[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[Anders Sandberg]

Dennis May <dennislmay at yahoo.com> , 16/6/2014 4:35 AM:

Over many years of reading about the stability of minarchy versus anarcho-capitalism [market capitalism] my primary conclusion is that both require a high degree of cultural sophistication and unanimity in order to remain stable in a finite largely closed system such as the Earth.  Cultural sophistication and unanimity cannot be maintained through coercion in a free thinking free society.  So it would seem that present conditions are not conducive to either form.  I believe there are possible long term stable models in an open system such as space but that would first require the industrialization of space.

In general, we do not have good tools for analysing robustness of political philosophy. The closest is economic arguments or game theory, but in practice the open-endedness of human behavior makes most theories fail when exposed to reality. At the same time we have empirical evidence about robustness of all kinds. One interesting observation is that many social systems on the face of it sounds utterly unstable, but actually do work - partially because they have correction subsystems, partially because human adaptation makes many societies "sticky" and more robust than on paper. 
Space does have interesting political connotations. As Iain M. Banks pointed out in "Some notes on the Culture", once you have enough space industrialisation enforcing a central power becomes hard - it is possible to move away and set up shop elsewhere, and attacks removes value. Disagreement may just lead to splitting of habitats. That doesn't necessarily lead to niceness (which Banks assumed): habitats might be internally far more bigoted and closed than Earth societies, maintaining their cohesion through underhanded means. And one could maintain an "empire" by threatening everybody. Still, the decentralization tendency would likely lead to a lot of divergence and diversity. So I think Nozick wins in space, even if he doesn't win on Earth. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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