Alright, same reference as above. Found the quote from David in the thread. It was the driver's side window. I agree with your assessment. If he hadn't been shot, he could have had glass fragments in his eye. The story is a fib. . .pure fabrication.
Skimming this thread, I caught the statement that carrying a gun is a "natural right." That immediately struck a false note with me. It is generally assumed that the gun was invented in China during the 13th C., that Adam did not have god-given firearms. Firearms do not grow on trees and little firearms buds do not grow on the hands of new borns. If guns are not natural, how can the possession of guns be a natural right?
Today, because I tripped upon this thread, I not only question that natural rights exist, I say that only such rights that derive from the social contract of each citizen with the state exist.
Liberty, property and equal protection of the law don't grow on trees either. Nevertheless, we consider them natural rights. That's not what "natural" means in political philosophy. Rather, the term defined by social contract theory, and means that the right isn't conferred by government. It predates the formation of a government. In this sense, the right to bear arms, and to resist oppressive governments with those guns; has been "natural" since Hobbes (1660).
A covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For (as I have shown before) no man can transfer or lay down his right to save himself from death, wounds, and imprisonment, the avoiding whereof is the only end of laying down any right; and therefore the promise of not resisting force, in no covenant transferreth any right, nor is obliging.
Now, your citation of liberty, property and equal protection not growing on trees is not a logical parallel to my example of guns being wholly unnatural. Liberty and equal protection are abstractions and guns are physical things. An argument could be made that property is both.
How is the Nazi's rise a counter example?
plainoldme wrote:Today, because I tripped upon this thread, I not only question that natural rights exist, I say that only such rights that derive from the social contract of each citizen with the state exist.
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But even if I accept that there are no natural rights, only contractual rights under the social contracts, I don't see a substantial effect on the foundation of the right to hold and bear arms....
Talking about a "social contract" without talking about natural rights is missing the point, since the guys who came up with the notion of the "social contract" -- Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau -- linked it to natural rights theory.
You'll need to take that up with Plainoldme, who made the distinction first. That said, I'm quite willing to go along with her idea that social contracts and natural rights can be separated in principle. Are you familiar with Robert Axelrod's game-theoretical experiments? The dominant strategies emerging in these experiments could meaningfully be called social contracts, even though they don't include any notion of natural rights.
More generally, the law-and-economics literature has extensively analyzed contracts in the light of game theory. The game starts when I offer you a contract (or not). If I do offer it, you can then accept or reject. Once we have a contract, either of us can perform or default, rely on the other side performing or take precautions on the other side defaulting. If one side defaults, pre-agreed rules about remedies kick in, and so forth. In this model, parties still up having rights and getting them enforced. But they get them because their behavior under their contracts produce a rights-friendly Nash equilibrium. At no point does this analysis depend on the concept of rights being "natural".
Well, that doesn't make much sense. It's true that parties to a contract have rights that flow from that contractual relationship, but they only have rights as against each other, not the rest of the world. Unless everyone is out there making bilateral contracts with everyone else, for your game-theoretic "social contract" to work there would have to be a real contract between all members of society -- which is something that even the social contract theorists regarded as more of a useful fiction than anything else.
But I don't understand how a dominant strategy can be called a "social contract."
Individuals can save transaction cost by contracting with one another through a trusted intermediary. You will remember that that's Ronald Coase's theory of why most people work for firms rather than freelancing. Once you consider transaction costs as a (negative) payoff in the social game we are all playing with one another, it is perfectly obvious why the Nash equilibrium would contain governments, and why we would agree to be governed by them. The foundation of nations on social contracts is no more fictional than the foundation of companies on employment contracts.
joefromchicago wrote:But I don't understand how a dominant strategy can be called a "social contract."
Take tit-for-tat, for example. I, being a tit-for-tat player, offer you cooperation by starting out cooperating with you. You, being a tit-for-tat player too, agree by cooperating back. From there on we both perform by cooperating, thereby gaining an advantage over other players.
Sure, it may not look much like a contract to you, because there is no lawyer drafting anything in this picture. But I think it's pretty well-accepted that this is not necessary to have a contract. You can offer and accept contracts merely by what German jurists call "conclusive behavior" (not sure what it's called in America).
For example, say you own a newspaper stand. I can offer you a contract by slapping a copy of the New York Times onto your counter; you can accept by opening your palm; then I perform by dropping three quarters into it, and you perform by letting me leave with the newspaper. There don't need to be any documents exchanged, or even any words said. Yet you and I would still have a real contract, not just a legal-fiction kind of contract.
On the other hand, I still don't understand why, even if government is chosen because it represents a Nash equilibrium point, that individual rights necessarily flow out of that. It's certainly possible to have a government where no one has any rights, even if it might be sub-optimal.
Tit-for-tat is a strategy for competing in an open-ended, two-player game. But the players, even if they're involved in a cooperative relationship, aren't thereby engaged in a contractual relationship.
Just because one player chooses cooperation doesn't mean the other is contractually required to choose cooperation as well,
They don't necessarily, and it wasn't my claim that they do. My claim was that you can distinguish the concept of natural rights from the concept of a social contract. When you object that you can have a social contract without having any rights under it, you only confirm this claim of mine.
joefromchicago wrote:Tit-for-tat is a strategy for competing in an open-ended, two-player game. But the players, even if they're involved in a cooperative relationship, aren't thereby engaged in a contractual relationship.
Why not? What element of contract formation is missing that would be present in our wordless newspaper stand contract?
joefromchicago wrote:Just because one player chooses cooperation doesn't mean the other is contractually required to choose cooperation as well,
And my tit-for-tat example didn't imply that it always did. If I initiate cooperation and you don't reciprocate, you have rejected the contract I offered, so of course there couldn't be any contractual obligations on you. But the case is different if, after (say) 50 rounds of mutual collaboration, you suddenly choose to obstruct. Then I think it's a reasonable interpretation of our behavior to say that we did have an implicit contract, which you breached. Moreover, my tit-for-tat reaction, which is to obstruct you on my 51st move, can then be reasonably interpreted as a contract remedy.
I didn't say that. I said that you can have a government without any individual rights. Saying that "government" and "the social contract" are the same thing is to beg the question.
Now, is the assassin right that you two had a contract?
Just because I play a tit-for-tat strategy consistently doesn't mean that I intend for you to reciprocate -- after all, tit-for-tat was shown to be superior to all other strategies, so a rational player would pursue tit-for-tat even if the other player did something else.
Uh, no. If a player chooses not to reciprocate his opponent's "offer" of tit-for-tat, that's not a rejection of a contract. If I offer to sell you something, you can either accept the offer, reject it, or propose a counteroffer. The players in a game, on the other hand, are required to play, so they have to do something.
. If Player T plays C, hoping to induce Player X into reciprocating with C, but Player X instead plays D (and thus sticking Player T with the "sucker's payoff"), and Player T then plays D the next round to "punish" Player X, that's not an exercise of a contractual remedy, that's simply punishment.
joefromchicago wrote:Just because I play a tit-for-tat strategy consistently doesn't mean that I intend for you to reciprocate -- after all, tit-for-tat was shown to be superior to all other strategies, so a rational player would pursue tit-for-tat even if the other player did something else.
Yes you do intend for me to reciprocate -- because reciprocity is what makes tit-for-tat the superior strategy for you.
How so? Or in other words, what was the question again?
No, for two reasons: (1) I never received any consideration from the assassin, and (2) a contract that involves killing me would be void for being against public policy. (Though I'm sure Joe Lieberman is working to change that.) This differs from the cooperative tit-for-tat equilibrium in that your cooperative conduct would (1) work out as consideration for me, and (2) not involve assassinating me.
Yes you do intend for me to reciprocate -- because reciprocity is what makes tit-for-tat the superior strategy for you.
That's an artefact of Axelrod's particular version of the game. I'm sure you could set up a modified version, offering players to choose the quasi-move, "don't do anything now", with a payoff of zero for both parties. But I doubt that would change the dynamics much.
Sure! If we assume player T's move C was his first move toward X, and player X plays D, then T and X don't have a contract, so contract law cannot possibly apply. I already said this.
But if players T and X have already exchanged 50 rounds of reciprocal cooperation, you have everything a contracts needs. You have an offer, you have acceptance, performance, consideration, and everything. Now if you play D in your 51st move and I reciprocate with D in mine, it's a contract remedy.
To rephrase, hopefully in clearer language: You don't intend for me to reciprocate by being a tit-for-tatter myself. But you do intend for me to reciprocate the cooperation you initiated under your own tit-for-tat strategy. Remember, as a tit-for-tatter, you'll never "win against" other players. You'll lose against the greedy ones (but only once), and you'll prosper with cooperative players (but no more than they do). The reciprocity with all cooperative players is what makes tit-for-tat the superior strategy for you -- no matter what particular strategy causes them to cooperate back.
Interesting that as the driver, you had your window closed but the other open for ventilation. This is the opposite of what most people would do in the car.
