[ExI] intellectual property again

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 3:29 PM, JOSHUA JOB <nanite1018 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, efficiency can only be judged in reference to a certain system of values, and so comes after those values. Property is, in my view, a necessary component for human life and all values, and so must come before efficiency. So, ideas of efficiency come after the principles upon which property is based.

### Isn't this assuming too much? Of course, values come first,
efficiency in this context and in the first approximation is just a
measure of the degree to which available resources are used to realize
values of members of the in-group. But equally obviously, many people
do not care much about property, in most extreme situations to the
point of not even caring about their own bodies except as means to an
end (suicide bombers, religious fanatics and others come to mind). A
lot of people do not care about most types of property - yet they are
alive and have other values, which means that strongly valuing
property is not a necessary component for human life.

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>As I subscribe to an egoist morality, global efficiency is not a factor in the moral basis for property, since it >isn't based on any sense of individualism but rather a collectivist viewpoint that what is "best for society" is >what should be done.

### If your egoist morality totally discounts my values and the values
of everybody else, then of course global efficiency is not important
for you. But, then if you don't care about what I want, or what
everybody else might want, why should anybody care about what you
want, except as a strictly tactical issue?

Throwing around the term "collectivist" doesn't help here either,
since collectivist thinking is only very tangentially related to
efficiency (efficiency in the strictly technical sense I mentioned
above). Collectivism is a way of thinking which elevates some aspects
of social body (national survival, tribal or religious beliefs,
"equity") to a special status, such that desires of many or even most
members of that body can or should be dismissed as unimportant. This
actually goes against efficiency in the technical sense, since it
discards a lot of desires from consideration and limits their
fulfillment.

Rafal