What Would a Parliamentary System Look Like in the US?

Murali in reply to Joe Sal says:

@joe-sal

The problem is that however you divvy up social and individual constructs, even if coercion based on one gets you (extensionally) libertarian results, doing so does not seem to track what strikes us as wrong about particular instances of coercion.

What tracks our beliefs about instances of justified or unjustified coercion is whether we think we have conclusive reasons to endorse those acts. (When spelled out like that, the statement seems tautological) What can give you roughly libertarian results is the more fundamental principle to apply coercion only when each and every member of society (or some suitably idealised version of us) take ourselves to have adequate reasons to endorse such acts.

This better tracks what seems to be going wrong in certain central cases of illiberal coercion (think religious coercion etc), does not assume off the bat that property claims are absolute, but still, at the end of the day (arguably) gets you classical liberal results.Report

Murali in reply to Joe Sal says:

What do you mean individual construct? By social constructs, we normally tend to mean things which are the product of inter-subjective agreement. E.g. language is a social construct because the link between symbol and meaning has to be mutually agreed upon in order for communication to take place. The market value of a good is a social construct because it depends firstly on the agreement between buyer and seller and secondly on all the other actual and potential exchanges everyone else in society is willing to make. Any implementation of individual rights in a social context is also going to be a social construct in that in order for any system of rights to be implemented, people must mutually agree (for whatever reason) to respect those rights. It is bound up in various feelings of reciprocity and fairness that we have that we are willing to respect others rights only provided that they respect ours. Any humanly possible implementation is going to involve people keeping an eye out to what other people are doing before deciding to agree to the rules that define the rights. I would suppose that it is by now a rather banal hayekian point that these things are the product of human action but not of human design. But that could only be possible if the phenomenon itself is in a deep sense social (saying nothing about whether the social is reducible to the individual). We might after all imagine that if these constructs were some way individual, then their eventual form would reflect the conscious design of some individual. But we don’t ever see this when we examine the basic building blocks of a classical liberal order. (private property, individual rights, markets)Report

Murali in reply to Joe Sal says:

Here is where I depart from classical liberalism and do stand upon the notion that society is empirically the sum of its individual members.

You’re going to have to get a bit more complicated than that. Society cannot merely be the sum of its members, there has to be another ingredient. There are many ways to pick some N individuals in such a way that they are not members of the same society. This is important because one way of demarcating one society from another is by pointing to sets of rules that apply to all and only members of those societies*. One way of telling that the two of us are in different meat-space societies is that we owe (not necessarily in a moral sense, just in a legal or positive social rule sense) our taxes to different agencies. In fact the criterion I provide is still too crude. But some way of spelling out why everyone resident in the US belongs to the same society (even if they belong to different communities, clubs and associations) is going to end up pointing not just to geographic proximity (because people in new mexico are not part of the same society as those in mexico but are part of the same society as those in ohio even though the former is closer than the latter geographically) but also to the existence of some interpersonal rules which are in some sense non-optional for everyone in that society but not for those in others.

This gets relevant to how we cash out what to do in cases where people disagree about what kind of rule is to non-optionally apply to them. And one solution to this problem (i.e. the libertarian, classical liberal or perhaps even more basically liberal solution) is that the rules which applies non-optionally are the rules which maximise (or more precisely maximin) the optionality of rules for each person.

*This is still too simple as we often apply rules to outsiders who are visiting. But that’s an exception that we can put aside for now.Report