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On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

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Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#61

Post by xpe »

virmundi wrote: post #49
xpe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, a man can wake up one day saying to himself, "Damn, I feel like a woman". If I don't accept that he is, if only for a fleeting moment, a woman, than I'm labeled a bigot. This comes across as a caricature of a serious issue. For what it is worth, whether I agree or disagree with you (or anyone), I strive not to mischaracterize your concerns. I would like to ask a favor. Please read [1] and come back her…

It’s not a mischaracterization. That is the platform of the trans positive groups. They say that sex and gender are divorced and anyone who does not agree with that are committing hate speech. Further there are those that advocate for fluidity of gender. They say that a single individual may float across the whole spectrum of gender in the same day. If I don’t use the proper pronoun at the right time for that person,…

> That is the platform of the trans positive groups.

Please include a link to some of these platforms.

> If I don’t use the proper pronoun at the right time for that person, again, I am committing hate speech.

This is a big claim -- please share a reference.

> If I say no one floats across the spectrum like that...

What is your basis for saying this?

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#62

Post by gentleman11 »

lukev wrote: post #24

This is, of course, an eloquent expression of a vital philosophy. We should be seriously grateful that it gained serious uptake through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us(1) the democracy and freedom we enjoy today. Everyone should read it. However, critical thought about how to run a just, fair society should not stop with 1859. Particularly in light of events in the 20th century, and with observations of the fa…

Curious why posts like this get downvoted so often. Is there something I am missing? It seems like a reasonable statement, and whether you agree with it or not, it’s worded in a way to encourage discussion

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#63

Post by phs318u »

dvt wrote: post #59
xpe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please answer my other question: >> Utilitarianism as the moral mechanism of social policy > "Is this a quotation? A phrase from a particular work? Could you share the context?"

Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America said it quite well: "Democratic laws generally tend to promote the welfare of the greatest possible number; for they emanate from the majority of the citizens, who are subject to error, but who cannot have an interest opposed to their own advantage." This is, by definition, utilitarianism (greatest amount of good, least amount of bad, and all that). [1] http://xroads.…

That's a great quote, but I'd suggest it is mistaken in its last clause. Citizens, including the majority, can and have indeed held interests opposed to their own advantage. This has happened in the past and continues to occur. I'd suggest this is precisely because they "are subject to error" - a fact which few powers have failed to exploit.

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#64

Post by lxdesk »

virmundi wrote: post #49
xpe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, a man can wake up one day saying to himself, "Damn, I feel like a woman". If I don't accept that he is, if only for a fleeting moment, a woman, than I'm labeled a bigot. This comes across as a caricature of a serious issue. For what it is worth, whether I agree or disagree with you (or anyone), I strive not to mischaracterize your concerns. I would like to ask a favor. Please read [1] and come back her…

It’s not a mischaracterization. That is the platform of the trans positive groups. They say that sex and gender are divorced and anyone who does not agree with that are committing hate speech. Further there are those that advocate for fluidity of gender. They say that a single individual may float across the whole spectrum of gender in the same day. If I don’t use the proper pronoun at the right time for that person,…

Let's put it this way. Trans people are researching the topic of sex and gender through active self-experimentation. They are claiming empiricism, and their direct experience makes them credible experts. They have produced facts backing their empirical claims, and certain of these claims are further backed up by other sources. You are wandering in, denying both facts and expertise and treating it as if it were crackpot theory, a simple matter of "believe whatever you want".

Now, denial of a factual argument is not hate in and of itself, but denying it on the premise of assigning no credit to the messenger, cherry-picking the weakest arguments and calling it "relativism" can be hateful, because it is indicative of a reality that is actively impeding the investigation of truth.

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#65

Post by smhmd »

newacct583 wrote: post #48
nine_k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You think personal liberties are at a low point? They are again under attack, as is free speech, mostly out of outwardly good intentions such as preserving justice, public safety, or even, ironically, inclusion. This is a perpetual conflict, though. > Everything that is marketed to us, that enters our political discourse, ... "You do your way", "how you want it, when you want it", etc ...as long as it's politically…

> A tyranny of majority is a thing :( It's a meme for sure. Whether it's a "thing" in the reality of modern American discourse is sort of an open question. The fact that the people most enthused with the idea of being suppressed by the tyrannical majority are members of the ruling party, dominant gender and most affluent racial demographics sorta makes the logical construction a bit complicated.

A tyranny of the majority is most certainly a thing. You defining that majority based on race and drawing conclusions is your call, not everyone's.

Coming from an Islamic country, minorities such as gay people or non-religious people cannot seek legal action without a strong sense of a chilling effect.

In the US, you have the electoral college as an attempt to amplify small state's voices to not have states with massive populations dictate who's president (at least in spirit, as I understand the implementation is far from perfect) which is understandable, since states are _first-class citizens_. The other thing, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that you have the house and the senate. The senate adheres to that first-class citizenship of states, while the house is a direct representation of citizens (blocks of them), which makes a tyranny of a majority (e.g. one-size-fits-all bill that suits people of California but wouldn't go well with the people of Wyoming) impossible.

So, if you don't feel like there is a tyranny of a majority in the US, you perhaps have to thank your legislative process for that. That sadly, does not map to private entities.

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#66

Post by newacct583 »

nine_k wrote: post #55
newacct583 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tyranny of majority is a thing :( It's a meme for sure. Whether it's a "thing" in the reality of modern American discourse is sort of an open question. The fact that the people most enthused with the idea of being suppressed by the tyrannical majority are members of the ruling party, dominant gender and most affluent racial demographics sorta makes the logical construction a bit complicated.

Do you think that racial segregation regulations, anti-gay regulations, long-gone anti-Jewish regulations and fresh anti-immigrant regulations were created against the will of the majority? Often the majority directly voted for them, like city-wide sundown laws. It takes a rather hard conscious effort to remember that other people freedoms need preserving if you value your own, because you are not always guaranteed b…

I don't disagree that it's happened as an issue of historical fact. I'm pointing out that the argument is most often deployed in defense of very much unsuppressed voices. And I'm implying strongly that it's being deployed in bad faith.

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#67

Post by DharmaPolice »

supernova87a wrote: post #23
arminiusreturns wrote: post #17

A classic everyone should read, especially today. Individual liberty is increasingly disregarded, belittled, and discarded, and I find that extremely dangerous. JSM is one of the handful of pillars of that thinking whose eloquence makes it accessible to all.

>A classic everyone should read, especially today. Individual liberty is increasingly disregarded, belittled, and discarded, and I find that extremely dangerous. JSM is one of the handful of pillars of that thinking whose eloquence makes it accessible to all. Wow, well I have to voice some public disbelief over this statement. Maybe you just write it as a reflex? You think personal liberties are at a low point? I mus…

>You think personal liberties are at a low point?

I'm not American but I think the underlying (philosophical) support for the type of liberty (of expression) that Mill is talking about is probably weaker than at some points in the past. I see more comments on Reddit bemoaning the 1st amendment usually indirectly but sometimes explicitly. The spirit of the old quote (usually misattributred to Voltaire) by Evelyn Beatrice Hall - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" seems to be really out of favour these days.

On top of that, the power that corporations are able to exert over public discourse is probably at an all time high. Newspapers were often/usually owned by elite interests but a lot of the street level debate used to take place in forums they didn't control (i.e. face to face). Now both the newspapers and the discussion platforms themselves are controlled by basically the sets of same people. There's a reflex to say "Well, YouTube banning you isn't censorship, just a private entity making a decision not to host your content" and that's true but it's not quite the full story. If Facebook, Google, Apple, et al all ban you (and particularly if your ISPs refuse to host your content or the payment processors refuse to handle your accounts) then that is not too far from the level of influence governments have when banning things. When people like Alex Jones are "de-platformed" we might chuckle (or cheer) as he's either a huckster or a lunatic (and possibly both) but you don't need much imagination to see that the same thing could happen to anyone else deemed to be too radical/dangerous in the future. Fortunately the internet is still very fragmented and there are probably thousands of hosts I could go to put up my website if I wanted. But if AWS/GCloud/Azure/Alibaba end up dominating the market completely will that alternative exist in the future? And even if it does if everyone is getting their news from Facebook/Twitter then maybe they will delete any mentions of my call for a general strike anyway.

Again, to be clear - that does not mean that there is less liberty today. There is unquestionably more. But the direction of travel in both these areas is concerning.

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#68

Post by cjslep »

dvt wrote: post #12

Just a few of the ideas that this seminal text brought to the fore: - The Marketplace of Ideas - The Harm Principle - Utilitarianism as the moral mechanism of social policy One of my all-time favorite pieces of political philosophy. I wish more people (not just philosophers or political scientists) took the time to read it. Also consider checking out Hobbes' Leviathan [1] and Rousseau's On the Social Contract [2]. [1…

I just finished Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourses, and I really recommend reading the Discourses as they paint a harrowing picture of how any government -- including democracies -- can become bent to a particular will and therefore lose its Sovereign mandate: it will sound very much like the modern USA. Whether that is true is best left for another time.

I'm currently reading the book's predecessor, John Locke's works Second Treatise and On Toleration.

I think one thing that is very important to these books on liberties that is missed is finding one with a good introduction that can put it in it's historical (read: dated) place. It is too easy to otherwise miss that Locke is not exactly anti-slavery, for example. Or that the "family debate" and role of the patriarchal family, that left the suffrage of women in doubt, was not addressed. Or that the whole struggle for their times was really a question of how to morally justify rule by people versus rule by monarch (and your suggestion of Hobbes' Leviathan is actually arguing for the monarchy, on the other side of the debate). And this debate was otherwise taken within the cultural context of "Wealthy, Man, Head of household", which may be wrong on all 4 counts today (the culture itself is changing, the discussion is no longer limited to the wealthy, men, nor head-of-household family units).

The "monarchy vs people" debate of their time is not an argument we are exactly having in real life. And what I've found by reading the works of this area is: just as fans of this kind of liberty love to out the onus on the "other side" that they need to consider these points, the fans of this kind of liberty really have an onus on them to need to continue the discussion and update it for the modern world: as I move from Plato to Locke to Rousseau their writing really do faithfully build off one another and so it should be possible today in 2020, and modern writers like Haidt (whose works I have also spent time reading) do not meet this bar, I feel.

Without this, simply reading these authors and saying "see, America, read this and be convinced" keeps giving everyone the burden of catching up on the 300-ish years of criticism of these works and discards those intraveneing years' political philosophy debates. A major setback, in my opinion, as I may have the time and willpower to earnestly become a read person of political philosophy, but that is certainly a luxury of a wealthy individual like me (and the founding fathers of the time) and not everyone can afford that (and economic disparity is also a key factor addressed by people such as Rousseau).

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#69

Post by dvt »

phs318u wrote: post #63
dvt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America said it quite well: "Democratic laws generally tend to promote the welfare of the greatest possible number; for they emanate from the majority of the citizens, who are subject to error, but who cannot have an interest opposed to their own advantage." This is, by definition, utilitarianism (greatest amount of good, least amount of bad, and all that). [1] http://xroads.…

That's a great quote, but I'd suggest it is mistaken in its last clause. Citizens, including the majority, can and have indeed held interests opposed to their own advantage. This has happened in the past and continues to occur. I'd suggest this is precisely because they "are subject to error" - a fact which few powers have failed to exploit.

I totally agree, and the most obvious example is Julius Caesar (of course!). A charitable interpretation, though, would push us to look at the "average case" (us engineers often solely look at the extremes), where Tocqueville I think has a point.

Re: On Liberty (1859) [pdf]

#70

Post by claudeganon »

A relevant quote that seems to always be passed over in discussion of this work-

“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.“

-which of course was intended as an expression of support for the British colonial project in India.

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