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caper_estHaving set myself a not very demanding challenge for the next month:
Firstly, I want seriously to look at reasons for paying or not paying for goods, where one has the choice - and get to grips with the issues I haven't satisfactorily figured out.
Secondly, by the end of the month I should like to have started on regular habits in these matters that make better sense in terms of the code I believe in, and the budget I have to work with.
Thirdly, I want to see how far some of my fine-sounding ideas survive concentrated application to reality, and report on the results. This is one very low-stakes and easily controlled practice arena.
Fourthly, I want to look at structural and technical obstacles to useful voluntary payment practices, and swap actual and potential workarounds for them.
Fifthly, I want to make a case for the necessary link between libertarianism and liberality, which I think is systematically underestimated from both perspectives. It would be nice to convince some other people of it. It would be quite enough of a victory to convince myself, to my own practically expressed satisfaction. Worst of the acceptable possibilities is that events, or other people reading these sketches, defeat my argument because it is wrong. I question whether I could be persuaded that either free agency or free-handedness is overrated in itself. I am, though, open to being convinced that they are independent or even conflicting virtues, or that the same social institutions are unlikely to embody both. Either way, I wish to begin this argument via some simple bread-and-butter issues here.
My next post in this series will examine the boundaries and dangers of my starting notion of 'moral debt', and cast about for promising alternatives.
Paying My Moral DebtsI've now ponied up for all the things I said I would. Somehow I expected this to involve a lot more time and hassle than it did. If this were just a question of settling moral accounts for the year, the matter would end there. It would then have been needless for me to have posted about it at all, except possibly - as with my writing wordcount posts - to use the fact of public commitment as an encouragement to Get On With It. Which it probably has been. But that is not the main point of this extended challenge, at all.
I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous. Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial. The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.
Firstly, I want seriously to look at reasons for paying or not paying for goods, where one has the choice - and get to grips with the issues I haven't satisfactorily figured out.
Secondly, by the end of the month I should like to have started on regular habits in these matters that make better sense in terms of the code I believe in, and the budget I have to work with.
Thirdly, I want to see how far some of my fine-sounding ideas survive concentrated application to reality, and report on the results. This is one very low-stakes and easily controlled practice arena.
Fourthly, I want to look at structural and technical obstacles to useful voluntary payment practices, and swap actual and potential workarounds for them.
Fifthly, I want to make a case for the necessary link between libertarianism and liberality, which I think is systematically underestimated from both perspectives. It would be nice to convince some other people of it. It would be quite enough of a victory to convince myself, to my own practically expressed satisfaction. Worst of the acceptable possibilities is that events, or other people reading these sketches, defeat my argument because it is wrong. I question whether I could be persuaded that either free agency or free-handedness is overrated in itself. I am, though, open to being convinced that they are independent or even conflicting virtues, or that the same social institutions are unlikely to embody both. Either way, I wish to begin this argument via some simple bread-and-butter issues here.
My next post in this series will examine the boundaries and dangers of my starting notion of 'moral debt', and cast about for promising alternatives.
