Well, no such specification was made. Certainly I don’t need to make such a specification to make my argument against your claim. But we could, if you like, make it: let Joe Bloggs be absolutely obsessed with sleeping with Paris Hilton. He will, then, feel very acutely his legally-coerced inability to have sex with her. And he may feel that he is being deprived of the ability to lead a good life. The sensible thing to say is: he’s exactly right about the coercion part. But he’s got a messed up idea of the good life.

One incidental point here is that we don’t normally call it coercion unless we positively anticipate a strong desire to do the thing in question. We don’t normally think that the average person on the street is being coerced not to murder and rape, because we assume that most people wouldn’t want to do that stuff even if they could get away with it. Nevertheless, it is strictly true that laws against murder and rape and theft are coercion. That’s just what it is to be a law prohibiting something. It’s a form of coercion not to do that thing.

It has always been my impression that Equality under the law is critical to a functioning Democracy. It is equally important that a citizen have all the same rights regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or religion. Thus I tend to view the right of a citizen to apply religion to the political process as just as important as the right of a citizen to have state recognized benefits regardless of who they chose to sleep with. The Individual rights of all are lost when it becomes possible to strip one group of a natural right to the benefit of another.

While I sympathize with your position, however it runs into two pre-existing barriers.

Since the time of Locke, Western Governments have readily established several laws in which they override an individual freedom for a perceived moral good. An example of this which you may approve of is the establishment of Hate speech laws. The bright line restriction on the establishment of a morality based law versus an individual right has already been moved. How do you tell a Religious Conservative that “…the right of religious freedom, specifically, is not a right to use public power to enforce moral/religious views” when it has been established that random philosophical positions have used State power to enforce moral views.

The second problem is the State willingness to contravene the private practice of religion in order establish some other desired good. Again, a US example is, in New Mexico a photographer was sued and fined $7000 for refusing to take pictures of a same sex wedding. It is unreasonable to expect Religious Conservatives to view “freedom of religion” as a private act if the power of the State is being used to interfere with the actual practice. (think PETA and requiring them to wear fur coats, etc.)

No no no no no. You’ve confused “you” with “he”—your system of justice should answer these questions in the general case. Joe Bloggs does not get an exception or exemption (unless you’re a reactionary utilitarian who accommodates everyone’s desire according to its intensity, but that’s not on-topic right now). Each individual person does not get to create their own legal institution and live in it; that would be anarchy. Anarchy is not a strong enough word. That would be Calvinball with hand grenades.

Now, Joe Bloggs could argue that in general some persons ought to be allowed to kidnap and sexually assault others, and I hope you would join me in feeling Joe’s “theory of justice” worthy of our contempt and disdain.

The violations of the body are not equalised in the case of castration. A raped woman can recover emotionally, a castrated man can’t (as far as I know given the current state of medical knowledge). So castration lasts for a life time. This is closer to the denial of air situation I discussed earlier.
Forced wearing of a chastity belt – this depends on context. After all, arguably, isn’t that what we try to do to prisoners now, well at least strictly-hetrosexual prisoners? Or to someone no matter how innocent who no one nearby happens to want to sleep with? But many people who support imprisonment for serious crimes don’t advocate the explicit rape of those prisoners.

Take the example of the disenfrachisement of African-Americans between 1877-1965. This was a negative-anti-freedom, in that African-Americans were being forced not to vote.

However unpleasant, it was noticeably better than slavery which involving forcing people to be slaves. Based on Frederick Douglas’s autobiography, he at least far preferred being free but unable to vote to being a slave. As a slave, he had virtually no control over his life, except of course that he had enough practical control to escape. This argues that there is an asymmetry between coercing someone to do something and coercing someone to not do something.

John Holbo:
I don’t really think you can generalize. Whether it is more harmful to ‘force to’ or ‘force not to’ is not a function of the ‘not’ but a function of whether the thing forced on you, or kept from you, is highly desired, necessary, central to your conception of the good life.

So we specify that Joe Bloggs finds the idea of sleeping with Paris Hilton is highly desirably, necessary, and central to his conception of the good life.

Or let’s take another example. My grandmother was during her lifetime highly Christian, and it bothered her deeply that both her children were atheists and thus by her lights destined to go to hell – she loved her children as deeply as any other mother I know. But still, my Dad being an atheist doesn’t strike me as being as much of a wrong as Joe Bloggs raping Paris Hilton.

I should say explicitly that I am arguing that whether it is more harmful to force to, as opposed to force not to, is a function of both the “not” and other features. Sometimes the other features can outweigh the “not”, as in the example of forcing someone not to breathe for a few minutes.

Sam C – agreed. I quoted the wrong bit from the original post given the problem I was worrying away at. My apologies for my earlier mistake.

I don’t really think you can generalize. Whether it is more harmful to ‘force to’ or ‘force not to’ is not a function of the ‘not’ but a function of whether the thing forced on you, or kept from you, is highly desired, necessary, central to your conception of the good life. So forth. One way of seeing this is to think about how the same case can easily be described either way.

If you are in prison, is it a case of being forced to stay in a little box for a long time, or it is merely a case of you being forced not to do anything outside the little box for a long time? Is the latter a less harmful arrangement, as you suggest. Since it’s just the same thing being described two different ways, I don’t think it can be.

I’m not sure about your forcing to do versus forcing not to do – or rather positive and negative unfreedoms. I think this distinction you’re making can be very easily blown up as purely semantic, in that every action of forcing to not do can be construed as forcing to do.

To use your Paris Hilton/Joe Bloggs scenario. The positive anti-freedom here is rape, but I think the negative anti-freedom could well be castration or forcible installation of a chastity belt. Since the violations of the body are now equalized, the distinction collapses.

Furthermore, I think a historical perspective really puts the lie to this one. Historical examples of negative anti-freedoms almost always manifest as positive anti-freedoms. Take the example of the disenfrachisement of African-Americans between 1877-1965. This was a negative-anti-freedom, in that African-Americans were being forced not to vote. However, this became a positive anti-freedom in two ways. First, the consequences: not having the right to vote meant being forced to attend unequal schools and being forced to live in substandard housing and take substandard pay (not having the legislative power to alter your circumstances), being forced to pay taxes and obey laws without your consent, and so on. Second, the mechanism of enforcement – in order to bar African-Americans from voting, it was necessary to use both legal and extra-legal violence (force directed against the body), economic intimidation (indirect force directed against the body), and similar mechanisms.

I think the point of enforcement mechanisms is the most important, because in reality, you can’t really force people not to do something without forcing them to do something else, and that’s usually backed by force and the threat of force.

JB is not being forced to not have “sex” unless of course by “force” you mean not cooking her dinner on the otherwise mutually arrived at time, all things being eqaul that is.