Theme: Responsibility

Nassim,

Wanted to suggest a framing, possibly helping you construct your “skin in the game” property of ethical actions.

I work in an amoral language (economics), and for the purpose of constructing law (which I consider the west’s empirical social science). This in your work you appear to retain moral loading of terminology, and that explains the difference in use of terms.

Where you use ‘skin in the game’ I use ‘warranty’ because this is a legal term with a long history. And would include investment, escrow, warranty, and inescapable legal requirement.

**”Ethical (and moral) action is one that imposes no involuntary costs upon that which others have acted to inventory without themselves imposing involuntary costs.”**

However, we have the problem of asymmetry of information, which you are trying to both defend against, and find a measure for. (Which will be one of the great intellectual innovations in human history if you can find an actionable measure of it.)

Properties Of Ethical and Moral Action

DOOLITTLE…………TALEB

Productive……………NO???

Fully Informed………YES

Warrantied…………..YES

Voluntary…………….YES

Transfer………………YES

Free of externality..YES (Fragility)

The only one that I am unsure of is ‘productive’ since there is a pretty significant question at present whether financialization (trading) is in fact productive or whether it’s parasitic. I’m not sure myself.

Cheers,

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

—BACKGROUND ARGUMENT—

COOPERATION

The Evolution of Cooperation:

1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory many categories of resources, and evolved to demonstrate constant acquisitiveness of those resources.

2) Property: The scope of those things they act upon, or choose not to act upon, in anticipation of obtaining as inventory (a store of value), constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.* (See Butler Schaeffer) “That which and organism defends.”

3) Value: Human emotions evolved to reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.* As such nearly all emotions can be expressed in terms of reactions to property. (imposed costs here, pre-moral, but also pre-cooperation, and only defense and retaliation, not cooperation)

4) Non-Conflict: That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they evolved to intuit as their property, and demonstrate this intuition by defense of their inventory, and by their punishment of transgressors.

5) Cooperative Production: That which humans act in concert with one another to produce. (Important take-away is that the purpose of cooperation is material and reproductive production.)

6) Moral (cooperative) Intuitions(instincts): Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding by members with whom one cooperates in production and reproduction. (This is where free riding enters.)

7) Distribution of Intuitions by Reproductive Strategy: Moral intuitions vary in intensity to suit one’s reproductive strategy. This intensity and distribution of moral intuition varies between males and females, as well as between classes and between groups.

8) Variation By Family Structure: Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production.

9) Resolution of Disputes: Property rights were developed in law as the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity (corporation) agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment. Conversely, any possible property rights not expressed, the community (corporation) is unwilling to adjudicate, restore or punish, or has not yet discovered the need to construct.

10) Instrumentation: Property rights are necessary for the instrumental measurement of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in human emotional states, and our inability to determine truth from falsehood. And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state.

11) Family: As a general rule, as the division of knowledge and labor increases, so must the atomicity of property rights, and as a consequence, the size of the family must decline {Consanguineous, Punaluan, Pairing (Serial Marriage), Hetaeristic, Traditional, Stem, Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear}.

12) Transaction Costs: As the division of labor increases, relationships increase in distance from kin, increase in anonymity, decrease common interest, and the incentive to seize opportunities rather than adhere to agreements increases. This decrease creates the problem of trust, which increases costs of insuring any agreement is fulfilled, and decreases the overall number of possible agreements and the number of participants in any structure of production.

13) Trust (ethics in production): As a general rule, for the size of the family to decrease, and division of labor to increase in multi-part *complexity* then trust must increase, and trust can only increase with expansion of property rights to include prohibitions on unethical actions. Mere ostracization, boycotting and reputation are insufficient to preserve agreements (contracts).

14) Moral Competition (ethics in political production): (morals property rights, cheating) As a general rule, the scope of moral prohibitions expressed as property rights, must increase to limit demand for authority.

15) Demand for Authority: As a general rule, if a delay in the production of property rights evolves, then demand for authority will fill the vacuum with some form of authority to either suppress retaliation (conflict) or to prevent circumstances leading to conflict, or both.

THE REASONS FOR THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION

INGROUP COOPERATION

1) The disproportionately high return on cooperation.

2) The differences in abilities at different ages.

3) The difference in reproductive role and strategy between the genders.

4) The differences in abilities among men.

5) The local structure of production: the division of knowledge and labor.

6) The local structure of the reproduction: family and inheritance rights.

7) The distribution of property rights between the individual, family, group and the commons.

8) The degree of suppression of, and intolerance for, free riding both in and out of family.

9) calculative, cooperative technology available for economic signaling and coordination. (objective truth, numbers, money, prices, interest, writing, contract, and accounting).

10) The use of formal institutions to perpetuate these constraints.

11) The competition from groups with alternate structures of production, family, inheritance, property rights, free riding, cooperative technologies, and formal institutions.

OUTGROUP COOPERATION

12) The geographical distribution of nature-given factors of production. (note that this is last.)

MORALITY

OBVERSE: Those prohibitions on action that are necessary for preservation of the disproportionate rewards of cooperation. REVERSE: Those requirements that we impose no costs upon the property-en-toto of others.

The Criteria for Morality: That all transfers:

(a) are productive

(b) fully informed,

(c) warrantied,

(d) voluntary

(e) exchanges

(f) free of imposition against the property-en-toto of others by externality.

IMMORALITY

OBVERSE: Immorality then includes:

Murder, Violence, Theft, fraud, fraud by omission, unproductive exchange, externalization of costs, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy (statism), competition in norms, competition in laws, competition through conversion, competition through immigration, competition through invasion, competition through colonization, competition through conquest, competition through genocide.

REVERSE: IMMORALITY DOES NOT INCLUDE:

Competition in the seizure of opportunities (first use), since (a) this is the purpose of constructing commons: constructing a division of knowledge and labor, concentrating opportunities, the reduction of opportunity cost, and transaction costs producing opportunities which may be seized.

PROPERTY

OBVERSE: That which I have born costs to obtain without imposing costs upon that which others have acted to obtain, which they in turn, have obtained without imposing costs upon that which others have acted to obtain…(repeat)

REVERSE: That which I have born costs to obtain that I will retaliate against the imposition of costs upon.

PROPERTY-EN-TOTO

***”Those properties in which we have invested our forgone opportunities, our efforts, or our material assets, in order to inventory capital of every conceivable use.”***

Types of property based upon observations of what people consider to be their property:

I. SELF-PROPERTY

Personal property: “Things an individual has a Monopoly Of Control over the use of.”

a) Physical Body

b) Actions and Time

c) Memories, Concepts and Identities: tools that enable us to plan and act. In the consumer economy this includes brands.

d) Status and Class (mate and relation selection, and reputation.)

II. PERSONAL PROPERTY

a) Several Property: Those things external to our bodies that we claim a monopoly of control over.

III. KINSHIP PROPERTY

a) Mates (access to sex/reproduction)

b) Children (genetics)

c) Familial Relations (security)

d) Non-Familial Relations (utility)

e) Consanguineous property (tribal and family ties)

IV. COOPERATIVE PROPERTY

a) Organizational ties (work)

b) Knowledge ties (skills, crafts)

V. SHAREHOLDER PROPERTY

a) Shares: Recorded And Quantified Shareholder Property (physical shares in a tradable asset)

b) Commons: Unrecorded and Unquantified Shareholder Property (shares in commons)

c) Artificial Property: (property created by fiat agreement) Intellectual Property.

VI. INFORMAL INSTITUTIONAL PROPERTY:

a) Informal (Normative) Property: Our norms: manners, ethics, morals, myths, and rituals that constitute ur social portfolio and which make our social order (cooperation) possible.

VII. FORMAL INSTITUTIONAL PROPERTY

a) Formal Institutional Property: Formal (Procedural) Institutions: Our institutions: Religion (including the secular religion), Government, Laws.