John Thornton wrote:
>
> Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> > On 7/15/07, John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >
> >> To directly answer Doug's question as posed to Bill: "do you think a
> >> just society should allow some people to coast by on the labor of others?"
> >> Of course! When my work allows others the freedom to not work it
> >> maximizes my own freedom.
> >> I actually have more freedom under such a system than I would under any
> >> other system. Anything less is a less just societal arrangement.
> >>
I haven't been following this thread, but reading this I would say the question is wrong. "Just society" is a phrase to play with in a seminar in metaphysics.
As a matter of fact, however, a society which organized itself as to prevent all freeloading would be intolerable to live in for anyone. An attempt to construct in the mind a blueprint for such a society is a gross misuse of human power to think. The key phrase which must figure in this discussion if it is to make any sense at all is "revolutionizing practice," i.e. practice aimed at the transformation of human relations which transforms the agents of that practice themselves. Within that framework, and assuming that the practice achieved in a preliminary way its general aims, a rough and ready sense of what "justice" -- within those circumstances -- meant, and they would attempt to work out ways of achieving, roughly, social practices which satisfied that rough and ready shared sense of justice. (There is no such thing as Justice; there are only historically generated shared conceptions of social relations which come to be called just.)
Within that context we can indulge ins some speculation as to the occurrence of freeloading within those social relations, and it seems pretty obvious to me that those practices would NOT make any effort to avoid some significant but barely significant proportion of freeloaders within the society, in order to avoid a tremendous waste of human energy in preventing such freeloading, a waste of energy which would generate activities and feelings that would tear the society apart. Some freeloading is the price of avoiding a plunge into barbarianism. How much must be tolerated or even encouraged can only be decided by immediate practice, not dreamt up in advance.
Carrol