Comments on: Justice vs preferences

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:54:29 +0000

No, because he’s not saying anything about how things ought to be. He’s just trying to describe patterns of behavior. To have such bumper sticker thoughts in your mind, you must assume there’s one well defined meaning for justice. This might be the case, but when you explicitly lay it out as an assumption, its not so obvious.

By: swong

swong — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:02:50 +0000

If you think Friedman’s statement is brilliant, would you call yourself a moral relativist? Not that that’s a good or bad thing.

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:56:15 +0000

Your premise that every mammal must have a mammal for a mother is false.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:50:40 +0000

Well, I wasn’t bringing up the topic of protests per se but rather the issue at stake with this particular set of protests (namely, the role of women in society). An individual woman who goes against the prevailing social order risks get killed, and not necessarily by her husband or by a blood relative. So this social order may have very well evolved and reached a sort of equilibrium where everyone is doing the best they can given everyone else’s behavior, but that doesn’t mean it arose out of a series of *independent* (decentralized) interactions in which no one was thinking about the “general good.” Also, changing this social order will require both some kind of collective action and some appeal to “higher” concepts (”justice”, “fairness”). Finally, this isn’t some strange pathological case; defining proper and improper activities for different classes of people is what the social order is all about.

Proof that there are no mammals: Every mammal must have a mammal for a mother; there was a time before there were any mammals; therefore, there are no mammals.

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:07:33 +0000

I think protests aren’t explaining “to the extent [society] is evolved rather than legislated”. Friedman is explaining most social order. Also, most protests (but not the one you cite) are about partying, dressing up funny and breaking windows, not collective action.

I’m not clever enough to get how you can prove no mammals exist.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:10:28 +0000

The social order, to the extent that it is evolved rather than legislated, is a set of rules that exist because it was in the interest of pairs of individuals to abide by them, not because they promote the general good of society. But consider the issues of social order that arise here. I think almost everyone would agree that the protests and counter-protests are fundamentally about the social order, but Friedman's framework of freely contracting independent individuals seems woefully inadequate for explaining what's going on. Also, you can extend Friedman's proof that every number is unique to show that no mammals exist.