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?

Brandon Berg:

But by the very same logic, you’re not allowed to throw innocent people in jail to create the sort of society you want to live in.

But Brandon, you’re not entitled to do that.

Incarceration of the innocent is a moral crime and the victims of it are owed both release and proportional compensation from their victimizers.

That does not, contrary to your claims, entail that you can’t incarcerate anybody. “You can’t morally incarcerate the innocent” doesn’t entail “You can’t morally do anything that risks incarcerating the innocent.” But it does entail that you’re under some obligations of restraint.

First, you’re obliged to use violence only to the extent that it’s necessary to defend yourself and others from the threat posed by the individual person you’re using it against, since anything further involves not only taking a risk that you’ll harm the innocent, but taking a gratuitous risk that’s neither justified nor excused by the right of defense. You’re entitled, sometimes, to risk harming innocent people in order to defend against a concrete threat. You’re not entitled to risk harming anybody in order to preemptively ward off alleged future dangers posed by unspecified and unrelated third parties.

Second, you’re obliged not to use violence so as to make it impossible for you to compensate any innocent people that you may hurt, if you can possibly avoid it. If you’re going to risk hurting innocent people then you had better be prepared to do what you can to ameliorate or make up for the damage that you’ve caused, should it turn out that they were innocent after all.

Incarcerating people for crimes doesn’t categorically violate these obligations. Incarcerating alleged criminals just to serve as a “deterrant” to anonymous third parties does violate the first obligation, and you have no right to do that. Deliberately killing prisoners as a “deterrant” directly violates both of these obligations.

Either it’s okay to accept a certain false positive rate in the justice system because it ultimately makes us safer on average, or the rights of innocent people are sacrosanct, and we have to avoid punishing criminals altogether.

“A certain false positive rate?”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

—George Orwell (1946), “Politics and the English Language”

Dauntless: “You assert that a business owner would be breaking the ‘law’ by not withholding their employee’s taxes. I challenge you to post that law to this message board. Good luck finding it, though.”

Let’s say that tomorrow morning the United States Congress and the several states all pass a Constitutional amendment, stating that Congress has the power to impose an individual income tax, and each individual citizen is legally obliged to pay it. If they did this, would you recognize the authority of Congress to take your money from you by force?

If so, why do you think that the demand is made any less arbitrary just by putting it in writing?

If not, then why does it matter whether the government is working from written law or not? The “law” would be a naked usurpation without any moral excuse, whether or not it was formally written down.

Brandon Berg: Doesn’t the same logic apply to imprisonment? The state imprisons far more innocent individuals than it executes, and while it’s worse to be executed than to be imprisoned for twenty years and then released, imprisonment is still irreversible. A person may be released from prison, but one who has whiled away his youth in a cell can never really be made whole again.

I’m not a big fan of arguments from the possibility of innocence (plenty of innocent people are killed; but I think the death penalty is morally indefensible even when the condemned is clearly guilty as hell). But I don’t understand the argument that you’re making here. It’s true that you can’t get back the time lost while you were unjustly incarcerated, or undo the pain that was inflicted on you by the incarceration itself. But it’s not true that nothing can be done toward making you whole again: besides being released, you can also be compensated for the wrongful harm that was done to you. Whether or not that can ever fully make up for the wrong done you, it’s more than can be said for judicial murder of the innocent: there’s no possible compensation for the wrongfully executed. (Their estates can be paid off, but so what?) So how do you go from pointing out that no policy offers 100% restoration to the wronged to a defense of a policy that absolutely guarantees 0% restoration of the wronged?

Or, to put an AnCap spin on it, suppose you’re choosing between two privately-governed communities: One in which you have a .01% chance of being murdered and a .001% chance of being executed unjustly, or one in which you have a .02% chance of being murdered and no chance of being executed unjustly. Which do you pick?

I don’t know; I figure it depends in part on what you value in a society. But I think that this question actually changes the subject rather than responding to Sean’s point, anyway. He is not making a claim about what sort of society you should prefer to live in if you had to choose one. He’s making a claim about what you, personally, are or are not entitled to do: you are not entitled to commit premeditated murder, whether or not it helps produce the sort of society in which you would like to live. Now, maybe you think that he’s wrong about that; if you’re a strict consequentialist, for example, then one of the things you probably have to reject is the idea that, body count being equal, there’s any moral difference between doing murder and failing to prevent murder. But if so, that’s the point at which the argument needs to strike; offering two hypothetical societies for choice is just going to sidestep the point that Sean was explicitly trying to make.