Clearly, it's not really worth my while saying or yours reading anything much more on the heckling and subsequent explusion at the Labour Party Conference, especially since it was already two days ago. So, I'm going to ask a couple of relatively quick questions - would we have heard about this as much or even at all, if it hadn't been a pensioner who is effectively morally unimpeachable by virtue of having fled from the Nazis and long-standing membership of the Party, and if we wouldn't have, what does that say about the meeja in this country, and does it mean that this has happened before, or even happens regularly? - point you in the general direction of Actually Existing for discussion of and comment on both the legislation apparently used to detain Mr. Wolfgang and his expulsion, and invite praise to be showered on KC Gordon of Llanllechid, Gwynedd, who managed on the Grauniad's letters page to find a way of connecting one famous heckling incident with another.
In related linking, Chicken Yoghurt's analysis of the Dear Leader's exercise in seeing how many sentences without verbs or an ounce of moral integrity in them can be strung together before some kind of combined syntactic and normative singularity opens up and swallows him whole a) is excellent and b) references - I think - an excellent Billy Bragg song.
In unrelated linking, Chris Brooke discovers that someone else noticed, in 1754, that Locke can't, on pain of inconsistency, have had a self-ownership theory of property rights, because if he did, all property would be theft from that which is held in common, since mixing my labour with something that someone else has rights too wouldn't give me a right to it, and all land is originally held in common. As long as we have a right to some minimum level of subsistence, then it seems likely that any self-ownership based claim for property will fail or be superfluous for these kinds of reasons, until that minimum level of subsistence is provided for all. This is because either the property being justified will be over the level of subsistence, and therefore could be redirected to provide the level of subsistence for those who lack it, meaning that the self-ownership claim is invalid because the person never had a right to it in the first place, or it will be exactly at or below the level of subsistence, in which case it is justified by the right to subsistence. I think it's plausible that we have a right to subsistence, therefore any self-ownership justification for property fails or is superfluous.
Friday, September 30, 2005
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8 comments:
My favourite was the Daily Mail getting all up in arms about the mistreatment of a person who they wouldn't have allowed into the country anyway even then, and who was fleeing from people they supported for a consdierable period of time. You've got to love consistancy
"who is effectively morally unimpeachable by virtue of having fled from the Nazis and long-standing membership of the Party": how do you know? (1) In my experience, many of the people who fled Germany were a striking demonstration of the fact that there were precious few liberals in Germany. Of course, a teenager might be exempt from that remark. (2) Many long-standing Labour members were pro-communist shit-bags: I don't know whether this chappy was, but I don't see why I should assume that he wasn't.
"all land is originally held in common": evidence? And meaning of "held in common"? "Right to subsistence": who has given us this right and who has the duty to provide the subsistence?
Dearieme,
Point taken about the heckler: still though, surely you can see why it makes it both more difficult to dismiss him and more attractive as a story. On the Locke stuff, Locke believes that land is originally held in common. Exactly what he means by this is an open question (the account of property is chapter 5 in the second treatise on civil government, if you want to have a look). The point is that this makes his account of property rights incompatible with a self-ownership reading: I personally think that more or less all questions about the historical origins of rights are totally normatively uninteresting. On the right to subsistence, a) moral rights - of this type at least - don't need to be granted, because they are possessed in virtue of simple moral agency; b) everyone else has a very strong pro tanto duty to provide the means to the fulfillment of that right, in Locke's case, for example, by not depriving people of access on reasonable terms to property.
The conference business: the expulsion of the old boy was, I suppose, within the power (rights?) of the organisers, but was a woeful display of the combination of incompetence and bullying that marks Blair's Labour. The police action in refusing him entry was just a spot of Blair's fascism.
"more or less all questions about the historical origins of rights are totally normatively uninteresting": you must surely be right, if only because the historical origins are so frequently utterly unknown.
"on resonable terms" collapse of stout argument?
Sorry to pester you, but since you seem to know about this sort of thing:-
(1) Why would one use such a weak basis as entirely notional history to justify a policy?
(2) Do such writers, as a rule, establish what commoners' rights actually were in, say, medieval England, or do they just assume some generalised commoners' rights?
Dearieme,
Locke's 'reasonable terms' meant the two provisos on appropriation, basically: that appropriations were illegitimate unless a) enough and as good was left for others and b) the products of what was taken were to be put to use/didn't go to waste. On the policy implications, depending on how you read Locke's account of the invention of money, the story he tells about property rights will either have little or no implications - perhaps some requirement for provision for the elderly, young and sick - or mean that all property is illegitimate. It's worth noting that Locke's theory isn't best understood as a Nozickean justice in transfer account, meaning that the justice or otherwise of the original acquisition may not be vital: what probably matters is that the purposes he identified property rights as having - being fruitful and multiplying as according to God's command, basically - are fulfilled. So the history, notional or otherwise, doesn't matter that much either way (it's actually one of the better 17th century philosophical anthropologies, I think). On the commoner's rights, I think Locke would distinguish between land held by a defined group of commoners, which would presumably be subject to the normative restrictions he places on all appropriation but otherwise be governed by whatever laws governed it, and land held in common, that is, with everyone in existence having equal rights to it. None of this is to necessarily endorse Locke's account, BTW.
Thank you for that.
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