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fubarobfusco comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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Since I'm no longer maybe going to write a thesis on it, mostly I don't work on this a lot. Not lying, not stealing, and not attacking people does pretty good for everyday. There's sort of an informal checklist when I think something might be a right - the rights have to be reasonably consistent with each other, they're overwhelmingly negative rights and not positive ones, simpler ones are better, etc. This would be easier with a sample maybe-a-right but I haven't examined any of those recently.
If I may offer one —
Suppose that I am photographed on the street outside a place that has a bad reputation (with some people). The photographer might publish the photo, which could lead viewers to believe bad things of me.
One acquaintance of mine, M, claims that I have a right to forbid the photographer from publishing this photo; I have the right to control publicity about me or the use of my image, even though the picture was taken in public.
Another acquaintance, B, claims that the photographer has a freedom-of-speech right to publish it, so long as they do not explicitly say anything false about me. B believes that it would be nice of the photographer to ask my permission, but that I do not have a right to this niceness.
Still another acquaintance, R, says that it depends on who I am: if I am the mayor of Toronto, I have no right to control photos of me, since my actions are of public interest; but if I am a privately employed engineer of no public reputation, then I do have that right.
Okay, I'll walk through my process of apprehending and making a call on this situation. It looks like a good example, thanks for coming up with it.
The conflict here is between you, and the photographer - other persons in the story have opinions but aren't directly involved. The steps are that there was an opportunity to ask you if it was okay to photograph you (which the photographer passed over), the decision to photograph you, the opportunity to ask you if it's okay to publish it (which the photographer also passes over), and the decision currently at hand of whether to publish the photo. If there's a rights violation potential or actual, it's probably in one of those places. The statement of the problem doesn't suggest that you've committed any rights violations by happening to be in this location.
The fact that two chances to ask for consent have been passed up is suspicious. It's not a guarantee that something has gone wrong - the photographer is allowed to look at you without securing permission, for instance - but it's a red flag. In the normal course of things, people waive some of their rights when asked explicitly or by other mechanisms all the time. People waive their right to refuse sex, for instance, on a per-occasion basis in order to have non-rape sex.
You don't actually do anything in this story, except exist in a place that by stipulation you are quite entitled to be, so only the photographer might be committing a wrong here.
So the obvious candidate possibilities are that you have a right not to be photographed, or that you have the right not to have your likeness publicized, or that you have no such rights and the photographer may do as they like with the photograph provided no other wrongs (such as libel, a form of lying) are committed in so doing.
But earlier I said the photographer is allowed to look at you without permission. You're in a public place, where anyone, including photographers as an unspecial class of anyone, may walk by. The upshot of a photograph is that others, too, may look at you. Any of them could have walked by in real time and seen you without wronging you. There's no obvious mechanism by which a gap in time should change things. If one of the passersby had a photographic memory, that wouldn't change the fact that they could look at you. Similarly, the fact that people who live far away from this location might not have had a chance to show up in person and espy your presence, or the information that anything going on might be of interest, doesn't seem like it has anything to do with anything.
So it seems to me that the photographer is probably, at worst, being a dick. You do not have a right to prohibit someone from photographing you and publishing a photo of you unless something else is going on. (I feel like I should mention now that I hate this result. I don't photograph well and definitely don't like the idea of my likeness being used in any which way without my agreement. In fact, if the law allowed, I might even pursue someone who did this to me via legal routes, which - I hope obviously - are separate from ethical condemnation. In any event I'm not rigging this to suit myself.)
But supposing it were the other way around, your acquaintance R might still have a point. Assuming it's known that elected politicians are treated differently with respect to the use of their photographs, pursuing a career as a politician might constitute waiving one's right not to be photographed (if we had that right, which I concluded above we probably don't). In this counterfactual, this would apply to the mayor of Toronto, but not people who became public figures without doing anything wrong (that would be a potential rights forfeiture, particularly if they are a threat to the photograph-viewing population) or choosing to become public figures on purpose.
Ok, this is quite a detailed response and I appreciate the thought that went into writing it. However, from my perspective, it raises more questions than it answers. For example, you say things like this:
But why not ? I'm not asking this just to be a contrarian. For example, many people believe that all of us have a fundamental right to privacy; this would imply that you do, in fact, have the right to "prohibit someone from photographing you and publishing a photo of you". Presumably you disagree, but on what basis ?
Furthermore, you say that you
I don't see how that works. If you believe that a person has a right to photograph you and publish the photo without your permission; and yet you are launching a legal challenge against him for doing so; then are you not engaging in an immoral attack ? Sure, it's not a physical attack, but it's an attack nonetheless, and previously you stated (assuming I understood you correctly) that attacks on people who have violated no rights are immoral.
Can you tell me where I lost you in the description of why I do disagree?
No. This isn't how the right is framed. They don't have a right to do it; no one must behave in a way to protect their ability to do so; I don't have to stand still so they can get a clear shot, I don't have to go out in public, if I happen to own a news outlet I don't have to give them a platform, if I acquire a device that makes me look like a smudge of static to nearby cameras I can carry it around without this being morally problematic. (Perhaps unless I'm under some sort of agreement to be visible to security cameras, or something like that.) I just don't have the right to not be photographed. Remember that rights are overwhelmingly negative. The fact that someone commits no wrong by doing X does not imply that others commit a wrong by making X inconvenient or impossible.
(You're also being kind of overbroad in understanding my use of the word "attack", which was intended broadly, but not so broadly as to include "seeking legal recompense in response to an upsetting, by stipulation illegal, behavior which does not happen to constitute a violation of any intrinsic moral rights".)
You state that "you do not have a right to prohibit someone from photographing you", but I don't understand where this rule comes from. You expand on it in your explanation that follows, but again, I don't fully understand your reasoning. You say:
That makes sense to me, in that your rule is consistent with the rest of your system. I may even agree that it's a good idea from a consequentialist point of view. However, I still do not understand where the rule comes from. Is photographing you qualitatively different from murdering you (which would presumably be immoral), and if so, why ? Come to think of it, why are all rights negative ?
I may have misunderstood your goals. In launching a legal challenge, what do you hope to accomplish in terms of "recompense" ? Are you seeking to extract a fine from the photographer, or perhaps to restrict his freedom in some way, or both ?
Let's say that you seek a fine, and you succeed. How is that different, morally speaking, from breaking into his house and stealing the money ? In one case you use a lockpick; in the other one you use a lawyer; but in the end you still deprive the photographer of some of his money. Why does one action count as an attack, and the other does not ?
Now that I think of it, perhaps you would consider neither action to be an attack ? Once again, I'm not entirely sure I understand your position.
Are all rights negative? What about, say, the right to life, or the right to -not-starving-to-death?
Many people seem pretty jazzed about the idea of a "right to marriage" or a "right to insert-euphemism-for-abortion-here", based largely on the fact that our (as in, their and my) tribe considers the policies these imply applause lights. I have no idea what Alicorn thinks of this, though.
I'm fine with that kind of right existing in the legal sense and encourage all the ones you listed. I don't think anyone has a fundamental moral obligation to feed you or perform abortions for you or conduct a marriage ceremony for you, though you can often get them to agree to it anyway, empirically, with the use of money.
If I may, I'm curious on what basis you consider those rights a good idea? Is it just a whim? Are you worried real rights might be violated?
I'm not usually in favour of calling all these various things "rights", since it rather confuses things - as you're probably aware - but I must admit the "right to not-starving-to-death" sounds important.
Are you saying you would be OK with letting people starve to death? Or am I misunderstanding?
I think those rights-in-the-legal-sense are good for political and social reasons. Basically, I think they're prudent.
I don't think I am doing something wrong, right now, by having liquid savings while there exist charities that feed the hungry, some of whom are sufficiently food-insecure for that to make a difference to their survival. I bite the bullet if the starving person happens to be nearby: this doesn't affect their rights, and only rights have a claim on my moral obligations. I might choose to feed a starving person. I will support political policy that seems like it will get more starving people fed. I will tend to find myself emotionally distraught on contemplating that people are starving, so I'd resent the "OK with it" description. Also, when I have children, they will have positive claims on me and I will be morally obligated to see to it that they are fed. Other than that? I don't think we have to feed each other. It's super-erogatory.
What do you mean "comes from"? The rule in question fails to exist; it doesn't have to come from anywhere, it just has to not be. Do you think that it does be?
Someone photographing you has a different intention from someone murdering you. (If the photographer believed that taking a picture of you would, say, steal your soul, then I would hold them responsible for this bad behavior even though they are factually mistaken.)
I don't think literally all rights are negative. Positive rights are generally acquired when someone makes you a promise, or brings you into existence on purpose. (I think children have a lot of claim on their parents barring unusual circumstances.). But nothing has happened to create a positive obligation between you and a random photographer.
I don't actually know any jurisdiction's laws about publishing nonconsensual photographs. What I'd be looking for would probably depend on what I could reasonably expect to succeed at getting. This entire endeavor has left the moral sphere as long as I don't violate the photographer or anyone else's rights. My goal would probably be to discourage non-consensual photography of me and in general, as it's kind of a dick move, and to compensate myself (perhaps with money, since it's nicely fungible) for the unpleasantness of having been nonconsensually photographed. If I do not, in so doing, violate any rights, I can seek whatever is available, no problem.
This entire thing is actually complicated by the fact that I think political entities should guarantee an opportunity of exit - that if you can't live with your society's set of rules you should be shown out to any other place that will have you. Without that, there's definitely some tension on my moral system where it interacts with the law. If we had proper guarantee of exit, the photographer being around me at all constitutes agreement to live by applicable shared rules, which in this hypothetical include not nonconsenusally photographing each other (I don't know if that's a real rule, but supposing it is) and also not breaking into each other's houses and also producing fines when legally obliged to do so. In the absence of guarantee of exit it's complicated and annoying. This also gets really stupid around intellectual property laws, actually, if you really want to put the squeeze on my system. I'm just gonna say here that any system will stop working as nicely when people aren't cooperating with it.
I don't think I'd characterize burglary as "attack", but I already listed "stealing" separately in that shortlist of things.
I... am not sure what that paragraph means at all. In more detail, my question is twofold:
Once again, how do you know this ?
Fair enough; I was using "attack" in the general sense, meaning "an action whose purpose is to diminish an actor's well-being in some way".
That said, I'm not sure I understand your model of how the legal system interacts with morality. At one point, you said that the legal system is ethically neutral; I interpreted this to mean that you see the legal system as a tool, similar to a knife or a lockpick. Thus, when you said that you'd wield the legal system as a weapon against the photographer (or, more specifically, his money), I questioned the difference between doing that and wielding a lockpick to accomplish the same end. But now I'm beginning to suspect that my assumption was wrong, and that you see the legal system differently from a tool -- is that right ?
Depending on how you define "purpose", burglary still might not qualify. The purpose of a burglary isn't to harm its victims, it's to acquire their valuables; harm is a side effect.
Good point; in this case, the fact that the victims lose said valuables is merely a side effect of how physical reality works.
Perhaps a better definition would be something like, "an action at least one of whose unavoidable and easily predictable effects includes the diminishing of another actor's well-being".
Rights are a characteristic of personhood. Personhood emerges out of general intelligence and maybe other factors that I don't fully understand. Rights are that which it is wrong to violate; they are neither laws of physics nor heuristic approximations of anything. They are their own thing. I do think they are necessary-given-personhood.
Can you tell me where I lost you in the detailed description of what my process to determine that people don't have that right was? I wrote down the whole thing as best I could.
Promises are the sort of thing that generates positive rights because that's what "promise" means. If it doesn't do that, it's something other than a promise. (At least formally. You could have other definitions for the same word. The particular sense in which I use "promise" is this thing, though.)
I think if I were you I'd be really careful with my paraphrasing. I'm not going to object to this one in particular, but it brought me up short.
The legal system is many things; it definitely works as a tool for problems like collective action, coordination problems, deterrence of disrupting the social order, and more. I'm not sure what you're reading into the word "tool" so I'm not sure whether I want to claim to see it exclusively as a tool or not.
I want to ask "why", because I don't fully understand this answer, but I fear that I must ask the more difficult question first: what do you mean by "personhood" ? I know it can be a tricky question, but I don't think I'll be able to figure out your position, otherwise. However, this next line gave me pause, as well:
Since I am not a deontologist (as far as I know, at least) I read this as saying: "rights are sets of rules that describe actions which any person (pending Alicorn's definition of personhood) must avoid at all costs". Is that what "wrong to violate" means ?
I'm having trouble with the "process" part. From my perspective, whenever I ask you, "how do you know whether a person has the right X", you either list a bunch of additional rights that would be violated if people didn't have the right X; or derive right X from other rights, whose origin I don't fully understand, either. Clearly I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is.
I do acknowledge that your system of rights makes a sort of sense; but the only way I know of interpreting this system is to look at it and ask, "will these rules, if implemented, result in a world that is better, or at least as good as, the world we live in now ?" That is, from my perspective, the rules are instrumental but not terminal values. As far as I understand, deontologists treat rights as terminal values -- is that correct ?
I did not want to make it sound like I'm putting words in your mouth. Whenever I say something like, "you, Alicorn, believe X"; I only mean something like, "to the best of my understanding, which may be incorrect or incomplete, Alicorn believes X, please correct me if this is not so".
By "tool", I mean something like, "a non-sapient entity which a sapient agent may use in order to more easily accomplish a limited set of tasks". For example, a hammer is a tool for driving nails into wood (or other materials). The "grep" command is a tool for searching text files. The civil legal system could be seen as a tool for extracting damages from parties who wronged you in some way.
I believe (and you might disagree) that most tools (arguably, all tools, though weapons are a borderline case) are morally neutral. A hammer is neither good nor evil; it's just a hammer. I can use it to build shelter for a homeless man, thus performing a good act; or I could use it to smash that man's skull, thus performing an evil act; but it is the act (and possibly the person performing it) who is good or evil, not the hammer.
Where does your utility function come from?
These are good questions. It seems like deontologists have difficulty reconciling seeming conflicting rights.
In my main reply to the original post, I discuss some of the conflicts between truthfulness and privacy. If people have a right to not be lied to, and people also have privacy rights, then these rights could clash in some situations.