posted
This is my explanation of my political framework. I wrote it specifically to begin a dialog with some libertarians on an e-mail mailing list. I won't be able to edit it once I post it there so I wanted to fine tune it here first. I think that people here (libertarian or otherwise) will probably still disagree with some things, but I think those things will stem from differing values rather than interpretations of the facts.
I don't think I've made a mistake with my logic, but I may have. For the past few months I've been examining what I think about morality and what affect that should have on my future actions. This essay serves, in part, to help me find inconsistencies in some areas.
Starting from the Beginning
I do not believe in "rights." As much as I'd like there to be, there aren't little tags woven into the universe saying that people automatically deserve food, or shelter, or the right to vote, or the right to accumulate more material goods than you are capable of defending by force, or the right to experience happiness in proportion to the effort you put into life. You might naturally have access to those things, or you might not.
But people have the ability (not a right, just an ability) to make agreements with each other, and the option to cooperate or defect on those agreements. And overall, it seems that people like having the right to free speech and to be protected from thieves and ability to participate in a communal socioeconomic system. So they collectively decide on certain rights, and work together to enforce them.
If they didn't do that, rights would not exist.
Another fact of the universe is that people can be born (or forced) into situations they don't like. They might not have enough food, or shelter, or medicine. And they might find themselves locked into a social contract they don't like that they lack the influence to change. In some cases, that can be genuinely awful.
I'm a self interested agent, but due to genetics and upbringing, I care about situations that make people sad. Even people I don't know. Even people whose values are different from mine. My goal in life is to maximize my life satisfaction, but doing so requires me to make (some currently unknown amount) of effort to maximize other people's life satisfaction as well. Or trick myself into thinking I did.
Rights that I Care About
If I didn't have that bizarre value, I'd still care about rights, simply as a matter of negotiated self interest. If I want other people to behave as if I had freedom of expression and the right to own property, it's easiest if I participate in an agreement wherein everyone has that right. (Or at least, the people who don't have that right are a minority who are incapable of causing problems for the majority.)
There's a lot of rights I care about having for myself. The right to acquire an *infinite* amount of wealth and claiming *all* of the wealth I acquire for myself is not one of those things. The happiness research I've read and my own experience suggests that after acquiring enough income that you aren't constantly stressing about money for food and rent, happiness isn't really dependent on wealth. I'm already at a point where I have more money than I wish to spend. The fact that some portion of it goes to support a socioeconomic system is largely irrelevant, no matter what the socioeconomic system ends up spending it on and whether that system is evil.
If I didn't have my arbitrary values on helping other people, the only traits I'd care about my socioeconomic system are "if circumstances caused me, personally, to lose the income and wealth that I already have, how easy would it be to re-acquire them again so that I didn't have to stress out about money?"
My Arbitrary Values
Since my happiness is dependent on the welfare of others (or perception that I've tried, at least), I DO care about my socioeconomic system in ways that don't directly impact me. I care about being able to acquire wealth BEYOND what's necessary for my own happiness, so that I can use it to help other people. I care if the US government is wasting money on policies that don't work, because then it's taking money I could have put to good use and essentially trashing it. I care when the US government is doing things I consider actively immoral.
Things I care about include (but are not limited to), the following:
• People not having access to food and shelter • People not being treated with respect and dignity • People not having access to health care • People being forced by circumstance to do "level 1" tasks that meets their basic needs rather than chasing careers and lifestyles that would improve their overall life satisfaction. • People lacking the education (including rationality) to figure out HOW to improve their overall life satisfaction. • People being forced to participate in political, economic or social systems that they consider immoral or otherwise unsatisfactory, and lacking the resources to renegotiate fairly. • People not having access to great art. (This one is particularly random - I do not attempt to justify it, but it's there).
The difference between the way the world is and the way I would like it to be is enormous. My own influence on the world is (proportionately) small. I have to prioritize the things that I care about. I sometimes have to decide between an evil thing and a less evil thing. Or a good thing and a great thing. I have to figure out which ideas simply sound good and which will actually create a lasting, positive impact.
"People with above average wealth being demonized and forced to part with an unequal portion of that wealth to support a political system they don't like" is on the list of other people's problems that I care about. But it is at the bottom of the list. Above average wealth means you already have greater than average ability to affect the system and, if necessary, move to a different system. Confronted with the huge list of problems other people have, I need to prioritize.
The only reason I devote time to studying the problems of the wealthier-than-average (and the super rich in particular) is because it interacts with a lot of the other issues that I care about more, and I need to figure out what actually WORKS when it comes to maximizing my terminal values. Creating a system that people of above-average wealth WANT to remain a part of is an important instrumental goal. Creating a world where there is food for everyone and great works of art get financed will require people to work hard and provide venture capital to get things done.
I do not value small government for its own sake. If a small government produces a better world than a large government, great. If a large government produces a better world, fine.
And if your interests and values differ from mine, that's fine. I accept that some ways you strive to accomplish your goals may hamper my ability to accomplish mine. But I suspect there are still many goals we share that we can cooperate on, to produce the greatest possible equilibrium for the both of us.
[ April 16, 2011, 08:12 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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Right now, donate money to causes I support. After a bit of struggling last year with deciding which charity was the best use of my money, I went with the current top recommendation on givewell.org (even though I'm not sure it accomplishes what I want) just to get myself in the habit of donating meaningful amounts of money and assure myself that I wasn't just putting it off because I was lazy. I'm trying to figure out what to do by the end of this year - both in terms of budgeting for it seriously and finding causes that will produce the best benefits. I intend to start a thread about effective charity soon.
I'm currently evaluating whether I should be donating time as well, and where I'd be useful if that were the case. Right now time is more valuable to me than money. I have a bias towards not donating time because it's what I've been doing and I feel like I don't have enough time as it is. Despite my lofty values the fact is I DO still care about my own happiness, my own happiness is not ENTIRELY dependent on eliminating rampant suffering of others, and I'm sort of okay with being a less effective humanitarian if my own life is genuinely better for it. (Donating money is nice because it lets me improve the world without happiness-cost to myself, as long as I have an excess of money)
But I've also heard that being personally involved with important work is fulfilling and amazing and might actually make me feel more satisfied so long as I don't end up with too much responsibility and get burnt out from it.
I'm working on improving my social life, and I probably could be doing so in way that also accomplished something good. I don't expect to actually do so in the near future, and I don't pretend that's for any reason other than weird status quo bias.
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What about their goals, in the case of people whose goals are in direct, conflicting opposition with your own?
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Raymond, depending on the charity you give to and your own skill set, giving money is often of more use than giving time. For example, $10 to micronutrients supposedly results in $170 in net benefit. Odds are whatever you can do for the charity for an hour will be of less use than that $10. If you are a doctor, lawyer, nurse, etc, than perhaps the numbers will be better, but most of the time, the impersonal cash gift is of most use.
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That's an argument I've heard a lot recently, and I like it because it happens to be nice and easy for me to use. I was wary of getting too excited about it though, because it was so damn *convenient* for money to be more valuable than time that I was suspicious of my judgment. (Not a reason to DISBELIEVE it for sure, I've just made sure to remind myself not to let the convenience cloud my thinking)
There are still things that DO need to be done that require *someone* to do them, that would involve interacting in a community. Doing so would also probably help me meet cool people who care about the things I care about, as well as make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Since I was already budgeting time for improved social life, it seems like it should be worth my while to get involved in those things. (Not as a way to maximally impact the world, just to find other ways to improve it without cost to myself)
I haven't though, and that's mostly due to pure inertia. It's not the worst of things I could be (not) doing, but it makes me feel lame.
In any case, I'm definitely thinking a lot about the money side, so don't worry about that.
[ April 16, 2011, 10:30 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: What about their goals, in the case of people whose goals are in direct, conflicting opposition with your own?
It depends on the person and goals in question.
I haven't actually talked much to my primary target audience for this about the topic at hand (Libertarians in the NYC Rationalist Meetup group). We've had a few conversations about individual policies (public education in particular) where it was clear that we were coming from different worldviews and that it wasn't worth getting into specifics until everyone understood what each other's core values were.[1]
My intention with this is to explain my core values, and then figure out theirs, and then decide how/whether to proceed.
My suspicion is that (despite much lauded "rationality") their core values were rooted in vague ideas that are in fact contradictory or silly. (Specifically, that they expect me to care about their right to property, but not to care about other people's rights that by any objective measure should be more important).
My HOPE is that they'll read it and say "oh, yeah that belief of mine WAS dumb" and radically change their entire worldview instantaneously. Then our conflicting goals are no longer a problem!
Yeah. Something like that.
Footnote[1]: (I *think*, one of them describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, and my initial reaction to him was that his morality was purely selfish, but he periodically speaks up about how we're allowed to have "moral preferences" when other people are advocating moral selfishness. I noticed that I was confused and have tried not to form an opinion on him until he explains himself better)
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