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Tordmor comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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I value individual responsibility for one's own life. As a corollary I value private property and rationality as means to attain the former.
From this I evaluate as good anything that respects property and allows for individual choices. Anything that violates property or impedes choice as bad.
Are you sure that is your real reason for valuing the latter? I doubt it.
"Are you sure that is your real reason for valuing the latter? I doubt it."
Why do you think you know my valuations better than me? What evidence do you have?
As for your bullet points, if I eat a sandwich nobody else can. That's inevitable. Taking responsibility for my own life means producing the sandwich I intend to eat or trade something else I produced for it. If I simply grab what other people produced I shift responsibility to them.
And on the other hand if I produced a sandwich and someone else eats it, I can no longer use the sandwich as I intended. Responsibility presupposes choice because I can not take on responsibility for something I have no choice over. And property simply is the right to choose.
Only the benefit of the doubt.
If you actually value private property because you value individual responsibility then your core value system is based on confusion. Assuming you meant "I value personal responsibility, I value private property, these two beliefs are politically aligned and here is one way that one can work well with the other" puts your position at least relatively close to sane.
No more than Chewbacca is an Ewok. He just isn't, even if they both happen to be creatures from Star Wars.
So, there's the problem. I was using property as "having the right to choose what is done with something". I looked it up in a dictionary but that wasn't helpful. So what is your definition of property?
Edit:
Wikipedia seems to be on my side: "Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property has the right to consume, sell, rent, mortgage, transfer, exchange or destroy their property, and/or to exclude others from doing these things." I think this boils down to "the right to choose what is done with it".
On a side note it seems that "personal property" is closer to what I meant than "private property".
Laws pertaining to personal property give me the reasonable expectation that someone else will take, indeed, insist on taking responsibility for punishing anyone who chooses to take my stuff. If I take too much responsibility for keeping my personal property I expect to be arrested. I have handed over responsibility in this instance so that I can be assured of my personal property. This is an acceptable (and necessary) compromise. Personal responsibility is at odds with reliance on social norms and laws enforced by others.
I am all in favor of personal property, individual choice and personal responsibility. They often come closely aligned, packaged together in a political ideology. Yet they are sometimes in conflict and one absolutely does not imply the other.