Cultural Relativism Be Damned!
Ronald Bailey | September 3, 2008, 10:52am
In Pakistan, according to various news reports, five women were buried alive last month in "honor killings." What was their offense? Three of the women wanted to marry men of their own choosing. The other two women had come to the defense of the first three. The Washington Post reports:
It is considered an insult in some conservative regions of Pakistan for women to have affairs or marry without consent, and rights groups say hundreds are killed by male relatives every year.
The killings - which apparently occurred after the women defied tribal elders and asked a civil court to marry at least three of them - was raised in Parliament on Friday, prompting a lawmaker from Baluchistan province to claim that "only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."
"These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents the province where the women died, told the chamber on Saturday.
According to some anthropologists, cultural values are arbitrary, and therefore the values of one culture should not be used as standards to evaluate the behavior or persons outside that culture. Bull! Cultures that practice "honor killings" are barbaric. The wikipedia definition of barbarian sums it up well:
"Barbarian" is a pejorative term for an uncivilized person, either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos perceived as having an inferior level of civilization, or in an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person whose behaviour is unacceptable in the society of the speaker. Barbarians are considered distinct from savages in that they are perceived as being willfully ignorant, choosing to preserve their way of life despite contact with more civilized societies....
Liberal societies, for all their faults, are morally superior and we should not be shy about saying so.
joe | September 3, 2008, 12:53pm | #
Whatever, SugarFree, I'm going to continue the discussion with people better able to shed light, rather than heat, on the subject.
Elemenope, TAO,
My point in bringing up slavery wasn't a "But us, too" argument, but to point out that the western institutions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery existed right alongside an equally western movement called Abolitionism. Which is authentic? Which is really western? Why, they both are. Every society has their right and their left - old forces that enforce old power dynamics of domination of one group by another, and a progressive impulse that works against them. I don't see any plausible reason why we should use the former and not the latter to define any culture.
TAO, can you see the difference here between what I'm saying and what libertymike is saying? I'll note that your theoretical Senator from Georgia, while condemning slavery, would most certainly
not condemn his state as a whole, or his society as a whole, or claim that only the racial attitudes of 1858 are "authentically" Southern, and the only authentically-Southern attitude. Nor would he accept the assertion that opposition to slavery and the advance of racial equality was foreign. In fact, he'd probably call anyone who made such an assertion an anti-Southern bigot.
Fluffy,
Levi-Strauss's ideas, while pioneering in the field, are quite dated. Not as much so as Phlogiston theory or bodily humors, but well out of date. It's not unusual for the first iteration of a novel way of looking at the world to be absolutist and simplistic - because they are usually reactions against an unquestioned absolutism in the other direction (in this case, the ethnocentric and racist assumption of western superiority). That's why anthropologists tend to talk about being "post-straussian."
BG | September 4, 2008, 12:02pm | #
Well, I consider peonage or serfdom to be a variant of slavery [an argument that is pretty easily supported by the early history of the institution in late antiquity]. If serfs were indeed a sort of slave, it becomes somewhat easier to see the connection to income taxation.
Property taxes or excise taxes would be less analogous because the tax is tied to the object or transaction involved. The principle behind income taxes, however, is that X% of the individual person belongs to the state.
Serfs were tied to a particular fiefdom and were not free to seek a living elsewhere. The income tax does not say that "X% of the individual belongs to the state". It says X% of the individual's
income belongs to he state. Income tax is also tied to a certain set of transactions – those in which one person gains income in excess of the minimum amount.
There are two important ways that the income tax, is different from slavery (and serfdom).
One is that it only limits your freedom to the extent that it takes some of you income. Serfs and slaves had their freedom of movement restricted and were often subject to other restrictions by virtue of that status.
The other is that it doesn't preclude you from finding means of living that would leave you unaffected by the income tax system. You are allowed live as a subsistence farmer or hunter/gatherer and not pay income tax. You are allowed to work at a job that pays less than the minimum threshold to be charged income tax - and simply live with a really tight budget. You are allowed to move to a country that doesn't have an income tax. Serfs and slaves had no comparable options.
liberymike,
Gordon Kahl huh? That’s who you're going with?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Kahl
(Interested readers make sure to click through to the Posse Commitatus link in that article)
No, it most certainly is
not legal to execute someone for tax evasion (and the state did not do so). I don’t know who started that shootout, but if it was the cop than he is guilty of murder and should be tried (though it may be hard to prove).
As for families where two or more people have to work (instead of one) in order to maintain the same standard of living, the people in those situations have the option of not working and living with fewer luxuries. Unjust? Maybe. Slavery? No. If you are imagining a situation where members of a household are struggling to avoid starvation or freezing to death, then that family doesn’t make enough to be charged income tax in the US. (In fact they may be eligible for a public assistance program funded, in part, by taxes. But that’s another story.)
It sounds like you consider all taxes, and perhaps some private acts of theft as well, forms of slavery. Sales taxes, excise taxes, and tariffs fall
more heavily on the poor than a progressive income tax (barring some kind of rebate system or something); and are thus more likely to create a situation where some members of a household who would rather not work are under economic pressure to do so. And we can certainly imagine a situation where a private criminal steals a lot of money from a household, and a non-working member of that household responds to their new financial difficulties by getting a job.
So, in your opinion, is almost everyone on the planet a slave? Should thieves be charged with the same crime as people who put a gun to your head and force you to do manual labor?
If a private employer is unwilling to hire someone with tax problems, then it is the decision of the
employer that is constraining the options of the person who wants that job but can’t have it. The same goes for any other reason that an employer might refuse to hire someone. Some private employers are unwilling to hire someone with bad credit, but that does not mean a credit card company is enslaving people who don’t pay their bills by reporting them to credit agencies.
So, the law commands one to fork over a third to a half or more of one's income…….
If you are paying half of your income in income tax, then some combination of the following is happening:
1 – You live in the most heavily taxing State/City in the country and you make millions per year.
2 – Whoever does your taxes is stealing from you.
Did I miss the Radley Balko article where IRS agents executed a drug-bust style raid? I think the drug war is a lot more troubling, and less justifiable, than the income tax. I wouldn’t go over the top (for example by comparing it to slavery). But there are a lot of derogatory things I will say about it when the appropriate thread comes up. The worst thing that can happen to you if you (repeatedly) evade the income tax and get caught is a few years in jail and bankruptcy. One could argue that it is unjust. But overall, the income tax would be at most a minor injustice compared to many other government policies – past and present.
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