Editor's note: Hey, whaddya know, I wrote this, and it's been sitting in my drafts for 7 months ETERNITY, in internet times. Cleaned, edited, and bits added. Clearing out those cobwebs!
Line of thought that comes up:
The institution of slavery is such that there is no particular application or version such that any particular version or application is morally right, not inherently degrading and so on and so on. One of the more popular anti-abolitionist arguments of the time was that it wasn't the case that slavery was an inherently morally bad institution; it was that there were a 'few bad apples' that were giving a bad name to what was overall a fine system. This argument was rejected on the basis that this was impossible; there was no particular application that could possibly be fair or morally good or even morally neutral.
Chomsky makes a similar argument regarding corporations (presumably large, public, profit-seeking transnationals); the institution of corporateship is such that it leads to inequitability and social and environmental degradation and so on. We reject this argument on the basis that it is genuinely possible to imagine and institute a system of capital ownership and distribution such that it doesn't create or contribute to those moral bads.
Copyright these days gets much a similar rap. The idea that modern methods of distribution and creation of content these days lends itself strongly to draconian and unfair methods of copyright enforcement, and for that reason, we should abolish copyright. This is wrong because it ignores the differences between copyright and copyright enforcement: those are separate and distinct issues to be dealt with disparately.
I'm going to call this the inherent quality analogue, in that it tries to illustrate to that there exists certain inherent and basically immutable qualities in certain objects, and that these relevant qualities exist in the target of the analogue. Though, really it's more like meta-qualities, namely the qualities possess these properties, without being these qualities themselves.
Topics for further discussion: where else does this argument hold, where else is it employed, anything else I can think of, Bueller, Bueller, Bueller...
Chomsky makes a similar argument regarding corporations (presumably large, public, profit-seeking transnationals); the institution of corporateship is such that it leads to inequitability and social and environmental degradation and so on. We reject this argument on the basis that it is genuinely possible to imagine and institute a system of capital ownership and distribution such that it doesn't create or contribute to those moral bads.
Copyright these days gets much a similar rap. The idea that modern methods of distribution and creation of content these days lends itself strongly to draconian and unfair methods of copyright enforcement, and for that reason, we should abolish copyright. This is wrong because it ignores the differences between copyright and copyright enforcement: those are separate and distinct issues to be dealt with disparately.
I'm going to call this the inherent quality analogue, in that it tries to illustrate to that there exists certain inherent and basically immutable qualities in certain objects, and that these relevant qualities exist in the target of the analogue. Though, really it's more like meta-qualities, namely the qualities possess these properties, without being these qualities themselves.
Topics for further discussion: where else does this argument hold, where else is it employed, anything else I can think of, Bueller, Bueller, Bueller...
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