So… say I bake a pie, and my neighbor is starving.
Let us accept for the sake of argument that everything you say here is correct, and it is therefore immoral for me to be compelled to give that pie to my neighbor against my consent. Let us suppose further that I wish to behave morally in this situation.
If I understand you correctly, my wish to behave morally is essentially irrelevant to the question of what I do with the pie… it gives me no guidance, because morality provides no basis for choice here. Either I eat the pie, or I give it to my neighbor, or I throw it in the trash, or I do something else, and there are no moral grounds to prefer one of those acts over another. (There might be other reasons to prefer one over the other… e.g., if I really like pie that’s a reason to eat the pie, and if I don’t want my other neighbors to think I’m a meanie that’s a reason to give the pie to my neighbor, and so on and so forth, but none of these things have anything to do with morality.)
Yes. What I choose to do with my pie is an amoral decision, unless I have entered into some prior contract regarding the pie (using a very broad definition of ‘contract’- a contract is anything that I have consensually agreed to be morally obligated to do in the future, and includes obedience to laws created by a government if I have consented to be governed).
If I have consented to be part of a community with certain social norms, does that constitute a contract that includes obedience to those norms? (And, more importantly, how might I figure out the answer to that question for myself?)
Have you accepted any treatment based on your assent to be bound by those norms? Have you represented yourself as someone who will be bound by those norms and influenced others thereby? Is obedience to the social norms a required part of being a part of that community? If you didn’t know about the norm when you became a member of the community, did you disavow your membership immediately upon learning of it? Or did you ever agree to follow the norms when you didn’t know what they were?
It’s hard for me to answer the general question of whether you have agreed to do something.
Implicit contracts are valid only for an implicit period of time and for implicitly defined circumstances, and may have an implicit penalty clause (if there is a penalty clause for nonperformance of other duties, then the agreement may be fulfilled by fulfilling the penalty clause instead of the other portion of the contract). Typically for an implicit contract, disavowing the contract and returning or renegotiating all of the value that you have gained from it is sufficient. For any explicit contract, refer to the terms of the contract.
What do you suspect that you might have agreed to do, and why do you suspect that you have agreed to do it?
It’s hard for me to answer the general question of whether you have agreed to do something.
Yeah, absolutely. The thing is, I’m in the same boat with respect to my own agreements, for the most part.
I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever actually formally said “I consent to be governed by the governments of my nation, my state, my town, etc.” to anyone, and yet it seems relatively clear that I am being governed by them. Similarly, there are many government services that I benefit from (many of which I’m unaware of benefiting from) that might be provided under the assumption that I’m consenting to being so governed, with neither my being aware of that assumption, nor the provider being aware of its falsehood (supposing it’s false).
It’s hard to say unambiguously whether I’ve agreed to any of that, and if so exactly what.
This is even more true when it comes to communities less formal than governments. When I join a community I don’t ever say “I will be bound by your social norms,” nor has anyone ever said “I offer you this treatment if and only if you agree to be bound by our social norms.” Indeed, often the social norms themselves are never explicitly stated.
More generally: in practice, many of the important consensual agreements in my life are implicit.
All of that seems reasonable enough to me, but then I’m of the opinion that there exist acts which are morally obligatory or morally impermissible in the absence of consent. Of course, people disagree on which acts those are, exactly, or how I could tell. Which causes problems.
You are proposing what seems to be a simpler approach, in which the only determinant of moral status is consent. Which sounds great.
But if I understand that to mean explicit consent, then the moral status of most of my life is utterly ambiguous, as the underlying consent is not at all explicit… and it’s really not at all clear to me that it could ever be otherwise among humans. In which case that moral framework fails to do the work I want a moral framework to do (that is, allow me to decide what the right thing to do is in various situations).
Conversely, if I understand that to mean implicit consent, then we’ve simply replaced the question of which acts are morally obligatory or morally impermissible in the absence of consent with the question of which acts I am understood to have implicitly consented to.
What do you suspect that you might have agreed to do, and why do you suspect that you have agreed to do it?
Well, for example… there have been periods of my life where I was unable to feed myself, and others fed me. And there was never an explicit contract governing the terms of that feeding, at least not one that I ever agreed to. And my understanding of the implicit social norms that underlay the decisions of others to do so (which often go by names like “being a decent human being”) do seem to assume that I am agreeing to be bound by similar norms.
So is it possible that I’ve implicitly agreed to an implicit contract that stipulates that I will give my pie to my starving neighbor under certain circumstances?
Perhaps.
Then again, perhaps not.
Admittedly, your model has what seems like a simple way out… I can just disavow the implicit contract.
Except that to do so I must return the value I’ve gained from it, or renegotiate that value.
And, well, the value I gained from being fed when I couldn’t feed myself is, well, my life.
If you are asking whether duress is a factor in an implicit contract, the answer is “It can be”. Personally, I don’t think that any contract can be made where one party has placed another party into duress, but the system of universal consent fails to robustly account for people who choose not to consent to the government which controls the area in which they happen to be physically present and lack the ability to leave without using the infrastructure provided by that government.
Returning the value you received involves returning the cost to the other parties, not removing the benefit to yourself. What cost was incurred as part of the implicit contract “I will help you live if you accept unstated obligations afterward”, what part of the cost of raising you was incurred as part of the social and legal obligation to care for children, and what part was provided freely and without obligation?
Returning the value you received involves returning the cost to the other parties
Ah, I see. Well, that’s far more convenient. Does this include opportunity costs?
what part of the cost of raising you was incurred as part of the social and legal obligation to care for children, and what part was provided freely and without obligation?
Beats me… what does the social and legal obligation to care for children comprise?
Ah, I see. Well, that’s far more convenient. Does this include opportunity costs?
Either it includes only opportunity costs, or it includes only direct costs. You don’t have to give them back what they spent AND also give them what they could have gotten with that. Unfortunately, costs also include time and other things that are hard to quantify.
Beats me… what does the social and legal obligation to care for children comprise?
Ah. Well, if all of it is obligatory, then it follows that none of it is provided freely and without obligation. That’s easy enough to calculate, at least.
Assuming that math applies in this case, it is. I was using the counterquestion “How much of it could have been withheld without sanctions being applied?”. Actual values may vary.
So… say I bake a pie, and my neighbor is starving.
Let us accept for the sake of argument that everything you say here is correct, and it is therefore immoral for me to be compelled to give that pie to my neighbor against my consent.
Let us suppose further that I wish to behave morally in this situation.
If I understand you correctly, my wish to behave morally is essentially irrelevant to the question of what I do with the pie… it gives me no guidance, because morality provides no basis for choice here. Either I eat the pie, or I give it to my neighbor, or I throw it in the trash, or I do something else, and there are no moral grounds to prefer one of those acts over another. (There might be other reasons to prefer one over the other… e.g., if I really like pie that’s a reason to eat the pie, and if I don’t want my other neighbors to think I’m a meanie that’s a reason to give the pie to my neighbor, and so on and so forth, but none of these things have anything to do with morality.)
Have I understood your position?
Yes. What I choose to do with my pie is an amoral decision, unless I have entered into some prior contract regarding the pie (using a very broad definition of ‘contract’- a contract is anything that I have consensually agreed to be morally obligated to do in the future, and includes obedience to laws created by a government if I have consented to be governed).
If I have consented to be part of a community with certain social norms, does that constitute a contract that includes obedience to those norms? (And, more importantly, how might I figure out the answer to that question for myself?)
Have you accepted any treatment based on your assent to be bound by those norms? Have you represented yourself as someone who will be bound by those norms and influenced others thereby? Is obedience to the social norms a required part of being a part of that community? If you didn’t know about the norm when you became a member of the community, did you disavow your membership immediately upon learning of it? Or did you ever agree to follow the norms when you didn’t know what they were?
It’s hard for me to answer the general question of whether you have agreed to do something.
Implicit contracts are valid only for an implicit period of time and for implicitly defined circumstances, and may have an implicit penalty clause (if there is a penalty clause for nonperformance of other duties, then the agreement may be fulfilled by fulfilling the penalty clause instead of the other portion of the contract). Typically for an implicit contract, disavowing the contract and returning or renegotiating all of the value that you have gained from it is sufficient. For any explicit contract, refer to the terms of the contract.
What do you suspect that you might have agreed to do, and why do you suspect that you have agreed to do it?
Yeah, absolutely. The thing is, I’m in the same boat with respect to my own agreements, for the most part.
I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever actually formally said “I consent to be governed by the governments of my nation, my state, my town, etc.” to anyone, and yet it seems relatively clear that I am being governed by them. Similarly, there are many government services that I benefit from (many of which I’m unaware of benefiting from) that might be provided under the assumption that I’m consenting to being so governed, with neither my being aware of that assumption, nor the provider being aware of its falsehood (supposing it’s false).
It’s hard to say unambiguously whether I’ve agreed to any of that, and if so exactly what.
This is even more true when it comes to communities less formal than governments. When I join a community I don’t ever say “I will be bound by your social norms,” nor has anyone ever said “I offer you this treatment if and only if you agree to be bound by our social norms.” Indeed, often the social norms themselves are never explicitly stated.
More generally: in practice, many of the important consensual agreements in my life are implicit.
All of that seems reasonable enough to me, but then I’m of the opinion that there exist acts which are morally obligatory or morally impermissible in the absence of consent. Of course, people disagree on which acts those are, exactly, or how I could tell. Which causes problems.
You are proposing what seems to be a simpler approach, in which the only determinant of moral status is consent. Which sounds great.
But if I understand that to mean explicit consent, then the moral status of most of my life is utterly ambiguous, as the underlying consent is not at all explicit… and it’s really not at all clear to me that it could ever be otherwise among humans. In which case that moral framework fails to do the work I want a moral framework to do (that is, allow me to decide what the right thing to do is in various situations).
Conversely, if I understand that to mean implicit consent, then we’ve simply replaced the question of which acts are morally obligatory or morally impermissible in the absence of consent with the question of which acts I am understood to have implicitly consented to.
Well, for example… there have been periods of my life where I was unable to feed myself, and others fed me. And there was never an explicit contract governing the terms of that feeding, at least not one that I ever agreed to. And my understanding of the implicit social norms that underlay the decisions of others to do so (which often go by names like “being a decent human being”) do seem to assume that I am agreeing to be bound by similar norms.
So is it possible that I’ve implicitly agreed to an implicit contract that stipulates that I will give my pie to my starving neighbor under certain circumstances?
Perhaps.
Then again, perhaps not.
Admittedly, your model has what seems like a simple way out… I can just disavow the implicit contract.
Except that to do so I must return the value I’ve gained from it, or renegotiate that value.
And, well, the value I gained from being fed when I couldn’t feed myself is, well, my life.
So, that doesn’t seem to work too well.
If you are asking whether duress is a factor in an implicit contract, the answer is “It can be”. Personally, I don’t think that any contract can be made where one party has placed another party into duress, but the system of universal consent fails to robustly account for people who choose not to consent to the government which controls the area in which they happen to be physically present and lack the ability to leave without using the infrastructure provided by that government.
Returning the value you received involves returning the cost to the other parties, not removing the benefit to yourself. What cost was incurred as part of the implicit contract “I will help you live if you accept unstated obligations afterward”, what part of the cost of raising you was incurred as part of the social and legal obligation to care for children, and what part was provided freely and without obligation?
I’m not asking about duress at all.
Ah, I see. Well, that’s far more convenient. Does this include opportunity costs?
Beats me… what does the social and legal obligation to care for children comprise?
Either it includes only opportunity costs, or it includes only direct costs. You don’t have to give them back what they spent AND also give them what they could have gotten with that. Unfortunately, costs also include time and other things that are hard to quantify.
All of it, I think.
Ah.
Well, if all of it is obligatory, then it follows that none of it is provided freely and without obligation.
That’s easy enough to calculate, at least.
Assuming that math applies in this case, it is. I was using the counterquestion “How much of it could have been withheld without sanctions being applied?”. Actual values may vary.
This is where super-erogation comes in.
Perhaps? As near as I can tell, Decius is implicitly rejecting the idea that a moral framework can classify certain acts as supererogatory.
EDIT: Make that “explicitly”; see below.
It’s not the moral framework that classifies acts as supererogatory- it’s the cultural framework.