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Can there be honor among thieves?

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hernan

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In order to live, man must eat food and drink water. This principle is adhered to by anyone who is alive. If it were made illegal to consume neither food nor water, could you trust any living soul you encounter?

Would you distrust fellow Objectivists in that distopia? I'm not claiming that trust in that situation would be easy or total but even in the worst situation there is always the opportunity find like-minded individuals.

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Would you distrust fellow Objectivists in that distopia? I'm not claiming that trust in that situation would be easy or total but even in the worst situation there is always the opportunity find like-minded individuals.

That tells me that you probably observe trust as more of a matter of adherence to principle (and presumably the Aristotelean principle of truth derived by coherence to reality) than of adherence to prescribed law.
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That tells me that you probably observe trust as more of a matter of adherence to principle (and presumably the Aristotelean principle of truth derived by coherence to reality) than of adherence to prescribed law.

Actually, I think there are many methods for judging trustworthness, among which is knowing another's principles. In the simplest form, the question (particularly as I defined honor), is a matter of acurately predicting another's choices in given situations. Obviously a principled person will be so directed.

But equally obvious, someone who, as a matter of principle or simply out of fear, conforms to the law will not be someone to trust in the distopia you described. On the other hand, such a person can be trust to, for example, drive on the appropriate side of the road.

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I should have written (and presumably, in accordance with the Aristotelean principle of the correspondence theory of truth.)

Trust is earned, at least in the sense inquired about. While I trust that the approaching driver will remain on his side of the road, it is a more colloquial usage of the term.

To judge someone as trustworthy, presumes you have a working grasp of what you consider trustworthy to be and have evaluated someone as having that characteristic.

What, though, are the metrics. Trust has magnitudes.

If you go to the bank to borrow money, your history of paying your utilities, present a metric for consideration for a credit card, which present a metric for consderation for an autombile or a house.

A bankruptcy can hinder your ability to borrow money. If the lending institutions sweep these metrics aside, or select the wrong metrics to use as a criteria, you could end up with Fannie May or Freddie Mac appealing to the government for an emergency bailout. If a government continues to indiscriminately exercise its authority, you could end up with a Weimer Republic, an Argentina, or a Bosnia. Each of these illustrate a violation of trust. Bankruptcy is considerably easier to comprehend and explain.

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Trust is an estimation in some ways like an automated emotional response on some level, a prejudice in other words. The estimation is based on the observance of a man's or entity's actions and whether or not those actions adhere to, or are consistent with what is believed to be the motivating factor behind those actions. If an action is motivated by ideas, than trust is the estimation or judgement of the level of fidelity to the motivating factors of the entity. Does this person act in fidelity to what are the perceived principles he holds, either explicitly stated principles or principles that may be deduced by his actions in the past.

There are different levels of trust and different colloquial uses of the term. To say one trusts 'gravity' , would be better said to have an understanding of the scientific explanation of the laws of physics if even on a very vague level.

To say you trust the oncoming driver will maintain his lane is to say you assume that other drivers are operating on the principle of self preservation. The rule of law in this case is which side of the road is the appropiate one.

Edited by tadmjones
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You both make some great points that are back toward where I'd like to take this discussion.

Turst is earned? it can be. Specifically we can act in ways that earn the trust of others. We can be trustworthy. We can be men of our word and earn a reputation for honesty, for honor.

But can we we men of our word to some and not others? I claim so and this is crucial in the situation (that we all agree we are in) where law and principle are inconsistent if not in conflict. I claim further that we observe this all the time in what I call factional trust: being trustworthy among your faction but not so outside it. This is never the ideal as it always greats a gray zone of ambiguity but in the real world one has to choose between surrendering principle to law or living with the gray zone that comes with living principle in spite of the law.

Trust is an emotional estimation? Reasoning, in general, is far more emotional than most rationalists allow. Or, to put it another way, there is no hard wall between emotion and reason, though we can always point to examples of surrendering reason to emotion. It's thus the case that trust has a natural component: we trust some naturaly (e.g. those who are good to us) and distrust others (e.g. those who harm us). This obviously lends support to factional trust.

We could certainly argue, as in the previous thread, about distinctions between trust in nature and trust in humans. But as there, I will argue that this is not so important as it might seem at first. While there are certainly simple examples where we can have great confidene (e.g. math or basic laws of physics), most of life is quite complex and unpredictable even before we throw humans into the mix. In all cases we are attempting to make decisions based on the information available to us, which almost always falls well short of what is needed for certanty.

The rule of law is a long-standing trational solution to the problem of trust and so pitting principle against law is not without consequences. If I follow the law I am more assured of how my life will unfold. So it's naturally very tempting to surrender principle to law, to conform to culture and society, to go with the flow.

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Are you pitting principle against law, or is bad law pitting itself against principles, and the latter certainly has its consequences. If you are wiling to surrender your principle to law, why bother deriving your principles at all when the lawmakers are sure to supply you with more than an adequate abundance of rules for you to abide by? Since when is identifying and living by the principles required for life a gray zone? I also notice you still seem to think that there are two worlds here, an 'ideal world' and a 'real world'. Last I checked, there is only reality, and this world is part of it.

If I were to observe that you are a man of your word to some and not to others, I would have to either draw the conclusion that you are a man of your word to some and not to other, or more easily retained, you are not a man of your word.

While you can point to examples of surrendering reason to emotion, what do you do if and when you discover that your emotions are by and large a by-product of your reasoning?

Edited by dream_weaver
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I claim further that we observe this all the time in what I call factional trust: being trustworthy among your faction but not so outside it. This is never the ideal as it always greats a gray zone of ambiguity but in the real world one has to choose between surrendering principle to law or living with the gray zone that comes with living principle in spite of the law.

When going down the road you described... it's always good to keep in mind that the grey is just a shade of black.

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Are you pitting principle against law, or is bad law pitting itself against principles, and the latter certainly has its consequences.

I'm merely observing that the two are in conflict and exploring the consequences of that. I'm not sure that either is pitting itself against the other as much as that they are different animals that do not get along.

If you are wiling to surrender your principle to law, why bother deriving your principles at all when the lawmakers are sure to supply you with more than an adequate abundance of rules for you to abide by?

Well, that is a very good question but, in reality, it's probably more often the case that either you are a man of principle or you are a follower of the law. There are many, though, who profess principles as a political opinion but otherwise surrender to the law. And that's not an absurd choice, that is what democracy teaches we should do.

Since when is identifying and living by the principles required for life a gray zone?

Let me clarify: living by principles that are illegal requires living in a gray zone in which you can be honorable with some but not others. This has important consequences one of which is that there will be situations where you cannot be as honest as you would prefer.

I also notice you still seem to think that there are two worlds here, an 'ideal world' and a 'real world'. Last I checked, there is only reality, and this world is part of it.

Well, the "ideal world" is obviously not the real world, it is an ideal, a mental image of what we would like the world to be. The ideal world is not bounded by any laws of physics or human nature. It is a wish, an aspiration. The real world, of course, is that which we inhabit and about which we complain. There is one reality but we are able to reason beyond reality to possibility, however flawed that reasoning might be.

If I were to observe that you are a man of your word to some and not to others, I would have to either draw the conclusion that you are a man of your word to some and not to other, or more easily retained, you are not a man of your word.

This is the problem with life in the gray zone. Now sometimes the divisions are clear cut (e.g. a soldier's uniform) but they will not always be so (e.g. a spy).

While you can point to examples of surrendering reason to emotion, what do you do if and when you discover that your emotions are by and large a product of your reasoning?

Sometimes that is certainly true, but not in general (depending on how you define emotion). For example, my desire for food arises from my hunger, an anatomical response to my body's needs that long precedes the development of the brain and what we would call reason.

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When going down the road you described... it's always good to keep in mind that the grey is just a shade of black.

That's certainliy one way to look at it. That's the path that leads to pacifism and submission to power. There are certainliy many who will argue for that approach.

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Choosing to follow the law, is choosing to abide by the principle that you are going to follow the law. You don't escape the fact that you need principles to guide your actions in life. By choosing to follow the law, you are in essence choosing to let others establish some of the moral guidelines you will try to adhere to. In so far as the laws are moral, this should not be an issue. Prescribed law is written by man. Man is not infallible. Man is capable of error. Man needs a method to check his knowledge. Laws by this reckoning can also be immoral. Morality is a matter of choice. Validating your principles to ensure they are true, consistant, and have no contradictions is a matter of choice. Would you consider validating your principles to be moral or immoral? Would you consider adopting a principle without validating it to be moral or immoral? Would you consider following an immoral law to be moral or immoral?

Edited by dream_weaver
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Choosing to follow the law, is choosing to abide by the principle that you are going to follow the law. You don't escape the fact that you need principles to guide your actions in life. By choosing to follow the law, you are in essence choosing to let others establish the moral guidelines you will try to adhere to. In so far as the laws are moral, this should not be an issue. Prescribed law is written by man. Man is not infallible. Man is capable of error. Man needs a method to check his knowledge. Laws by this reckoning can also be immoral. Morality is a matter of choice.

I don't really find much here to disagree with.

Validating your principles to ensure they are true, consistant, and have no contradictions is a matter of choice. Would you consider validating your principles to be moral or immoral? Would you consider adopting a principle without validating it to be moral or immoral?

This is all well and good questions but I don't think they really bring us closer to solving the problem I am posing here in this thread. Obviously it is a Good Thing to check your moral principles and even to allow some tolerance for disagreements with others on moral issues. The question is whether, or at what point, such tolerance is stretched to the point that you can be said to have abandoned your moral principles and what are the consequences either way.

Would you consider following an immoral law to be moral or immoral?

And here lies one of the core issues. (I say one because there are others.)

Suppose, for example, that a law was passed that you thought was absurd but it was not a great burden. Would it be immoral to follow the law? Or, to put it another way, is there a moral principle that would lead us to following an immoral law? Naturally democratic principles are such but I'm assuming that there won't be many fans of that here. Another is tolerance, which is more to my liking; I will tolerate a certain amount of interference from others. And still another is simple calculations of survival; there is no moral compunction to throw oneself into the maw of the beast. Also, some will make a distinction between following an immoral law that is harmful to ourselves and following an immoral law that is harmful to others, a variation on tolerance (it's very easy to tolerate a law that harms others).

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I believe a group of men made a correct observation when they wrote:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

While you consider deciding to follow an immoral law is one of the core issues, you may find what you consider to be other issues can likely be examined under the same microscope, so to speak. Still, the law, or more broadly politics is the final manifestation of something more basic. It is the machinery of the juggernaut. If you want to control or avoid the juggernaut, you need to discover what pilots, steers, or directs it. It would be this knowledge that would guide you as to whether to follow an immoral law or not on the basis of your proximity to the juggernaut.

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I believe a group of men made a correct observation when they wrote:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

While you consider deciding to follow an immoral law is one of the core issues, you may find what you consider to be other issues can likely be examined under the same microscope, so to speak. Still, the law, or more broadly politics is the final manifestation of something more basic. It is the machinery of the juggernaut. If you want to control or avoid the juggernaut, you need to discover what pilots, steers, or directs it. It would be this knowledge that would guide you as to whether to follow an immoral law or not on the basis of your proximity to the juggernaut.

As with the previous thread, that is an option that I would prefer to keep off the table for a number of reasons. I believe that there are far more moderate options to explore and any problems with the moderate option (aside from being too moderate) will manifest in that more radical option.

However, it's worth touching on this option in relation to the issue of the relationship between rule of law, power, and honesty.

One can think of government power as a moral high ground. Whoever occupies that high ground gets to openly practice their principles. Everyone else is faced with less attractive options, some of which we've discussed.

The natural reaction of those who wish to open and honestly practice their principles is to fight to seize that high ground, either through the machinery of politics or by other means. This is seldom a satisfying choice but it is the dominant mentality.

The question may be posed this way: Is this mental disposition toward fighting for this moral high ground a reflection of reality or is it a common misconception? I am exploring the second possibility here.

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The mental disposition toward fighting for the moral high ground is the recognition that morality is the recognition of man's proper relationship to reality. The common misconception is that it can be circumvented without adverse consequences.

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The mental disposition toward fighting for the moral high ground is the recognition that morality is the recognition of man's proper relationship to reality. The common misconception is that it can be circumvented without adverse consequences.

This is well trod ground that is litered with martyrs, innocent victims, and record of failure with only a smattering of qualified success. It doesn't strike me as a very rational choice.

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This is well trod ground that is litered with martyrs, innocent victims, and record of failure with only a smattering of qualified success. It doesn't strike me as a very rational choice.

Presuming, of course, that the martyrs, innocent victims, and record of failure is dealing with a those adhering to a very rational choosen morality.
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Now this does bring us back to the question I raised here and especially in the ethics thread Can there be honor among thieves?. Operating in an underground economy requires, at a minimum, being dishonest toward the government.

Is it dishonest to lie to the robber about where the jewelry is hidden? Or to tell the SS that you are hiding practitioners of the Judaic religion in your attic or basement?

Operating in an underground economy limits the economy of scale. This, too, has been discussed elsewhere on this forum.

If you are trying to state that appealing to an underground economy to escape government oppression (such as the black market in your other thread) establishes a case of 'honor among thieves', what you are missing is that it may be moral to do so. This does not make you a thief in principle, only a thief in the eyes of prescribed, immoral law.

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Is it dishonest to lie to the robber about where the jewelry is hidden? Or to tell the SS that you are hiding practitioners of the Judaic religion in your attic or basement?

Well, it's an interesting question whether that is justifiably dishonest or not dishonest at all. But certainly they both entail being untruthful and this may lead to other untruthfulness. For example, is it dishonest to lie to somone you suspect to be a robber/SS or to anyone who might unwittingly help said robbber/SS? The tangled web of deceit.

Operating in an underground economy limits the economy of scale. This, too, has been discussed elsewhere on this forum.

If you are trying to state that appealing to an underground economy to escape government oppression (such as the black market in your other thread) establishes a case of 'honor among thieves', what you are missing is that it may be moral to do so. This does not make you a thief in principle, only a thief in the eyes of prescribed, immoral law.

It does, though, entail making distinctions about who you are honest with. In the extreme case (e.g. under totalitarianism) you become quite paranoid, not even trusting your own children. I had intentionally avoided giving a hard definition of "thief" exactly so that we might explore the various interpretations. But you describe it well here: thief in law vs. thief in principle. And this is, of course, exactly the sort of consquence that one would expect when law and principle conflict.

I'm trying to resist drawing a conclusion here in order to explore the various consequences.

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Being honest means not faking any aspect of reality. If one lies to those perceived to be a threat to his values it would be a moral action. In the extreme case of living under a totalitarian regime an honest man may indeed conclude his family could pose a threat to his values and lying to them would be protecting himself. The recognition of values and the acts of obtaining and keeping them are moral actions.

Edited by tadmjones
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Being honest means not faking any aspect of reality. If one lies to those perceived to be a threat to his values it would be a moral action. In the extreme case of living under a totalitarian regime an honest man may indeed conclude his family could pose a threat to his values and lying to them would be protecting himself. The recognition of values and the acts of obtaining and keeping them are moral actions.

Your response is amgibuous on the key point: there is the question of what is honesty (e.g. your defintion) and whether dishonest is ever justifiable (your example). I can't quite tell if you are suggesting that if it is not immoral then it is not dishonest. But your first sentence does not define dishonesty in terms of the justifiablness of faking reality.

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You might take a look at the Ayn Rand Lexicon in regard to how honesty is couched as a virtue.

This is one of the reasons that a thief, in principle, has difficulty with trust. The thief may think that everyone else is dishonest, but that he is at least honest enough to admit it, even if just to himself.

He puts himself at war with reality. Instead of grasping the requirements needed for productivity in any endevour, he relies on others to produce the goods he seizes by force. The thief cannot exist without the victim, while rational men can easily get by without thieves in their midst, and prefer to do so, by the establishment of govenments to deal with those who would initiate force against them. It is when the thieves discover how to seize the reigns of govenment that you seem to be interested in. This theme is present in both this and your thread imploring how Ojbectivism adresses socialism.

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You might take a look at the Ayn Rand Lexicon in regard to how honesty is couched as a virtue.

This is one of the reasons that a thief, in principle, has difficulty with trust. The thief may think that everyone else is dishonest, but that he is at least honest enough to admit it, even if just to himself.

He puts himself at war with reality. Instead of grasping the requirements needed for productivity in any endevour, he relies on others to produce the goods he seizes by force. The thief cannot exist without the victim, while rational men can easily get by without thieves in their midst, and prefer to do so, by the establishment of govenments to deal with those who would initiate force against them. It is when the thieves discover how to seize the reigns of govenment that you seem to be interested in. This theme is present in both this and your thread imploring how Ojbectivism adresses socialism.

Here Rand is using a specific test: that of dependence. I'm not especially fond of that test since we are all dependent on each other in a complex economy. But I get her meaning anyway. And, yes, I am intersted in it as you describe though I think it's safe and more general to simply observe that law and principle can, and often do, conflict which is nicely illustrated by theives in government.

You introduced a great linguistic distinction before: legal thief vs. princple thief. Perhaps that will be useful here.

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