A sale is a contract through which two individuals exchange two items (one of them usually money) and waive their right to sue each other for violation of the right of not being robbed.
Hm. I think this is trying to fit a wide range of interactions into a framework of
Another example might be: initially I have a right to keep you out of my house. If you rent a room then I permit you in advance to enter my house whenever you want (irrevocably, during some time and subject to some conditions). If I want to have you over for dinner then I permit you to enter my house only at one particular time.
As a matter of public policy, our modern society takes the position that one can give irrevocable advance permission only for some of these rights (entering my house or taking my objects but not having sex with me or punching me). There are some rights where I cannot permit you to do the thing at all (you killing me). Some rights can be transferred or delegated and others cannot.
What I think this misses is that typical contracts also involve agreements to perform physical actions, not just to waive or transfer rights. If I buy an apple from you then you agree not only to transfer your right to ownership of it to me but also to physically allow me to take it. If I buy a meal from your restaurant you agree to make it for me. If both of our labs agree to slow down work on AI capabilities then we create a new right (against violation of this) and also take some concrete actions (reallocating compute and employees, giving METR new API keys, etc).
I recently read and like Schelling's treatment of agreements in the first few chapters of The Strategy of Conflict.
Epistemic status: Defining a concept to clarify my stance, which is probably in disagreement with it
Some of Kant's thesis on political philosophy are:
1. The tragic disharmony between morality and politics
A premise of this post is that I believe that the moral and political frameworks reach incompatible conclusions, and this is tragic but inevitable. Here I'm trying to explore whether Kantian consent is the right political concept of consent, which I'm confused about, while having no doubt that it isn't the right concept from a moral point of view.[1]
2. A content-less criterion of political legitimacy
Legitimacy for Kant doesn't stem from a list of behaviors that should be legal, but from the content-less criterion of allowing every behavior that doesn't conflict with others' symmetrical rights. [2]
3. Kant's definition of consent
Let's eliminate the contingent heteronormative and Christian aspects, and generalize the point:
Which is analogous to:
Or:
How could it be implemented?
I imagine something like a phone app, with a system of password (and delays, etc.) as complex as each individual wants, where all kinds of contracts could be specified with as much detail as each individual wants. If something happens which prima facie is a violation of a right, the verdict depends exclusively on the present of such a contract, with potential additions of establishing meta-crimes such as "systematically leading people on with obscurely formulated contracts", like to some extent is the case for commercial contracts.
Wouldn't this turn society into a bureaucratic mess?
People who trust each other don't need contracts. But people constantly interact with people who are, to different degree, strangers. Sometimes, they are unhappy with the interaction, and sometimes the unhappiness leads to using the state's tools to sue the other person for violated rights. It is for those cases that this notion of consent would apply, as opposed to other possible definitions (like whether "a normal person would have agreed with that", or whether "someone got hurt", etc.), and as opposed to the in my view incoherent system currently in place.
Written at Inscribe.
Disagreements about my moral/politics division are of course welcome, but note that it is not argued, but presupposed here.
And similarly to how a house's threshold is the criterion to evaluate certain things.