From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 09:33:42 MST
On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Lee Corbin wrote:
> This is quite a claim, pregnant with implications.
> To pursue my fanciful analogy a bit, then I am to
> understand that I am being forced to look at ugly
> or crippled people as well? After all, they walk
> down the street and "intrude" on my visual space
> much as billboards do.
Well, yes. After all, in theory ugly/crippled people could be forced into
institutions where you would never see them. I heard that in some
cultures, kids with hare lips are kept indoors almost their whole lives...
> I think that you should reconsider your very broad
> usage of "force" (and, I'm guessing "violence" in the
> main thread). After all, where do you stop? No
> matter what kind of an effect one kind of matter
> has on another, according to your usage, it seems
> the former is using force on the latter.
Yes.
> Now while that might be okay for physics ;-) it
> still sounds like a bad idea for law or philosophy.
> It would mean, for example, that since you are
> forcing me to read your email subject lines, and
> your name to the left of them, then perhaps whatever
> force I use to stop you from doing this is in the
> same basic category. And *you* were the one who
> started using force after all!
Yes, you could use force to stop from looking at my emails. You could
block my emails, or kick me off the list, or whatever.
> Yes, I understood. And you're right; but I'd say
> instead that it depends on one's value system.
> However, I think that we are saying the same thing.
I think so... A particular aesthetic philosophy has a set of criteria for
establish what is valuable or not... So it's a kind of "value system"...
> Yes. As it stands, local communities still have the
> legal right to pass ordinances against a great many
> things---anything (in the U.S., that is) at least that
> does not violate the Constitution, the supreme law of
> the land. If I had my way, they could pass laws against
> *whatever* they pleased that did not strictly violate
> the constitution, including, for example, abortion, or
> other laws favoring infanticide. But few agree with me
> there: the honest ones will disagree by claiming that
> a kind of utilitarianism supports their position that
> the federal government should disallow such local freedom,
> the dishonest ones will twist the constitution until it
> says whatever they want.
Legal "rights" to do anything are basically memes. Through human behavior,
they can exert various kinds of force. The U.S. Constitution, and any
particular interpretation of it, are memes. The humans who contain these
memes can exercise bodily force to follow or advance them. That anyone can
do whatever they please, and that they will tend to do what they are
"forced" (in this very general analytical sense) to do, is a fact of
reality, not a political viewpoint or desideratum. We all have our way, we
just don't necessary exert much sway.
> But more seriously, note your egregious use of the word
> "force" yet again; no one really forces anyone else to
> agree with them in a free country.
Lee, I just don't see the analytical value of talking about
this sort of "freedom".
I don't wish to reductively deny the human-level experience of
"freedom" (which is real), or to reduce things to their literal
physics-level interactions (agentless, supposedly). But I am using the
word force in a kind of literal, kind of rhetorical way to describe the
play of forces in the world that cause things to be the way they are, the
play of cause and effect.
I cannot see that I have ever personally exerted any significant force on
the issue of billboards, to take the example from my previous post. Why
then doesn't it make sense to analyze my having to see billboards as the
result of someone else's use of force? That is actually the case. Whether
it was a majority, or a cash-full company, or a politician on a mission,
or just the advertisers themselves, someone exerted the force to bring
about the condition I am faced with. And it was not me.
p.s. though - if "freedom" is thought of as a property of agents and
subjects (as opposed to patients and objects), we might, as Haraway
suggested, attribute agenthood and subjecthood to units of reality that
exhibited any sort of undetermined, indeterminable behavior - such as
elementary atomic particles, or clouds in the sky. Saying that they
"choose" to go here or there is not far from the metaphorical
mark. Anything whose behavior is significantly influenced by probablistic,
random, or even chaotic factors.
gej
resourcesoftheworld.org
jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu
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