(no subject)

[ewt]

Since I'll be offline all day and feel like having some good comments to come back to:

Do people have intrinsic worth as human beings? What is the difference between intrinsic worth and value within a society?

Are there intrinsic rights, or only those granted by society?

Does truthful gossip (that is, passing on true information about someone, rather than making up or passing on fictitious stories) form a positive or negative contribution to human society? How and why? Under what circumstances? Why does truthful gossip so often turn 'bad' somewhere along the chain and venture into the area of untruth?

Will the landlord recharge the electric meter by the time I get home today? It's looking a little low. I can laptop for a bit with no electricity but I can't interweb, because something has to run the router. EDIT: it seems to have gone over into emergency credit or something.

PLN for today:
-tidy up a bit here, because it is currently showing the effects of three days of rehearsal and running around with not much downtime or sorting out time
-go have horn lesson, meeting with CDP
-go to Isle of Cats, arriving about 13.15, do lots of big sorting and tidying
-come back here at some point; I'm going to aim for about 21.30 because I've had so many late nights recently.

The hardest thing? Moving the keyboard from the loft to the living room so that when someone comes to pick it up at 7pm they don't have to navigate (or even see) the rest of the house. This needs two strong people, because the keyboard is heavy. Once upon a time I could have been one of those people but this is no longer the case.

Comments

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

So. A regularly takes advantage of people. B, C, D, E, F etc. don't gossip about it, because Gossip Is Bad. A never gets a reputation for taking advantage of people, so is free to take advantage of W, X, Y, and Z.

At what point does the negative aspect of gossip outweigh the possible good of warning systems for a society?

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I would see your post here (http://secretlondon.livejournal.com/380608.html) as a demonstration of the positive advantages of negative gossip (assuming the allegations were true).

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

The key is here, but the landlord is responsible for topping it up (electric included in rent).

We ran out of gas when I first got here so I texted him and he sorted it within 20 minutes... so far I'm not worried. I suppose if the key is here then if it's urgent and he isn't around one of us could do it ourselves, I just have no idea how any of this works not having had a key meter before.

[mupstasia.livejournal.com]

Heya...I'm ill today, still got the cold of doom and now it has gone into my chest so my asthma is not very good. So I unfortunatly cannot help you this evening. Sorry hon. Hope lots of other people can and if you need help when you get back from Canada with anything (or just want to go for tea) I can easily stop by B.Green station on my way home from work.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Ta for letting me know - I hope you feel better soon.

[mupstasia.livejournal.com]

Thanks...me too! I'm really tired of this, second cold this month and they have struck much harder then the 'can function but with sniffles' variety, so I've had to miss lots of things/let people down. At least I can work from home. I must not get myself so worn down though. And start taking echinecea regularly.

Did I remember you posting awhile ago some cold remedy drink with chili powder in it? Any idea of the link?

PS - I think truthful gossip can be a positive thing some time (as long as it doesn't turn deceitful/spiteful/backstabing) in the spread of information through society. But can't really give that too much though now as my head is full of snot instead of brains.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Gossip is an integral part of society structure; its not just how reputations appear and evolve but a big group identity building thing, and sort of a social location identifier/trust symbol, and a sort of information currency. I mean gossip in the sense of "information about people you obtain from people" rather than "smuggled private incriminating rumours". I do not think all features of the universe are classifiable into good and bad - handled badly it can cause a lot of harm.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

If there are intrinsic rights, but they aren't granted by society, then against whom are they enforceable? Certainly you might argue that a society in which the rights "not to be killed" or "only to have sex with someone of your choosing" don't exist would be an unpleasant one, but I don't think you can have intrinsic rights without a concept of social contract (or God).

[naath.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone or anything has "intrinsic" worth; value is placed on things by society. On the other hand I think people *ought* to have value, and think that societies that don't accord people value are stupid/wrong. The same applies to rights (and *responsibilities*) the things you can (and must) do are governed by society, I don't think there are any 'intrinsic' rights - but again I think that a society that doesn't give what I consider basic rights and enforce what I consider basic responsibilities is not one in which I want to live. I think that it is Right And Proper to persuade other societies to do things that we consider Good if they aren't currently; but Bad And Wrong to force them to do so.

There are two issues with gossip
1)That stories grow in the telling and rapidly become untrue - leaving the 'victim' to correct the error; which is likely impossible since the gossip may well spread beyond their social circle or they might never know what stories are being told about them.
2)Often information transmitted by gossip is information that the originator did not want spread around; if I wanted to tell everyone something I'd put it on LJ in a public post - I don't want to have to assume that everything I tell to anyone will be told to everyone!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Questions 1 and 2 are related. And, yes, humans have intrinsic worth.

The INTERESTING question is to what extent OTHER animals have intrinsic worth. This, incidentally, is why the United States has creationists, anti-evolutionists, and Biblical literalists. They are people who believe that humans have intrinsic worth (although you wouldn't always be able to tell it from their actions), and who feel that, in order for that to be true, you have to draw a hard-and-fast line between humans and all other animals.

If you don't draw that line -- and Nature doesn't draw very many hard-and-fast lines: God and Nature are way more about shading from one thing into another -- and you believe that humans have intrinsic worth, that leads to the idea that other animals ALSO have intrinsic worth -- perhaps a lesser degree, but SOME. A chimpanzee, a dolphin, an African Grey parrot all have SOME degree of self-awareness and sapience, and therefore have some degree of intrinsic worth.

Which means that they have some degree of intrinsic rights.

The word "rights", as we're using it, means two related but very different things in this context. We can call them "human rights" and "legal rights", but, since I think that other animals besides humans also have some degree of these rights, I'll call them "intrinsic" or "inalienable rights" (after the phrasing of Thomas Jefferson, one of the writers of the founding documents of the United States), and "legal rights".

"Inalienable rights" are those which people -- or other animals -- have simply by the virtue of their existing. They are "granted by their Creator", which can mean "God", if you're theistic, but can simply mean Nature, or the plain fact of your existence, of you're not. And governments exist primarily to protect these inalienable rights.

Now, if a government DOESN'T protect, or even recognize the existence of, these rights, it doesn't mean that the people don't HAVE these rights. It simply means that that government is failing to do its duty.

This, of course, is why people are so terrified of the possibility of other creatures having inalienable rights -- if whales have a degree of sapience which means they have the right to not be murdered, well, Japan is in trouble. And my home state of Massachusetts has a HUGE historical moral debt to pay, since we were the home of the largest whaling fleet in history.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

Worth is assigned to things by other things. So nothing has intrinsic worth. One can assign worth to oneself, but that is not the same thing as intrinsic worth, because intrinsic worth would be something one possessed simply by existing, whereas one's own estimate of one's worth is dependent on one's psychological state at the time.

There are no intrinsic rights, either. If you were stranded on a deserted island, for example, you wouldn't have a 'right' to anything at all (even food), because you would have no way to enforce it. You could tell yourself that you had rights, but it would make no practical difference at all. Rights require some means of enforcement beyond an individual's own efforts, and they are therefore things granted by common agreement within a social group, and enforcement of those rights is a social responsibility.

There is the claim that people have intrinsic worth and rights because a god, Nature, or whatever makes it so. This is still not properly intrinsic, it just posits another agent granting the worth or rights.

I think life is generally more pleasant for all concerned if everyone is granted certain rights, responsibilities, and worth. But I'm not under the illusion that we get them for free.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Now, "legal rights" are simply social conventions, and are designed for the convenience and practicality of the society. Two examples are "intelectual property" and "real estate property."

Neither the "ownership of ideas" nor the "ownership of land" actually exists. But societies have chosen to model exclusive usage of land and ideas on the ownership of items, for convenience, and because it gives benefits to the society. The ownership of ITEMS is actually real. If I own a shirt, or a car, or a blender, I genuinely DO own that item in the way that we think of "ownership."

However, when I own a dog or a cat, my "ownership" is different -- I do not have unrestricted rights to do whatever I want to that dog or cat, because the dog or the cat has some sort of rights to him or herself, too. And if I own a piece of land, what I actually have is a title to the exclusive use of that piece of land for certain purposes for a period of time. That period of time may be open-ended -- but, for instance, every year, my wife and I pay taxes to our town on our house.

That, fundamentally, is a lease that we are paying to the town to act as if we own the land for one more year. In fact, society as a whole "owns" the land, and our town government, acting as an agent for our society, leases "our" land to us year-by-year. Now, we have certain legal rights to how we may use that land -- but those are legal rights, not inalienable rights.

Intelectual property is also a legal fiction. Societies have realized that it is beneficial to allow artists, creators, scientists, and inventors to have the exclusive benefits of their work for a period of time. This is a purely pragmatic thing: if creators have the legal ability to control their creation for a period of time, they can use that time to make money off of their creation. That gives them a REASON to create, and an ability to make a living off of creating (well, that's the hope, anyway).

Then, after a period of time, those ideas and creations become the property of everyone in the society.

In fact, ideas REALLY belong to nobody, and therefore to everybody. But we choose to let people ACT as if they belong to them so that they can make a living making ideas, and, therefore, so that there will be more creative ideas made. But we do that purely for the pragmatic reason that, if we do it that way, we as a society get the benefit of having, and owning, more ideas than if we didn't do it that way.

This is why copyright and intellectual property is a good thing -- but that copyright periods that are too long are a bad thing. Personally, I think the Berne Convention terms are too long.

Now, what about the French droit d'auteur? The property rights that the French respect fall into that same category. But what about the droit moraux -- the "moral rights" to the work?

Some of those -- most of those -- seem perfectly reasonable. A work may never be disseminated without the author's name attached, for instance. A work may not be altered.

But what does that do to derivative works? Under droit d'ateur, could I write more "Tarzan" stories? I feel that I should be able to -- but can I?

It seems to me that droit d'ateur rights can be looked at in two ways. If they are rights that the author holds, rights of being recognized, rights of a person being respected, I can understand that. I think that the right to be treated with dignity and respect is an inalienable right, and I could see that that would include always acknowleging the work that a creator did in putting together a creative work.

But some people perceive them as rights that the work has, and that seems odd to me. How can a non-alive thing have rights? But I know authors who feel that their character are real. For instance, Robin Hobb feels that if people write stories about her characters, it hurts them, not her.

I can understand that, and out of respect for Ms Hobb, wouldn't write fanfiction in her worlds, but I don't think that what she's talking about is something that is ACTUALLY real, or should be enshrined in law.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I disagree with your analysis of property tax as a form of ground rent. Property taxes are generally levied at least partly on the value of improvements to the land, not the value of the unimproved land, and are an attempt at a progressive ability-to-pay tax. You generally do not forfeit your right to the land (and thus face eviction) if you do not keep up with property taxes [your jurisdiction may have particular wacky laws, I know not]. The concept of freehold pre-dates such taxes, indeed, and I'm sure I could name many jurisdictions where there was no such property tax. [England around 1991, for starters].

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it doesn't map precisely. But I still feel that there is some sort of connection there. Because, fundamentally, why do you have to pay property tax?

I'm not asking what you get for it -- that's obvious -- we get police and fire protection, trash pickup, schools, and all sorts of other benefits. But what is the right by which a society taxes land?

I could be convinced that my analysis is completely wrong -- I've been known to be totally wrong before. But the point of which I am more certain is that "ownership" of land is somehow fundamentally different from ownership of things. And that both are fundamentally different from "ownership" of ideas.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree that the ownerships are different. But property tax doesn't enter it to it. Society taxes land on the same bases that it taxes income, televisions, sales, windows, fuel, capital gains, or in some cases, standing wealth: by fiat.

Common law generally regards property law to be a natural right akin to the the ownership of chattels, and not an artificially created right such as copyright.

[poggle.livejournal.com]

I think it depends on the gossip issue, when a friend of mine was splitting up with her partner. On purpose she told someone who was a big gossip so my friend didn't need to tell anyone, everyone knew already. So on that occasion it worked in my friends favour.
I tend to pass on good news like someone is pregnant, getting married or someone has died.
Everything else I keep to myself.
I also find if I have said something I shouldn't have said going to the person I had said it about and tell them.
An example of this was a neighbour was worried about housing benefit and another friend had been took to court. I explained that was due to a change in circumstance that she hadn't informed the housing benefits about, where as my other friend was doing everything she could to sort it out.
I informed the friend who had been to court what I had said and she was fine with it as she wouldn't want anyone to go through what she had been through.
So I suppose it depends with me what you class as gossip, some would see what I did as gossiping.