If most human social structures are unnatural where does the 'unnatural' come from then? What makes them unnatural?
The fact that they weren't present since our evolution but were developed later (usually at some identifiable historical point), combined with the fact that social structures can differ radically depending on individual culture.
In other words, they aren't innate to us, hardwired into our nature as humans.
Hard but not impossible. Research is done all the time on just this.
Not without controversy for any particular claim, though, nor has any common human behavior been definitively identified as the result of evolutionary biology. Certainly no social structure has ever been so identified.
I think they are salient.
What do you think notably missed?
I already pointed them out to you: marriage, reproductive rights, law enforcement, Constitutional protections, corporate regulation for safety and fraud concerns, etc. Most of these are conservative principles, too.
Why are you ignoring how conservatives are just as unlikely to offer freedom as liberals are? The only difference between the two is which freedoms are never offered.
This is absolutely wrong as regards Rawls. Well unless his last book changed his position. I didn't read that.
In his 1993 revision of his classic
A Theory of Justice, he proposes the following:
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
Rawls explicitly stated that the first principle took priority over the second. That is, even if social and economic inequalities no longer are available as equal opportunities to all (and note that he's not suggesting a Communist equal distribution of
wealth, just that if inequalities
exist, that everyone have the same opportunity to get those inequalities), then if remedying that would infringe on the basic rights and liberties of an individual, then it can't be done. Actions taken to fulfill the second principle can never violate the first, since the first always takes priority.
It's like Asimov's laws of robotics. The First Law takes priority, so that if a robot attempting to follow the Second Law would break the first, then it can't be done, even if doing so breaks the Second Law.
Freedom most certainly does not outweigh equality except and until he redefines freedom as 'freedom to' instead of 'freedom from'. Specifically some freedoms are most certainly trumped by redistributive justice, and necessarily others he deems nominally sacrosanct are similarly compromised.
Again if he meaningfully rehabilitated his thought please correct me.
He does no such redefinition. His freedoms are still "freedom from", not "freedom to" You may take issue with
what freedoms Rawls defines as inviolable freedoms and what he thinks are violable (though he considers things like freedom of expression and the right to property ownership as inviolable, so it's not like his freedoms are weird or wacky or anything), but Rawls most definitely considers strict equality secondary to those freedoms he identifies. Therefore, you cannot say that Rawls considers equality to always take priority over freedom - his principles would not support, for instance, a social structure where everyone had perfect equality but no freedoms or rights whatsoever.
It seems clear that compulsory equality causes inequality. We can see this empirically, and the case can be made logically.
On a strict theoretical level, this is true. However,
no compulsory equality also causes inequality. Why is one type of resultant inequality worse than the other?
It has to lessen freedom, justice, and charity. If compulsory equality actually accomplished equality then it might be worthy (from a consequentialist perspective, naturally not from an ideological perspective) to try to balance.
It depends on what sort of and how much equality you're trying to accomplish. If your goal is to
As we're talking Rawls, as a philosophy attempting to justify compulsory equality (painted up as charity, IMO) he merely creates a self reinforcing justification for perpetual redistribution.
No he doesn't. See above; Rawls is not concerned that inequalities exist...just that there is equality of opportunity to
have those inequalities. In other words, it's perfectly fine that some be billionaires and some work for minimum wage, as long as those minimum wage jockeys have the same chance (through hard work, performance raises, education, etc) to amass billions themselves. Naturally, not all of them will have the necessary drive, or skills, or study habits, or investment luck, but if a minimum wage jockey wants to go to school to get an Executive MBA and work his way up the corporate ladder, Rawls says he should be able to, and not be sidelined because the son of an existing billionaire takes priority when registration for classes rolls around.
Assuming it could work (which I do not) the least advantaged will always have a 'positive rights' claim against the liberty of the more advantaged. There's no end point.
And, according to Rawls, this can never happen, because the claim of the least advantaged (the second principle) cannot violate the specific liberties and rights of the more advantaged (the first principle). You cannot take away a rich man's farm to break up and redistribute as smaller plots to those who have no farm, in other words. And if you say, "well, what about taxes and welfare", then you're no longer arguing against Rawls' principles, but merely sidetracking the core argument with quibbling over their details about what counts as a freedom and what doesn't.
I like the idea of equality. I just think find that maximand is best achieved when no attempt is made to achieve it.
Has there
ever been a time in history where it worked? That a natural state of equality developed when there were no attempts to enforce equality?
We've been talking about my thoughts not teabagger thought.
Well, since you came into a thread about the Tea Party convention with a first post in which you described yourself as a "teabagger", I thought those were the same thing for the purposes of this discussion.
Consider yourself corrected. You do ill to say what I 'basically' said because I said no such thing nor would I. What I would say is that any 'liberal' whose basis for liberalism includes 'redistributive justice' or the new euphemism 'social justice' or any other way to say compulsory equality is necessarily against freedom even if they don't think of it that way.
One difference I have found between a liberal and a conservative is that a conservative is often receptive to the idea that you can't have freedom, if you aren't willing to offer freedom.
A liberal almost never is..
And so we return to this question. What did you mean by the above, then? What freedoms to conservatives offer, and in return for what freedoms taken? What freedoms to liberals want to take, and what freedoms do they never offer in return?
I would say the structures of forced equality have been maximized completely to the necessary detriment of freedom, and those structures are used as always to force inequality. Equality isn't just economic, that's just the one best received in the west. The ground is more fertile in some places for compulsory equality of thought or religion.
Since you admit you never read his last book, it may interest you to note that Rawls saw no problem with nations that do things like oppress those who don't adhere to a state religion, or have nondemocratic forms of government. They weren't
ideal countries, but if they didn't otherwise violate human rights or try to start wars, then they should be welcomed as valid members of the international community.
Regardless even Rand didn't suggest anarchy (although some of her detractors have).
No, but that's the inevitable end result of her philosophies being put into practice (whether intentionally put into practice or not).
Just as totalitarianism is the inevitable end result of Marxism-Leninism being put into practice.
Is this a poor attempt to paint me as an anarchist? If so it's nonsensical, anyone discussing a balance isn't suggesting liberty as an all important maximand.
No, simply highlighting the problem with your view above, about your idea that equality is best achieved when no one tries to force any kind of equality. I'm saying when that happens, you don't get maximized equality, you get Somalia.
It would be except that it has been tried and it has worked. It's just always undermined. (the seeming inevitability of which which is a valid argument, and one I have made)
But you see, this is that same old argument. It's always failed, whenever it's been tried in real life (if it worked, you wouldn't be complaining that it's been "undermined" - you don't complain that your car has been sabotaged if it's running right, after all), yet rather than admit that it's a flawed pipe dream, you blame any failures on it being "undermined".
Just as Bob Avakian blames the failures of Marxism-Leninism on its being undermined by people like Stalin and Gorbachev and capitalists working to undermine Maoist China (seriously, if you want a good laugh, read his book "Communism is Dead, Long Live Real Communism"...sadly, while Amazon has a number of
his other books, they don't have that one, though).
Put simply the more we try to force equality the less there is.
So your construction is correct, just poorly aimed.. or rather erroneously aimed at a strawman of an anarcho-capitalist state which I don't propone.
Again, I'm not saying that you're proposing or favoring an anarcho-capitalist state with almost no equality in any metric whatsoever. I'm merely saying that that's the inevitable end result of what you ARE proposing, whether you like it or not, as proven by what happens every time the measures of forced equality have been removed from a society.
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