DDL on 10/8/2012 at 16:28
Huh, you're right. I stand corrected. Interesting read though, thanks!
...Christ, it's worse. It's a whole lot worse. It's not even giving them a vote. It's just "hay we'll have representation on your behalf, also you only count for 60% of a person". It's..treating them as subdivisions of people for like..tax purposes.
And that's not about human rights? Really?
LarryG on 10/8/2012 at 16:56
You're still not reading carefully.
It has nothing to do with human rights. The Three-Fifths Compromise has to do with the political realities of getting human beings to agree to a common endeavor, in this case the formation of a government and the allocation of political power and wealth (taxes). There were several allocation schemes debated, including one that allocated political representation based on wealth (real estate), which was rejected in favor of one that allocated it based on population.
The North wanted only free people to be counted towards political representation. The South wanted all slaves included in the population count. The compromise was to only count 3/5 of the slave population when allocating political representation. The northern states didn't get what they wanted, but neither did the southern states. It was (
Realpolitik) realpolitik in action in order to allow the formation of a single government for both northern and southern states.
It had absolutely nothing to do with an evaluation of the "worth" of a slave as 3/5 of that of a free person.
from the Wikipedia article:
Quote:
... the Three-Fifths Compromise is sometimes erroneously said to mean the founders believed blacks were only partial human beings (i.e. three-fifths of a person) ... the compromise had no relation to the individual worth of the black slave
DDL on 10/8/2012 at 17:51
Oh I read that bit (hence the thanks). Learning is always good.
I guess the limited amount I've read about has been more concerned with the 1783 bit (south don't want slaves to be people, north do, coz WOO TAX MONEYS), when what got passed in '87 was apparently the reverse (south pro, north anti), even if the value decided upon was identical (much like the personal mandate debate, eh?).
And I'm not saying they all got round a table and went "hay guise, how much d'you reckon them slaves are worth, liek, as peoplez?", but the very fact you have a political compromise on how much an actual person is going to count as..a legally recognised actual person, seems to me to be a fairly clear cut human rights issue (not withstanding the fact that slavery itself is basically about as strong a human rights issue as human rights issues GET). While neither the north or south were happy about the compromise, I'll willing to bet the slaves were even less happy with the whole situation.
Anyway, thanks again for the link (history was never my strong suit, 'specially american history). :)
Yakoob on 10/8/2012 at 19:44
Quote Posted by demagogue
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;
I am glad you bring that example because it proves yourself wrong. There are many people who cheer on; remember the London riots a year or two back? Or any time a major soccer team loses in Poland? Or look at the North Irish troubles way way back, or even Isreal and Palestine. The hatred between the groups is so ingrained they often do not consider the other as "equal" or even "human."
Granted this is different from ingroup, where stabbing someone from your social/ethnic circle would indeed be looked at as "patently wrong." But this brings back the whole idea DDL is arguing, that the laws only make sense within a particular group because it is the group that defines them, just as it
arbitrarily defines itself. Quote:
You'd be living in a very weird, inhuman world that couldn't recognize and just see it's wrong.
We DO live in a very weird, inhuman world; people are dicks, kill each other, steal, push the little guy etc. sometimes for personal gain, sometimes from spite, and other times for utterly irrational reasons. It's all nice and good to talk about inalienably rights and world peace, but it's just a fantasy we strive towards, not something that is actually happening.
But I do not intend to say this in order to go into BS metaphysics debate that benefits no one. I point it out because, as DDL said:
Quote:
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.
Again, equality is a fairy tale, it's just
not realistically feasible. You cannot make decisions that will please every single person in the society, and as soon as there's at least one person who disagrees - bam, "infringing my rights" and "inequality."
The thing is, democracy does not creates "tyranny of majority" in and of itself. Tyranny of majority is simply the natural outcome of trying to equalize the playing field; even with mulitple divided groups, those with most similar viewpoints and ideologies will, even accidentally, end up agreeing on the same laws or ideas and, again, the minorities will be marginalized. There simply is no way around it.
I mentioned the example of consotional democracy and power sharing that recognizes various groups and gives them equalized power. This, in practice, leads to few more issues. I can cite sources if you want (dont have my notes with me), but basically what ends up happening is that the smaller groups that are not part of the equal grand coalition start bitching about being unrepresented. Worse yet, the groups that are represented end up internally divided and splintering off, creating new minority groups demanding equal treatment. But where do you draw the line where one group ends and another starts? How do you decide which group should be included in the grand coalition? Again, there is no practically feasibly solution to keep everyone happy.
Aside from giving every single person a veto power to ensure that every decision pleases 100% of population. But then, nothing would ever get done. The "tyranny of majority" (or at least, "tyranny of all major
groups" as in multi-party democracies) is about the closest approximation of true equality we can get to.
Papy on 11/8/2012 at 05:15
Quote Posted by DDL
bear in mind that there are huge discrepancies in the interpretations of the concept of 'equality between individuals'.
Equality is a clear concept and is not subject to interpretations. I'm not sure I understand what you mean. In the examples you gave, women and people who didn't own property were considered as having an inferior social status. They were never considered as equals.
Quote Posted by DDL
If your definition of democracy is that it considers all people equally (regardless of number), then there are relatively few (none?) democracies.
There are no true democracies. Not a single one. Democracy, like communism, goes against human nature and it requires a high level of moral development from each of its members to simply understand it. Realistically, it is not implementable. The best we have is societies where an elite implemented a set of rules in order to force some basic democratic values.
Having said that, I don't understand why you say "regardless of number". I don't see why a democracy of 5 million people would be different than a democracy of 10 million people. (Yes, I'm playing dumb on purpose.)
Quote Posted by DDL
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.
Here's what I said : "when voting is not between equal individuals anymore, but between groups [...] This is when voting destroy democracies and change the system to a tyranny of the majority".
What I'm saying is that the minute a society begin to view itself as a set of different groups instead of one single group of individuals, then that society can't be a democracy anymore.
And the example you give is a vote between one group against another? Don't you see your example is irrelevant because its basic assumption precludes the idea of a democracy?
As I said, democracy goes against human nature. We are not only social animals, we are also hierarchical animals. We will naturally try to get a higher social position. We will seek to form associations in order to increase our power and become in a higher position than the members of another less powerful groups. We use conflicts as a way to assert our position. That's our nature. That's how we naturally view politics. And that's exactly the opposite of what democracy is. So change your natural way of thinking! If you don't, then you will never be able to really understand the concept of democracy.
demagogue on 11/8/2012 at 09:02
You guys were completely misunderstanding my point, and for the most part are agreeing with me but I was trying to shift the emphasis, but I didn't explain it the best so it's ok.
I didn't say I was a moral realist like you're apparently reading me. I said I was an anti-realist, and anti-essentialist (like you guys are). I was saying moral categories were innate, cognitive constructions that then get projected onto the world when it gets constructed in experience. They don't exist in the molecules or "out there", outside a cognitive construction. (In that respect, from the start I said they're all "in your head". If you want to call them a conceit or lie, you could, but that doesn't stop people projecting them in the world as they experience it. Scientists are trained to discount projections to give a "pure" description of reality in terms of physical processes, but once you're talking about tables and stock exchanges, anything outside the description of fundamental particles, these are human constructions to their core so you can't help but bring in cognitive projections to recognize them at all.)
I think the social world that get constructed is saturated with normative claims all around us. To recognize a person at all (or table or knife) is to already bring in a lot of normative baggage about human purposes and interpretations, or you just don't recognize it as that thing (you might recognize it as something else, or just a weird artifact). A very important projection is the character of law out of the voice of the authority; the words that come out of their mouth get a literal halo projected on them in our experience (lots of experiments to show this; chimpanzees by the way, don't have this projection, although they perceive the world like humans in a lot of ways. They can recognize that "If I do X, I get a snack" in a situation. But they can never feel the force of law or command in words like humans intuitively do). When your father says "Come here!", the normative weight is built right into the voice. When you get to law, of course the actual content will differ on some things if you feel that the authority figure is God versus a democratically elected congress.
Also, note I'm talking about recognition. I didn't say that a normative projection magically made people follow or want to follow the law, only that they'd recognize it in a situation as such. People can then make a decision to do something illegal for their own personal gain, or cheer for arson and lootings as in the London riots. The fact that they were cheering, or committing a crime, usually means they understand perfectly well what it means and what they are doing... Doing something bad to punish people they don't like, or hurting another person illegal for personal gain, and they think they can get away with it. (Sometimes there are fundamental normative disagreements though, where one group doesn't recognize what another group does. I didn't discount that either; but I still think both sides are projecting it, and it's not just blind "arbitrary convention.")
All I was saying is people are capable of recognizing the existence of a law applying in a situation, and this is not an "arbitrary" recognition (as if they need to take a poll to decide if it's really a "human convention" before recognizing it as law). They recognize it constructed right into the situation. I'm not actually saying a very strange thing. Most of the reality we see is constructed by our minds, so we don't really get a "pure" view detached from human purposes or interpretations (I used the example of the solidity of a table, since the whole point is that under quantum mechanics tables are in fact not solid at all, so you can hardly call the solidity a "brute physical fact", the moluecular matrix in solid state physics may be, but the smooth table without empty space looking like it's made to hold things is a social fact our minds construct, bringing in all sorts of normative baggage of human purposes and interpretations to interpret it as a table at all. But color is a little better example since nowhere at the molecular could you find the color blue, only a spectrum of photon energy levels, and blueness is most definitely a projection of the mind in constructing a scene. But recognizing blueness doesn't bring in human purposes and interpretations like recognizing table-ness does. But it's a minor point anyway). The point here is once you start getting acculturated and can recognize social situations at all, you start recognizing social situations with all the normative and moral baggage built right into it, and if you didn't understand the normative baggage built in, you wouldn't recognize the situation. Yes of course you have to know land is owned by somebody to feel it's trespassing, but that knowledge is projected into the land you're walking on, not by cold calculation (sometimes it is by cold calculation, but that doesn't account for how most law got up and running; sometimes OTOH it is very obviously built into a situation, you wouldn't cross the threshold of a stranger's door just because it's obvious, in recognizing what a threshold is at all, that it belongs to somebody).
My main point is, you can't discount how much these normative elements are cognitively constructed, as opposed to a cold calculation like "totally arbitrary convention." I mean, my neighbor Ed could write a law on a napkin, but it doesn't have any force as law. If the force of law were totally arbitrary, there would be no difference in the experience of Ed's napkin and a law in the lawbooks aside from some cold calculation that the law books have more "convention" on their side. But actually our experience of the force of the words written in Ed's napkin and in a lawbook are very different, and that difference in mental construction is what you'd want to look to that's doing all the work in constructing a law, in what a law is.
Edit: If I could boil it down maybe, if you say law is arbitrary convention, you are begging the question. What about it makes it a convention? And is it the fact that other brains out there also believe something that suddenly *zing* makes special in my brain? You need to dig into deeper layers and get what's actually pushing human motivation to follow norms, and what "norms" that human motivation can follow even are, and how they get connected to social situations and how we can recognize when they apply in the first place. I don't care much about the type of "existence", since it's all cognitive constructions, but I do care about "recognition". And for that, I don't think it's enough to just say it's "convention" or "culture" and think all the work is done, without connecting the dots. Understanding how social situations are cognitively constructed so that people can recognize a norm or law applies in it is what connects the dots. That's why I'm making a such a case for it.
---------------------------
@DDL, Another point I wanted to make way back when... At one point you framed it that only power over others matters to what people follow; that's what's doing the work. Whatever the law says, it's the people with the biggest arsenal that can coerce behavior out of others that end up having the only law that matters... Maybe it's a good law or maybe it's a bad law, but it's the one people follow, and the only one you can say "exists" (and there's no other basis to say which is law is "right"; the world doesn't care, it only notes which law is followed.)
I wanted to say that this is of course a very ancient position with a long and illustrious career over the centuries. It's probably best associated with Thrasymachus in Plato's The Republic, who Socretes argued against, and almost every commentator on The Republic from Plotinus to the political realist schools & realpolitik in our era have had something to say about it. (One famous one was by Nietzsche, who took Thrasymachus as a positive model; since Nietzsche thought power was a sign of health and vitality, and he thought appeals to a "higher law" was just a way for weak people to bluff the strong people into submitting to rules that cater to their weak and sick natures.) There is also a famous argument (by Leo Strauss) that Plato himself was actually on Thrasymachus's side, but his argument through Socrates was actually tailored to the weak-class as a way to cow them into subjection by the higher class people... And another famous data point is what Tocqueville said about Thrasymachus.
So, because the metaphysical stuff is getting off topic from democracy and political theory, I wanted to talk about the realpolitik line you're taking that the only law that really matters is power. But I'll have to post about it a bit later when I have some time... It's just the thing I'm interested in talking about.
LarryG on 11/8/2012 at 09:20
Quote Posted by Papy
Here's what I said : "when voting is not between equal individuals anymore, but between groups [...] This is when voting destroy democracies and change the system to a tyranny of the majority".
What I'm saying is that the minute a society begin to view itself as a set of different groups instead of one single group of individuals, then that society can't be a democracy anymore.
— GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address, Sep. 17, 1796:
Quote:
However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Quote:
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Yakoob on 11/8/2012 at 20:33
demagogue I am still a bit confused about the finer details, so please clarify if I get you right :)
I get that you say that morality is not inherent in the universe in an of itself, and only arises in the human's cogentive construct of the universe. Gotcha, agreed.
But afterwards it gets fuzzy; are you saying that the morality that arises as social constructs is always universal, i.e. killing someone is always wrong?
If I get you correctly, then that's where our disagreement lies - while I can accept that there is some moral judgement attached to all actions and perceptions, I disagree it has an inherent value. I would argue that the ways we perceive the world, morality included, are
learned and constructed via education/upbringing/context/social interactions/etc. Our "biology" has a say in it as well (nature vs. nurture), but I don't know if you are arguing that morality is biologically/evolutionarily ingrained in our psyche.
So the idea of a table, if presented to someone who was brought up in a society that does not use tables, would just leave them confused. The idea of "murder" is no different.
Quote Posted by demagogue
I didn't say that a normative projection magically made people follow or want to follow the law, only that they'd recognize it in a situation as such. People can then make a decision to do something illegal for their own personal gain, or cheer for arson and lootings as in the London riots. The fact that they were cheering, or committing a crime, usually means they understand perfectly well what it means and what they are doing... Doing something bad to punish people they don't like, or hurting another person illegal for personal gain, and they think they can get away with it.
Understanding what they are doing is not a moral judgment. Yes, they know that someone is being killed, they understand the implication, but it doesn't necessarily mean they think it is "wrong."
I highly recommend you watch (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403462/) Route 181 to get an account what the Israelis think of Palestinians and vice versa. In some cases, hurting them has as much moral implications to them as choosing what they are going to have for dinner that night.
We are getting on the topic of dehumaniziation, but I've also read studies interviewing the youth of the region that showed how the propaganda does a formidable job of convincing many that the other group deserves and must be killed, even at the expense of your own life. In this case, then, stabbing someone is not recognized as morally wrong, but morally good. Morality can swing either way or occupy any area inbetween, including complete neutrality aka no moral judgement.
Either socially constructed actions such as "killing" do not have an innate moral judgement, or half our globe is made of sociopaths. Take your pick.
----------------------
EDIT to your EDIT:
Quote:
If I could boil it down maybe, if you say law is arbitrary convention, you are begging the question. What about it makes it a convention? And is it the fact that other brains out there also believe something that suddenly *zing* makes special in my brain? You need to dig into deeper layers and get what's actually pushing human motivation to follow norms, and what "norms" that human motivation can follow even are, and how they get connected to social situations and how we can recognize when they apply in the first place. I don't care much about the type of "existence", since it's all cognitive constructions, but I do care about "recognition". And for that, I don't think it's enough to just say it's "convention" or "culture" and think all the work is done, without connecting the dots. Understanding how social situations are cognitively constructed so that people can recognize a norm or law applies in it is what connects the dots. That's why I'm making a such a case for it.
The selfish gene - whatever benefits
me is the driving factor, and if a single "law" benefits enough "mes" it has a high chance of becoming and accepted convetions. The majority will want said law since it benefits them all, and since they overpower the minority, they can enforce it. This is the whole reason violence against your ingroups is a nono, but violence against the others is a-ok! Helping and protecting members of ingroup is beneficial to each of its members, hence why we do it. And as far as how social situations are constructed and framed, I already explained above, they are learned via education / upbringing / interactions / parents / observing peers etc. etc.
There's been decades of research, studies, philosophers and papers written on the topic, but
personally I believe we are simply product of years of evolution interacting with the world/society/social groups we live in, and on the fundamental level it's not really as complex as said philosophers try to make us believe it is.
demagogue on 12/8/2012 at 05:17
Ok I'll try to just give my thinking directly instead of trying to make it fit as a response to things. I think the term "learned" isn't quite enough, and it leaves out what we might term human intuition or common sense, when that's doing a lot of the actual work. And I think there's quite a spread of modality, some of it really is cold knowledge we don't feel and it only exists because it's on the books (some arcane rules of securities or tax law), some of it is inculcated by society so deep that we actually think it's a "brute fact" (recognizing a table as such, as opposed to an obstacle), but some of if I think is what you'd call innate, meaning infants "know" it before they've had social learning, or you see it across societies (sometimes across species).
There are a number of experiments showing that infants across cultures recognize at a certain age (the same across cultures) that when a toy is taken from them without reason, they show reactions of it being "unfair" (versus when it's taken with a good reason). So they talk about this kind of unfairness as a kind of innate proto-norm that is just built into the construction of a social situation for all humans; although of course like you say, different cultures can push these proto-norms in different directions. Chimpanzees can understand I think it was about 200 words and have a working language, but they simply can't grasp the concept of fairness like humans do universally at the same age.
Ok, that's one thing, but my main point I was trying to express originally was to respond to the model of how law or morality works that DDL presented, which was the classic positivist model, also very behaviorist. And part of my reaction was just because the hot topic in philosophy these days is that all things "behaviorism" and "over-formalism" have to burn in a fire. Now we look to how people's brains really deal with issues, and that does the work, rather than just coming up with a formal logic and saying that does all the work.
The idea with formalism or behaviorism is you want to assume as little as possible about what's in the mind, as if it's a blackbox; and you only look at what "really" happens out in the world, and the logic of it, and then assume the mind just echos that logic. It's useful for some things, but it just falls apart under scrutiny.
So, the way he framed law was that you have these two hermetically sealed domains, a set of objective facts out in the world (a table is there, a knife enters a neck), these are objects and events out in the real world that everybody agrees happen, and we just assume the mind directly reflects these events as they are. And then we have a set of "rules"which are written down by somebody (with elements like, (1) person A does an action which kills person B, (2) with features that demonstrate intent to kill, and (3) without some justification, and there's a list of those), and the meaning is clear by its text, and we assume the mind reflects the objective meaning of the text. And then we say there is some comparison (or interpretation) module in the mind, where we compare a "rule" to the "world", and if the clear elements are met by the clear facts, then some equivalent of a green light goes on. The rule has been broken, and if it's my job I'm supposed to do some action (like arrest the guy & start a legal process on it, so people can argue other interpretations).
It's the textbook model, but it's a bit over-formalistic and it leaves out how much of law actually works in the real world. In the real world, we do not usually receive a set of facts as a purified population of objects out there. Instead, we receive the world as complex social situations, where to even recognize it as a situation, the facts have already brought in a ton of normative baggage with them. People do not usually see "a knife abstractly entering a neck", they usually see a burglary, or a enraged murder, or a soldier doing his duty... They see and make sense of the world already in a situation where a bunch of normative strands are already embedded into it. (They could be wrong! Maybe they think it's situation-A when it's "actually" situation-B, and the trial is an argument over which situation it is). But the example where DDL talked about, objectively a guy gets knifed, but there are many interpretations that vary what kind of "crime" we think it is... maybe it's part of a burglary, maybe it's in self defense, maybe it's a soldier in battle... etc. This was exactly the point I was trying to make.
I doubt that DDL didn't know these exceptions existed until he looked up in a law book, and only then "ah, ok, so a soldier isn't murdering an enemy, because that's what it says in the law book. But if the provision didn't provide for it, then it would be murder." He got these examples from his own intuition of how these situations work. To recognize a complex social situation like a war is to already understand the normative strands that it's not considered murder. The main point here is that that understanding is *first* embedded in the recognition and understanding of what a battle is versus a blatant murder. *Then* the law makers come around and make laws that embed that understanding in the books (or if they don't, people intuit that it *should* be the law, and the government has made a mistake). It's not like no norm existed in advance, it's only when it was written down then *poof* now it's a rule we have to follow, but it doesn't exist apart from our arbitrary convention. The problem with that kind of model is that it can't distinguish a law from the rule of a game, or the police arresting somebody versus a thug kidnapping someone, or a just law versus a Nazi law just there to let the state be thugs... But intuitively we can distinguish these situations, so we need to have some concept of the "justifiability" of a law, if only to explain how we can intuitively distinguish those cases in real world practice.
I was trying to distinguish the way humans actual recognize norms and morals from "arbitrary convention". Because a purely arbitrary convention could be like, ok, we now have a rule that knifing a guy is okay if it's on a tennis court. But in the real world, people would rightfully look at that law and say, "But that makes no sense. There's no reason a tennis court would have anything to do with justifying the crime.", and in fact "arbitrariness" is one reason courts have to strike down a law.
So then my general point from there is that law, as it works in the real world, is less like the formal positivism and behaviorism, where there are these hermetically sealed domains of "facts" and "rules", that exist in a pure sphere, nothing exists of the law or norm until we say the "rule" and apply it abstractly to the facts... But the reality is more like legal realism. From the start we are already caught up in complex social situations that to recognize them at all, already have all these norms and proto-norm strands everywhere, and its embedded in our intuition and common sense, it's already legalized before we even know what convention says (what we call "convention" is a reflection of our shared recognition of the situation we already all carry with us; I'll get to the issue of other legal cultures later...). And for most cases we can't abstract apply rules to facts. There isn't a pure sphere of objective facts without norms already enmeshed in them that we can "retreat" to and do our abstract calculus. We first understand the situation (is this a blatant murder, or self defense, or a war going on), and then, in practice, we massage the rules to come to the result that our common sense or intuition tells us is right.
It's not like I was wholly disagreeing with you or DDL. Law doesn't exist on its own "out there". But I was just trying to shift the emphasis from "arbitrary convention" to "human intuition and common sense", and arguing against this idea of a pure sphere of facts and norms, when the reality is more like a hybrid of facts and norms impossibly entangled in recognizing a complex social situation at all... The hermetic seal has holes all in it on both sides... To recognize the situation is to already intuit what should be done (in that sense norms do exist in situations; they aren't like separate things we apply after the fact); and to understand the rule is to already have the situation inside of it (little point about cognitive linguistics; they now say that pragmatics is built into the semantics of a sentence. The world & context of utterance is just enmeshed in the meaning of a proposition.)
I'm not really trying to create a bizarre world or disagreeing entirely with the way you guys were framing it, just trying to put the emphasis where I think it should be. I might have more to say later, but I have to go to lunch now.
Edit: Yeah, I want to talk about when and how things break down, when people disagree on what the law is or should be, either across cultures, or in a democracy... And when the people think it's justified for the government to arrest or punish them (a burglar typically should recognize in the situation of a burglary that they can expect to get arrested if they get caught, whether they want to or not. There's a question if they think it's justified or not, but part of recognizing what a burglary is is understanding that you're stealing without any justification; if you didn't get that you wouldn't understand it as a burglary.) This issue is really at the root of what's important to talk about with the normative force of laws, and political theorists spend a lot of time thinking about if, when, or how law can ever be justified to coerce people to do things they don't want to, or is it always arbitrary or just a compromise most of us agree on for the greater good but not "really justified". I want to think some on that next.
