Partly inspired by Would You Support A One World Government thread, I have been wondering about the whole idea of national sovereignty and how the idea holds up philosophically and morally.
My feeling is that national sovereignty can’t hold up philosophically to the idea that “all people are created equal,” in that one country has the ability to deny non-citizens access. I don’t even know that private property in general is philosophically sound, but I’d probably be willing to move my opinion on that given that I shudder to think about what might happen if there wasn’t private property of some sort.
Anyway, I just thought I’d throw out the question. Cheers!
The universal declaration of human rights outlines a variety of human and civil rights that people are innately entitled to. The final article outlines that no nation has sovereignty to deny the other rights listed.
Article 30.
* Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
I do believe you need some kind of border system though. Since living in a nation and being dependent on a nation offers benefits over living as an individual, then you need to curtail certain rights to maintain the integrity of that nation. So police forces, military forces, legal systems and borders come up. But I think its a trade off most people are comfortable with, but it is a tight rope where too far in either direction causes problems.
The basis for property rights in my opinion is to circumvent the tragedy of the commons. When all is shared (e.g. a grazing field), people maximize their own benefits through their actions (increasing their herd) while while pushing most of the costs of those decisions onto society at large (overgrazing effects every herdsman who uses the commons). Dividing up the land as private property allows us to insulate ourselves from our neighbor’s poor decisions. Even better, they will probably make fewer poor decisions in the first place.
People tend to make better decisions when they weigh all of the costs involved, but in reality they only actually weigh the costs that effect them. It is in everybody’s best interest to align these as much as possible (the costs of a decision and the costs that the decision-maker feels). This is why I would support a pollution tax but I am against the war on drugs. Pollution is a free ride by polluters on the back of everyone else. Drug users make their decisions bearing all the consequences of their actions, apparently of the opinion that the benefits are worth it.
Long story short, I think this theory can be used to defend a “more power to local governments, less power to the higher levels” approach to governing, in order to insulate local consequences from the whims of someone in Zimbabwe, for example. On the other hand, it doesn’t rule out a weaker worldwide government to oversee the whole thing, and it can’t really be used to support 100% national sovereignty either.
That would depend on the size of the commons, would it not? Just sticking with your example of pollution, for example, different kinds of pollutants affect different areas. Ozone emissions can effect a city, sulfur emissions can affect a significant chunk of a country, and carbon dioxide emissions affect the entire planet. So if I’m understanding you correctly, the ozone tax should be levied by the city, the sulfur tax should be levied by the national government, and the CO[sub]2[/sub] tax should be levied by a worldwide government: Is that correct?
Sure. But while one motivation for a pollution tax is to recoup the public’s losses, either to clean up the pollution or to just take cash in exchange for living with the costs, the other motivation is that it provides a disincentive to pollute in the first place. For this, it wouldn’t matter if the city government taxed CO2, as long as enough of them did so that the polluter couldn’t just move to the next town over. Still, I think your scheme would probably be ideal.
Good discussion so far. When you say that this is a “trade off most people are comfortable with,” that seems like it would be true for those that already live in a first world country, but those that live in 3rd world countries might not be so pleased.
My feeling is that if human society evolves to a point where we can guarantee equal access to resources (e.g., solar energy becomes, for all intents and purposes, very, very cheap to the point of virtually being free on a per-capita basis), we can bring the entire world up to 1st world standards, and there would be less of an incentive to keep national borders.
What are your views on city and county governments? It is philosophically valid to have subdivisions of government at the local level? Or should the liberal residents of Hippieville live under the same laws and policies as the conservative residents of Teabag City?
I have no problems with subdivision of government; in fact, I think it makes very good sense, as local governments are going to be more in tune with the needs and desires of local populations. But, I don’t believe a local government should be able to discriminate against who can and cannot buy/rent property in any given locality. This is what sovereign governments do all the time, and I think that is philosophically untenable. If Mr. Teabag wants to move to Hippieville, no one should be able to say, “Sorry, you don’t have a Hippieville passport, so you can’t move here.” Now, Mr. Teabag might not like the fact that his neighbor is allowed to grow weed in his garden, but he should be free to vote accordingly (once he becomes a resident of Hippieville, which should simply be a matter of getting an apartment/house, or establishing residency in a local homeless shelter, etc.).
So the question isn’t one of political boundaries. It seems to be one of policy, as in, whether immigration laws should be liberalized.
Otherwise, the same arguments for how political subdivisions more accurately reflect the will of their electorate would seem to work equally well for the socialized health-care lovin’ Canadians in Hippieville as does the concealed gun-totin’ Americans in Teabag City. And what’s wrong with Canadians and Americans having different political divisions to suit their policy preferences?
I agree. But I think issues such as health care would become more comparable between these divisions, because if they were important enough (as health care arguably is) and there were stark differences between communities, people would likely move to a location that has the better policies.
That’s why my question is one of national sovereignty, but maybe the question is poorly phrased and should indeed be one regarding free immigration. But in that case, there are still questions such as whether or not an independent nation should be able to have an army to keep out other nations, etc. A world government might be able to enforce the boundaries without having to resort to local militia.
My feeling is that national sovereignty can’t hold up philosophically to the idea that “all people are created equal,” in that one country has the ability to deny non-citizens access. I don’t even know that private property in general is philosophically sound, but I’d probably be willing to move my opinion on that given that I shudder to think about what might happen if there wasn’t private property of some sort.
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I think this is the key point, and its a good analogy. Yes, theoretically speaking, we should all be better off we abolish private property and live caring, sharing communal existence. But in reality the result of abolishing personal property is hell on earth.
Likewise for the national sovereignty, it theory we are all citizens of the world, and national boundaries, and sovereignty are meaningless. In reality the respect of them is what makes the modern era, moderately more bearable for human life than previous eras.
For those of us lucky enough to be in on the dividing, of course, and those who inherit those rights. If not, you’re SOL (unless you can create new property ex nihilo - good luck with that).
The “tragedy of the commons” isbullshit. The same problem of greed occurs whether there is common ownership or a capitalist system. The actual historic commons worked just fine, ironically enough.
Correct. It’s a precise example of petitio principii.
So shut up. You have absolutely no right to point that out. And I take offense at your doing so – and, in this particular universe of debate, the majority is on my side.
Note that, in this case, this post is not the belligerent sort of flame that belongs only in the Pit – it’s reasoning from your point. If we are unable to presume rights for mankind, then your ability to point that out is protected by nothing, and may be stifled by brute force or social overpowering – mob rule.
Or, perhaps, you might want to rethink whether there are innate rights which governments have a moral obligation to recognize.
So? Unless one’s country incorporates that phrase into its basic law / constitution, it’s irrelevant.
And largely tossing off regardless since sovereignty is an established practice to describe the real fact that generally speaking, outsider interference (e.g. Iraq) in the perceived internal affaires of a given national identity group usually is intensely disliked.
I’m afraid that a rather skewed representation of the tragedy of the commons argument from a hard Leftist journal is not particularly strong grounds. And we have a fine illustration of the tragedy of the commons in the area of high seas fishing right now, with clear over-fishing occurring in areas which meet commons definition. The article itself presents a caricature of an argument.
I’ll grant that the initial division of property probably wasn’t very equitable, but more like a bunch of warriors and conquistadors grabbing whatever they could defend. That’s a good argument for attempting to mitigate the problems of economic inequality now and for working towards more equality of opportunity in the future, but it isn’t a very good argument in support of commons style communism.
That article is almost 100% straw man, addressing the scientific merit of Hardin’s essay when in fact it is an essay on philosophy and ethics. About the only debatable assumption Hardin makes is that incentives drive human action and I think it is reasonable. It is odd that the article mentions using The Tragedy of the Commons to support laissez faire capitalism when in fact Hardin is arguing in support of socialist policies like temperance, population control and reducing pollution.
I’ll admit that there must have been times in the past when the commons was a worthwhile way to manage resources. And most of the ‘evidence’ against privatization in that article is just evidence that privatizing real estate isn’t enough, because ‘deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems’ are all consequences of the costs of property owners’ decisions spilling over onto the rest of society.
The article left me with the belief that while communal management of resources might be better than wanton exploitation, it is not nearly as good as enlightened self-interest. In my view, a big part of the government’s job is to supply that ‘enlightenment’. Again I think this is applicable to the topic of local autonomy versus centralized management.
Then Hardin should have picked his example more carefully.
And no,wmfellows, the high seas problem isn’t really the tragedy of the commons, it’s the tragedy of runaway capitalism - or is it subsistence fishers that operate the big trawlers that do most of the damage? It’s not like international fishing isn’t regulated. Just that people (with money) have the means to ignore inconvenient laws. This is no different than foreign trawlers fishing in restricted national waters (i.e. not commons) and running when spotted, as happens quite often here.
And Dr. Cube, it amuses me that you seem to be saying the problem is that we need more government regulation to supply ‘enlightenment’ for our self interest, when it seems evident that the larger a government entity gets, the more removed from its constituency and the less likely it is to act in their interest.
It’s funny, you seem to be implying here that communists are all subsistence farmers and fishermen. Which makes sense because when all the fruits of your toil are taken from you, you tend to work just barely enough to survive. Communists love poor people so much they want us all to join in on the poverty fun!
I’m not talking about more government, I’m talking about better government. Personally, I’d like to see the size of the government drastically reduced. I’m just recognizing one of the few tasks I think government is ideally suited for – creating incentives. I think the ‘proper way’ to set up an incentive system is to focus on maximizing freedom of all involved, where ‘freedom’ here entails not being burdened with the costs of other people’s decisions.
In fact, given the proper definition of ‘freedom’, I think maximizing freedom should be the main overarching goal of government. And I think the best way to do that is to make government transparent, inclusive (open to all who all who have a stake, not just citizens) and to concentrate its powers at the local level.