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Specifically think tanks and organizations. Now I still think it's wacko, as are of course a lot of things about the man, but on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent.
Having one's rights end where those of a legal fiction begin is one of the more insane accepted beliefs of our time.
There's definitely a bi-partisan contingent of people who think corporations should shut the fuck up about politics, that their involvement amounts to bribery and that Citizens United was a bad decision.
It's of course a longstanding gripe in US lefty circles, "take the money out of politics" and so on, but individualistic libertarians on the right and even MAGA people don't hold woke corporations in their hearts. So RFK codes as a friend more than he does as an enemy.
I don't see how it can be coherent at all when organizations are simply groups of people. If a person expresses a belief, that's fine. But if a person brings 5 of his friends who all believe the same things together to form an organization and express those beliefs together, that's not allowed?
Isn't it weird then how their legal status is not that of simply a group of people? You could, if you wanted, replace every single person in an organization,, and the government would treat it as the same entity.
This is Ship of Theseus paradox and I don't see how it relates.
It's not, even if replacing everyone is instantaneous, it doesn't change anything I'm the example.
It relates to the question by demonstrating that organizations aren't just groups of people composing them, at least legally.
Fair enough.
If I'm understanding your point correctly, the same can be said of people themselves. You are not the same person (probably) as you were 10 years ago, but legally you are considered the same person. The legal status of a group is simply a shorthand because it's not feasible to continually update the listing of members in a group.
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Novel behaviors emerge out of collections of components. Locusts are harmless and even helpful when in their solitary phase, but subjecting them to enough density induces a far more destructive gregarious phase by a cascade of social and physiological changes.
To take a human example, I don't really care if someone does fentanyl alone in the confines of their own home. I guess it's sad if they die, but that's their life. But allowing large groups of fentanyl addicts to congregate and use together has damaging consequences far larger than the damage they inflict on themselves.
Unless you're a hyper-individualist, it's perfectly coherent to say it's reasonable for the government to regulate destructive collective behaviors while otherwise taking a hands off approach to individuals.
I would say that the obvious solution to preventing groups of fentanyl addicts from congregating is to stop individuals from using fentanyl in the first place. Further, I'm not sure that groups of people using fentanyl in and of itself is the problem, but the results of that such as homelessness and destitution. Suppose a group of otherwise functioning fentanyl addicts congregate to one of their homes and does fentanyl, then leaves afterwards and goes back to work and later goes back to their families. Is that a problem in your eyes? Conversely, if a single fentanyl addict is shitting in the street and yelling at passers by, is that not a problem simply because it's an individual?
They're both problems, but a large, concentrated group is worse. It drives the formation of consistent, predictable markets and behavioral norms. Concretely, 100 addicts spread out around the city are a much better problem to have than 100 addicts congregated on a single block. Once you have 100 on a single block, you make the market much more efficient, and political structures develop around those 100 addicts to defend them, advertise for them, and make it much harder to actually address the issue.
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Devil’s advocate, but it’s almost never just their life. Sooner or later someone has to pay the bill. So long as it’s possible to go outside and make a mess, the warped incentives of drugs will lead people to do so. And we’re a long way from the level of totalitarianism you’d need to make it impossible.
You can still say it's better for them to individually go outside and make a mess, then to allow groups of drug-zombies to collectively make a mess.
I suppose so.
I’m unhappy about individual drug use in the same way that I’m unhappy about individual suicides. You probably ought to have the right, but that won’t make the janitors feel much better.
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No it's not, it's completely bonkers. An organization - especially something like a think-tank - is just a group of people gathered for a common purpose. Anything that a member of the organization says can trivially be rebranded as the speech of one or more of the organization's component members.
My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.
Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?
The only coherent theory of rights that provides for organizations to have rights is one where those are privileges granted by the State, which are as revocable for corporations as they are for individuals.
I assume that by Gnon you mean god. But these are extremely bold assertions to make. The idea that there is a god, and that there is such a thing as rights in any sense other than that of a social contract, and that god gives you these rights... all these ideas should be justified by some kind of argument, I think, not just stated blankly. Because certainly not all of us here agree with any of these assertions. I personally agree with you about qualia. I think that in some sense of the word "god", there may be a god. The hard problem of consciousness is real. But I do not believe in a god who grants natural rights, unless by natural rights you mean something more like a striving for those rights that is inherent to being human.
My own opinion is that "rights" are a legal fiction. They are extremely important, but they have no existence outside the context of a society with its particular laws, habits, narratives, and power dynamics.
It's "Nature Or Nature's God" reversed, the Jeffersonian part of his attributes that doesn't require providence or miracles. I use that because the Liberal argument for rights ties itself specifically to that part of the idea and only requires an extremely limited form of Deism that's tantamount to Kantianism.
This I think defuses the rest of your argument. The existence of Nature and its game theoretic reality explicitly do not require belief in the supernatural. We are a certain way, which means that there is a category of rules that are good for us to follow to be good whatever-it-is-we-are, and that category is natural law, from which rights spring. God is a reification of this.
There are certainly patterns of behavior that are more adaptive for living in reality than other patterns of behavior are, but then to say that your individual natural rights come from those patterns is either extremely metaphorical or just inaccurate, depending on what you mean by "rights".
To have a "right" implies having a claim. And nature, from what I can tell, gives no-one any claims on itself. Why would any rights spring from a set of behavioral patterns that are adaptive for humans to follow?
How else do you understand the concept of Natural Law exactly?
A moral claim, yes. Not some receipt from power. Later reactions to Liberalism would end up opposed to this of course.
What is the aim of ethics? Flourishing. Eudaimonia.
You can attack the problem from a lot of angles, but be you Kant, Aristostle, Aquinas or Mill, you always end up requiring of humans that they be good at being human.
All logical approaches of ethics require then that the individual choose virtue consciously and from that stems various systems of political organization, Liberalism and its concept of natural rights being one of them.
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From the rights of the natural persons they are made up of.
Let's assume that rights are transferable or transitive, which they are not.
What then of organizations that only exist on paper as objects of ownership, that contain no people or people that have no rights? Are these rights revocable by the participants?
This is evidently not the source of such rights, corporations are treated as facsimile persons, and the rights they are granted are legal fictions that only exist by analogy and have no serious philosophical backing.
They may be agents of people who have rights, but they themselves possess no such thing.
Such an organization cannot do anything without a person being involved somehow. That includes corporations. If it does not do anything, the question of rights is moot.
The idea that if I make a film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, it's my right, but if I get together with a bunch of other people and make a better film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, that can be censored, makes no sense. And the no-rights frame makes it absolutely pernicious, because it means there's no reason the law cannot be such that organizations are forbidden from denigrating Hillary Clinton, but not from praising her.
There's a lot more to being a corporation than just working together. Incorporating provides considerable legal and financial protections which you wouldn't get on the basis of just working together with others. So in the proposed schema there's actually nothing stopping you from getting together with your collaborators and making the anti-HRC film of your dreams - but if you accidentally flood an entire town with sewage while recreating the tour bus moment you won't have the legal protections that a corporation would. If you're going to donate vast amounts of money to a political party/candidate or otherwise get seriously involved in politics, I don't think there's anything unreasonable about requiring you to give up the protections of corporate personhood to do so.
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How about you making that film on behalf of people who are not allowed to make such a film by themselves, such as Hillary Clinton and her agents?
The idea that you can launder bribes through this mechanism should be an argument against this being a coherent framing of the world rather than for it.
And that's regardless of whether you view bribing politicians as something that ultimately is a right or freedom.
I don't view it as that binary because to me the whole frame is wrong. Applying rights as a category to something that's not an individual is a category error that yields strange results as legal fictions always end up doing.
Hillary Clinton is certainly allowed to make a film about how bad she is, or how good she is.
Not beyond certain limits of funding she isn't. Isn't that the whole controversy?
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Of course individual rights are alienable. What "right" to life does a murder victim or conscripted soldier have? What "right" to free speech does a nativist Britbong have? Etc. etc. Even the founders admitted that rights only exist where people demand them and are willing to back up those demands with force if someone tries to take them away.
Hypercooperation and the formation of organizations is hard-coded into us.
At the very least, the organization would have the same rights as its constituent individuals, no?
Well there's two ways you can take the line of objection you're pointing at to Liberal theory.
One is Fascism and related radical syndicalist ideas whereby individuals are actually not real and the true protagonists of history and real persons are groups and nations and corporations, etc. I think this is more sound than most people like to admit. O'Brien makes a good point. But I still believe it's ultimately disproven by qualia and individual consciousness. If God wanted us to be ants, he'd make us ants.
The other is a less radical but no less incompatible with Liberalism form of Traditionalism. Either of the perrennial or integralist variety. This I think is less clearly invalidated, but it still as incomplete an account of the human condition as the Liberal one.
The Liberal concept of rights isn't quite as revocable as you're making it out to be because it's not pointing at something that always is instantiated and can't be violated. But at natural law and the game theory thereof. It's trying to build a metaphysical understanding of the individual experience of the world and then points at it to justify a morality that would have us be good whatever-it-is-that-we-are because to not do that is tyranny and bad government, which is the same thing.
(In this sense at least, Objectivists are a a truer continuation of Liberal philosophy than a lot of other things, despite Rand's animosity towards Kant.)
The modernist puts man as a cog in a machine. The traditionalist puts him as the organ of a living thing. But both deny something real about the individual experience this coercion begets. "Everywhere he is in chains" did not come out of nowhere. And yet, we live in the ruins of the radical liberation trying to destroy his bonds with others.
I don't have a neat post-liberal answer, but completely abandoning the liberal conception of rights doesn't seem wise to me, because the things that Hobbes and Locke gesture at true in some sense. They're just not a complete account.
I should hope there's a lot more than just two! Humanity is very adaptable!
Individuals are absolutely real. Group dynamics are also real. It's not an either-or proposition - humans are social individuals. As I originally said, trying to regulate groups but not individuals is ridiculous because the group is the individuals.
I don't know what you mean by "disproven" here, but this also just goes to show how trying to distinguish between "groups" or "organizations" and "individuals" is a lot harder than you'd think. Founder-effects and path-dependency are very real forces that impact individuals and their development and outlook! So is heritability, which gives rise to the subtle, yet substantial differences between populations that we observe all over the world! So is the Overton Window! Group dynamics affect everybody, even if they're not formally affiliated in an "organization," and likeminded people are going to find ways to cooperate and work together no matter how you try to prevent them.
What? Which and whose traditionalism? I'm confused what this has to do with restricting organizational behavior but not individuals.
Then they shouldn't have used the word "inalienable," which means "can't be taken or given away."
Who's abandoning rights? I'm not. I very much like the rights I have as an American, and am frequently rather obnoxiously patriotic about it with my friends. I just don't think that those "rights" are anything other than fragile current social consensuses that need to be handled with care - like beautiful Faberge eggs - in order to keep them around and pass them along, more-or-less-intact, to future generations.
Everyone's.
But they can't be given or taken away, only violated. Locke is very explicit about this. The man who is trampled by the tyrant still has his right. Because the right itself is a metaphysical construct of logic.
Fascism is so radical in its claims of the primacy of the State (which to a fascist is a metaphysical entity, not an administrative government) that the mere observation of one's individual will suffices to disprove it in my opinion. The Fascist has to dismiss such a conception as mental illness or renounce the more radical parts of his doctrine, which are the parts that interest us in this conversation anyway.
Then you don't believe in rights. You believe in traditions. Which is as I expected but has its own specific shortcomings which I point out. You are missing the metaphysical point that Liberalism has against such traditions which allowed it to destroy them so effectively.
We can very well defend the Liberal conception of Rights as a tradition instead of a metaphysical doctrine, indeed that is how they originated, as the traditions of Englishmen. But those are fit only for Englishman not for Man.
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Organizations often have privileges beyond those granted to individual members. Why should we be able to grant such privileges to organizations but not set restrictions on them?
Could you elaborate on what these privileges are? Because the obvious ones that come to mind are limited liability, which has some limitations and regulation regarding group formation, and tax advantages for nonprofits, which come with restrictions on governance, actions, and even speech -- 501(c)(3) organizations are largely prohibited from political action in favor of candidates.
Because "the combined group has more resources" is true, but seems pro-egalitarian: pooling resources allows larger expenditures (TV ads! Blimps!) that would only otherwise be accessible to the Musks and Bezoses of the world.
They don't have to serve in the military or importantly, to pay the same kind of taxes. Those seem pretty big.
The taxes, are different, although the people that make up corporations are still responsible for their own taxes and serving in the military. The Defense Production Act allows the President to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for "critical and strategic" goods, which is at least related.
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Practicality, for one. If your restrictions can be trivially circumvented by a constituent member of the organization publishing "in their own name" instead of in the name of the organization, you haven't meaningfully impaired or restricted anything, and have just incentivized the organization to go underground.
You say that like we don't do this on the regular for terrorist and criminal organizations. In a lot of countries it's a crime to re-form a banned organization.
Yes, because committing terrorism (or, more relevantly, conspiracy to commit terrorism or attempted terrorism) is equally illegal whether one or many people do it. The organization isn't restricted because it's an organization; it's restricted because of the illegal purpose.
But it is restricted as an organization.
Other people who have not participated at all in it are not allowed to form it again, even under a new name.
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Money out of politics? Is this what you think this is about?
No. It's about shaking down any company that does things that New York thinks is bad, or is associated with a persona non grata. Such as being funded by the Kochs.
Thinking that this is about getting corporations out of politics is among the more naive takes I've seen on this forum.
You think you're a cynic, but you're not nearly cynical enough. Politics isn't about policy or the effects of policy for the most part.
It's about signalling the right things to the right people. Politicians routinely support insane policies that would never actually be implemented or even do anything that furthers their goals on the sole motivation that those policies send the right signals.
"Build the wall", they say, and then don't literally build a literal wall, because what the people heard and care about is "I want to lower immigration", not the thing in itself.
What I'm trying to get at here is what tendency RFK is coming from and whether that tendency is reconcilable with that of Trump's electorate. That his actual policy positions are contradictory with those of Trump, or even with themselves, is immaterial.
RFK is the standard bearer of old school hippie leftists who are skeptical of the government, corporations and buy into every conspiracy theory under the sun, his alliance with Trump is a ritual that consecrates the alliance of that tradition with the generally syncretic MAGA movement. Or at least it's what the Trump campaign is trying to make it into.
The wall was synechdoche, not metaphor. There is indeed a literal wall involved, but it's also part of lowering immigration.
Well more of a fence. But you get my point.
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This isn't even cynicism, it's just taking him at his word.
Noted businessman Trump is not exactly the kind of guy who I would say is skeptical of corporations. The argument you are making here seems incoherent - RFK is against corporations, we must imagine Trump is too, therefore they go together. Then you confusingly heap the campaign finance angle on it for some reason even though nobody is talking about that.
And yet Caesar is no less the ally of the plebs because he is himself a patrician.
The distinction you are not seeing is the one delineated further down in the thread, between public companies as oligarchies and private companies as monarchies. Trump is a champion of the latter, of personal power and individualism.
This is compatible with old hippie individualism to some degree. It's also contradictory of course, but that doesn't and has never prevented syncretism. All that needs to happen is a depersonalization of the robber barons. Which is effectively what comes out of RFK's mouth when he wishes death on abstractions instead of specific names.
Everybody is talking about that.
There is a specter haunting the Western world. And his name is Managerialism.
All political conversations are ultimately about the ruling class and its enemies. Or they're not political conversations.
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