Jaime_Souviens wrote:
Giving the world to men in common does not equal a right inherant in a group. That's what you claimed in "Thus the right of the group: Homo Sapiens."
Of course it does, it means a property right in common, inherent in the group that is humanity. It couldn't be much more straightforward than that. If it was an individual right, why repeatedly specify it as being held
in common? Have you looked up "in common" lately? Common, community, group?
Jaime_Souviens wrote:
By the way, "alienated by admixture with labour" is Marx, not Locke.
[.....]
You can't alienate from someone else. You can only alienate your own things which you already have. It's an act of 'putting away'.
Then I don't suppose Marx could have said it either, eh?
I was using "alienate" in the sense that it's been used in property law for ages. For example, the government may use eminent domain to alienate your property, against your will. It becomes alien, foreign, it's not yours anymore. Kind of like when some of the commons become someone else's private property.
Damn, it's annoying when nitpicking gets down to the level of definitions of individual words. Short phrases were bad enough.
Jaime_Souviens wrote:
I don't see an inconsistency.
Feel free to point one out.
No problem.
Locke says that slavery is fine in the case of captured war criminals, because the alternative would be executing them.
By this logic, it should also be fine to enslave anyone who had been sentenced to death for a crime committed as a civilian. There is no difference, based in nature, between a civilian criminal and a military one.
But he says nothing of the kind. That is logically inconsistent.
Hardy wrote:
I cannot sell myself into slavery because I don't own myself. I can't give a master the right to flog or kill me, because I don't have the right to flog or kill myself. That is the control which I can't sell because I don't have it.
Lame.
No wonder I forgot about it.
Jaime_Souviens wrote:
So, in other words, the view of slavery you expressed, which I said was crap in your head, was in fact, crap in your head.
No, it was my posing a question which you apparently couldn't answer, and which I had forgotten the answer to. I was seeing illogic, but was frustrated by my inability to pinpoint it. Locke's one sentence about lacking control over one's self made no sense at all on its own, and the explanation of that sentence was in about the last place in the book one would look for it. I had forgotten that a religious explanation was substituted for a logical argument.
I was smelling shit, and looking in vain on the soles of my shoes. You were insisting that there was no shit outside of my own head. Eventually I found the shit, stuck to the ceiling.
Jaime_Souviens wrote:
The Locke quote is perfectly compatible with the previous lines you said were incomprehensible.
Perfectly compatible if you accept as an indisputable logical axiom that we belong to God, and thus have no right to control our lives, or our deaths.
But if you accept that, then you should also oppose the death penalty, since only God has the right to decide when we die. Had Locke done that, he could then go ahead and argue against any and all slavery without contradicting himself.
Jaime_Souviens wrote:
Perhaps the reason why you find it lame is that he was not trying to write a irrefutable demolition of the basis of slavery as a final polemic, but was only trying to write of the irrationality of it as he saw it. So his 'lameness' is just because you expect him to be something he never pretended to be.
What he was trying to do was to establish limits to state power, which I am in absolute agreement with. For that reason, he did not accept the idea of commuting civilian death sentences to enslavement. In those days, people were regularly executed for what we would now consider fairly petty crimes, and Locke would have abhorred the idea of the state enslaving any subject, let alone a large number of petty criminals. The option of enslavement would only give the state incentive to arrest and convict as many people as possible, and before long they would be enslaving jaywalkers.
So I agree with his goals, I am just disappointed by the recollection that he sometimes has to engage in convoluted logic -- or non-logic -- to get there. One ends up with a suspicion that he made up his mind about various political matters, then had to come up with justifications for those beliefs, rather than starting off with an open mind and letting logic take him wherever it would lead.
I know that's a lot to expect of anyone -- an open mind ruled only by logic, and by no agenda -- it's probably not entirely possible. But Locke was such an exceptional thinker that I hold him to a lot higher standards than I do most of our species.
