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Imagine the following scenario. You are employed by the world's first asteroid mining company. Since it is the first, it has no competitors and won't for at least another twenty years. In addition to that, once you are out in the asteroid belt, you cannot return to Earth in any way except by paying the company a small fee. Now when you sign up, the pay is very good, working conditions are safe and awesome, and you have a good time. However, at some point, the company introduces a new policy. In order to boost falling morale among management, they allow managers to give arbitrary and degrading orders to the people working under them. For instance, some managers make employees strip off their clothes, defecate, and then smear themselves with their own feces before they can pick up their pay-check. And to keep people from leaving they also keep raising the price for the trip back to Earth to the point that nobody can afford to leave. That is, unless you offer your body to the person in charge of transportation. He does not accept money, but he will take both men and women. (I could go on with disgusting kafkaesque scenarios like this, but let's just get to the point) ---------------- According to Objectivist ethics, has the company committed any sort of wrong against its employees in the above scenarios? As far as I can see, they have not, since they have used neither force nor fraud in their activities here. However, it is undeniable that this type of scenario is a nightmare and not only would I not to live it but I also would not want anyone else to live it either. It is a human created horror and this seems to be enough to require that people's right to dignity be respected.

This is not an innate idea, that's an innate capacity. Tabula rasa just means, to Rand, no innate concepts or ideas. There is no mechanism to form ideas with genes. An -emotion- goes with some evaluation.

Well, SK already clarified that the question is about the law here, not ethics. It has been easily established so far that dignity itself is not relevant to legality. The next issue is what to do about it as an individual who wants to leave. What matters is being free to do what one wishes to lead their own life. Still, self-ownership isn't a principle for Objectivist ethics. We ought to respect people in general as potential traders, while disrespect ignores that potential a lot of the time. Self-ownership is not fundamental anyway - you can't merely "offer your body", as the law ought to only protect and enforce initiation of force. "Offering" yourself is not enforceable, the means to defend that is initiation of force. The reason this asteroid problem may seem tricky is that the company seems to be within legal bounds - people agreed to the contract and agreed to potential sudden changes. But there's no way out without finishing the job and more humiliation! They'd be trapped. But being trapped is the whole issue. SK chose an asteroid exactly because it's extreme entrapment. So it's not wild or weird to answer assuming that the company has entrapped employees. They'd be legally obligated to offer a way out (just as locking people in a factory by saying "lol contract change" would be illegal).

According to Objectivism the right to life cannot be contracted away. You cannot sign a contract to literally become a slave, nor will a sneaky attempt at smuggling in a clause which amounts to carte blanche for one side to arbitrarily commit crime be upheld in a rational court of law. Any clause stating that one party can unilaterally change a contract does not validly encompass (by any stretch) the class of clauses which entail violation of the rights of a person, including being imprisoned, threatened with starvation or death, even though the person purportedly agreed to be exposed to such (heretofore) unknown and unstated clauses. Second, once a company unilaterally acts on the assumption its rights violating clauses are valid, the company is committing a wrong which constitutes the initiation of force and fraud. An employee is imprisoned, and threatened with death. A proper Objectivist government would step in to apprehend the criminals and save their prisoners to the extent physically possible. In one scenario, rescue does not occur until decades later, the perpetrators are jailed, and the damages from the companies coffers are awarded to the victims. As for "dignity", it is a state of consciousness. Like happiness, laughter, peace, such states of mind are reached by persons in the course of their lives and although these are in part a consequence of the acts of others they are not directly created by anyone else, with consent of the "experiencer" or not. As such there is no direct right to any of these. Freedom and the right to life enable a person to pursue them. The right to life makes dignity possible. There is no right as such to "dignity". Let me know if you have any questions.

Changing the conditions of your work in a way that is different from your contract could be construed as an initiation of force/fraud (and a contract is definitely needed in situations like these). And there would be legal issues associated with holding you ransom. You might say that the corporation didn't force you to stay there. But the issue of force is determined by the nature of reality. If somebody locked you in a room only they can open, you would essentially be held as a prisoner. By the nature of reality (i.e., by the constraints placed by the fact that you are physically unable to leave), the situation is very similar and legal issues can be involved. Also another thing: if this is the mentality, I doubt they would be the first to do anything in space. So situation is very unlikely as well.

Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit. If you think there are more pressing problems to solve, you can kindly fuck off and go solve them. You are the only one degrading the level of discussion here. In case you haven't noticed, this is a philosophy forum. We can talk about whatever we want. If you aren't interested in participating, then don't.

You're missing the point Mindborg. Let me put it this way. There has never been a state which has in principle separated economics from interference of the state. Black markets presuppose the state is involved in economics.

Seriously? This is the level that you want to bring the discussion to? Is this really a world problem that you want to spend your time solving? There are no more pressing problems for you to think about than a manager in an asteroid company smearing poop in employees face? Pathetic. If these problems are what objectivists are spending their time on, then it's easy to see why more important problems are not being solved.

Given the current alternatives, I'm better off with the US government in my life than I would be without it. But I want it all, a country whose government protects my rights from both street thugs and politicians and bureaucrats.

yeah, that's more or less what I'm wondering. Marxists and Libertarians agree largely on the problems of the current society of arbitrary government and corporate power but disagree on the causes and the solutions. So I'm trying to think outside my own box and see how some of the issues that really bother me appear from the other end of the political spectrum (and whether that analysis is better or has insights I might have missed). I think the error of the labour theory of value is in postulating a sort of "pure" conception of utility that exists independently of the market as a means of evaluating a resources value. its going to be something I will need to look at. I got a copy of Capitalism: The unknown ideal yesterday (and reached chapter 5 this morning). its refreshingly bold and will make my head spin for a while. its pretty clear just how big the gulf between left and right ways of thinking on these questions are so I will just have to keep going. The section on anti-trust laws more than likely answers my question by arguing that economic and political power are not equivalent because political power rests on force/violence whereas economic power does not. the "bigness" of a company is a sign of its success and the result of accumulated voluntary transactions. I've not heard anyone put it in those terms before and couldn't really argue against it. I guess the issue is who decides that the reason why someone buys something is "stupid" to begin with, as that implies coercion in undermining a person's autonomy. I was more worried about how something like Television can be used to by-pass the rational side of the brain and appeal directly to the emotional part. whether its used for political or commercial reasons, that struck me as very corrosive to free thought. In Randian terms, its an appeal to the subjectivist value of what is "good" as a property of the mind and of emotions. That could be coercive in that what feels good becomes the norm of human behaviour by taking away from the human part and making us more into animals to be herded into Black Friday sales. I guess I'm horrified by how de-humanising it is for people to become a single unthinking collective mass in the name of shopping. In terms of its motivations, its a small step from that to Nuremberg Rallies if you change the symbolism. mobs are pretty scary whatever reason they form.