The State

Political Philosophy
1
  1. How do people figure out how big and how centralized the government should be? The function of the state is to protect individual rights.

This is question of method, how does a society answer questions like “Do we need a giant police force, or 20 little ones?”, “How many police does this area need?”, “Does the military need bombers or fighters?”.

Businesses use market functions to figure out how big they should be, and how centralized they should be. The state exists before the market does, so I am not sure if it can access all of the information a business could.

  1. In a capitalist society who should be allowed to vote?

Should we have a buy in? Literacy test? Civil service requirement? Property requirements?

  1. Our society is becoming more and more complicated due to the advances in technology that we have. A rational society would have to settle cases that involve all sorts of scientific issues. A farmer for instance, may be suing a factory for polluting the air and ruining his crops, a violation of his rights. Ultimately, judges will have to listen to arguments between scientists about issues (does X gas actually poison crops) like this.

Should judges be required to know about the subjects that are involved in their case? This would be possible because the law would be much simpler in a rational society.

Is the state allowed to have scientific opinions (Would it be considered a form of precedence if a judge ruled in a case that X gas did in fact poison crops)?

Are jury’s capable of judging scientific arguments? Should they be required to take classes before attending jury duty? Who will provide the classes?

Please answer questions with more than just a yes or no, and only answer the questions you want to talk about. I am only bundling these three topics together because I don’t want to make separate posts. and people might not be interested in every issue brought up here anyway.

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  1. How do people figure out how big and how centralized the government should be? The function of the state is to protect individual rights.

Debate and experiment. It’s worth noting that the first government established by the founders under the Articles of Confederation proved unsatisfactory in operation. That’s what led to the drafting and adoption of the Constitution. Figuring out how to structure a government that would protect rights was the central focus of the constitutional debates. Read a copy of the Federalist Papers.

  1. In a capitalist society who should be allowed to vote?

Again, no clear philosophic answer. I could envision a proper government in which nobody got to vote. It probably wouldn’t be stable over the long term, though. I view this and the prior question as two sub-aspects of the same general question: Given that the function of government is to protect individual rights, how should it be structured to best achieve that end?