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Strange7 comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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Well, there you go. Any restriction on freedom of contract can be rationalized as preventing something "harmful," one way or another.
And it's not a hard problem at all. It is in fact very simple: when people like something for ideological reasons, they will use the libertarian argument to support its legality, and when they dislike something ideologically, they will invent rationalizations for why the libertarian argument doesn't apply in this particular case. The only exceptions are actual libertarians, for whom the libertarian argument itself carries ideological weight, but they are an insignificant fringe minority. For everyone else, the libertarian argument is just a useful rhetorical tool to be employed and recognized only when it produces favorable conclusions.
In particular, when it comes to marriage, outside of the aforementioned libertarian fringe, there is a total and unanimous agreement that marriage is not a contract whose terms can be set freely, but rather an institution that is entered voluntarily, but whose terms are dictated (and can be changed at any subsequent time) by the state. (Even the prenuptial agreements allow only very limited and uncertain flexibility.) Therefore, when I hear a libertarian argument applied to marriage, I conclude that there are only two possibilities:
The speaker is an honest libertarian. However, this means either that he doesn't realize how wildly radical the implications of the libertarian position are, or that he actually supports these wild radical implications. (Suppose for example that a couple voluntarily sign a marriage contract stipulating death penalty, or even just flogging, for adultery. How can one oppose the enforcement of this contract without renouncing the libertarian principle?)
The speaker has an ideological vision of what the society should look like, and in particular, what the government-dictated universal terms of marriage should be (both with regards to the institution of marriage itself and its tremendous implications on all the other social institutions). He uses the libertarian argument because its implications happen to coincide with his ideological position in this particular situation, but he would never accept a libertarian argument in any other situation in which it would imply something disfavored by his ideology.
Personally I'd be okay with the flogging version. Some people are into that sort of thing. As for death... legitimate governments generally consider murder a fairly serious crime, and refuse to enforce contracts which would require illegal activity of the signatories. I'm comfortable with having the libertarian principle superceded by criminal law. The interesting part of the question is: is there any choice a person should be allowed to make about their self or property, where they should not have the option of committing to a specific choice in advance as part of a contract?
Read literally, this means that you're OK with any violation of the libertarian principle, as long as this violation happens to be formally codified as part of the criminal law. Is that really your position?
In short, yes. I also think that the range of activities covered by criminal law should be greatly reduced, e.g. possession of potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals should not be something people are imprisoned for.
I don't know of anyone who's into serious, blood-down-the-back flogging, although I'm not confident there aren't any, but supposing they are, doesn't that render it meaningless as a disincentive?
Even someone who regards the process itself as pleasurable or spiritually satisfying could logically recognize it as inconvenient, or prefer it in certain quantities at certain times. Compare, say, two people making a bet wherein the loser has to eat half a gallon of icecream in one sitting.
Maybe they want to encourage adultery.
Or, perhaps they expect to engage in adultery and feel guilty about it, but want the relationship to continue in such circumstances, so the flogging is a way to discharge those guilty feelings and get on with things.
Off-hand, I'd say not. What makes that the interesting part of the question, though? I don't know anyone who objects to the existence of voluntarily entered-into contracts, merely to the idea that they supersede or obviate the need for other social/legal/governmental mechanisms.
Really? How about these examples (given in the context of the contemporary common law jurisdictions):
You're allowed to commit suicide. (Assisting another person's suicide is still illegal, but legal penalties for one's own suicide attempt have been repealed for a long time.)
You're allowed to mutilate yourself.
You're allowed to act voluntarily as someone's slave or serf.
You're allowed to make yourself permanently available to someone for sexual acts.
You're allowed to remain permanently an adherent of a specific religion.
You're allowed to stay permanently confined to a small area, or even inside a single house.
All these are perfectly legal choices, and some of them aren't even very unusual. Do you believe that people should therefore be able to bind themselves contractually to make them?
Sort of, yeah. What I actually believe is that if the activity is problematic enough that I should not permit people to bind themselves contractually to perform it, it's not clear to me that I should allow people to perform it at all.
I don't necessarily endorse allowing all of those options in the first place, though.
The problem is for many of the items on Vladimir's list (especially the last 4) allowing the government to force people not to do them is also scary.
Well, OK.
First, let me clarify that my point was simply that if contracts are being relegated to the role of managing agreements among individuals to perform acceptable activities, and something else maintains the responsibility for managing what activities are acceptable, then I have no problem with relying on contracts to perform that role. But it doesn't follow from this that individual contracts can substitute for that "something else."
With respect to your articulation of "the" problem, though: I agree that there are activities that it's problematic to declare unacceptable, whether we do that by governments formally passing laws or by local communities enforcing more informal social norms.
I agree that for some of the items on Vladimir's list, allowing people to be forced not to do them, or to be forced to do them, is scary in some contexts. But whether they are being forced by their government, by a foreign government, by their neighbors, or by an independent commercial norm-enforcement agency, doesn't play a significant role in how scary I find it. If they are being forced by virtue of an arrangement they willingly entered into, I am somewhat more sanguine about it, but not infinitely so.
The objections I am aware of are to specific subcategories of contracts, such as variant marriage terms or multigenerational commitments.
A person can work for the benefit of another at the other's direction without receiving remuneration, but he can't contract into becoming the other's slave--that is, despite being free to act the part. Would you repeal the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery?
I was asking, not answering. Trying to point out a more interesting gray area, rather than standing back and accusing each other of unreasonable extremes. Where would you draw the line between "acting the part" and actual slavery?