[ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2012-12-30 06:22, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com
> <mailto:msd001 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     The whole issue makes me so angry that I just can't write any more on
>     it tonight.  I don't care as much about the guns themselves as I do
>     the general attitude towards revoking rights under the guise of public
>     safety.
>
> I'm with you Mike. Revoking rights under the guise of public safety is a
> fool's bargain.

I'm generally in agreement, but being in a philosophy department I 
cannot avoid complicating things.

J.S. Mill had a nice concept of rights in his "On Liberty", in that the 
only legitimate restrictions on our freedoms imposed by society are 
those that prevent us from harming the interests of others. Of course, 
determining what constitutes harming interests can be subtle and political.

Should we have the liberty to make anything? Mill had the example of 
selling poison, pointing out that we shouldn't prohibit it since it can 
be used for good - but that there is no threat to liberty to legislate 
having clear warning labels on the bottles. Being able to make stuff is 
like that: we can make bad things, but obviously also good things, and 
there is no way a machine can distinguish these categories (try writing 
a filter for baby-mulching machines). In fact, it is once-removed from 
the good or bad uses for the things printed: the baby-mulching machine 
might actually be intended and used as an edgy artwork rather than as a 
way of fertilizing gardens with toddlers. There is some saying about 
guns not killing people that might be applicable here.

However, there seem to be certain things that are so dangerous that it 
is rational to ensure that they are very hard to make and come by. 
Nukes, nerve gas, enhanced pathogens, devices for triggering existential 
risks and so on probably belong in this category. Even though I just 
want to have the vial of uber-smallpox in my art exhibit, the danger of 
it merely existing is too big: it is in a sense harming the interests of 
others on a big scale by having a low probability of causing enormous 
damage.

Whether a mere gun is anywhere close to this category can be debated: I 
think it is unlikely to matter much. The damage done by using it badly 
is great, but by no means as big as the WMD cases above (the Theoretical 
Lethality Index of a WMD is about 100,000 times greater - so a WMD a 
thousand times less likely to be misused is still far worse than a gun). 
But where to put the threshold depends on what is considered an 
acceptable risk by society, and that is up to societies to debate and 
decide. And change, as time goes on.

Giving people increased manufacturing capacity means that we give up 
some control abilities for what things people can get their hands on. 
For some problematic objects lack of access was a convenient way of 
controlling their use. But we control the use of guns or poisons in many 
other ways beside making them harder to buy. In particular, by 
sanctioning the unsafe use of them. Most likely the simplest response to 
a loss of control over access is to strengthen the sanctions. Another 
approach is to make bad usage more detectable: more sensors and 
surveillance, or perhaps mandate that all legal guns should have "flight 
recorders" that cannot be disabled undetectably.

In a world where everybody can have anything they wish for, we either 
need to ensure that people largely wish for safe and nice things (moral 
enhancement, peer pressure, few reasons to wish for badstuff), or that 
dangerous things or uses are detectable, preventable and/or acted 
against in a consistent way. We should not be surprised that a change in 
manufacturing ability ought to lead to shifts elsewhere in our society 
and its laws, norms and customs.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University