🚀 go-pugleaf

>DATE:   Wed, 30 Sep 1992 13:30:13 GMT
>FROM:   Brian K. Yoder <brian@quake.sylmar.ca.us>
>
>In article <2926876536.0.p00004@psilink.com> p00004@psilink.com (Michael Smith) writes:
>>>DATE:   Fri, 18 Sep 1992 09:59:53 GMT
>>>FROM:   Brian K. Yoder <brian@quake.sylmar.ca.us>
>>> ...  I am of the opinion that destroying the 
>>>property of others is wrong.  Do you see a problem with that?
>
>> [analogy to Auscwitz railroads deleted]
>Since such railroads were "stolen property" (stolen by the government from 
>the previous owners) and since the property was being used to violate the
>rights of others (the concentration camp victims), it is a matter of 
>self-defense (even proxy self-defense) to bomb them.
>
>What it depends on is whether the activity violates someone else's rights.
>There is no such thing as a right to violate the rights of others.
>
>> ... nobody really 
>>gives a hang about comprehensive, abstract principles (like "private 
>>property"). Appeals to such principles are mere rhetoric.
>
>I have a surprise for you.  I am such a person.  I care a great deal about 
>comprehensive abstract principles.  Your admission is telling though.  You 
>apparently don;t care about ideas or principles.  Your claim is an admission
>that your use of words and ideas is merely a ruse to get your way rather than
>a way of learning about the world.  If you are admitting that your use of words
>has no relation to the facts of reality, why don;t you just shut up and go
>away?
>
>--Brian

Temper, temper. Two points:

1) I'm glad to see you agree with me in substance about the Auschwitz 
railroad analogy: the principle of private property there is secondary 
to the obvious rightness of stopping Nazis from killing folks. You 
apparently feel the need to justify this fairly uncontroversial 
conclusion, however, by constructing a legal case that the railroads 
were actually stolen property (untrue in fact, as far as I know). Having 
committed this somewhat insubstantial argument to paper -- or rather, to 
screen -- and apparently then realizing its flimsiness, you back it up 
with the much better argument that the railroads were being used to 
violate the "rights" of others, thus abrogating the RR's private property
rights.

Well, of course it's true that to violate the *rights* of others is 
*wrong*. Trouble is, it's tautologically true and therefore empty of 
concrete content. What's bad is certainly not good, what's ugly is not 
beautiful, what's boorish is not well-bred, and so on.
The crux is: just *what* --concretely -- is good, bad, ugly, 
beautiful; just what are a person's "rights"?

Here is where sweeping abstract principles (like private property, 
majority rule, due process etc.) don't help. Do I have a right to clean 
air? A nice view? A bigger apartment? Do I have the right to drive across 
town in ten minutes or less? On these matters people disagree, and every 
man jack of 'em will cite, with more or less purely *logical* 
consistency, some grand sweeping principle in his support. 
Unexceptionable principles, too, for the most part.

Factually, it simply isn't true that people reason down to concreta from 
an a priori commitment to abstract principles, e.g. "I believe in 
private property, therefore let the logging begin." Rather, people 
reason up from their own experiences, interests, and tastes. 
(Whether they know it or not.) And this is fine. Really. 
Don't be scared. To acknowledge this fact will not, repeat not, 
bring on a deluge of barbarism. Indeed, I personally think we're better 
off stressing the personal and concrete in our discussions, rather than 
getting lost in the trackless shadowlands of abstraction, where a person 
whose interests differ from ours may suddenly metamorphose into an enemy 
of Principle, Virtue, and Truth.  

2) Enough of Philosophy 101. (You're not alone, by the way; there are 
plenty of people out there who think Immanuel Kant was a deli owner, but
are still searching for the synthetic a priori.) On a more personal note:

I don't know you, you don't know me. Your claim to deep concern for 
transcendental principles is undoubtedly sincere. Somewhat uncritical 
and unanalyzed, perhaps; naif, even; but sincere. But you might have 
waited to get a little more experience of my "use of words and ideas" 
before characterizing it as you did. As it is, I'm afraid you've given 
us an example of how an inclination to identify one's own preferences 
with a general principle can have a bad effect on one's manners as well 
as one's thinking. 

--Michael Smith