INTENTIONS ARE IRRELEVANT. VIA POSITIVA (STORIES) HELP ORGANIZE BUT VIA NEGATIVA (LAW) DECIDES OUTCOMES.
The purpose of Natural Law is to prevent harm, resolve disputes, and force restitution. If no dispute, no harm, no externality exists then this is not a matter for law. law evolves via negativa. by discovering methods of conflict because of parasitism and preventing them by recording them as a warning that one will be forced to pay restitution, and as a help to those who want to know how to avoid conflict. It is a purely empirical process.
If one seeks to build consensus that is not the function of the law (via negativa). Yet if one seeks to build consensus by MEANS THAT CANNOT BE WARRANTED, and means that cannot be testified to, then one has failed to perform due diligence against harm, and one can be brought up for restitution.
Intentions are irrelevant.
The ease of transfer is irrelevant.
The ‘good’ of the outcome is irrelevant.
Those are statemetns of positiva (intention and excuse making)
However, when we come into dispute, disputes are decidable. All differences in property in toto are decidable.
If one does not impose a cost against property in toto then the matter is undecidable, precisely because it is immaterial. What you do in your own head that does not manifest itself as an imposition of costs upon the costs paid by others is irrelevant. (and reciprocity applies to others).
If you want a positive political philosophy (methods of cooperating in the production of commons) then we have a spectrum of options from near dictatorship to near anarchy to choose from. I don’t need to list them. We know them.
If you want a positive personal philosophy (generative options) we have at least these methods to choose from: , dreaming/free-association, the occult/new-age, superstition, myth, literature, Tradition/habit, rules of thumb/imitation, general rules of arbitrary precision (truth/science/history).
if you want an mental discipline mindfulness discipline we can achieve this through drugs/dreaming, suppression/meditation, internal-(recursive)-conversation/prayer, disciplined and restive ritual, contemplative writing, disciplined action-planning(stoicism), physical exercise/hiking-running-walking.
But if you want to DECIDE between competing wants, or decide between matters of conflict, there is only one possible method of decidability.
Now I might prefer a highly redistributed homogenous polity under strict rule of natural law, requiring all of that redistribution to be truthfully stated in the law, transparently performed and objectively measured. And I might prefer that order simply because I am highly independent by virtue of my talents and skills, and people seem to find me useful. But I can see others who are not so independent, not possessed of talents and skills, and not found useful, preferring a different order – although it is hard to understand a better order for getting it to them morally.
Now, others might prefer a different order for immoral reasons. Those reasons might be obvious (inabilty to compete in a market). Or they might be less obvious: inability to organize toward a productive end truthfllly. or they might be insidious: attempting to disorganize or organize toward a harmful end.
But all of these cases are decidable.
But in order for a case to be decidable, someone’s interests (property in toto) must have been subject to harm because of it.
Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2017-01-28 13:04:00 UTC
Leave a Reply