All right – this is a difficult issue to tackle. Still, it is an important one. So, if I go off on a tangent – please, comment and re-focus me!
The G8/G20 event cost over 1 Billion dollars in ‘security’ costs. Many people complained – yet, though I thought the figure high, I did not complain because I thought that if the people in positions to know thought the security costs were that hight, I was unwilling to double-guess them. In no way ought this event have been turned into a showcase for ‘unlawful people’ – if that was going to be the cost of upholding the rule of law, I was willing to pay the bill and not grumble (too much).
I am, if such a thing can be said to exist, a ‘pro-law libertarian’: it is my deeply held conviction that it is only through the rule of law that our rights can be respected and our liberties can be exercised.
I take a poor view of each and every individual who breaks the laws – even ‘bad laws’ (two ‘wrongs’ do not make a ‘right’), provided citizens have a recourse through their ability to lobby to change or otherwise get rid of ‘bad laws’. Even living in a totalitarian state, (though young) I thought that leaving everything behind and running away (not so bravely) was preferable to taking the law into my own hands: it would take a lot, including absence of any other course of action, to get me to break the laws or to condone others to do so.
Having explained my philosophical bend, I also ought to explain my attitude towards the police (and, yes, I am volunteering with the Ottawa police because I think cops ought to be ‘the good guys’).
Police officers occupy a very unique position in our society: they are the ‘Agents of the State’ whom we entrust with upholding the rule of law in our society. As such, they occupy a position of trust unlike those of most other people in society: trust which has to be continuously earned by their behaviour, because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. (Yes – I still have the nightmares…)
Unfortunately, ‘the police’ have recently been entrusted with two completely different goals: one is to ‘uphold the law’, the other is to ‘maintain order’. These two tasks are not necessarily in ‘extreme’ opposition to each other – but neither are they completely congruous with each other, either!
Example (from the past – to keep the current tempers even):
A large number of militant anti-Israeli protesters sees an Israeli flag in the window of an apartment and threaten to break into the building to get rid of it (presumably looting, or at least ‘damaging’ the building in the process). The police, ‘in order to maintain public order’, illegally enter the apartment and remove the ‘offensive’ flag in order to appease the mob which is threatening lawless violence.
These individual police officers chose to break the law, in order to ‘maintain public order’, instead of waiting for law-defying individuals to break the laws, then arresting them in order to uphold the laws of the land!
That is only one such example where the police chose to ‘maintain public peace’ rather than to ‘enforce the laws of the land’: had they enforced the laws, they would have waited for individuals to damage the property, then and only then arrested these individual lawbreakers and brought them to justice.
We have also seen a parallel to this in Canada, when a lone pro-Israeli protester (not breaking any laws) faced a large number of anti-Israel protesters in Alberta: the police threatened the lone, law-abiding, not-violence-threatening individual with arrest in order to ‘not provoke’ the violence-threatening (and thus law-breaking) mob because the law-abiding man’s ‘presence’ was a ‘provocation’ and thus a threat to ‘public order’. (Sorry, I can’t find the link – if you can, please, do so in the comments: yet, this is so common, most of us are aware of many parallel incidents!)
George Jonas (a fellow escapee from a totalitarian police state) phrases his observation of the role the police in our society are increasingly choosing to play:
‘The only group exhibiting Canadian-style restraint was the police. They cast a calm eye on the pandemonium, took a balanced view and chose no sides between people trying to exercise their rights and bullies trying to prevent them.’
These occurrences are not isolated: over and over, in much of the ‘free world’, we have seen police preferring to aid law-breakers (who are ‘difficult-to-handle’) in oppressing the population… instead of upholding the laws of the land.
Just consider the going-ons and race-based policing in Caledonia!!!
So, how does this relate to the G8/G20 situation – and the ‘split’ on the ‘right’?
In how the people usually considered ‘little-c-conservatives’ perceive what happened and how we evaluate the role the police played…
Let me first get a few things off my mind: it was idiotic to hold the G20 meeting in the middle of downtown of Canada’s largest city. Ensuring the security of the participants was going to be a nightmare. It was a situation where just about every possible outcome was going to draw serious – and ‘warranted’ – criticism. In other words, it was likely to be a ‘no win’ situation…
The police who were entrusted with the task of providing security for this event were in an unenviable position: ‘ensuring security’ necessarily put them into conflict with their primary role – that of ‘upholding the laws’!
Why?
Because ‘ensuring security’ meant the police were responsible for preventing any law-breaking which would result in ‘breeches of security’ at the summit.
However, the actual and proper role of the police is to uphold the laws: this means that they are only permitted to intervene AFTER a law has been broken!
How can a person (or collection of persons) possibly prevent a crime – when they are, by law, permitted to intervene only after a crime has been committed?!?!?
(Continued in ‘Part 2’ and ‘Part 3’)
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
July 8, 2010 at 23:59
[…] behaviour and the ‘split’ on the ‘right’: part 2 July 8, 2010 — xanthippa In part 1, I pointed out that increasingly, the police have been given two goals which are not always […]
July 12, 2010 at 04:43
Xanthippa:
The rule of law is a good thing. But too much of a good thing is bad.
I don’t suppose I need to remind you of what Tacitus said about the proliferation of laws and the corruption of the republic.
Of course, I agree that two wrongs don’t make a right, but I’m very surprised to see you classify the breaking of an unjust law as a wrong. My perspective is quite the opposite: it is the moral obligation of every upright citizen to disobey corrupt laws!
Your stance would be understandable if you believed that these bad laws are passed by mistake, and that legislators will readily jump to the task of correcting them just as soon as their mistakes are pointed out, because they really do have the good of the people at heart.
But you know as well as I do that, by the time social decadence gets to the point where the state is waging blatant lawfare against the people — which is the point we are at today, everywhere throughout what was once called the free world — any recourse the citizen seems to have for relief from unjust laws is nothing but a sham.
You know as well as I do that these laws are not passed by mistake, and their corrosive effects on the social fabric are not unintended consequences of poorly thought-out wording. These laws are carefully and deliberately crafted, by diabolically clever organizational psychopaths, to provide plausible deniability while brutally strangling what little is left of our liberty.
And because I know that you know these things, I am puzzled by your remark.
Xanthippa says:
You are absolutely right – and I have been struggling with ‘part 3’ where I explain precisely this…am now on version 12, I think…
…because it is so difficult to put into words the thoughts on this.
I find language (and, yes – I’ve tried ‘spitting it out’ in other language than English to see if I fare better…and I ran into a different set of problems) inadequate to describe my thoughts on this. Yes, I feel a fool – but however I do put it, I loose much of the nuance I consider central to this point of view.
So, until I get that ‘part 3’ cobbled together – IF EVER (!) – I’ll put down a few ‘key’ points in a really really crude way, in the hope that I make some sort of ‘sense’:
– ‘wherever it is possible to work to change/get rid of’ unjust/bad laws’, it is our duty not to break them
– ‘breaking a law’ and ‘defying a law’ are significantly different actions: one is to try to get away with breaking the rules of one’s social contract, the other is announcing one will break them and do so in public and face the full consequences of defying the law….and thus raise awareness of the ‘badness’ or ‘unfairness’ of that law to others, so they may join their voices in opposing this law….while some may point out that ‘a law is still broken’, I would argue that ‘defying’ and ‘breaking’ not the same thing. One is ‘sneaking around’, the other is ‘standing up to’. But, yes, I have to draw up the definition of that delta.
– ‘breaking a law’ is different than rejecting a ‘illegal law’ – if you understand what I mean by that….again, breaking is cowardly and sneaky, ‘rejecting’ is followed by ‘defying’ – and I am having terribly hard time articulating the acceptable behaviours (according to my never-humble-opinion) that accompany that.
…and there is, of course, that thing about ‘too many laws’…but that is a topic best noted and left for another debate
July 13, 2010 at 00:44
Xanthippa:
Yes, I agree that “sneaking around” is, well… distasteful, to say the least. But you present martyrdom as the only alternative, and that, I think, is a false dichotomy. There are other alternatives – all kinds of shades of grey between the two extremes – which may be more effective.
Suppose everyone but you actually wants to be treated like chattel, and thus supports laws that reduce people to chattel. Does that mean you should meekly accept such treatment, just because there is nowhere to go to escape it?
Suppose the oppressor is so big and so powerful that to be openly defiant is to be obliterated – perhaps cruelly – without hope of changing anything. Then being sneaky is still distasteful, but is it still cowardly?
Sometimes, being openly defiant accomplishes the exact opposite of what you want: it just gives a corrupt state an excuse to make an example of you, which further intimidates everyone else and thereby strengthens the oppressor.
In such cases, the most effective thing to do may be to break the unjust law, and allow only some (carefully chosen) people to see you getting away with it. This will give them courage. Enough, perhaps, to follow your example. Eventually, when there are enough of you, you can begin to defy the corrupt law openly, with some chance of actually making a lasting difference.
I speak of unjust laws, and corrupt laws, but there is no such thing as an illegal law. That’s an oxymoron, because the law is precisely what defines legal and illegal. However, in a state founded on a constitution, there is such a thing as an unconstitutional law. And, at all times and in all places, there is such a thing as an immoral law.
Of course, it is not the state’s place to legislate morality, and that is exactly why the people are morally obligated to break immoral laws: it is always the responsibility of the people to prevent the state from overstepping its rightful place.
Nonetheless, the whole point of the law is to try to capture and codify the content of what is meant by justice and morality. But this is an impossible task. No possible system of laws can capture all the nuances of the concepts of justice and morality. For this reason, justice and morality must always take precedence over the law.
Now, a moral relativist will object to this idea on the grounds that morality is subjective, which implies that the law should take precedence.
But I disagree. Strongly.
Morality is objective, because it follows from the inalienable rights of man. That is why the essential elements of morality are effectively invariant over all times and places in human history.
Laws, on the other hand, are quite arbitrary, because they follow from a socio-political process, and so laws vary widely from time to time and from place to place.
The rights of man are derived from the nature of man, and those rights cannot be infringed without endangering or devaluing the individual’s life. That is why the rights of man are what they are, and why they are inalienable.
Every other structural aspect of a just and moral society follows from this basic principle by reason tempered with compassion. Reason can be codified to a large extent, but compassion, hardly at all. That, again, is why the law is imperfect at best, and why justice and morality must always take precedence over the law.
Whatever is not determined by these principles is not a matter of morality, it is a matter of preference or custom. And, in these matters also, the state has no right to interfere with the individual. In fact, the state has only one legitimate function, and that is to safeguard the inalienable rights of every individual equally.
Any law made by the state, and any action taken by the state, which steps outside this boundary, is unjust and immoral.
And I say again: every person is morally obligated to resist any and all such transgressions by the state!
Peacefully and openly, if possible; and if not, then by whatever means necessary.
Xanthippa says:
OK – I mostly agree – I think.
By ‘illegal law’ I do mean ‘unconstitutional law’.
And where I was aiming – my ‘finish line’ (yeah, I’m giving it away) is to propose that the responsibilities we have because they are the other side of the ‘coin’ of ‘rights’ mean that when we see laws being broken, it is our civic duty to place that law-breaker under civil arrest. Especially if that law-breaker is meant to be upholding the laws…
That is where I am aiming.
Yes – it is a hyperbole.
No, it is not possible to put into practice in most situations.
That does not mean we should not think about it.
I am not subtle….3rd day of a bad, bad headache. And I am beginning to think that one ought not take migrane meds and then blog – the words don’t come out well…
Yes, I still plan to finish the write up. But I have to get my brain back first. Sorry…I do enjoy our debates like this. I’m just not all there right now. Yes, joke taken for granted!
July 13, 2010 at 19:47
Xanthippa:
I didn’t say it explicitly, but it also follows from my argument that justice and morality must always take precedence over meta-laws, like constitutions and bills of rights.
Jurisprudence, which is not grounded in morality derived from the rights of man by reason tempered with compassion, is no jurisprudence at all.
Laws and meta-laws based upon such a false jurisprudence carry no moral weight whatsoever and are not binding on anyone.
They are nothing but thinly-veiled excuses for the oppressive acts of the tyrant.
And as for social contracts, there is not a state in the world that is not in breach of the social contract under which it was supposedly constituted.
Further, the vast majority of those constitutions and so-called bills of rights are actually flagrant infringements of the inalienable rights of man.
Therefore there is not a person in the world who is bound by any such contract.
Xanthippa says:
I agree – but am also having trouble agreeing….
Difficult to verbalize…
OK: what makes ‘our’ objections to oppressive laws more valid than say those of some religious fanatics?
It boils down to ‘appeal to authority’: different authority or different objector, different objections but same reasoning….moral subjectivity…what makes what WE accept as evidence more valid than what, say, Islamofascists accept as evidence?
We cannot objectively prove our own existence – how could we possibly prove that evidence/fact is more valid than ‘belief’?
Just ‘thinking out loud’ – in a manner of speaking….and still chock-full of migrane meds – so take with a grain of salt…please!
July 14, 2010 at 18:29
Xanthippa:
If we want to engage in an abstract debate, then we can entertain questions like “how do we even know we exist?” but if we want to arrive at practical solutions to real-world problems like “how should a man live?” then we must accept such things as self-evident.
Applying reason to the real world is different from applying it to a formal axiomatic system. In the latter, all propositions are precisely true, or precisely false, with absolute certainty; and there is no other alternative. In the real world, all we have are degrees of rational belief that vary in a continuous range between absolutely certain truth and falsehood at the endpoints, and pass through complete uncertainty at the midpoint, depending on the balance of the available evidence.
Just as we can represent discrete truth values by the integers 0 and 1, we can represent continuous degrees of rational belief by conditional probabilities, which are real numbers in the interval (0,1). The rules for combining conditional probabilities (Bayesian inference) approach the rules of formal logic (Boolean algebra) more and more closely as the uncertainty approaches zero and drives the probabilities to approach 0 or 1.
It never happens in practice that conditional probabilities actually reach 0 or 1, because that would require weighing an infinite amount of evidence, which cannot be done in finite time. Still, in many cases, we can get close enough for practical purposes.
Thus, for brevity, we can speak of reasoning from known facts in roughly Boolean terms when the uncertainty is negligible, but we must always remain prepared to resort to the Bayesian technique when the uncertainty is sufficient to warrant it. In either case, we must begin with some minimal set of primitives which we take as self-evident, and this brings us right back to where we started. Only now we can say precisely what that means:
A thing is self-evident when its mere existence provides sufficient evidence of its existence that treating it as an established fact entails negligible uncertainty.
That we exist, that the world exists, and that it evolves with time according the law of cause and effect (misinterpretations of quantum mechanics notwithstanding!), are among the things which are self-evident. If people refuse to accept the evidence of their own senses in regard to such things, then they are beyond help; that way lies madness. And there is no reason to debate them; it’s futile.
That the vast stream of sensory input, from which one’s consciousness emerges, corresponds in regular, repeatable ways to real things that have their own independent existence — this is an assertion which, strictly speaking, must be taken on faith. It is a belief. But it is a rational belief, because it is supported by the overwhelming balance of an ever-increasing body of evidence. Thus it is effectively indistinguishable from an absolute fact.
In contrast, the belief, that a man has an immortal soul which will spend eternity in hell if he slaughters and eats a camel with which he has previously had sex, is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. It is therefore an irrational belief, because it is effectively indistinguishable from a complete fiction.
It is precisely when a system of morality is based on such irrational beliefs that it lacks legitimacy, and therefore it simply isn’t true that all moral systems are of equal value.
And it is precisely when so-called laws are grounded in such false morality that they are no laws at all.
Any attempt to enforce such non-laws is an unjustified act of violence.
July 14, 2010 at 20:27
Xanthippa:
Religious doctrines are to be accepted on pure faith. Asking for evidence isn’t allowed — mostly because there isn’t any. This is pretty much the exact opposite of reasoning from known facts.
We are thus lead to ask how it is possible to derive a system of morality that is not arbitrary or subjective. Speaking in roughly Boolean terms for reasons outlined previously, and simplifying greatly to keep the discussion to a manageable length, we argue as follows.
A typical person has the ability to hunt, fight, think, learn, and so on; he needs air, water, food, shelter, sex, companionship, and so on. Depending on how well these needs are met, he feels pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow, love, hate, and so on. We make no sharp distinction between needs and desires, because this distinction is highly context dependent.
These attributes are universal and intrinsic, applying in varying degree to every person and existing simply because the person exists. Most importantly, a typical person has all the intrinsic capacities necessary to satisfy all his intrinsic needs.
These facts can be demonstrated by direct observation. No faith is required.
Exercising intrinsic capacities to satisfy intrinsic needs and desires is the primal, fundamental right from which all other rights follow. The rights to life, liberty, property, privacy, self-defence and self-expression all follow rather directly by the usual arguments. These rights are inalienable because they cannot be infringed without causing death or at least suffering. We judge death and suffering to be bad because every single person, of their own accord, takes whatever actions they can to avoid them. This is a universal attribute of human beings, it is not a matter of consensus.
When people live alone, nothing prevents them from exercising their rights to the fullest; they are completely free, in the sense of being limited only by their own power to act. It is only when people live in community with others that the rights of each one must be balanced against the equal rights of each of the others.
There is strength in numbers, and the division of labour increases prosperity, and there are other benefits that result from living in community with others. But the requisite balancing of rights imposes constraints on the freedom of every member of the community, and therefore creates a moral obligation on each one to make the impact of these constraints as light as possible on each of the others.
From such considerations we derive a set of value judgements in respect of actions, which we consequently call good or bad, which in turn have many subordinate dimensions, like helpful or harmful, fair or unfair, honest or deceitful, and so on. Concepts, like necessary evil and justifiable violence, will be required. It gets complicated.
In broad brush strokes, however, we have found the origin of inalienable rights in the universals of human nature, and we have outlined how to derive morality from those rights and the need to balance them for the sake of community.
No appeal to any authority is required; no one’s ideology need be consulted; no consensus need be sought.
Granted, there are fine points in regard to which ideologies, customs, and preferences will have some degree of influence. But when it comes to the main structural members of this system of morality, all people in all places in the world and at all times in human history will agree.
Provided only that they look with open eyes and reason with open minds.
July 17, 2010 at 20:18
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