[W]hat is the objective basis of politics?

Political Philosophy
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4 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

Do you have to have law, or something like it, to have a city?

That’s an interesting question, because it seems like law doesn’t even occur until there are cities. Of course there are small villages before there are cities, but it seems like the earliest example of law only comes from when the population gets big enough. I’m thinking of how in South America, the advanced civilizations always had cities, just as advanced as anything in Europe. Civilizations like the Inca and the ones leading up to it had strong legal systems and robust cities. Same with some North American civilizations. Thinking of people like the Inuit, they certainly had cultural laws or religious laws, but nothing formal or anything demonstrating what is needed for a functioning city. 

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12 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

Anarchy is no political system. It would be harder to make a case that a politic would be formed by three on an island.

 

Anarchy is the name for a society without any formal government, but is certainly a type of political system so long as the people participating are consciously and deliberately deciding that they do not want to be governed by the people around them.  Perhaps you expect that a something described as a system has some degree of formality?  

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A people who are consciously and deliberately deciding they do not want to be governed by the people around them? Sounds organized even if not formalized on the face of it.

And should a roving gang of thugs rise in their midst, what then? 

 

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3 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

A people who are consciously and deliberately deciding they do not want to be governed by the people around them? Sounds organized even if not formalized on the face of it.

And should a roving gang of thugs rise in their midst, what then? 

Some systems are weaker than others.  That doesn’t make it not a system.

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9 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

And should a roving gang of thugs rise in their midst, what then? 

Then would the implication be that the objective basis for governance is some form of “safety”?

And then is politics a study of “safeness”?

I’m not looking for a yes or no, but a better formulation.

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How about individual rights instead of safety, @Easy Truth? The purpose of government being to identify, protect and uphold individual rights. 

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1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

I’m not looking for a yes or no, but a better formulation.

The question wasn’t really what fundamental consideration one ought to have regarding politics, but what defines or establishes an objective basis to the entire field of politics. Pretty sure everyone here agrees that individual rights is a proper basis for an effective political system.

On 4/15/2022 at 11:06 PM, Grames said:

I agree because it (the choice of family as basic political unit) already seems to be making a value judgement that reproduction is the most important or organizing principle in political activity

In your opinion so far, what do you think is the basic political unit?

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Here’s my take on it.  

The big open ended question of ethics is “What should one do?” Rand starts her talk/essay Philosophy: Who Needs It with a science fiction scenario of an astronaut crash landed on an unknown planet and show how the astronaut needs and in fact acts out some philosophy whatever he does or doesn’t do.  She affirms elsewhere that one needs ethics stranded alone on a desert island.  Ethics is about “what should  one do?”.

To make progress toward a rational answer Rand creates some conceptual handles on the problem.  The question is about action, and action has objects and actors.  Only living things need to act.  Living things need to act to gain certain things to continue to live and act further.  She defines value as “that which one acts to gain or keep”, with the “one” encompassing any single living organism not just people.  The objective basis of ethics is values.

Ethics is a necessity for people because of their conceptual faculty and volition, but not for plants or animals.  Ethical philosophy is essentially which values are chosen, what standard is used to choose them,  and how they are ordered and organized.

Politics isn’t any different from ethics in its objects, by which I mean politics is still about values.  Values are still that which one acts to gain or keep, never a collective.  Politics differs from ethics in its method: more than one individual is acting toward the same value.  Values are still necessarily selfish/egoistic even when working with others to achieve them.  

The ethical standard of value, selection of values, hierarchy of values, in fact the entire code of values stays the same and doesn’t change for politics.  There is no separate political code of values just a political means of obtaining them.

All human action comes within the scope of ethics because all action will have some result gained or kept.  Only action taken with others is within the scope of politics.  Politics is a subset of ethics in this way, and is also conceptually dependent upon ethics via the reuse of the concept of value.

“Acting with others” is sufficiently value-free to qualify as an objective basis to defining the scope of politics.  It encompasses everything from robbery, murder and slavery (the other need not be voluntarily cooperating, this is about your values not the other guy’s) to family, trading, and voting.  This definition can apply to animals when they act together because the definition is about acting not philosophizing.  

Economics is “acting with others for material values”.  Trading, robbery and slavery are within economics as well as politics and ethics.  

The basic political unit is coordinated action by two or more actors.  

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I mean this talk of a “basic political unit” what does it mean? What problem is it solving? There is a question about the foundation of politics and there is a question about the basic political unit. Are those the same thing? What work is the basic unit doing?

 

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6 hours ago, Grames said:

“Acting with others” is sufficiently value-free to qualify as an objective basis to defining the scope of politics.  It encompasses everything from robbery, murder and slavery (the other need not be voluntarily cooperating, this is about your values not the other guy’s) to family, trading, and voting.  This definition can apply to animals when they act together because the definition is about acting not philosophizing.  

Economics is “acting with others for material values”.  Trading, robbery and slavery are within economics as well as politics and ethics.  

The basic political unit is coordinated action by two or more actors. 

A few thoughts come to mind

Sometimes the greatest “action” is to simply “agree” not to perform certain actions.  Action “with others” need not be collective positive action but can mostly be collective “negative” action allowing individual human action to proceed in accordance with Ethics of those individuals.

The primary conceptual reality of humans is the individual, and that individual human’s existence which is why a “value” is defined on that basis.  We need to be careful in avoiding the concept of a “collective value” in the same way we must avoid concepts such as “collective will”, “collective consciousness” or “collective rights”.  In a sense, the group can pursue and enshrine what is necessary for individual free-will, individual consciousness, and individual rights, but those are not attributes of the group as a group.  A free society is a value to the individuals of the group, we should always be wary to avoid considering what is purported to be of value to the group “as such”.

 

Marxist’s love to argue that political systems and policies based on freedom “DO nothing”, that they are not systems of anything, and achieve nothing… through the lens of a Marxist, which is the mentality of Force, and Authoritarianism, it is as if upon seeing the absence of any rights violations, in the absence of anyone being forced against their will in the name of some alleged goal, then they simply see that nothing is being done… it is as if they need to see the sacrifice of or by someone, to see any value.

 

“Hands off”… FREEDOM itself IS a PROFOUND and necessary value for individual human flourishing… it is the means by which people flourish, and as such it is one of the goals of a society, pursued “in trust” on behalf of everyone.  Being one of the GOALS of society the MEANS much be limited thereby.

 

Refraining from trampling on your rights, your life?..Doing “nothing” indeed.

 

A collectivist simply does not get it, right down to the root of what it means to be human… not by a long shot.

Just a few thoughts.

 

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Grames,

I think you are right to think of the “basic political unit” as “coordinated action by two or more actors.” 

Rand had asked and answered why would one alone on a deserted island need morality. Many would wrongly answer that such a person would not need morality in that situation because morality pertains most basically to how to treat others.

Supposing Rand’s question and answer sound, we can ask further whether one on a deserted island would need the concept of rights. No. He or she would not. It is only in the situation you have for “basic political unit” that the concept of rights is needed.

Perhaps “basic political unit” could be identifying the most elementary situation which make rights and politics needed conceptions and areas of thought.

However, the Rand question and answer has a falsity to it. No human is alive and has potential for continued life without having been not alone in the past, in birth and earliest childhood. To think of a solitary human as somehow the home base for thinking about the most elementary nature of morality is as tilted as thinking that morality is only about social relations. 

Rand inverted the concept of justice and of honesty in order to make them at root purely individual egoist virtues in an easy way. That is, her definitions of them fail to notice that they are firstly concepts for social contexts and only reflectively and analogically virtues such as are needed by a solitary person on a deserted island. 

“Coordinated action by two or more actors” may be the fundamental setup for there being rights, justice, and honesty as pertinent moral concepts and the distinctively moral concepts arising together with the political in a broad sense. 

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I see at least three concepts of politics here.

The broadest, advocated by Grames and Boydstun, covers action coordinated among different individuals.  This requires at least two individuals.  “Coordination” here may be voluntary on the part of each individual or may be imposed by someone against someone else’s will, as in rape and dictatorship.

One somewhat narrower, advocated by Dream_Weaver, covers situations in which there is at least a potential for a party to interfere with, or govern, coordination between other parties.  This requires at least three individuals.

The narrowest of the three, advocated by Eiuol, refers to cities in an Aristotelian sense and to law.  This requires considerably more people.

 

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Eiuol’s approach raises the question, what are cities and law, do we need them, and why?  Can we answer this without referring to the other two approaches?

All three approaches raise the question, what is coordination, do we need it, and why?

(Here I am borrowing some wording from what Ayn Rand said about values.)

 

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2 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

I see at least three concepts of politics here.

The broadest, advocated by Grames and Boydstun, covers action coordinated among different individuals.  This requires at least two individuals.  “Coordination” here may be voluntary on the part of each individual or may be imposed by someone against someone else’s will, as in rape and dictatorship.

One somewhat narrower, advocated by Dream_Weaver, covers situations in which there is at least a potential for a party to interfere with, or govern, coordination between other parties.  This requires at least three individuals.

The narrowest of the three, advocated by Eiuol, refers to cities in an Aristotelian sense and to law.  This requires considerably more people.

 

Perhaps it is the situation noted by Dream Weaver, encompassing and the one Eiuol talked of, that the thing called metanorms in the book Norms of Liberty have their advent. Certainly game theory, from the two-player (a, b) to n-player, is pertinent for the enhancement of mutually advantageous coordination at all levels.

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NOL doesn’t have anything to say about a “basic political unit,” though. It certainly doesn’t try to put a number on it (like saying two or more, of three or more.) Obviously you do need two or more, but just two or even three isn’t a political community. There, the concept of a polis, or political community is the proper object of political theorizing. It needs to be sufficiently large that law and customs have a need to be institutionalized.

If there is anything like a “basic political unit,” it would be the individual. The argument for this is the same as the argument for individual substances being the most real things. Societies or communities aren’t substances in themselves, but are composed of substances. That you would need a “basic political unit,” though isn’t clear to me. The political community is composed of individuals and the political community is for the happiness of the individuals composing it.

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16 hours ago, 2046 said:

I mean this talk of a “basic political unit” what does it mean? What problem is it solving? There is a question about the foundation of politics and there is a question about the basic political unit. Are those the same thing? What work is the basic unit doing?

Proper definitions are important for clear thinking.  For politics as philosophy the genus we already knew as human action, a.k.a. ethics.  What I seek to add is an objective differentia.   The definition I propose makes clear that politics is much broader than government or power relations, and has interesting consequences for some of the Objectivist virtues as Stephen Boydstun points out.  There is also the original post at the head of the thread posing the problem in terms of objectivity.

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11 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Rand inverted the concept of justice and of honesty in order to make them at root purely individual egoist virtues in an easy way. That is, her definitions of them fail to notice that they are firstly concepts for social contexts and only reflectively and analogically virtues such as are needed by a solitary person on a deserted island. 

“Coordinated action by two or more actors” may be the fundamental setup for there being rights, justice, and honesty as pertinent moral concepts and the distinctively moral concepts arising together with the political in a broad sense. 

Is lying and learning to lie an inherently political action, requiring the presence of another person and mind? I think so now.  Would a hypothetic child that somehow had language and the ability to think but never had the opportunity to learn about lying to others or be lied to by others have any comprehension of or use for the virtue of honesty?  I think not.

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17 hours ago, Grames said:

Is lying and learning to lie an inherently political action, requiring the presence of another person and mind?

Then is “an inherent political action” an interaction as in  a human interaction?

On 4/19/2022 at 4:56 AM, Boydstun said:

I think you are right to think of the “basic political unit” as “coordinated action by two or more actors.” 

It seems it has to be a “rules based” agreement of some sort.

21 hours ago, 2046 said:

If there is anything like a “basic political unit,” it would be the individual.

The problem I run into is “An individual makes up a society”, but “an individual is not a society”. 2 or more people makes up a society and also is a society. Now is a political entity a subspecies of society?

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20 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Then is “an inherent political action” an interaction as in  a human interaction?

It seems it has to be a “rules based” agreement of some sort.

The problem I run into is “An individual makes up a society”, but “an individual is not a society”. 2 or more people makes up a society and also is a society. Now is a political entity a subspecies of society?

Non-human actors are encompassed by the term “actors”, so it doesn’t have to be a human interaction.   The coordination of that action is significant, so there are principles and rules involved but not necessarily agreement as much political action is informal and to some degree involuntary such as in one’s assigned place in a social pecking order.  Social hierarchies are found in most social species.  Some political principles of social hierarchies can inferred by studying non-human social species, such as in The Politics of Chimpanzees by Frans de Waal.

Politics is a branch of philosophy but ‘society’ is the single word used as a noun to refer to several individuals as a political unit.  Society is defined as “an organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity” but also has a usage referring to the whole “aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.”   “Political entity” and “society” are synonyms or nearly so, but “society” has the advantage of being a word and not a noun phrase.

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If we are to have an objective context for Objectivist political theory, we probably need both an objective definition of politics and an objective definition of government.