Ends in Themselves
“The thing is, at some point you have to balance the rights of the individual versus the needs of society.”
His statement left me stunned. I’d invited this tax collector into my home on good faith, and when he wasn’t praising the intricacies of World of Warcraft, he was busy uttering the vilest musings it’s ever been my misfortune to hear.
“I mean, you’ve got to think about China – we need to compete with their worker class, and we won’t be able to do that without locking up citizens for victimless crimes.”
China. Now there’s a moral barometer. I stifled my gag reflex with another shot of whiskey while he continued prattling. Soon enough he’d leave, I told myself, wander off somewhere in search of a young boy whose ear he can gently sodomize with a rolled up sheaf of Bible passages…
Where did this fool get these ideas? The Truth is so much simpler. By some chance alignment of the planets – or maybe just a natural outcome of evolution – the best organizations for our species, political and economic, are within a hair’s breadth of our intrinsic morality.
And morality’s easy. You want to know the secret?
People are ends in themselves.
The Utilitarians have done a lot of good for this world, there’s no denying that; when you actually bother to measure suffering X versus suffering Y, and come down on the side that weighs less, nine-times-out-of-ten you’re going to make the world a better place. If I have a choice between a googolplex of dust-specks-in-the-eye or one person getting tortured for fifty years, then of course I’m going to choose the torture – after all, Omega’s helping me out, isn’t he?
When all else fails “Shut up and multiply!” is a pretty decent fireteam partner. Whether or not it understands the situation, it knows how to shoot straight. Which is all well and good until you’re stuck in some sort of urban situation, and two stacks take the same basement from either end.
Stick with a Utilitarian long enough and you’re going to get some blue on blue. There’s a reason modern armies have switched from training grunts to strategic corporals.
For any of this to make sense you’ve got to understand the nature of human beings – not just as means to be dominated and controlled, funnelled the bowels of the leviathan by a caste of perverse patriarchs – but as an ends in themselves, world-changing sparks of understanding and optimization which are the closest thing to divinity you’re going to find this side of an acid tab.
The leviathan’s faithful look into the mirror every morning and project the ugliness they see there onto the rest of humanity. But the rest of us ain’t like them. Natural Rights and the Social Contract are the ideas of the day, and for us normal folk they’re as instinctive as breathing. We don’t give up any Freedom by respecting the Rights of others – there’s no blackness in our hearts, no desire to murder, rape, steal, and lie. Those vices belong to the political and religious classes – not to the honest folk that keep this country humming.
“But what about driving?” says the tax collector, subconsciously rubbing his limp genitals as he thinks about the small business he bankrupted last week, “Whenever you drive you give up the freedom to travel on the left-hand side of the road!”
This’ll likely come to a shock to any of you traffic cops out there, but I don’t actually want to drive on the left-hand side of the road; I just want to drive. I’ve got nothing against sharing the blacktop with other professionals. We just need to work out some basic rules so that racing through an intersection doesn’t fill a man with jitters. And as for government involvement? Hell, they’re just the best organization to police the rules that we the people want. It ain’t about them telling us; it’s about us hiring them.
“But society…”
As soon as society takes precedence over the individual, it won’t be long until we have another Unit 731 on our hands. If you really care about society that much, then why don’t you donate your own body to painful medical experiments? As a Utilitarian, it makes perfect sense. Just don’t hire your goons to donate mine.
“But about China,” he says, pulling his finger from his belly-button and tasting the lint, “if we let people do drugs then how will we compete with them economically? It’s a waste of man hours.”
I’m not even going to mention Prohibition; that argument’s getting stale, and if you haven’t heard it already then there are plenty of other resources out there. Instead I want to ask how many man hours are wasted on birthday parties? On take out pizza? On video games, for Christ’s sake? What I do on my own goddamned time, with my own money, and consenting partners is my own goddamned business.
Victimless Crime is an oxymoron!
“What’s an oxymoron?”
Christ in a cup! An oxymoron is a tax collector who worships Jesus and trusts the government.
Rorschach put it best in Watchmen when he said “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus.” Or maybe that was Kant. I can’t seem to recall just now.
Get off my lawn.
The Tax collector in question is not Utilitarian so much as he is ignorant of both human psychology, and simple business statistics. So i don’t know that addressing him is helpful, he’s dim, it can’t be helped.
Relevant, and interesting, is the topic of legalized drugs as it pertains to personal liberty. I’ve struggled with this issue for a few months now, here’s the quandary.
a) A free society should allow a person to be free to do as it pleases so long as it does not infringe on another persons positive rights.
b) Any substance like alcohol, pot or even heroine should be allowed under a truly free society.
The above is obvious, the problem comes as we continue with consequences.
c) In a free society a company should be free to hire or fire any individual they choose for whatever reasons they choose so long as that reasoning is applied equally. No amount of legislation will stop them anyway, they’ll just be honest about it if it’s legal.
d) As a result of the above it is likely that drug users will struggle to find employment, except in the capacity of drug maker/supplier, such is the nature of a free market.
However, the question is privacy. Should a company be able to request information such as “Do you drink?” or “Do you use Heroine?” and regardless of the answer, is an applicant required to tell the truth? It could be yes to both but it starts getting complicated. After all, what I do in my house is my own business and privacy is a positive right.
I suspect the answer is, in fact, if you can’t tell then it’s none of your business. If a person drinks every night and does a kilo of heroine but functions effectively at work without incident well…who am I to fire him?
This turned into a bit of rant, but what I’m getting at is that Personal liberty is an all or nothing game. Either we have it all, personal and professional and all the possible ugliness that it entails, or we don’t and more to the point can’t, have it. Legislation starts becoming necessary to account for the lack of liberty in society to attempt to enforce some idea of equality.
I dunno, tough issue.
Aurini: I completely understand your point – and as a smoker, this is particularly relevant towards me.
First off, to define terms, let’s leave the healthcare issue out of it. The current system in the US, where companies are expected to provide healthcare, distorts this issue. So lets stick to a safe, clean, lab-controlled environment where this doesn’t come up.
So I go and apply at Company A, and during the process they ask if I’m a smoker (presumably if I lie they will issue a civil suit, or fire me, or dock my pay, or something akin to that – no need for government enforcement here).
I’m certain there are HR people out there who believe that smokers steal an hour of company time each day with their cigarette breaks (I’d point out that, while I was working my last job at the Telco, my cigarette breaks occurred were usually spent sussing out a particularly difficult problem; but that’s neither here nor there). So company A decides not to hire me because I smoke/drink/am female/black et cetera.
That is their loss assuming I’m equal to my nonsmoking/teatotalling/male/hispanic counterparts in skill. They have narrowed their hiring pool, and are at a competetive disadvantage.
Now in the current environ they can’t ask me that, no more than they can ask a woman if she plans to have kids. The selection filter is still there, but it’s hidden; many women aren’t hired because companies fear pregnancy – female employment figures have actually decreased since ‘protective’ legislation was put in place, while women who ‘break the rules’ by discussing these issues with HR have an advantage over others, and both parties are able to reach a mutually benefitial agreement.