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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25991 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I'm not a fan of the law-n-order branch, but it's not antithetical to personal agency at all. Do the crime, go to jail; it's your choice whether to do the crime.

It seems very incompatible with the idea that a right winger is high in personal efficacy to say that tax dollars need to be spent, and civil rights abrogated, in order to pay people to "protect" you from scary things.

The police exist as the enforcement arm of the state in order to hold up the state's half of the bargain in their monopoly on force.

We are making a deal with the state. We give up some things, most notably the right to use violence to enforce our will and of course our money in the form of taxes. In return the state acts as the "unincentivized incentivizer" to solve Molochian coordination problems and arbitrate disputes up to and including using force on our behalf to bring those disputes to a satisfactory close. The police are part of the terms of the contract, so to speak.

It is not a violation of one's autonomy to enter into a contract. Right wingers acknowledge that the state and its monopoly on violence is helpful and necessary (necessary in order to avoid the state of nature, the Hobbesian "war of all against all"), they aren't anarchists.

I think that difference in internal/external locus of control between the Left and Right is better thought of as a side effect of the difference between right and left wing thought, not the source of it. The primary philosophical disagreement from which all others flow is the Hobbes/Rousseau split, which is basically how you would answer, "if we stopped controlling everything and completely took our hands off the wheel, would things be good or bad?" or, "are people inherently good and learn to become evil, or inherently evil and learn to become good?" I think there are a fairly strong selection effects in that people with high personal agency tend to gravitate towards right wing politics, but it's not the cause.

We are happy to abolish the police and handle their functions ourselves, individually and as a group. The police are a peace treaty with the rest of you, who prefer to avoid the realities of that arrangement.

I disagree, I don't think this is an accurate description of what most right wingers believe. IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain. You're right that an average RW, high agency person is more likely to be capable of solving problems with violence, but I think they also tend to be more aware of the what the costs of doing so are (especially on a societal scale) and therefore are more likely to prefer the existence of the state/police.

IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain.

That's not the Leviathan. With the Leviathan, once you (or your forebears) have made the deal to surrender your sovereignty (whether voluntarily or at swordpoint), you're bound to it forever. Hobbes's second "OF THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION" is "Soveraigne Power Cannot Be Forfeited".

Secondly, Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne; and consequently none of his Subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from his Subjection.

Full disclosure: I haven't read Hobbes, I just know the lingo, so I can't speak to what Leviathan actually says or not. So if you're trying to argue "what you mean is the state in general, not The Leviathan, that's something different" then I must decline to argue.

However, it seems obviously true that nobody is bound to a sovereign permanently and without recourse; history is replete with successful revolutions against governments.

However, it seems obviously true that nobody is bound to a sovereign permanently and without recourse; history is replete with successful revolutions against governments.

Sure, but Hobbes would argue that these were all morally illegitimate. The Hobbesian social contract is openly one-sided (as opposed to later social contract theories which were more covertly one-sided).

Again, I have not read Hobbes so I can't speak to what he does or doesn't say. But to put it bluntly, the argument that you ascribe to Hobbes seems pretty fuckin' dumb to me; of course there can be sovereigns whose rule is morally illegitimate and against whom revolution can be morally legitimate.

I don't actually disagree with your disagreement. My point is that the police don't exist to "protect right wingers from scary things". Right wingers can and will do that on their own. The police exist to provide that protection in a codified, formalized, legible, purportedly neutral fashion.

No, personal agency does not require anarchy. Personal agency is vitiated by insulating people from the consequences of their own actions, not by insulating them from the consequences of the actions of others.

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