Chinese “Slavery?”

I’ve often heard a comparison made between antebellum U.S. slavery and current working conditions in China as exemplified in this blog post (from a very interesting and recommended blog, BTW), and I think it may be unfair for a few different reasons.  ”Near-slave-labour” implies close to no choice for the workers, but each year many Chinese individuals willingly and gladly migrate from family farms into cities to participate in factory work.  They are fully aware of the poor-per-western-standards conditions due to reports from relatives, but they see such a lifestyle as an improvement on their condition.  No one is brandishing guns or whips in this case; no such force is needed.  To denigrate their choices is dangerously close to paternalism; to deny such choices would be dangerously close to sadism, condemning them to subsistence living at far less than a few cents an hour.

Our sensibilities are offended because we are used to a much different standard.  Tremendously wealthy individuals in the developed world could easily analyze developed middle-class workers in the same way, horrified by the dangers faced by construction workers, sickened by the environment of sanitation workers.  There is no objective threshold of work conditions acceptability; there is simply a dynamic interchange of individuals trading off negatives and positives to reach mutually acceptable arrangements.

It’s probably instructive to realize that Japanese factory workers around WWII dealt with conditions very similar to the Chinese today.  After only one generation of development, Japanese factories today are often models of safety and worker consideration.  If you look at patterns of development in emerging economies, you’ll see it’s quite likely that developed world overconsumption is, at long last, slowly being balanced out.  Global wage arbitrage is bringing about a point where moderately priced goods will coincide with moderate lifestyles around the world, deftly avoiding the catch twenty-two mentioned in the blog post simply through the free choices of individuals.

Consciousness, Metaphysics and Free Will

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about determinism and substance dualism.

My primary argument for substance dualism is that there has to date been no success in researcher’s attempts to accurately describe thoughts or feelings solely by analyzing brain activity (as far as I’m aware).  There are certainly correlations between brain activity and thoughts, we can see the amygdala firing when a person is afraid, for instance, but as of yet there is no way to have a person think about an image and have an analyst accurately determine what image the subject is imagining without the subject describing it.

It could be argued that we simply haven’t yet developed the technology for such analysis, but I think this response fails.  The typical conception of the brain by believers in monism is that of a highly complex computer-like system which stores memories like a flash drive and runs “thought programs” per the instructions of binary-code-like electro-chemical nerve impulses.  Their argument is that if we could interpret this binary code, if we could exhaustively catalog the various algorithms which decipher the meaning in these codes, we could indeed find exactly what a given person was thinking by analyzing their synapse firings.  This very computer metaphor which is utilized to undermine dualism, however, is helpful in showing how this conception can’t be accurate.

Binary code in a computer system contains no pertinent information in and of itself; it requires interpretation by an algorithm which turns the code into useful data.  These algorithms can only interpret code up to the limitations of their design.  Unicode, for instance, can interpret no greater than 109, 449 characters (as of this past October), because these are the only characters defined within the standard.  A program utilizing Unicode must have every instance of the 109,449 binary blocks in its reference stores in some manner.  Despite this requirement, this system is still helpful for transmitting data, because binary code is more compact than alphanumeric characters.

A system which could interpret and express all possible thoughts, feelings, memories and senses, however, even if incredibly efficient, would be so physically dense with algorithms as to certainly take up many times the physical space of even the largest human body.  Theoretical algorithmic efficiency in computer science is so far from being able to accomplish such a task even with quantum computing that it seems fundamentally impossible.  Integer factorization is trivially simple compared to such a monumental undertaking.  Therefore, the theory that a non-physically limited system is interacting with our physical brains in order to produce thoughts and other aspects of consciousness seems reasonable.

Accordingly, I believe that the indeterminism we all seem to inherently experience in “making” our decisions is not illusory.  There truly does seem to be a non-physical “mind” which interacts with our physical brain, therefore our decisions can’t be physically determined.  The entirety of human experience throughout time has been built upon personal responsibility for choices, and I think this is not simply a manifestation of folk psychology, but reflects something we know deeply to be true.

Though experience and genetics clearly shapes us, we are ultimately responsible for the choices we make.

Abortion Quandry

I’d love to have your explanations or arguments regarding the following problem I see with the pro-life position.  Perhaps you can help sway me one way or the other.

Here’s my issue:

Slavery is clearly wrong.  If someone contractually agrees to do a job, and then they find the job isn’t desirable to them and they want to quit, forcing them to continue in the job is slavery.  As elucidated in the Wikipedia entry on specific performance, the law has traditionally found contracted personal service to be unenforceable in the event of a changed mind.  If this were not so, then slavery would be possible de jure.  Traditionally, “damages” are awarded in such cases as a sort of substitute for specific performance, usually in the form of a monetary payment.  Such damages are only awarded if a party can prove a contract was breached.  Valid contracts necessarily must be mutually consensual and fully understood by the parties involved.

In the case of the ostensible “contract” to provide sustenance between a woman who has sex and the resultant fetus, no faculties exist in the fetus to assent to such a contract.  In fact, the fetus didn’t even exist at the time such a contract would need to be made.  Accordingly, while it may be extremely morally repugnant of a woman to end the life of an innocent person who requires her specific sustenance for life, to legally disallow this option is a requirement of specific performance.  Thus, it seems that the pro-life position is akin to a pro-slavery position.

Now, the reductio response to this could easily be, “well, doesn’t such an argument entail a woman being able to abandon her toddler at any time, also?”  To this I can only respond in the affirmative.  I would find such an action morally horrific, but I can’t see how it can justifiably be legally prevented.

In essence, my legal position is that of Murray Rothbard in chapter 14 of The Ethics of Liberty.  However, I find this position to be morally abhorrent, putting me in an awkward philosophical position.

Any ideas?