Notes on deriving propertarian ethics

Tuukka Pensala
2022-06-22

These notes contain ideas discovered over hundreds of hours of thinking and dozens of failed attempts, so they are quite condensed.


Part 1: The a priori of instruction.


1. Understanding is consistent -- one can't accept contradictory meaning.

Examples: "1 = 2", "The car is blue and red", "I am lying", "I know I'm going to trip over by accident", "I know I'm losing control unexpectedly"

2. Some meaning can be consistent for one but necessarily inconsistent for another.

Example: "Bob is going to trip over by accident" can be understood by someone else than Bob, but can not be understood by Bob himself, because then the tripping over would be known to him instead of being a surprise to him, which has a different meaning compared to the original proposition.

Let's use this notion of "self-consistency" to stress that the consistency of a meaning is sometimes dependent on who considers the meaning.

Meaning is self-consistent for a specific person iff the meaning can be consistent for him.

Self-consistency over multiple people is a stronger condition than merely finding meaning to be consistent, which is self-consistency for only one person, namely oneself. So we are not accepting relativism, but instead have found a stronger notion of consistency.

3. One can not instruct another with meaning that is self-inconsistent for the another.

Such action would always fail in its purpose of making the other person accept the proposed meaning.


Part 2: Qualities of competent ethical theories.


Let's then investigate a subclass of instructions, namely ethical theories.

4. Ethical theories are universal in the sense that they are intended for everyone who can understand them.

We're not interested in just any instructions, but only those which are intended for as wide audience as possible, and identify them as ethical theories.

Let's call the group of actors who can understand the ethical theory as the target group of that theory.

5. Proposable ethical theories do not prescribe meaning that would be self-inconsistent for anyone in the target group.

Prescribing self-inconsistent meaning within the group which is being instructed would violate point 3. The proposing action of such ethical theory always fails, meaning that such theory is not proposable. As ethical theories do not exist in a vacuum, but are proposed by people to people, we can disregard all non-proposable ethical theories as irrelevant.

We have now found the exclusion of certain kind of meaning in the prescriptions of proposable ethical theories, but exclusion of meaning does not necessarily imply inclusion of the negated meaning. We need further constraints to eliminate the third option of an ethical theory not classifying a specific self-inconsistent meaning either way.

6. Ethical theories are supposed to be comprehensive in prescribing what is allowed and what is not.

Each failure to answer a question of what is allowed and what is not makes the ethical theory worse.

For a comprehensive-enough proposable ethical theory the forbidding of allowing a specific self-inconsistency implies the forbidding of the said self-inconsistency, because the middle option of not specifying the status doesn't exist for comprehensive-enough ethical theory. With the requirement for comprehensiveness we are in effect getting something similar to the law of the excluded middle for the normative rules of ethical theories -- either something is allowed or it is forbidden by the theory.

7. A comprehensive-enough proposable ethical theory forbids anyone in the target group to have understanding that is self-inconsistent for anyone else in the target group.

Let's next tie up a bunch of requirements together in the concept of competence:

8. Proposability of an ethical theory is an aspect of the competence of the proposing action.

As noted, non-proposability of an ethical theory implies that the proposing action of such theory always fails, making such proposing action most incompetent.

9. Comprehensiveness of an ethical theory is an aspect of the competence of the proposing action.

As the purpose of an ethical theory is to comprehensively instruct, the more holes there are in an ethical theory the further away the proponent of such theory is from his intended purpose.

10. The practicality of the institution of a proposed ethical theory is an aspect of the competence of the proposing action.

The institution of an ethical theory is a goal of the instructing action of that ethical theory; the proponent is persuading people to act like he proposes. If the institution is implausible due to practical obstacles, then the success of the proposing action is also implausible, meaning that the proposing action is incompetent.

Let's call an ethical theory that can be competently instructed as "a competent ethical theory" in short.

11. A competent-enough ethical theory forbids anyone in the target group to have understanding that is self-inconsistent for anyone else in the target group and mandates a practical way to achieve this.


Part 3: Deducing concrete results.


12. The knowing of a current misunderstanding is self-inconsistent.

One can understand that someone else is misunderstanding, but the misunderstanding party can't accept this same meaning. When one becomes aware of one's own misunderstanding, his understanding has already changed, and he can only understand that his past self had a misunderstanding, not the present self.

13. The knowing of the possibility of a current misunderstanding is self-inconsistent.

When one notices that he might be incorrect, the possibly incorrect understanding in question was held by the past self, not the present self. The present understanding is necessarily known. Known risks are understood uncertainties, not misunderstandings. 

With claim 13 we know that a competent-enough ethical theory forbids anyone in the target group to know about possible misunderstandings within the target group, which practically means that risking misunderstandings per se is forbidden among the target group. In other words, misunderstandings are trusted to never happen within the target group when the competent-enough ethical theory is accepted. (This is the crucial piece towards which we have been building. It allows us to deduce extremely strong results such as claim 15.)

Accidents, deception and unexpected loss of control require misunderstanding. Two actors presuming control of the same object at the same time implies that at least one of them has a misunderstanding, as control is exclusionary. The lack of misunderstanding therefore implies the lack of accidents, fraud and physical conflict; harmony.

14. A competent-enough ethical theory mandates practical but total avoidance of misunderstandings, that is, practical harmony.

To reiterate, a competent-enough ethical theory has the following qualities:
- Universality; It is intended for everyone who can understand it (4).
- Comprehensiveness; That which is not allowed is forbidden, or that which is not forbidden is allowed (9). (This might be an ideal that can be reached only asymptotically.)
- Proposability, which implies the non-acceptance of the possibility of misunderstandings to anyone in the target group (3), which with comprehensiveness implies the total avoidance of misunderstanding for anyone in the target group, which is harmony within the target group.
- Practicality; The institution is plausible (10).

Let's shortly consider a class of competent ethical theories directed towards ordinary humans, calling it A. (We're not explicitly specifying the level of competence or what ordinary human means, because that's unnecessary to get the idea of how to derive the concrete rules.)

For theories of class A to be practical, they must have a solution to the problem of two people accidentally presuming control over the same object at the same time, which necessarily involves a misunderstanding of control. The solution must be applicable to times even before any communicative interaction between the parties has happened, because communication itself requires presuming control over some objects, namely the means of communication, and accidentally presuming double-control over the means of communication is also obviously forbidden.

The solution to this problem is for class A theories to mandate that the control status of each controlled object will be noticed by anyone prior any interference with the state of the object. In simpler terms, the control status of already-controlled objects must be visible from a distance. Then accidental double-control and the accompanying misunderstanding can be avoided.

This places restrictions on what kind of objects are allowed to be controlled in class A theories. The controllable objects (property) must have objective, visible boundaries (physical borders), and the controlling actor (owner) of the object must remain the same unless he otherwise announces. Objects that do not have such visible boundaries are not property and can't be owned, as that would over a long enough period of time lead to a misunderstanding of control, a disruption of harmony. In this sense class A theories are all propertarian.

15. A competent-enough ethical theory mandates propertarianism.

Further refining results can be derived by finding additional rules which lower the chances of accidental or intentional destruction of the institution of harmony, which increases the plausibility and thus the competence of the ethical theory. The quest for improving the competence of ethical theories seems to be a never-ending pursuit that has barely started.

The limits of justified self-defense can maybe be deduced by noticing that reaching the goal of instituting harmony requires that the plausibility of harmony is not lowered below the point of where the seeming attacker lowered it.