Topic: Hardcore libertarians: explain your anti-IP-rights position to me. (Read 6806 times)

As a libertarian minded person, I am not concerned with IP rights.   My concern is that excessive governmental regulation and abusive power does not infiltrated into the private life of the citizens which government is to protect.  This does not mean no regulations at all.  Government regulation is vital to prevent monopolies.   The power of the US government is killing us all.  We work to support the state but our labor should only be to support ourselves.

This sounds rediculous. How my music (copyrights protected) violates anything??

I would like to follow this discussion.  I could just use the notify function, but this is just my fourth post and I need a post count to break out of the newbie ghetto.

Alright, so we are on the same page. I misinterpreted some of what you were saying at first. Why I pressed the issue so hard is that some people I have been debating with lately are trying to convince me that conscious beings have intrinsic rights that exist outside of human perception - as if grass doesn't just reflect EM waves of a frequency we associate with green, but that the grass has an ethereal "greenness" that it radiates out for us to see. I wanted to know if there was some way to justify such a view of natural rights that didn't use religious or supernatural explanations of consciousness.

Right. And it took a complex understanding of the physics of color to know that. And there are some interesting subtleties. Physically, mix of yellow and blue light is nothing like green light. But it looks just like green light to us. That's because of the quirks of how we perceive color. Our perception of colors results from a mix of the physics of color, the actual colors of the objects we look at, and the way our perceptual 'hardware' works. And we needed to understand the science of how light works and how our eyes work to sort that out.

Precisely.

Of course. Poke out our eyes and we wouldn't know that grass has certain physical characteristics that cause it to look green.

Exactly. As long as we have eyes, we will see that the grass really is green. However, we may not quite know what's coming from the grass, what's coming from our eyes, and what's coming from the laws of physics. But the grass really is green -- it has real properties of the grass itself that make it look the color we call green.

For very good reasons, in ordinary cases, we simply say "the grass is green" as if this was a property purely inherent in the grass. We don't say "most grass looks the color we call green to people with ordinary color vision under typical lighting conditions". Why? Because when we say "is green", that's already what we mean -- that it looks green to people with ordinary vision under typical conditions. We should do the same things with rights, and we do. Most people just never realize they're doing that, just as they don't for colors, sounds, and so on.

We save these arguments for philosophy. When someone says "how do you know grass looks green to other people" and "how do you know colors aren't just in your head" and all that. But we all know these arguments are nonsense. It just takes us a bit of head scratching to explain why we were right all along, just as we knew for sure we were. You can try to call my perception of rights into question, but I know how to answer the objections. You cannot prove to me that I do not see what I know I see because I'm actually seeing it.

Correct. "green" is the experience you associate with electromagnetic radiation with a certain frequency. The electromagnetic waves exist outside of your mind, the experience does not. There is nothing "green" about the EM waves. It is only their interaction with the brain that gives rise to the experience of green.


The grass is still green only in the sense that because our brain would still function the same way, when we would see the same frequency of EM waves we would experience the same sensation.

When you say 'wipe everyone's brains', I can think of two different things you could mean:

1) We also wipe everyone's ability to empathize and our protective instinct we have for kids. In this case, we would not suddenly conjure up the idea that kids should not be tortured.
2) We wipe everyone's memories and past opinions, but our evolution-given instinct to empathize and protect kids remains. In this case, we would think up the idea that kids should have the right to not be tortured.

Edit: word order

How do you know? Before we understood what colors were, you could have argued that there was no green outside of someone's perception of green.

Of course. But imagine if you could somehow wipe everyone's thoughts and feelings about this issue away. If they started thinking about the issue, those thoughts and feelings would return and the widespread agreement would re-emerge. So something other than the thoughts and feelings must account for the thoughts and feelings.

If nobody ever looked at the grass, the sensation of green and the agreement that the grass looks green goes away. But the grass is still green, and as soon as someone looks at it, they will see that it is green. The greenness of the grass is what explains why it looks green when people look at it, not the sensation they get when they look at it.

My point is that there is no widespread agreement that children should have that right independent of anyone's thoughts or feelings. There is widespread agreement ONLY BECAUSE most people have thoughts and feelings on the issue.

That's mostly correct. You can't see what color something is in a darkened room. There are many reasons you may not be able to see it, no matter how much you try.

And if humans had evolved without light, there would be no colors. We did what we did, and as a result we have what we have.

How do you explain the widespread agreement that children have the right not to be tortured for pleasure independent of anyone's thoughts or feelings on the issue? Is it a coincidence? Or is there something in the real world, a part of objective reality, that corresponds to this? If there's a third alternative, I don't know what it is.

I'm still not entirely convinced we're on the same page. When you say "change the environment, and the rights change", it is as if you're implying that rights are a characteristic of the real world, and humans look at it and interpret what the new correct set of rights are. It is as if there is some absolute right and wrong for any given situation, and unless you are "broken", you should be able to see it after giving it some thought. In other words, your ability to empathize gives you some new insight into outside world. I disagree. I think our ability to empathize and our protective instincts only drive us to make up rights that we convince our fellow humans to enforce, with no one set of rights being 'more correct' or closer to the 'real' set of rights. If humans had evolved without needing to protect themselves or their loved ones, there would be no empathy and consequently there would be no idea of rights.

LOL. I'm going to start using eXclusive OR in regular speech from now on.

Not to imply that this applies to Toast, who I'm sure is a wonderful human being, but many people who are broken also have learned to lie about it. Many sociopaths learn to act like normal people by pretending to be the way they're supposed to be.

I amend my previous statement:
"You are not lying xor broken."

To be fair, Toast might be both. In fact, the statement you quoted precludes all options but Both or Neither. Just sayin'.




No, I don't think Toast is a child molester. Just pointing out an assumption. Carry on.

Right, that's because you know children have the right not to be tortured for fun. You are not lying or broken.

Exactly. You know that this is the right thing to do.

Oh, you're just using the word "right" to refer to something different from me. Our disagreement is purely verbal. When I say "right", I mean the *reason* we agree to structure society in this way. When you say "right", you mean the *fact* that we agreed to structure society this way. We have no real disagreement then. We both accept that both of these things exist.

Does the sky *always* look blue? Does the ground *always* look green? No, it's not that people in other societies have different right perception, it's that they are looking at different things. Just as color is a complex result of the interaction of the light landing on an object, the surface composition of that object, the position of the observer, and so on, so rights (and the perception of them) are also the result of the interaction of many things.

Just as we understood that color has something to do with the interaction of light and the thing the light bounces off of long before we understood it in detail, we understand that rights are the result of the interaction between human beings and their environment. Change the environment, and the rights change. I can't imagine any environment in which children would not have the right not to be tortured for pleasure, just as I can't imagine any way complete darkness could look yellow, but I can't prove it's impossible.

I think that it must take a really sick fuck to torture children for fun. I also would like to live in a society where children are not tortured for fun and where people who want to would be rehabilitated appropriately. I think children everywhere would agree with me. Therefore it is my opinion that we should make a legal social contract among all the people in this country to not torture children. We'll call this social contract a "right". We invented this right, and since most of us agree that it's a good one, we might even call it a more fundamental right. This right is particularly easy to "perceive" because most people come with the ability to empathize as a natural socio-biological mechanism for group preservation.

But you're claiming that ALL rights should be "perceivable" as clearly as this one, as if they exist in nature and we can observe them. I do not see how you could support in the face of evidence to the contrary in the form of contradictory social norms and moral codes in different parts of the world (for example: oppressive moral codes in some middle eastern countries. Are you claiming that ALL of those people [who were born and raised to believe in a certain set of morals] have a broken "rights perception"?).

Yes, exactly. You are supposed to directly perceive that children have a right not to be tortured for pleasure just as you perceive directly that the sky is blue. If you say you do not, you are lying or broken. I do. The vast majority of other people do. If you don't, something's wrong with you. We don't know what yet -- perhaps you are "rights blind".

No, that's not what I'm claiming. A painting of the sky is just as blue as the sky, even though someone made the painting blue. And no matter what we agreed or what our society said or did, it would be just as obvious to a normal human being that children have a right not to be tortured for pleasure. (Though I can imagine no situations where this wouldn't be the case, I can't be 100% sure no such situations exist. I have seen none and cannot imagine any. But who knows.) We don't fully understand the source of this right yet, but that it exists is a directly-observable fact. Anyone with normal "rights vision" can see it.

I'm being somewhat whimsical, but my point is quite serious. The vast majority of normal human beings (perhaps sociopaths can't) can directly perceive that other human beings have rights. You can make an argument that some of the rights we think we see are somehow illusory, just as our color vision can be fooled by many optical illusions. But you can't deny that we see what we see. Any arguments that claim we don't will simply be laughed at. Just as you would laugh at me if I tried to convince you that the sky and the grass actually look the same color to you.

Wait, I'm supposed to somehow "perceive rights directly"? What?

My understanding is that when I say "you have a right to not get beaten up by your neighbors", I mean "we live in a society where we generally agree that we would like to not get beaten up and we also have the primal ability to empathize with other human beings, so our laws (both written laws and unwritten moral codes) tell us that we should not beat you up or else the rest of society will punish us." It seems like you're claiming these rights somehow exist intrinsically and that we only discovered them. That makes absolutely no sense to me.

Sure, and in that case you wouldn't have been liable... but that's not what happened, so you are. If you think it's unfair to be blamed for causing an explosion that might have happened anyway, there's an easy way to avoid that: don't blow stuff up.

Adjusting damages based on wild speculation about what might have happened is just desperate wishful thinking.

If there were billions of people who interpreted colors differently, who didn't see some color differences we did and saw others we didn't, we could hardly call their perception "broken". At best we could call it different.

Likewise, it's awfully presumptuous to claim that you just happen to have perfect perception of rights when you're surrounded by people who perceive them differently. If anyone's perception is broken, what makes you so sure it's not yours?

Yes, we know that now because we understand the physical nature of light. But we were able to use colors long before we understood that.

They can be measured now, but we used them long before we knew how to measure them. As for us being able to prove they exist in nature, we used them validly for a very long time when the only way to prove they existed in nature was to point at something and say "Look! See the color?". We can do all the things for rights that we did for colors before we understood their physical nature. And we used colors validly.

People made that exact same argument about colors before we understood their physical nature. "If someone says the sky and grass are the same color, how can you prove them wrong? Colors exist only in the mind, so you can't use them."

We don't know how to measure rights yet, just as we once didn't know how to measure colors. But we can use them because we perceive them directly, just as we did with colors. If someone says "I believe I have a right to torture children for pleasure" or "The grass and the sky look the same color to me (under ordinary conditions)", all we can say is that they are either lying or somehow their perceptual mechanism is broken. It is impossible to convince a person that he does not see what he knows he does see.

I think you are wrong in this conclusion.  Some libertarians with libertarian leanings are also among the most ardent defenders of IP rights.   The question really is if you think ip exists.  If you do, then you feel that it should be protected from theft and bad faith contracts like any other property.   If you don't then you don't think a framework should exist to protect it.   Like with abortion there is a core belief at a different level then the politics itself that can have people of pretty much all political beliefs on both sides of these issues.