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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: FIRST order? (intractability)
Message-ID: <jqbDBu30q.MBs@netcom.com>
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References: <3u5u6m$llk@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> <805851917snz@longley.demon.co.uk> <jqbDBsG1K.BEJ@netcom.com> <95Jul16.192506edt.6164@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 00:07:38 GMT
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In article <95Jul16.192506edt.6164@neat.cs.toronto.edu>,
Calvin Bruce Ostrum <cbo@cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
>In article <jqbDBsG1K.BEJ@netcom.com>
>   Jim Balter <jqb@netcom.com> wrote:
>
>| One form of behavior management used in the past was to put people into gas
>| chambers.  Flow and resource analysis was very useful for achieving the final
>| desired behavior.  I don't want to put the tools of behavior management into
>| the hands of what I consider to be a morally criminal class (the criminal and
>| "justice" institution).  In fact, I tend to think that any management of the
>| behavior of adults, beyond preventing them from harming others, is a moral
>| wrong.  Would you like to provide your extensional demonstration that I am
>| wrong to think so, or that this position is "irrational"?
>
>I can't provide a "extensional demonstration", but one problem with what
>you say, at least when it is said by many, is that there is no clear and
>obvious baseline from which to measure harm.  Usually a person who
>expresses a belief such as you have expressed does so because they 
>think the baseline is some kind of laissez-faire capitalism, or
>"libertarianism".  The appeal of this view is that it is very simple
>and avoids apparently intractable discussions about how society should
>be organised in order that we may reasonably call it just.   But this
>kind of attitude is often as much a religious faith as is a committment
>to behaviorism.  It ignores the fact that many people could be "harmed"
>by the institutions of laissez-faire property rights, in comparison to
>how they would fare in a more just and equitable set of institutions.

You are making a large number of assumptions here about what justifications I
or others may have, and what an elaboration of my views may be.  For instance,
I spoke of harm, and then you criticize me for ignoring harm done by "the
institutions of laissez-faire property rights".  But I am not a libertarian, I
do not pretend that only certain sorts of harms are real.  Perhaps you were
confused by my hypothetical contrast between American and Cuban prisons; I did
that intentionally to be in harmony with common nationalistic biases, not as
an indication of my actual beliefs about the two systems.  I provided a brief
glimpse of my views strictly as an example within the context of Longley's
comments about intensionality vs. extensionality and his subsequent
intensional characterizations of "irrational feelings".  This is not the
proper forum to go into depth about my political views.
-- 
<J Q B>

