Morality masks technical ignorance

[James A. Donald]

On Thu, 29 Dec 1994 blancw at pylon.com wrote:
> I also don't see much success in attempting to protect privacy 
> through the promotion of morals, policies, or laws, either.   

If we fail to point out that people have a right to privacy,
if we fail to point out the moral and constitutional implications
of coercive inspection, then our enemies win, by citing tax
evaders child pornographers terrorists and pedophiles.

Public key technology is totally ineffective against rubber
hoses.

How people are to live together peaceably is always first
and formost a moral question.

If all morality is relative, then the only possible way
for people to live together peaceably is for a single
authority to define morality absolutely by its arbitrary
will and to impose that morality by as much violence as
necessary  -- this is the classic argument (Hobbes, Nazis)
for absolutist government.

If this is so, then of course private cryptography must 
be suppressed, and private ownership of guns, and as 
much as of the internet as is necessary to ensure that 
communication is strictly few to many rather than many 
to many.


There are good historical examples of this kind of thing:

In Japan, under feudalism, science and technology was proceeding
well.  They got hold of a western gun, and rapidly produced large
number of excellent imitations.   Now feudalism in Japan was based
primarily on the fact that a samurai, trained from infancy in the
are of war, wearing carefully tailored armor, could easily defeat
a peasant with a sword.

But they soon realized that guns were equalizers -- that a peasant
with a gun was roughly equal to a samurai with a gun, even though
a peasant with a sword was totally unequal to a samurai with a
sword.  So they banned guns, not only for the peasants, but for
themselves, and ordered a halt to technology.

This coercive reversal of technology was completely effective
until outsiders with guns started knocking on their door.

An even more relevant example is paper.  When paper was first
discovered, the Chinese government, forseeing the revolutionary
threat posed by paper, made it a state monopoly, made private
possession of the knowledge of paper manufacture punishable
by death, castrated those permitted to make paper so that the
knowledge would not be passed from father to son, and successfully
kept paper to themselves for a very long time.

This monopoly was broken when western barbarians kidnapped
some of the eunuchs.  This immediately made woodcut printing
feasible, which had strong revolutionary effects, and eventually
led to moveable type printing, which had even greater 
revolutionary effects.

Note that the technology did not have revolutionary effects
until it got into the hands of those who had strong moral
beliefs, based on natural law theory, beliefs that led
to the position that the king could not make law as he
pleased, that many actions of the state were unlawful.

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We have the right to defend ourselves and our
property, because of the kind of animals that we        James A. Donald
are.  True law derives from this right, not from
the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.            jamesd at netcom.com