@socialjusticemunchkin, you were recently talking about a libertarian approach to human genetic engineering, perhaps you would be interested in the dialogue conducted by @davidsevera under way at veracities.online on this very subject.
Given the number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning folk in these parts I am curious how the precautionary side of the debate will be received and whether anyone is willing to jump in and play devil’s advocate!
I sorta would want to argue about this, but my issues are about possible negative consequences rather than certainties.
In truth, I don’t think it should be categorically forbidden, but think some caution is in order. One big issue is that the argument here is over a hypothetical we’re still a not at with consequences that won’t become apparent for a while. Honestly, the thing I would most want is for people not to oversell it.
Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)
There are some possible tragedy of the commons effects, as with existing issues like sex-selective abortion, which is just an extreme case of parents exercising choice over the genetics of their children.
(Also accidentally causing human extinction when parents universally choose mutations which boost IQ by ten points but also turn out to cause sterility, oops).
Yeah, one the big ones is: “We still don’t really understand the genome or the mind very well, please don’t accidentally make an entire generation of psychopaths“
It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the moment to think through the potential pitfalls and probable dynamics as sort of a roadmap.
I’d imagine that, at least at first (and possibly for quite a long time?), any alterations to the genome would be made by selecting from within preexisting natural variation. Most personality traits are influenced by countless genes, so it’s not likely that we’d hit upon some weird combination of alleles that led to psychopathy, but there’s no guarantee of what might happen if we push the distribution of a given trait dramatically in one direction. Certainly I’d hope we have an understanding of how various pathologies arise well before making any major changes on a large scale, and I’d hope the research moves fairly slowly.
Libertes all the way.
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
My cynical pragmatist side says: “Hello, convicted fucking criminal speaking; if the PoliceMob ransomed me for estradiol, how in hell would I trust them not to fuck up regulating genetic engineering just as horribly?” They can pry CRISPR from my cold, metallic upload hands once I can just sudo straight to my root account, but until then I will not surrender one inch of bodily autonomy.
Yes, there will be terrible consequences if we let parents CRISPR their kids freely, but the only way to reduce the obvious consequences would be to sweep them under the rug and turn them into even more terrible but just less-visible consequences with an FDA of genetic engineering. Sure, kids won’t have two heads, but neither will they have very useful augmentations. I’m not expecting anyone to start shooting bees or lightning from their fingertips so this is kind of a no-brainer.
Seriously, the things the system does to trans people or drug users are very illuminating of how it “wants” to treat all unpopular self-modifications and exercisings of bodily autonomy: with brutal repression and giving in only as little as it can. I won’t make its job one bit easier by consenting to such things instead of resisting all the way. I trust a free society to do better than the state, because the bar is set so low I’d need the help of an oil company to reach it (snark intended).
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
I like this idea.
However, I seriously doubt the average parent can afford to cover the appropriate cost for giving someone a severe chronic pain condition or genes that will kill them by 30, and if we don’t force them to buy insurance they probably won’t. (More generally, people are not likely to buy liability insurance unless they have to.)
And then, of course, there’s the incentive issue where if you don’t want the kid you inflicted the severe chronic pain condition on through neglect to sue you, you might want to convince them that they don’t want to do anything about it.
Yes, terrible outcomes would result because terrible outcomes always result, but if parents effectively have to have insurance to have legal protection (ArguProtect regular plan, as the platinum family plan would be way too expensive because only abusers and really principled assholes would buy the “children are property, do what you want” one instead of the “children have rights, don’t be evil” one, and thus compensation payments would be really predictably ultra-likely) and abused children can authorize the Dia Paying Group to collect millions from ArguProtect if the brainwashing fails; and if the culprits themselves don’t have the money then all the better because ArguProtect’s other customers would be incentivized to tell them to stop ruining their insurance premiums, it would reduce the problems. Even if only one in ten abused children can break out of the brainwashing and demand compensation, it would eradicate the abuse people aren’t willing to pay 10% of the compensation to continue doing.
And furthermore, this can’t really be done in a monopoly law system, because people won’t have the liability insurance as they very seldom need it, and it would soon degenerate into either PoliceMob kidnapping any parents who do anything that seems slightly risky, or PoliceMob giving tacit approval to all kinds of “children are property” bullshit when they don’t want to have too strict universal rules and therefore conclude that kidnapping children to dangerous and autonomy-violating boot camps against their will is totally ok (as I’ve understood, the US seems to have managed to kind of have *both* at the same time). Monopoly law is subject to enormous democratic pressures which means that people’s religious etc. objections to childrens’ rights are very effectively coordinated whereas Dia Paying Group could just say it doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s religion because someone’s consent and autonomy were violated and they need to pay for it no matter what.
And while I have been focusing on the business side, there would be nothing actually preventing people from having their security provider be something else; I’d expect communists to run their own grassroots democratic collectives sharing property and fulfilling many such functions on a non-commercial basis (but they would still be expected to fork over the cash or otherwise compensate the victims outside the collective, incentivizing people to keep tabs on each other’s nonconsensually risky behavior to avoid being held liable for them, thus enabling enforcement of prosocial mores without binding people to non-consensual communities which is a severe failure mode of traditional clan systems), charities doing pro bono or sliding-scale-priced security, etc.; it’s just that having a sound business logic/incentive structure is the core question altruism can easily operate on top of. I wouldn’t be surprised if eg. trade unions took on many of these duties*.
Also, mandatory liability insurance would probably improve even monopoly law IF said monopoly law is established on a strong principle of bodily autonomy. Insurance would make prison abolition (mostly; there would still be people who need to be segregated from potential victims but a very small amount) dramatically easier when the solution to “poor person violates your rights” could be “make the associates of the poor person pay sufficient compensation” instead of “kidnap the poor person because they can’t pay a sufficient compensation”. It would have the problems of determining what counts as valid insurance and it might degenerate into an overregulated bullshit system, but it would open new avenues for less-coercive behavioral control and more sensible management of risks (for example, a working-class single mother could leave her child in the car during a job interview without getting kidnapped, because her insurance provider would be more likely to understand the problems of poor people than the System as a whole is (because incentives; if insurance is oligopolized by big overregulated cronyist corporations it doesn’t work but if the market is actually functional people would be incentivized to cater to their customers’ needs and situations) and thus more sympathetic to the idea that sometimes people have only bad and worse options and punishing them for choosing bad over worse doesn’t make sense; of course in a proper system she should have access to eg. a childcare cooperative or another arrangement of mutual aid).
* In fact, trade unions are already an example of polycentric law functioning around us (although due to corporatist regulations, they may be monopolistic locally or industry-wide; for example in Finland there is no national minimum wage, but it’s instead negotiated bindingly for each industry separately) in the sphere of work. In essence, a trade union acts as its members’ Dia Paying Group for negotiating the specifics of employment contracts, and when unregulated, in a way that is very much like the ad hoc monkey-patching I’d expect a polycentric system to provide for other things as well.
For example, the employer argues that the workers should be paid $10 an hour and have their bathroom breaks controlled; the union argues that the wages should be $15 and bathroom breaks should be deregulated. The employer says going on strike is a contract violation, the union says that controlling bathroom breaks is a violation of what the contract is supposed to be. Then they negotiate what the contract actually means in this situation. Maybe they settle on $12 and no bathroom control, because the employer threatens to fire the workers and the workers threaten to tell everyone the employer is shitty and they should either be customers somewhere else or keep bothering the employer with customer feedback until a deal is reached. Maybe they settle a deal right away to avoid a protracted labor struggle, maybe they get into a protracted labor struggle. What’s known for sure is that the 19th century nastiness wouldn’t be repeated if PoliceMob doesn’t take sides and permit pinkertons to do nonconsensual violence to workers without getting in trouble for it.
Similarly, Dia Paying Group would argue that causing a severe chronic pain condition necessitates compensation regardless of intent, and ArguProtect’s rules would then determine whether the parent has to pay what they can afford or if it is pooled among all customers. Since causing a chronic pain condition is clearly a violation of a person’s rights, ArguProtect would have very little to stand on and would be incentivized to minimize the causings of chronic pain conditions.
On the other hand, if the child argued that their autonomy was violated by a vital vaccination at age 3, the case would probably be laughed out of arbitration because nobody wants to do business with someone who doesn’t let people be protected from dangerous diseases that expose innocent third parties to excessive risks (compensating the families of immunocompromised people who caught measles from some hipster’s brat isn’t cheap).
There would be the uncomfortable territory of evolving law on topics such as “is a person who was circumcised by their parents entitled to compensation just for that even if there were no complications”, and Dawn Defense might say “yes, anyone who wishes they hadn’t been circumcised should be paid”, Dia Paying Group might say “no, if the circumcision was based on sincere religious belief (as we have defined in our policies on page x…)”, and then they would just have to figure out the least unsatisfactory agreement with the knowledge that later decisions in a different context might be different. The problems of public opinion would still be there but at least they would be more limited in scope. If all situations where something is obviously not a violation of another person’s bodily autonomy, such as “driving while black” or “walking while trans” were immediately thrown out as completely frivolous, the opportunity for popularly-sanctioned oppression would be far smaller even though it couldn’t be eradicated altogether.
(And how would the system deal with boudary cases? Let’s say Adam writes a blog post Steve doesn’t like, so Steve begins stalking and harassing Adam, and ArguProtect says they won’t limit Steve’s freedom of expression. In that case, Dia Paying Group purchases the same plan Steve is using for their own very large employees, who then begin expressing themselves in Steve’s inbox, voicemail and doorstep, or if Steve doesn’t mind, they inform other customers of ArguProtect that unfortunately they would have to express themselves in obviously ArguProtect-approved ways to them if Steve won’t stop expressing himself to Adam. If ArguProtect is a bunch of weird assholes who all enjoy harassment in both directions, Dia Paying Group shouldn’t have excess difficulty in convincing Dawn Defense, BLM security etc. that ArguProtect should be scorned until they keep their harassment strictly internal-only.)
(And if ArguProtect wants to enforce its own informal “bathroom bill” by having its large employees creep in other people’s bahrooms just to impose its own sense of morality on the rest, others can simply ban ArguProtect employees and customers from their bathrooms.)
(In fact, diminishing people’s ability to coordinate meanness is kind of “the point” of libertarian policies, because people are probably doing way too much coordinated meanness. When it is combined with better protection against uncoordinated meanness as well, the result is expected to be a less mean society. And the exact nature of the coordinated meanness is important too; taking taxes to fund a basic income is way less mean than voting to ban $group for being offensive by simply existing.)
1 month ago · tagged #anarchist eulering #i don't know how well the practice would match the theory #but that's why it should be tested somewhere · 23 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from ilzolende and added:Yes, terrible outcomes would result because terrible outcomes always result, but if parents effectively have to have...
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argumate liked this- ilzolende reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
I like this idea. However, I seriously doubt the average parent can afford to cover the appropriate cost for giving...
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collapsedsquid reblogged this from davidsevera and added:Variation is part of the problem actually, it can lead to inconsistent response to genetic changes. When you combine...
davidsevera reblogged this from collapsedsquid and added:It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the...
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Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)There are some possible tragedy of the commons...
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