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Papy on 9/8/2012 at 23:47

Quote Posted by DDL

the problem with your argument here is that (as noted by yakoob), "tyranny of the majority" is pretty much the logical outcome of the basic definition of democracy: government by the people. That's pretty much all the definition says. Everything else is handwavy sub-definitions.

No. You have the wrong idea of what is a democracy.

OK. Democracy is a fuzzy concept, but some notion of equality between individuals is essential. Without equal legislative power, there is no democracy. In a democracy, it doesn't matter if people belong to a very numerous and well organized group or if they are some kind of outcasts, everyone should be equal.

Of course, since we live together, conflicts between individuals are inevitable and this when voting and the concept of the majority getting the final word become useful and efficient tools. On the other hand, the problem with majority deciding is that it can quickly destroy the basic concept of democracy of equality between individuals.

I'm not saying that a majority is always a tyranny of a particular group over smaller groups, after all a majority is only a mathematical result and not necessarily the representation of a specific group, but in practice, our ideas are generally selfish and mainly the results of our own culture and of our own individual characteristics. Most of the time, we don't think about how to make a better society for everyone, we think about how to make a better society for ourselves and for people who share the characteristics as we do. And this is when voting is not between equal individuals anymore, but between groups. Worse, it's between unequal groups with their power being a direct result of numbers. This is when voting destroy democracies and change the system to a tyranny of the majority.

So voting and the idea that the majority decides are useful tools, but they are only that : tools. They do not define democracy, equality between individuals does. If a vote lead to inequality between individuals, then the vote is not democratic and should be rejected in the name of democracy.

Your argument was that following majority should be the ideal for a democratic party. It is not. It is the ideal of a populist party. The ideal of a democratic party is rather to always ensure that individuals are equals, no matter what the majority says.

I'll use your example as an illustration :

Quote Posted by DDL

If the majority disapproves of gays, wants gays to be hanged, and elects a party that does exactly that, then that is still democracy.

Democracy is about the concept of equality, not about the concepts of voting and majority. So if the majority disapproves of gays, and if they elect a party that does exactly that, then it's not a democracy anymore. It is as simple as that.

-

One last thing. Probably like you, I think "natural human rights" are an absurdity. The only natural right is the right of the strongest. But like the concepts of voting and majority, the concept of right is a useful tool.

catbarf on 10/8/2012 at 01:40

Quote Posted by DDL

A meritocracy would theoretically work better, except for the fact that the prime characteristic one needs to be skilled at to be in power is..staying in power, not 'actually making sensible decisions'. People who give press conferences saying how great they are (even if they do nothing) will appeal more than people who are quiet and just get on with actually being good at governing, so in practice would simply devolve into the sort of clusterfuck we have now. Plus how do you decide who's best for each job? Get a dictator to do it? :p

This is kind of out there, but I wonder if it would be more feasible to have a hybrid between a democracy and a meritocracy, where every person gets a vote but the 'value' of that vote is skewed by how competent the person is in the relevant field. I don't know how you'd implement that without leaving it open to abuse (someone has to make the tests and that someone would consequently have a lot of power), but I thought it might be an interesting concept.

CCCToad on 10/8/2012 at 04:58

Quote Posted by Yakoob

I can actually dig out a whole bunch of academics from my masters program who criticized democracy for exactly that - marginalizing minorities, sometimes to the point of their eventual cutlural destruction. "Majority representation" vs. "minority rights" is a whole big debate of its own in the world of political theory.

True, but European democracies do a much better job of mitigating that than a "winner take all" system like the US has, which tends to result in a binary electoral system. Even with that category of "democracies" the actual results can vary widely.

Quote:

(someone has to make the tests and that someone would consequently have a lot of power)

Or they'd find themselves with a lot of money.

demagogue on 10/8/2012 at 05:34

Well this is fun, a discussion from my old home field of political theory & democracy theory.

@CCCT, Parliamentary democracies have the complementary problem of over-powering minority groups relative to their actual public support though, cf. most of family & civil law in Israel is run by the far right religious party, and think of Green Parties in Europe... The other issue they have is encouraging politics to splinter (the very idea of a Green Party or a Pirate party...), as opposed to the American incentive to build a "big tent" platform that naturally brings a lot of groups into the fold, and has them compromising and moderating internally, and saving the slugging for cross-party platforms. Well, when everything is working properly. The Rep party has recently derailed from behaving like a rational party.

BTW, the basic lesson of US political history in a nutshell is the "ideological cleavage" that split the two major parties and made up the two "big tents". It's evolved over time, and there's tension for it to evolve again (along a cosmopolitan / nativist split).

I'd love to add some thoughts about political theory, but not so much time now. One thing for now though.

@DDL, there's of course a big issue where human rights "come from", but one thing that distinguishes them, how they actually function in a working legal system, is that, whatever they are, they are not subject to democratic decision-making and not "created by positive laws"... You cannot draft a law to create or abolish a fundamental human right; you can't make a contract to do it; you can't make a treaty to do it... And the enforcers (in the US) are unelected judges without terms that act solely under their own discretion and the law. They are drafted in constitutions, but most all constitutions have language to the effect that any list they give isn't the definitive list, there are others out there, and imply that the rights are pre-existing before the constitution; the language isn't creating them.

It is important to note that from the start of modern political theory, especially of the Lockean brand, the "solution" to the tyranny of the majority over the minority was the role of "rights", where there were certain rights even majority opinion could not vote on. Today we'd have categories like rights to life, bodily integrity, health, political rights (suffrage), some rights to culture, self-determination, food & water, housing, some economic rights (opportunity), some special rights for women, children, the infirm, and other vulnerable groups...

As for the positivist angle (they're created "by law"), it's kind of an academic question because they're built into the UN Charter, of which every country is a member and has adopted into their domestic law. The main issue in practice hasn't been whether they exist or not (no legal system seriously questions a fundamental right to life), but it's always been how to interpret fundamental rights into concrete cases, on the margins where it's not automatically clear how the right applies (so a firing squad execution without any trial is pretty clearly a violation, but what about water-boarding as an interrogation technique?). The devil is always in the details, and on the details, general principles don't always get you very far. You sometimes need something in text.

DDL on 10/8/2012 at 10:14

That does sort of presume that we're already dealing with a fairly enlightened society, though. There is nothing to stop a government running roughshod over any and all 'human rights', as and when they so choose. Yes, they might be ostracised by other (more enlightened) governments, but there's no actual physical law that prevents them doing so (and indeed, many do).

We could take it closer to home, and deal with the death penalty, which is a pretty major infringement of the "right to life" (though I'm intrigued that you specified execution without trial as being bad, implying that it's ok to remove a life if a judge says so -even here we have grey areas).
Or hell, the right to health (doing a bang-up job on that one, america! -though possibly getting better).
It's not clear-cut, nor is it set in stone.
In a sense, we should be hugely grateful that the societies we mostly all live in DO consider these things to be inalienable rights, since they're really about as arbitrary and mutable as any other societal conceit.

Papy: bear in mind that there are huge discrepancies in the interpretations of the concept of 'equality between individuals'. Look at founding era america: everyone was able to vote, and have their vote treated equally. Unless they were female, or didn't own property (or both!). No matter how you cut it, any decision under those situations is going to be "tyranny of males".

Hell, when black people later got to vote, it was actually QUANTIFIED exactly how much less "equal" they were than others. "We are all equal! You are 60% equal."

If your definition of democracy is that it considers all people equally (regardless of number), then there are relatively few (none?) democracies.
Plus any political system that would give equal weight to "the sensible behaviour coalition" comprised of 70% of the population, and to "the setting cats on fire and raping them party", comprised of one angry, angry flameproof man...is inherently stupid.

And you're missing the point, anyway: as a government, you still need to make decisions. And those decisions will not always be popular with everybody. If we assume that the people in office are elected by the majority (all votes are considered equally, like a good democratic system, but you're still going to need to end up with a winner or coalition of winners), then those people are going to enact policy based around their political ideology, which is what got them voted in in the first place. They do what most people want. BAM: tyranny of the majority.

Your concept of a system where everyone is treated as an equal at all times under all situations...isn't in any shape or form a workable concept for government. Hell, it's not even a workable concept for "three friends deciding which bar to go to", unless they're all in agreement 100% of the time.

At some point, any government will have to make a decision that a percentage of the population will not agree with. How would your conceptual idealised democracy deal with that?

(note, I'm genuinely curious)

demagogue on 10/8/2012 at 11:08

Quote Posted by DDL

I disagree that human rights is only for enlightened governments, or only works for them. But I'll explain my perspective on it.

Full disclosure, the Free Radio Burma is not a euphemism. I'm on the Burma border right now working with exile groups on human rights in Burma. So the simple answer is the Burmese government, too, is a member of many of the major human rights treaties, and in any event subject to customary law on human rights (as all states are). They are legal obligations in Burma as much as they are in the US & Europe. The Burmese government isn't breaking our laws. It's breaking its own laws.

And AFAIK all the Burmese civil society groups all stand for human rights, and are pressing the government for reforms. Forget about being ostracized by enlightened governments. Forget enlightened governments altogether. All we should care about is the Burmese people, for now largely only represented by civil society groups. The Burmese people are the ones appealing for human rights against their own government (which overthrew the results of the last democratic election so has never had legitimacy with its own people). The government is the one alienating & ostracizing its own people...

You raise this point that anybody can break a law and there's no physical law "stopping" them, but that was never what law was about. Law is more about assigning legitimacy to actions... It's a way to separate legitimate government action from illegitimate action. So while a power-hungry government can always run over whatever rights it wants, it can never be legitimate in them (with its own people) unless it's under the rule of law. Of course some governments could care less if they're legitimate, but looking at a lot of historical cases, it can make a difference.

Cf. when the USSR adopted the Helsinki Accords (on basic human rights); they became a kind of banner for what the civil society groups were after and people rallied around them. There's an argument it started the incubation for peristroika and the resistance groups that came a generation later. There are other case studies to look at, some more optimistic than others. It's very fact-sensitive. But especially in the Internet age, a government can't just hide in the shadows of obscurity anymore.

It's all very relevant to me. As we speak I'm teaching a course on the big human rights treaties (to which Burma is a member) to my Burmese law students to take back into Burma, especially into the cities and towns, so they can press the government locally (land confiscations, extrajudicial killings, rights to culture & self-determination for the ethnic groups, etc.) For some things, law is a better tool than guns... It's something that can't be changed just by whoever has the biggest arsenal. Even if you're weak, you can still be right and get your rightness documented for the world to see.

Edit: I don't want to miss the punchline either that everything I said applies to all states. Of the non-democracies still out there, they all have civil society groups representing the people and AFAIK they're all standing for human rights and a right to democracy... Not all their governments are willing to hear them out of course, but there's not really grounds anymore for saying democracy and rights are only for enlightened peoples (if there were even a way to distinguish that), or that these things only "belong" to the West but other people can't take ownership of them... Pretty much civil societies in every country have already taken ownership of them... It's pretty intuitive though. No population is ever going to be in favor of being arbitrarily arrested, or tortured, or executed without a trial, or forcible evicted from their homes, or restricted in what they can say or where they can go. Not all of them may realize that their government is bound to laws protecting them on these things (as all ~200 governments are), but it's just an intuitive thing in human nature that there's something wrong about it and the government doesn't have any right to do it beyond their contingent power-position at the moment.

DDL on 10/8/2012 at 11:21

All of that is fair enough (and indeed laudable): all I was pointing out was that any kind of law other than "physical law of the universe" is a conceit. A noble conceit, but ultimately a conceit nevertheless. Things like "killing people who disagree with you" are not wrong because they're inherently wrong (the universe gives no shits about morality), they're wrong because we as a collective social group say they are.
The stronger and more widely-shared a given view of "right" is, the further back in our cultural evolutionary history it goes, but it's still a social/cultural consensus, not a concrete rule of the universe.

The one physical law of the universe that could apply immutably to human society is "might is right" (like papy says): all else being equal, the stronger party will win. Definition of stronger will vary, obviously, but if push comes to shove, the party that shoves hardest will always win.

The rest is just a construct we build for ourselves to try and forget that (and hopefully we're generally doing ok at that).

demagogue on 10/8/2012 at 12:36

Now you're getting into pure metaphysics and meta-ethics, which is a massive can of worms you just casually opened (edit: well I won't say casually. But it's one of those big topics where you took a pretty hardline stance that I don't think is the norm, at least as you framed it.)

I could spend a dissertation answering this, but in a nutshell I'll say I don't think law is just a conceit, at least as that term is normally used; or if it is, it is as much a conceit as the solidity of objects (also a cognitive projection onto the subatomic particles; a table is not really solid, cf. Rutherford). But if you go around saying tables aren't solid, it's a conceit, you're living in a very weird world, especially when you punch a table. I'd say the same about law. Much of it actually is built into the physical construction of the world (think of trespass. It's not a cold rule; it's built into the actual physical construction of the ground you're walking on). Or knifing a guy in the neck, the wrongness is built into the physical construction of that act, not some abstract concept but into the very slice of metal into flesh.

So if you did knife a guy and you said the "wrongness" of it was a conceit because it's projected into the physical act of the knife slicing through flesh, again to anyone watching it'd be crazy-talk, since it's patently wrong just looking at it; just like you punching a table to demonstrate how non-solid it is would be crazy talk. You'd be living in a very weird, inhuman world that couldn't recognize and just see it's wrong. To say "knifing a guy is wrong / illegal" is just a conceit, is like saying "this table is solid" is a conceit. Yes, strictly speaking, they're both projections on the sense data coming in, in cognitive constructions, but in the normal sense of "conceit" it doesn't make sense of the day-to-day "physical reality" that humans actually "live in", which is *all* a cognitive construction.

There's definitely a lot to talk about, what to do with all these cognitive constructions, and the fact that most of human reality is a cognitive construction, but if you open the "conceit" can of worms, you need to be prepared to live strictly in an alien world of subatomic particles that know nothing of persons or solidity or a regular-flow-of-time or states or tables or stock exchanges or any of your thoughts...

The catch is that law is also constructed out of authority, the "voice of the sovereign", also a cognitive construction built into the physicality of the authority's voice (of God, or the king, or convention through the democratic process, etc). It's a species of both, constructed in physical reality and constructed out of the voice of authority, which is why the debate between natural law and positivism can never be "solved" since they're both starting with the wrong premise (that humans "live in" a pure reality that hasn't already projected a lot into that reality in constructing it. The real answer is just to look at the cognitive construction itself, no more, no less.)

But the simple reply to your point is that, in the natural, day-to-day stance towards the constructed world humans have, law has a reality that calling it a "conceit" misses, in the same way that calling solidity a conceit misses the obvious solidity of all the objects around us. You don't want to commit yourself to living in a very weird, inhuman world that looks nothing like the world we actually live in. Humans can sense the law in the social world around them, built also into its physical construction as much as anything else.

DDL on 10/8/2012 at 14:21

No, there's a huge difference between "knifing a guy is illegal" and "tables are not solid".

Regarding laws, I'm saying that (ultimately) saying "knifing a guy is wrong" is about as valid as saying "tables are wrong". Neither statement makes any real sense. Both "knifing a guy" and "tables" are just facts, in this case an event and an object, respectively. They are not subject to interpretation. There was a guy, he was knifed. There was a table. Neither statement is by definition wrong: we ascribe that meaning to it ourselves, after the event.

You could look at it as "knifing a guy is illegal" being equivalent to "tables are illegal". Both are simply legal constructs we self-enforce. The former makes more sense, since nobody is currently planning to ban tables, but in terms of being abstract, self-enforced and self-moderated constructs, both are equivalent.

Saying trespass is 'built into the ground' completely avoids the issue of "who says who owns what ground?" All you can say is "the ground is there". Any questions of ownership and trespass are interpretations we ascribe to it ourselves, after the fact.

It's basic moral relativism. Morals are not absolutes, they're not immutable laws of the universe. They're just "things we've collectively come to believe in". I can think of a hundred ways to break the law (because these human-conceit laws are breakable), but I can't think of a single way to make tables suddenly cease to have solidity (because physical laws are not breakable).

Coming back to stabbing dudes in throats: there are myriad interpretations of this legally, whereas physically there is only one.

Physical reality: dude got stabbed in throat

Legal #1: dude got stabbed in throat for no reason, by an asshole
Legal #2: dude got stabbed in throat by accident
Legal #3: dude got stabbed in throat to stop him raping and murdering the stabber
Legal #4: dude got stabbed in throat by enemy soldier during combat
Legal #5: dude got stabbed in throat by himself, in a suicide attempt
Legal #6: dude got stabbed in throat as an emergency tracheotomy, just like on Quincy

There are a ton of different interpretations to the 'wrongness' of a throatstabbing, depending on circumstance, attitudes and environment. In terms of physical fact, there's only the one interpretation, and that's the difference I'm trying to make clear.

Belief in moral absolutes is...a comfort blanket, essentially. It's a lie we tell ourselves because the alternative is terrifying, and because those who don't go along with the lie tend to be weeded out of society (because they're usually horrible people).

EDIT: also, I think we may have bodyswerved this thread into wholly off topic territory...Personally I'd say it's more interesting than fox news, but that's not admittedly saying much :P

LarryG on 10/8/2012 at 15:10

Quote Posted by DDL

Hell, when black people later got to vote, it was actually QUANTIFIED exactly how much less "equal" they were than others. "We are all equal! You are 60% equal."

WTF are you talking about? If you think you are thinking about the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise) Three-Fifths Compromise, it has nothing to do with black people voting or human rights!