Hi Louigi!
I look forward to reading your whole argument in depth! I’m sorry
that I can’t do it right now, but I’d still venture a remark in
this discussion (feel free to reply with a link if already covered
in your work).
You bring up an interesting point: if I understood correctly you
say that
we should start with the 4 freedoms and then show that not
having them is
bad.
I think the problem raised by Thorsten is this indeed: we’d better
start with the idea that human beings are free. Then, they give
some freedoms away, for instance by social contract or because
others force them to. This could have good or bad consequences for
them, or no consequence at all.
So, we definitely cannot start by postulating the 4 freedoms,
and consider
them to be right until the point someone proves otherwise.
This is just
invalid reasoning.
The postulate is not about 4 freedoms. It’s about absolute freedom
as a starting point. I can’t see why it’s "invalid reasoning" to
think that human beings are free to the extent permitted by laws,
norms and social conventions.
(Of course, we’re talking about moral freedom: what we have the
"right" to do, not the actual capacity to do it or not. I may be
free to fly… but I can’t for lack of wings. The same applies to
writing or modifying software — I for one don’t have wings for
that either).
In fact, you make the general claim that people should "proove"
what they hold to be true:
However, to answer you question more generally, the reason why
anything we
postulate must be proven somehow is that if we do not do that,
we are then
open to postulating whatever and then acting on it, waiting for
people to
disprove the idea. This is a form of an argument from ignorance,
which
asserts that a proposition is either true or false because of
lack or
absence of evidence or proof to the contrary.
But what you oppose is a bit more that an "argument from
ignorance". Falsification might well be the only "reasonable"
position when it comes to proofs and evidence. At least that was
Karl Popper’s idea in the 1950s. He held that you can’t really
demonstrate a scientific theory by adding up "positive"
observations. You could observe 101 swans and note that they are
all white, there’s still no guarantee that the 102nd swan you come
accross won’t be black. Therefore, the theory that "all swans are
white" can never be fully demonstrated. It can however be fully
falsified: find a black swan, and you have proven that the theory
is wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability).
I think that this is an aspect to keep in mind if one wants to
discuss ethics as a matter of "reason". You can’t "proove" that
people should have 4 freedoms (or 5 or 18). You could only proove
that they shouldn’t. For that, you’d need to specify why it’s good
to restrict freedom (as a general condition) in those 4, 5 or
18 respects.
It seems to me that Stallman and other defensors of FLOSS are
pretty clear about the kind of world they want to live in. I’m not
sure that there’s an "opposite" view. Shareholders of companies
like Microsoft probably value "freedom" too and wouldn’t reject
the ideal of free flowing knowledge and cooperation in a society
of universal love. It may be just that they care less about this
than about something else (like personal enrichment).
Nothing "evil" here indeed. Maybe one "morally conscious" position
versus one which simply doesn’t care?
Cheers,
Victor
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