Saturday I visited Monticello, and was struck by hearing this story: Thomas Jefferson (TJ) brought slaves Sally & James Hemings with him to Paris. After 5 yrs, at ages 16 & 24, they could have stayed free in Paris, but they instead agreed to return to US as slaves. TJ agreed to free Sally’s future kids, and that James would be free in US after training replacements. The rest of their family had remained in US, she was pregnant w/ TJ child, James knew French & had a trade, and the French revolution had started.
The degree of moral reprehensibility surrounding Nazism, kidnappers, slaveowners, etc. (rightly so - don't hurt me) is a thought exercise much like a discussion espousing levels of greatness, e.g. discussing who is "the best" in a related field, be it sports, academia, politics, etc.
Discussing who is worst is different only in it's oppositive nature, not in it's lack of merit as a topic (well, it may have a relative lack of merit, but nonetheless). It's just as worthy in my mind as both are mental exercises.
Now, functionally, it does very little to just talk about gradations unless we do actually come up with words, like the TJ-like slaveowner being a "dick" versus "complete dick" versus "actual bagodix".
Sports and particularly baseball may have the longest tradition of gradation among it's participants so why not: "first ballot hall of shame slave owner", "hall of shame slaveowner", "five-time-all-asshole-slaveowner but never made the hall of shame", (TJ somewhere in this level), "cup of coffee slave owner", "career minor league slave owner" etc. etc.
Mainly glad I wasn't a slave and didn't have to decide at the time whether my enslavement was "effing horrible", or just "horrible".
The short answer is most certainly yes. If I found out a family member was enslaved by force I'd assume the absolute worst about the situation and their level of suffering. On the other hand finding out that they choose the situation over some other alternative causes me to believe they probably judged the enslavement to be less bad and thus I would think that you've hurt them less. But I do think that asking about people's family is a bit misleading because the emotional closeness there often reverses our moral judgements, e.g., generally we believe it is morally righteous to refuse to steal needed medication in some kind of triage situation but with our family members we tend to flip that and throw moral consideration out the window in favor of emotion that clouds our judgement.
I mean far from making our moral answers more clear when you pose hypotheticals about people's family being hurt you cause people to abandon their best moral responses (e.g. advocates of human prisons demanding blood when someone hurts their family members).
To give the fuller answer: depends what X is and how it is imposed. If you go figure out what X she will dislikes most and deliberately arrange for that to occur then maybe not (i.e. if she is crazy scared of dogs then specifically engineering that to be the alternative is particularly diabolical). If X is some bad state of affairs that many people unfortunately face as a matter of course that is viewed as unfortunate but not horrific by contemporary standards, e.g., having to work for your keep in a strange city, and you didn't deliberately arrange for that to be something my daughter is particularly averse to than yes it is less bad.
Actually, they were asked about their lives, mostly after they’d been freed. So we can hear it from them ... yes, Jefferson’s people could come and go, they did learn to read and write if they wanted to, and they did work for themselves. They had farms and sold produce and eggs to Jefferson and townspeople.
Oh, if we could only ask them if the fact they weren't free to come, go, educate themselves, and work for themselves as they pleased made a difference in their lives.
They were people. With dignity. Their legal status was slavery. They called themselves servants. Jefferson referred to them as the “souls in my family.”
Some of Jefferson’s slaves said they didn’t even know they were slaves until he died. In other words, the fact that they were “slaves” is more central to our lives than it was to theirs.
Hanson is interested in explicit contracts agreed upon in advance. A party to one of those having raised expectations as time goes on doesn't have a "lack of an actual and current agreement".
You said that "Letting it get too bad can literally topple countries", where "it" is "unscrupulous people will target people who have not yet learned to properly understand the value of those options and seek to get them to agree to give them away for much less than their value". You didn't provide any example of people agreeing to give anything away due to ignorance of the value of their options. I disagreed that revolt can be predicted from the objective conditions of the populace (that would be "deprivation theory"). To understand the actual reasons why political crises occur, I'd recommend checking out some of Peter Turchin's work on the overproduction of elites, who (rather than an oppressed underclass) are typically the drivers of such revolts.
Legal contracts don't matter here. Actual and current agreement (another way of saying consent) is what matters. If expectations rise and what is actually provided doesn't meet those expectations, that's the very definition of lack of an actual and current agreement. Completely consistent with what I'm saying.
I said nothing at all about deprivation being the cause. That's something you just pulled out from ... somewhere.
My point is still the same. Too many active contracts that don't match people's expectations of what those contracts were supposed to provide are bad for stability. Especially if they have no practical way to get out of them.
Another way to put this is that a "voluntary" contract where one of the parties misunderstood the contract to their detriment was not really voluntary at all. It's also a case where the expectations don't match the arrangement.
You didn't give a specific example, and I think you have a naive view of revolutions. Deprivation theory is wrong. That's why the most deprived people, like North Koreans, don't revolt and awful regimes can last a long time. Instead a "crisis of rising expectations" is more closely associated with revolutions.
So Robin Hanson writes about distinguishing between forced arrangements and similar ones entered into as an agreed contract. You make an argument about the latter, warning of revolution. Then when asked to provide an example you instead make vague references to cases where there weren't such contracts playing a significant role.
Pick any revolution in history where the people revolting can be said to have just cause. Every single one of them is an example of this in some way.
Granted, in many of them the people didn't lose their rights through contracts but never had a say in the first place, but that doesn't make for much of a difference. Whether (mass) consent exists today is much more important than whether consent existed in the past.
Joel, yes I would not legalize 3-year-olds selling themselves into slavery without an exit option or way to undo it later.
However, when I look at my own life, nonconsensual paternalism is actually more harmful to my interests than consensual foregoing of future options. Some nudging can be tolerated and of course we want to rule out things like jokes and "didn't read the agreement when I clicked continue" level things.
Short of that though, my interests are more harmed by people banning my choice set than people offering me bad choices (barring fraud). Suicide rights in particular are a clear example where parternalistic framing is abused to make me worse off.
Spoiler alert: People who use paternalistic language can also be malicious actors. And they also take options away from people. Usually without consent.
The degree of moral reprehensibility surrounding Nazism, kidnappers, slaveowners, etc. (rightly so - don't hurt me) is a thought exercise much like a discussion espousing levels of greatness, e.g. discussing who is "the best" in a related field, be it sports, academia, politics, etc.
Discussing who is worst is different only in it's oppositive nature, not in it's lack of merit as a topic (well, it may have a relative lack of merit, but nonetheless). It's just as worthy in my mind as both are mental exercises.
Now, functionally, it does very little to just talk about gradations unless we do actually come up with words, like the TJ-like slaveowner being a "dick" versus "complete dick" versus "actual bagodix".
Sports and particularly baseball may have the longest tradition of gradation among it's participants so why not: "first ballot hall of shame slave owner", "hall of shame slaveowner", "five-time-all-asshole-slaveowner but never made the hall of shame", (TJ somewhere in this level), "cup of coffee slave owner", "career minor league slave owner" etc. etc.
Mainly glad I wasn't a slave and didn't have to decide at the time whether my enslavement was "effing horrible", or just "horrible".
The short answer is most certainly yes. If I found out a family member was enslaved by force I'd assume the absolute worst about the situation and their level of suffering. On the other hand finding out that they choose the situation over some other alternative causes me to believe they probably judged the enslavement to be less bad and thus I would think that you've hurt them less. But I do think that asking about people's family is a bit misleading because the emotional closeness there often reverses our moral judgements, e.g., generally we believe it is morally righteous to refuse to steal needed medication in some kind of triage situation but with our family members we tend to flip that and throw moral consideration out the window in favor of emotion that clouds our judgement.
I mean far from making our moral answers more clear when you pose hypotheticals about people's family being hurt you cause people to abandon their best moral responses (e.g. advocates of human prisons demanding blood when someone hurts their family members).
To give the fuller answer: depends what X is and how it is imposed. If you go figure out what X she will dislikes most and deliberately arrange for that to occur then maybe not (i.e. if she is crazy scared of dogs then specifically engineering that to be the alternative is particularly diabolical). If X is some bad state of affairs that many people unfortunately face as a matter of course that is viewed as unfortunate but not horrific by contemporary standards, e.g., having to work for your keep in a strange city, and you didn't deliberately arrange for that to be something my daughter is particularly averse to than yes it is less bad.
Actually, they were asked about their lives, mostly after they’d been freed. So we can hear it from them ... yes, Jefferson’s people could come and go, they did learn to read and write if they wanted to, and they did work for themselves. They had farms and sold produce and eggs to Jefferson and townspeople.
Oh, if we could only ask them if the fact they weren't free to come, go, educate themselves, and work for themselves as they pleased made a difference in their lives.
They were people. With dignity. Their legal status was slavery. They called themselves servants. Jefferson referred to them as the “souls in my family.”
Some of Jefferson’s slaves said they didn’t even know they were slaves until he died. In other words, the fact that they were “slaves” is more central to our lives than it was to theirs.
They would deny that they haven't digested it. You are treating it more like a semantic stop sign, perhaps something that cannot be digested.
They. Were. Still. SLAVES.
If you bake a cherry pie for Slave Joseph's birthday, Slave Joseph is still a slave.
If you a!low Slave Sarah to keep her children with her, Slave Sarah is still a slave.
I don't know why this elemental fact is so hard to digest.
@debifranklin:disqus some treated their slaves better than others, that's all he's saying.
Hanson is interested in explicit contracts agreed upon in advance. A party to one of those having raised expectations as time goes on doesn't have a "lack of an actual and current agreement".
You said that "Letting it get too bad can literally topple countries", where "it" is "unscrupulous people will target people who have not yet learned to properly understand the value of those options and seek to get them to agree to give them away for much less than their value". You didn't provide any example of people agreeing to give anything away due to ignorance of the value of their options. I disagreed that revolt can be predicted from the objective conditions of the populace (that would be "deprivation theory"). To understand the actual reasons why political crises occur, I'd recommend checking out some of Peter Turchin's work on the overproduction of elites, who (rather than an oppressed underclass) are typically the drivers of such revolts.
Legal contracts don't matter here. Actual and current agreement (another way of saying consent) is what matters. If expectations rise and what is actually provided doesn't meet those expectations, that's the very definition of lack of an actual and current agreement. Completely consistent with what I'm saying.
I said nothing at all about deprivation being the cause. That's something you just pulled out from ... somewhere.
My point is still the same. Too many active contracts that don't match people's expectations of what those contracts were supposed to provide are bad for stability. Especially if they have no practical way to get out of them.
Another way to put this is that a "voluntary" contract where one of the parties misunderstood the contract to their detriment was not really voluntary at all. It's also a case where the expectations don't match the arrangement.
Like I said, I've been overconfident before in calibration exercises, and this isn't a topic I'm an expert on.
Agreed, but the 25% uncertainty figure you postulated is orders of magnitude too high.
You didn't give a specific example, and I think you have a naive view of revolutions. Deprivation theory is wrong. That's why the most deprived people, like North Koreans, don't revolt and awful regimes can last a long time. Instead a "crisis of rising expectations" is more closely associated with revolutions.
So Robin Hanson writes about distinguishing between forced arrangements and similar ones entered into as an agreed contract. You make an argument about the latter, warning of revolution. Then when asked to provide an example you instead make vague references to cases where there weren't such contracts playing a significant role.
Pick any revolution in history where the people revolting can be said to have just cause. Every single one of them is an example of this in some way.
Granted, in many of them the people didn't lose their rights through contracts but never had a say in the first place, but that doesn't make for much of a difference. Whether (mass) consent exists today is much more important than whether consent existed in the past.
Joel, yes I would not legalize 3-year-olds selling themselves into slavery without an exit option or way to undo it later.
However, when I look at my own life, nonconsensual paternalism is actually more harmful to my interests than consensual foregoing of future options. Some nudging can be tolerated and of course we want to rule out things like jokes and "didn't read the agreement when I clicked continue" level things.
Short of that though, my interests are more harmed by people banning my choice set than people offering me bad choices (barring fraud). Suicide rights in particular are a clear example where parternalistic framing is abused to make me worse off.
Spoiler alert: People who use paternalistic language can also be malicious actors. And they also take options away from people. Usually without consent.
(ignore)