Libertarians, property rights, and why bodies are irrelevant to the whole issue

Recently I've seen some libertarian rhetoric on Facebook that has made me think. The thing about libertarian rhetoric is that it's centered on a limited number of pretty steadfast concepts, unlike the tangled web of shifting D/R positions. Liberty or freedom is obviously one. Property is another. Property is taken as a fundamental right to be protected, along with life and the ever-cherished liberty - to the point where systems that do not acknowledge property are characterized as taking away property and infringing on that right. I think the way libertarians see it, protection of property is necessary so that each person can be a free individual. But that's not the only way to see it.

All individual rights constitute a limitation on the freedoms of others. This is expressed in the trope "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." But who is swinging fists and who is protecting their nose when it comes to property? Property is the right to exclude others from use of resources. It's the right to say "this is mine, you're not allowed to use it even if it's sitting idle, and if you try I'll call the fucking cops on you." If you think this is a fundamental right, then trespassers, squatters, P2P hosts, etc. are swinging fists and hitting the noses of property owners. But there is a reciprocal right: the right to use available resources to meet one's needs. These two are mutually exclusive. If you believe right-to-use is more fundamental than right-to-exclude-from-use, then property owners and enforcers are the ones who are swinging fists. (Thieves are in the wrong either way, as they seek to sequester property for themselves without consent.)

Where do we get the idea that property is so fundamental? Locke argued, and others have followed after him in accepting, that the right of property derives from bodies. That is to say, every person has property rights to their own body, and by mixing the labor of the body with other resources you acquire property rights to things outside yourself. It is hard to argue that one doesn't have the right to exclude others from one's body. To do so would be to turn an indifferent eye to rape, among other things, and undermine the basis for rights to life and liberty. But does a property-like right in the body necessitate property rights to other things?

Setting aside the whole "mixing" aspect of the argument, is it possible that you can have the same kind of rights with respect to other objects as you have for your body? I think not, and Rousseau makes an argument that illustrates why:

"Pufendorf says that just as one transfers his property to another by agreements and contracts, he can also divest himself of his liberty in someone else's favor. This, it seems to me, is a very bad argument, for in the first place, the property I alienate becomes something entirely foreign to me, and its abuse is unimportant to me, but it does matter to me that my liberty should not be abused, and without making myself guilty of the evil I shall be forced to do, I cannot leave myself open to becoming the instrument of crime." - Discourse on Inequality, second part, emphasis mine

In other words, since life, liberty, and any other right we might suppose to inhere in the body cannot be transferred away from us, cannot be treated such that we no longer have a vital interest in it - and as my own observation, is of a fundamentally different type of utility to whomever we might contract it to - these rights are meaningfully different than rights to control over transferable items. If you believe that property rights in objects are analogous to property rights in your body, then you ought to also believe that you can legitimately sell yourself into slavery - and while I'm sure there are some who do believe that, I suspect most libertarians would consider them the wacko wing.

So I think the traditional body-as-property argument is a red herring. The kind of rights you have over your body can't be the same as the rights you have over legal property, for the reasons discussed above. For similar reasons, they can't be the same as use rights over resources in a non-property system: one person's use of a resource has no bearing on anyone else unless they spoil or use up the resource, or use it for a harmful activity - but use of a person's body is ALWAYS relevant to that person, regardless of physical impact or intended consequence, and cannot be made otherwise. Bodies are a special case and thus irrelevant to the decision between use-rights and property-rights as the basis for individual liberty.

I'm not into pain

I'm not into pain. That may sound silly - most people aren't into pain, right? That's pretty much its purpose for existing, to tell us what not to do. But Reedies are some queer cats, and around senior year they start to get a little intense. At my last Symposium discussion we were talking about the rediscovery of Epicurean philosophy in the Renaissance and the practice of religious self-flagellation during the Middle Ages - and as a comparison, someone said "as Reedies, don't you think we're in pain much of the time?" Ermm... I try to avoid that. And then there's the little things, like the inconveniences people will put themselves into in order to spend all day in lab. I'm okay with taking an afternoon off from my thesis if I've got other shit to do. I've never really more than grazed the edges of "stress culture" before, but it's starting to pop up a lot lately.

 I know the general argument for pain being productive. "If you don't do hard things, you won't learn and grow." Eh, maybe a little, but that's far from a logically absolute statement. If you avoid hard things categorically, you'll miss out on a lot of opportunities for discovery. You have to do SOME hard things to open ALL your avenues of growth. But there are plenty of ways to build knowledge, skills, and experiences that don't seem hard and are often more efficient than the hard ways. Most importantly, the inverse is not true, which is where I think some "practical masochists" get turned around. The fact that an endeavor is difficult is NOT an indicator of its potential rewards. Don't assume straining yourself will bring good things unless you have an independent reason to believe so of the task at hand.

Not that I don't tolerate discomfort, inconvenience, or anxiety for the sake of learning - but there's got to be a balance. This is my life, man. I don't put myself through hell just for the promise of "I'LL FINISH WHAT I STARTED AND THE GREATER THE EFFORT THE SWEETER THE CROWN OF GLORY." Well, I did once, and y'know, the crown of glory in itself is overrated. It's the flowers and berries along the way that make it and if the crown's in the middle of a putrid swamp... pass.

That was Physics 200. That's what made all of this clear. It taught me to disvalue pain, not to think a challenge is worthy just because it's a challenge. And it cured any hyperexamination of my motives. I don't need to prove to anyone anymore that I'm not afraid of failure. I worked hard, succeeded (insofar as I got a good grade), and said "yeah that wasn't fun." I don't need to pursue arbitrary piles of successes and accomplishments if it's not going to be fun.

I dunno. Maybe this is just a long winded way of complaining that Reedies need to chill the fuck out. Nobody thinks it's a breeze, but I assume everyone who came here and stayed here is here because the pleasure is much more than the pain. Otherwise why would you do it? There are other fine and prestigious colleges with less homework and no thesis. The campus can't be populated by 1400 or even 700 tortured souls who simply believe suffering builds character. So what's the deal? Strange masochism or just people forgetting to put things in perspective?

Rationality, emotion, values and Vulcans

Back-posted from the FB note that made me realize I should just start blogging again:

First, I will say that in this piece I use "logical" and "rational" interchangeably. And that this piece was slightly inspired by the discussion of Logicomix at Symposium tonight.

Second, I will say that I don't think emotions are irrational. I think, however, that to elucidate their relationship to rationality one has to distinguish between two different senses of emotion - so let's start there.

One kind of emotion is the fleeting, temporal kind of emotion that arises in response to a specific situation. I'll call these feelings. People often think that feelings are irrational because the intense motivating quality they have is so transient, it seems whatever it is must be ephemeral and unreal. Some people embrace strong feelings as a part of their identity; others are disquieted by the uncontrolled madness they seem to bring.

The other kind of emotion could probably be better referred to as values. These are irreducible and enduring. They evoke consistent feelings when opposed or reflected upon, but even in the absence of feelings they can be abstractly known and articulated. One can dispassionately consider them, acknowledge that they themselves have no apparent basis, yet stand firm in the conviction that there is no better basis for behavior. They rarely change, except in the case of extreme (perhaps traumatic) life experiences, or when one simply discovers a deeper-lying value that accounts for both the generality of and any exceptions to the previously held value.

Sometimes people will also say that values are irrational due to their emotionality. This is the problem with Vulcans in Star Trek, and also the problem I have with Kant. Logic is perfectly fine for deducing conclusions from a set of premises, but you get nowhere without premises. Premises, postulates, axioms by definition cannot be proven. There are always irreducibles. So when it comes to rational human behavior, values are the premises. Emotions, in this particular sense, are the premises (along with factual beliefs, of course). Vulcans say "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few," but how can one determine the good of any number, if the people in question do not respond with happiness to anything? do not desire anything? How can even survival be classified as "good" without an emotional basis? Who is to say the universe is better now, or was better 10,000 years ago before agriculture, than it would be if all humanity died off and plastic-eating bacteria took over the Earth? Only us with our will to be here.

But surely feelings are truly irrational? Well, I don't believe that either. We don't simply have feelings for no reason. We have certain feelings in response to certain situations because of our previous conditioning, particularly early childhood conditioning, and conditioning has the kinds of effects it does because it made sense in our evolutionary past. We even have feelings that seem to come from no conditioning at all (whether this perception is necessarily always correct is beside my point) and straight from some bit of our brain that still thinks it's a lizard. Think of the lover who knows xe is in no danger of losing xir partner, even perhaps aspires to polyamory, and yet feels uncomfortable and jealous in the presence of a competing-gendered person that xir partner is close to. These feelings may not be appropriate, but they are rational. They come from a sequence of operations in the brain and can be followed back to their premises. The problem is that often these premises are hundreds of thousands of years old, or at least ten to a hundred years old, and no longer true.

This is why I view feelings with mild distaste and a good chunk of distance. Feelings are never "wrong," they can be wonderful, and they can even occasionally be useful, alerting you intuitively to incongruities you might have overlooked otherwise - but they are absolutely unreliable. It's for this reason that they should never be taken at face value unless the consequence is minimal, and often should be disregarded. Here I should hasten to clarify that I mean people should disregard their own feelings, and work to extinguish them, when the feelings are not consistent with their own values and factual beliefs. But while a person should not disregard the feelings of another - to do so would be disrespectful, not to mention a poor conflict avoidance strategy - a person experiencing feelings also should not demand that others take responsibility for them.

I hesitate even to bring up for critique the concept of "validating" a person's feelings because it is so widespread and generally positively regarded, and perhaps I misunderstand the intended meaning - but it seems that demands for "validation" are an attempt to make the other person accept unexamined feelings as truth. I can accept that a person feels a certain way, I can perhaps "validate" their feeling by agreeing with it if it is based on values and factual beliefs that align with mine, and if their values differ, I can agree to disagree. But if I can see no source for their feelings based in what I know of their premises, or any premises I believe in, then it seems unfair to expect my support in sustaining or acting out that feeling, when in fact I think they are either ignorant of facts or violating their own integrity to do so. I am happy to acknowledge feelings and be sympathetic to any suffering they may cause - I think this is what "validation" ought to mean. But I don't believe it's validating to a feeling to simply put it on a pedestal without analyzing to see whether it contains some real information, or if it's a chimerical impulse that we might learn to let go of.

So that's what I think about logic and emotions. Feelings are rational, but they are not necessarily derived from sincere values or true facts. They are the outputs of a more-or-less hardwired logic system that exists in communication with, but substantially independently of, what is commonly called "rational thought". Values, on the other hand, are half the basis of the logic system we use to make considered decisions - the "do Y" to the factual "given X". It gets a little muddy because optimizing feelings can be a value, but there are still multiple ways to achieve this - through environment manipulation or through self-training - giving one the choice of how to satisfy other priorities. Emotion is in fact an integral part of human rationality.