Actually considering the positions of both people is difficult but doable, and I think generally inconsistent with a rights-based view of morality.
Um, why do you think so? The “rights-based” view is not that “he has a right so no one can do anything”. Instead, it is “he has a right, so he can decide whether to insist on it or not, or maybe to trade it for some benefit”.
The core issue is who has the power, who decides. You are thinking of an impersonal entity above all whose freedom to choose the “optimal” solution is unnecessarily constrained by individual rights. The alternative is devolve the power downwards and let different people come to different views and conclusions. Sure, it’s going to be messy and in many ways (especially at the micro level) non-optimal. However it avoids the pitfalls of trying to impose seeming optimality from above which, as history abundantly demonstrates, has some pretty horrible failure modes.
The core issue is who has the power, who decides. You are thinking of an impersonal entity above all whose freedom to choose the “optimal” solution is unnecessarily constrained by individual rights. The alternative is devolve the power downwards and let different people come to different views and conclusions.
Sure. And we have technical tools that help us solve this problem, rather than just reasoning from moral principles. We can look at the structure of the problem and determine the optimal level of centralization for a particular variety of intervention, because problems are caused by mismatch of optimizer centralization and information centralization, and this can be both that the optimizer is too far up and that the optimizer is too far down.
determine the optimal level of centralization for a particular variety of intervention
I don’t see how you can get to the single “optimal level” without assuming a single underlying system of values. Optimality is a function of your evaluation of outcomes and your evaluation of outcomes is a function of your value system.
Who will determine that “optimal level” and what happens when there is significant disagreement about optimality?
Um, why do you think so? The “rights-based” view is not that “he has a right so no one can do anything”. Instead, it is “he has a right, so he can decide whether to insist on it or not, or maybe to trade it for some benefit”.
The core issue is who has the power, who decides. You are thinking of an impersonal entity above all whose freedom to choose the “optimal” solution is unnecessarily constrained by individual rights. The alternative is devolve the power downwards and let different people come to different views and conclusions. Sure, it’s going to be messy and in many ways (especially at the micro level) non-optimal. However it avoids the pitfalls of trying to impose seeming optimality from above which, as history abundantly demonstrates, has some pretty horrible failure modes.
Sure. And we have technical tools that help us solve this problem, rather than just reasoning from moral principles. We can look at the structure of the problem and determine the optimal level of centralization for a particular variety of intervention, because problems are caused by mismatch of optimizer centralization and information centralization, and this can be both that the optimizer is too far up and that the optimizer is too far down.
I don’t see how you can get to the single “optimal level” without assuming a single underlying system of values. Optimality is a function of your evaluation of outcomes and your evaluation of outcomes is a function of your value system.
Who will determine that “optimal level” and what happens when there is significant disagreement about optimality?