Is the choice between cake or death a free one?

[Frohicky1]

Howdy all,

 

A slightly playful question to start with - if a person is held at gunpoint and told they can choose to eat a cake or be shot, is this decision a free one?

 

If the gun is replaced with starvation and the cake is replaced with a wage contract, is the decision a free one?

 

Thanks in advance,

[cab21]

no

how is is starvation related to at gunpoint?

how is a wage contract related to cake?

 

"if a person is starving and told they can choose to sign a wage contract or starve, is this decision a free one?"

 

if a person is starving, there are plenty of options other from signing a wage contract

if a person is told to eat a cake or die, the other options are being violently taking away by another person

[Wuzzums]

I think you need to define what you mean by "free decision" because the two analogies don't hold up. A gun at my head means there's an external agent which binds me to make a decision. In contrast, starvation is a physiological constraint, my own physiological constraint. So if the two are the same and a gun to my head doesn't make me free then any decision I take isn't a free decision because all decisions I take have physiological constraints. This of course implies there's no such thing as a free decision which doesn't make sense to me.

 

For instance, picking out a sweater. I choose the blue one because I prefer the color blue. I prefer the color blue because my eyes or brain find it very pleasing. This is a constraint, a more lenient constraint to your life/death examples, but a constraint nonetheless and thus it's not a free decision.

[zippert]

Howdy all,

 

A slightly playful question to start with - if a person is held at gunpoint and told they can choose to eat a cake or be shot, is this decision a free one?

 

If the gun is replaced with starvation and the cake is replaced with a wage contract, is the decision a free one?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

For not starving, humans have to eat. The food is reaped with work. If you want food you either homestead it, someone gives it to you for free or you swap your workforce (Wage contract). 

 

If you want food another way, you have to force people to reap it. Forcing people means, that you will escalate violence, if they dont comply. This is in result similar to the gun-head example.

 

The difference between a gun threat and starvation is that the first comes from an human beeing and the latter from nature.

To eat is not a free decision. To aquire food is not a free decision. The wage contract is not by free desicion, since it's motivation is driven by nature, and this contract is just the best option.

 

But if you want to free yourself from that dilemma, you yourself have to force others to reap food and therefore with this model it is impossible, that everybody is freed of it, worse, the force to work ist ampflified for all others by your action. Plus, the fact that you force, destroys your relationship with humanity, because you became an aggressor.

 

So if you dont force it and i.e. devolp an automated farming tool, you can reduce the work that has to be done to feed the world.

 

Capitalism has already reduced the price of food drastically. Where before the industrialization people had to work all day for just not to starve. Today, with a wage of 6.5 $  an hour, you can feed yourself easily by just working 10 hours/week. The other time you can provide extra work for housing, medicine and luxery items.

 

The only countries in the world with mass starvation are countries, where people who think they should force the work on others suceed (dicatators).

[MrCapitalism]

No.

 

Yes.

[ProfessionalTeabagger]

Howdy all,

 

A slightly playful question to start with - if a person is held at gunpoint and told they can choose to eat a cake or be shot, is this decision a free one?

 

If the gun is replaced with starvation and the cake is replaced with a wage contract, is the decision a free one?

 

Thanks in advance,

1: No because it involves coercion. The person is choosing to coerce the other into eating cake. Free means free from coercion.

2: Don't know because the details necessary are not provided and it is phrased ambiguously. Why is the person starving and why is the other making this the only choice? What does the contract involve? If you are replacing the cake with a wage contract then this implies the contract involves little more than the equivalent of eating a cake. Is the person being offered the contract a hideously evil person who killed the other's family? If so then the other could been considered quite merciful. So many questions would need to be answered before any valid answer can be given.

[alexqr1]

Howdy all, A slightly playful question to start with - if a person is held at gunpoint and told they can choose to eat a cake or be shot, is this decision a free one? If the gun is replaced with starvation and the cake is replaced with a wage contract, is the decision a free one? Thanks in advance,

Well the two situations are extremely different.In the first case there is no free decision since your decision is being violently influenced by someone threatening your right not to be murdered.In the second case, there is no violent situation, unless starvation is a result of the individual being held against his will. This situation is more comparable to you having to chose between buying a quilt because otherwise you could be vulnerable to hypothermia or buying another pair of shoes because the one's you have are starting to hurt. There is no violence involved here.

[Frohicky1]

Thanks all for the replies.  So it looks like I can put your responses in to three groups

 

Group 1: The second case is free because it doesn't involve coercion, violence, an agent, or something like that

 

Group 2: The second case is free because if we call this action unfree, we must call every action unfree, which is false or undesirable, so by reductio ad absurdum the case must be free

 

Group 3: I haven't given enough information to allow a judgment to be made

 

To group 1, I don't think the freedom of an action is related to whether a second agent is involved.  I am not free to fly unaided, for example, and this is not due to another person or to violence against me.  I'm not entirely settled on a definition, but I guess freedom means either 'could have done otherwise' (the counterfactual), or even better something a little more human, like 'a person could have done otherwise without sacrificing other freedoms', for example a person who can eat donuts and not get fat is freer than a person who has to weight these concerns. 

 

To group 2, I don't think the conclusion is absurd, indeed I don't believe in free will.  Regardless, I don't think a person need deny free will to feel the point I made.  A bit like a differential in mathematics, you can apply the point slowly and see which way it is tending, without needing to apply all the way to infinity.  The fewer options a person has, and even the fewer options that a person wants to choose but could choose, limits their freedom. 

 

To group 3, you're probably right, I'll add a little more information.  The  wage contract can be anything you fancy (McDonalds, farm hand, librarian, contract killer, anything).  I stipulate only that the person very much wishes not to do the job, but slightly prefers doing it to starving.  A slightly artificial situation perhaps, but the person also has no other jobs available, and every means of subsistance (wild plants, fire wood, empty land, etc) is all privately owned and not available for use or sale. 

 

Thanks again for the uptake

[cab21]

if given the choice of X and Y

the person prefers X over Y

the person chooses X

then  the person had free choice

the person chooses Y

then the person had free choice

the person chooses not to decide

then the person had free choice.

[alexqr1]

Thanks all for the replies. So it looks like I can put your responses in to three groups

 

Group 1: The second case is free because it doesn't involve coercion, violence, an agent, or something like that

You are mistaking freedom with ability or capacity to do womething, I talk about that in the last few minutes of this video

 

Group 2: The second case is free because if we call this action unfree, we must call every action unfree, which is false or undesirable, so by reductio ad absurdum the case must be free

1: If in fact every action is unfree then what is the relevance of this conversation?

2: If you don’t think we have free will, then what is the relevance of this conversation?

 

Group 3: I haven't given enough information to allow a judgment to be made

I think your information was enough to make a difference between the two scenarios.

[Frohicky1]

Hi alexqr1,

 

Thanks for the response.  On  the point of free will, if we don't have free will, nothing follows I don't think, because everything is effected equally.  It doesn't mean we should cease our conversation, or carry it on.  When applied to the full, it's a true but useless fact.  But when we apply it incrementally, we find it more difficult to punish, more difficult to blame, more difficult to praise, and so on.  This is a seperate topic though, I don't want to derail the current one, but would be happy to investigate further in a seperate thread if you like. 

 

Your video is eloquently argued, but I disagree on two points. 

 

Firstly, and not very importantly, the use of freedom you use if one you define, which is fine and useful, but not the way I would say most philosophers use the term.  Freedom means the ability to do something, which includes capacity to do it, rather than being juxtaposed to it.  But as I say, definitions are not particularly interesting.

 

Secondly, you say (I hope I'm summarising correctly here) that if an inequality arises from transactions, this is a kind of fact of nature, not the fault of any person.  It's just the way the world is.  You can't chastise someone because of a tornado, and likewise you can't for scarcity of resources. I disagree, because the person with the wage contract has resources, and the other person does not.  The decision to share those resources only as part of a wage contract is a choice, and so carries moral significance.  The person who is offering the wage contract is morally responsible for the welfare of the person to whom it is offered, and depending on our conception of morality, is variously repsonsible for the happiness or the freedom of that person (or perhaps some other concept of morality). 

[cab21]

The person who is offering the wage contract is morally responsible for the welfare of the person to whom it is offered, and depending on our conception of morality, is variously repsonsible for the happiness or the freedom of that person (or perhaps some other concept of morality).

 

the person offering a contract is not responsible for the person or welfare of the person to whom the contract is offered. each person is responsible for their own welfare.

if people sign a contract, parties are responsible to honer that contract. such as if a wage contract is signed, and the person does the work, the employer is responsible for paying for the work that was agreed on

 

the person without resources needs the resources just as much as the person with resources needs the person without resources. the resources of the person without resources, include the skills to perform the job, time, all sorts of things that could be offered to gain resources and help out those that offer wage contracts, or other contracts such as saleries, or work for hire, or indepentant contracts, or loans, or trades, or angel investment, or gifts or so on

[alexqr1]

Hi alexqr1,

 

Thanks for the response.  On  the point of free will, if we don't have free will, nothing follows I don't think, because everything is effected equally.  It doesn't mean we should cease our conversation, or carry it on.  When applied to the full, it's a true but useless fact.  But when we apply it incrementally, we find it more difficult to punish, more difficult to blame, more difficult to praise, and so on.  This is a seperate topic though, I don't want to derail the current one, but would be happy to investigate further in a seperate thread if you like. 

 

Your video is eloquently argued, but I disagree on two points. 

 

Firstly, and not very importantly, the use of freedom you use if one you define, which is fine and useful, but not the way I would say most philosophers use the term.  Freedom means the ability to do something, which includes capacity to do it, rather than being juxtaposed to it.  But as I say, definitions are not particularly interesting.

 

Secondly, you say (I hope I'm summarising correctly here) that if an inequality arises from transactions, this is a kind of fact of nature, not the fault of any person.  It's just the way the world is.  You can't chastise someone because of a tornado, and likewise you can't for scarcity of resources. I disagree, because the person with the wage contract has resources, and the other person does not.  The decision to share those resources only as part of a wage contract is a choice, and so carries moral significance.  The person who is offering the wage contract is morally responsible for the welfare of the person to whom it is offered, and depending on our conception of morality, is variously repsonsible for the happiness or the freedom of that person (or perhaps some other concept of morality). 

 

Hi Frohicky1,

 

I think the distinction between freedom and ability is an important one, there are distinct differences between the two to understand them as two separate concepts.

 

On your second point, do you think the worker is also responsible for the employer's welfare and also for the happiness or freedom of the employer?

[Frohicky1]

the person offering a contract is not responsible for the person or welfare of the person to whom the contract is offered. each person is responsible for their own welfare.

if people sign a contract, parties are responsible to honer that contract. such as if a wage contract is signed, and the person does the work, the employer is responsible for paying for the work that was agreed on

 

the person without resources needs the resources just as much as the person with resources needs the person without resources. the resources of the person without resources, include the skills to perform the job, time, all sorts of things that could be offered to gain resources and help out those that offer wage contracts, or other contracts such as saleries, or work for hire, or indepentant contracts, or loans, or trades, or angel investment, or gifts or so on

 

Hi cab21, thanks for the response

 

I agree, and it's a good point, that both parties need each other.  But this isn't enough alone to satisfy me.

 

I think that we are all responsible for each and every person, because I think happiness is what counts, and it doesn't matter in which body that happiness or its absence resides. 

 

Can I ask, morally speaking are you most interested in consequences or rules, and if counsequences, does freedom or happiness or something else count most highly? In other words, does your support for free markets come from what they are or what they produce; is your support contingent?

[Frohicky1]

Hi Frohicky1,

 

I think the distinction between freedom and ability is an important one, there are distinct differences between the two to understand them as two separate concepts.

 

On your second point, do you think the worker is also responsible for the employer's welfare and also for the happiness or freedom of the employer?

Hi alexqr1,

 

Indeed I do think the responsibility goes both ways equally. 

[cab21]

Hi cab21, thanks for the response

 

I agree, and it's a good point, that both parties need each other.  But this isn't enough alone to satisfy me.

 

I think that we are all responsible for each and every person, because I think happiness is what counts, and it doesn't matter in which body that happiness or its absence resides. 

 

Can I ask, morally speaking are you most interested in consequences or rules, and if counsequences, does freedom or happiness or something else count most highly? In other words, does your support for free markets come from what they are or what they produce; is your support contingent?

 

 

happyness is subjective, so i don't know how to measure it.

if one says "i'm only happy when i rape", how is that honered it a way that can keep both people happy, as by definition the person being raped does not want to be raped, otherwise it's just consenting sex.

 

consequences require rules, so i'm not sure how separate rules are from consequences.

if two people want to be happy, they each have to write down what makes them each happy, their proposals may involve each other, they may involve going in separate direction. this still does not guarntee people will be happy once the proposal is acheived, and if one person cannot guarentee his own happyness, another cannot do it for him. they can only write up contracts and proposals and honer the contracts and proposals or choose different directions.

 

no system can produce happyness per say, if people choose not to be happy. a free market can provide a environment for happyness to be acheived and develuped, but it won't force happyness or force a result on people.

 

free market is more a system of proposals and negotiation than one of war. if one person cannot offer a job that another likes, that person can ask another person, or go out and create the job, or settle with doing something less happy in order to create something more happy later. the person is not to use war to say how happy everyone will be after some others are killed off or robbed from.

 

i'm not sure how different rules would bring the same consequences, or that the consequences could be defined or forced

consequences depend on how people think and form desires, not from the outside

 

if two are happy by giving to each other, that can work more than one happy to give, and another not happy to receive or give, but feeling a need to take, whether taking makes the person happy or not.

 

is shown a different system that worked better, sure i could change.

[Frohicky1]

Hi cab21,

 

When I contrast rules and consequences I'm referring to the old Consequentialism vs Deontology debate.  Another way to put it is, if it turned out (let's suppose for the thought experiment) that free trade made people more miserable, would you still support free trade?

 

The rape example is a good one.  I think (and this is a tentative belief) that every bit of happiness counts equally, and also that the total should be increased.  This means each person has a responsibility to change their hopes, desires, beliefs and so on to increase the total happiness.  The rapist has a responsibility to not be a rapist, the pampered heiress to not want a pony, the alcoholic to not want alcohol, etc.

 

I han't really intended to go down the responsibility route so much, I'm more interested in the coercion route, because I think a central claim of free market libertarianism is that decisions shouldn't be coerced, and I think that being in a state of starvation, lack of shelter, etc is the same (in the relevant aspects) as being a heroin addict or having a gun to your head.  As you say, both parties need each other, but not equally.  The power relationship is asymmetric. 

[cab21]

When I contrast rules and consequences I'm referring to the old Consequentialism vs Deontology debate.  Another way to put it is, if it turned out (let's suppose for the thought experiment) that free trade made people more miserable, would you still support free trade?

more miserable than what and how?

i dont think miserable can be calculated.

 

The rape example is a good one.  I think (and this is a tentative belief) that every bit of happiness counts equally, and also that the total should be increased.  This means each person has a responsibility to change their hopes, desires, beliefs and so on to increase the total happiness.  The rapist has a responsibility to not be a rapist, the pampered heiress to not want a pony, the alcoholic to not want alcohol, etc.

 

how is happyness measured?

 5 rapists and one person who does not want to be raped, do the 5 people get to rape because that maximizes happyness?

the 5 ought not to rape, even if it means less happyness overall

if 1 person thinks he can kill 5 and be happyer than the 6 , it's not a oppinion that i think should count, nor if 5 think killing the one, that the 5 should count against the one.

I han't really intended to go down the responsibility route so much, I'm more interested in the coercion route, because I think a central claim of free market libertarianism is that decisions shouldn't be coerced, and I think that being in a state of starvation, lack of shelter, etc is the same (in the relevant aspects) as being a heroin addict or having a gun to your head.  As you say, both parties need each other, but not equally.  The power relationship is asymmetric.

 

Do you think equal power would make people equally happy?

 

say eaqual desire makes people eaqualy happy, i don't think eaqual desire can be forced

[dsayers]

Consequentialism vs Deontology

 

My least favorite part of studying philosophy is all the different labels I get exposed to that I never realized were even a thing. It means that there are that many different ways people have explored to try and control others minus one. It makes me sad.

 

 

I think that we are all responsible for each and every person, because I think happiness is what counts, and it doesn't matter in which body that happiness or its absence resides. 

 

On what basis do you feel you are responsible for me other than not stealing, assaulting, raping, or murdering me? What if happiness to me is people not controlling me? How would this be compatible with everybody else being responsible for me if they only way they could intervene is by not intervening? If you believe it doesn't matter which body happiness and its absence resides, why not give everything that you have to somebody like Stef that could use it to bring happiness to that many more people at your expense? How can we take you at your word if you don't live your values in this fashion?

[zippert]

 

. I disagree, because the person with the wage contract has resources, and the other person does not.

 

Thats wrong. The other persons own (/has) his body. Otherwise he could not engage in a wage contract.