The Celebrants. Post III: Undue Interference

[k522...@mindspring.com]

The Celebrants. Post III: Undue Interference

In Post II, I attempted to establish the truth, in a relative sense, of
the premise that in the best life, the most wants are satisfied. In this
post, I address a second premise from earlier, that the only wants that
should not be satisfied are those that interfere unduly with want.

Not all wants are good. People want to kill, to rape, to steal, to
eliminate other races, to gain wealth even if it means the suffering of
others.

And so, ever since people began living together, they have been making
rules about which wants members could pursue and satisfy.

Ironically, mere human want has been considered such a trivial thing by
people through history that lawgivers often have been forced to allege a
divine inspiration for their law. The Ten Commandments, still considered
the root of law by many in the U.S. and other Judeo-Christian cultures,
provides a vivid examples of this practice. The Jews adopted their law not
because they had determined, through careful debate and reasoned
consideration, that it best served the various wants of all their people.
They adopted their law because God, in the form of a burning bush, told
them to.

Even the founders of the U.S. felt a need at times to claim that the acts
creating a new nation were the will of God. The Declaration of
Independence begins its argument for separation by asserting that "all men
. . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

But want alone may serve as a valid foundation for all law, as history has
increasingly demonstrated. More and more, as the human race progresses,
law reflects the premises laid down in my first post: All citizens may
pursue want unless doing so interferes unduly with want.

So, to address the question at the heart of the second part of this
premise: who decides what constitutes undue interference? Who has the
right to make such an important decision? Who dares pretend they have the
wisdom or authority to rule in such a crucial matter?

The answer of what does and does not constitute undue interference with
want has at various times been dictated by despots, despotic parties,
religious sects or arbitrary cultural tradition. But in the long run,
undue interference has been defined and decided over the millennia by
society as a whole, via both formal and informal means. Debate,
literature, elections and referenda, and the evolving consensus as
reflected in letters to the editor and talks over the dinner table -- all
of these mechanisms help establish what mainstream society does and does
not tolerate as an undue interference with other's wants.

Society has done a marvelous job (again, in the long run) of identifying
and addressing the issues of undue interference. The same invisible hand
that guides free economies has directed the progress of modern society
toward the increasing refinement of the definition of undue interference
with want.

In the last few centuries, society has declared slavery, torture,
dictatorship and oppression to be undue interferences with want. In the
last few decades, society has become increasingly intolerant of even the
appearance of an interference with others' wants -- for housing, jobs,
education, voting rights -- on the basis of race, sex, class or religion.
The significance of these changes, which have reversed in a few years what
seemed to be inherent, inescapable patterns of human behavior, would
boggle the mind of any non-human being who paused above our planet for
study.

Of course, society continues to accept other interferences with want as
not undue. For example, winning a scholarship or job at the expense of
another interferes with that person's want, but not to the degree that
society forbids it. Nor is subjecting convicted criminals to the misery of
prison considered by today's society to be an undue interference with
want.

So the answer to the question of what constitutes undue interference with
want is that societal consensus is the best means for deciding. And this
is a role society has shown an increasing willingness to play. We join
advocacy groups, we lobby, we march, we vote, we respond to opinion polls,
we write letters to the newspaper, we post to newsgroups and create Web
sites.

Quite significantly, even when our protests are driven primarily by self
interest, we invariably argue that the wrong we oppose represents a
general, undue violation of legitimate wants that no person should be
subjected to.

These arguments are presented by the press, dissected by those who
disagree, and considered with greater or lesser attention by us and our
fellow citizens. While individual outcomes may vary at the start, the
whole of society will eventually agree on the answer, and move on the next
disagreement.

Most of us see in this process only angry people who despise, gratuitously
contradict and sometimes kill each other. But if we look at the debate
from an historical perspective, we see that what is happening is the
grandest sort of social and spiritual progress.

(Nevertheless, we are still quite miserable. In the following posts, I
present the principle and preventable sources of our current want
confusion.)

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"The Celebrants" represents an attempt to offer, via a series of Internet
posts, a comprehensive philosophy based on enlightened want and its
satisfaction. These posts are being published exclusively on
alt.philosophy.debate, talk.philosophy.misc and talk.philosophy.humanism,
with the first post placed on April 12, 1998. The content of these posts
is not controlled by any copyright, but I respectfully request that use of
this material include, wherever appropriate, a reference to The
Celebrants, k522...@mindspring.com

Among the primary objectives of this effort are generation of a dialogue
through which these ideas might be refined, and like-minded souls might be
identified. Your replies, either public to the newsgroups listed above, or
private to k522...@mindspring.com, are welcome.