’t exercising a right, but rather doing something that it is authorized to do.

Authorized by whom?

Kennedy,

If I steal $1,000 each from you, Lopez, Lynette, and Sabotta, throw it all into a bag and shake it around, and then blow $1,500 at the casino, are the property rights for the remaining $2,500 completely unsalvageable? Can anyone at all lay claim to the remaining loot?