How ought we resolve disputes?
The title question is my preferred method to probe the fundamentals of politics. It works best if you can shed the baggage of the current moment. You can imagine some place and time that is separated from your place and time so that you can re-imagine from the ground up how disputes will be resolved. You can choose the distant past or the distant future. The place can be underground, some undiscovered continent, or a moon in some other galaxy. To your setting add a disorganized crowd. So you have perhaps thousands of strange people on some unknown yet habitable moon. Inevitably a dispute will arise. As one of the crowd what will you counsel? How ought we resolve disputes?
I'm a fan of naivety. Naivety is no grounds for dismissal. A naïve solution is obvious. If it is mistaken it is important that it be refuted as it will occur as a solution to many people. A naïve solution is simple. If it is mistaken it should be easy to explain why.
Some possible answers to the question: How ought we resolve disputes?
What ever society (or the market, community, etc.) decides upon.
There are various problems with this answer. The main one being that your actually existing society has already decided upon a method of resolving disputes and, presumably since you are reading this newsletter, you are dissatisfied with how they go about it. So you are not cool to go along with whatever society decides. If you are actually good with whatever then you have no role in this conversation and you should go.
When society does settle upon a method for resolving disputes it comes from individuals, like yourself, suggesting and trying ideas. There is no disembodied process in some higher plane that reveals how your society ought to handle disputes. If you are cool with waiting for that to happen then you have no role in this conversation.
Perhaps you want the market to decide. You want people to trade their things for other people’s things. But how do we know what things belong to what people if we don’t have a method for resolving disputes? Hoping the market will decide this is to put the cart before the horse. If you want to put a cart before a horse then you have no role in this conversation.
A resource goes to whoever needs it most.
Can a farmer protect his seed corn from a starving child? If so, then on what grounds? If not then how do the people in your society eat next year?
Some better answers include
(Lockean) homesteading, or as I like to call it: labour property.
It is a workable solution. Labour property can actually help resolve disputes and it won’t cause your society to starve in the winter. It has room for improvement. It needs kludges to solve problems like the donut problem, the nature reserve problem and to let people protect less tangible goods like radio frequencies.
Statism
This one is odd. This is the system for resolving disputes that most readers will live under but the conversation around it is unclear. Is there a method for establishing statism as a system? If, in your fantasy world, you decide upon statism then what are the actions that take you from the beginning to a completed state? Nobody wants to say it out loud because it sounds horrible: the method for establishing a state is conquest. I like to call statism: conquest property. This strikes me as a horrible solution but, on the other hand, it has built civilization. The mere fact that few others will discuss statism in honest terms tells me that they too find it ultimately indefensible.
Expectation property
This is my own idea that disputes can be settled by demonstrations of expectations. If labour is the only demonstration of expectation then it reduces to labour property but you could accept other things including development plans and public notices as demonstrations of expectations. When expectations conflict (as they must) then, as with labour property, the earlier and more profound will prevail.
The lead question is: How do we resolve disputes? Ultimately, the question is more important than the answer. Politics has progress so little even in the 2000 years since Plato’s Republic because we have such poor tools to discuss these matters. It may even be worthwhile to discuss why we have such poor tools. Just as the scientists of old were committed to a process rather than a conclusion, political philosophers can begin to closely examine processes and ask meaningful questions like, ‘How ought we resolve disputes?’