The first part is: "regardless of what you think, if something you do rearranges power, then it will become political". This is more a statement of fact than anything else.
The second part is: "now that I hope to have convinced you that crypto is necessarily political, here's the moral stance I would prefer for you to follow."
I completely agree with you that law enforcement officers will see it that way. I posit that that is a matter of limited perspective. They see backdoors as a means to catch criminals, and do not consider the implications for surveillance, democracy and freedom at all.
This paper is not aimed at them, it is aimed at the cryptographers, who could hopefully more easily understand that perspective.
Law enforcement will naturally seek to expand their power by any means available to them, in the same way that various branches of government or political parties will. Hence we have separation of powers.
Genuine question: What do people who believe this use as their reason for refraining from harming others for personal gain? I understand that simple intuitive preferences against seeing others suffer will often work, but what do you do about instances where either the rewards of screwing someone over are very great or where your intuition tells you that you would get a lot of pleasure from seeing someone in pain?
I know that I don't really have anything to support my belief that there exists an objective morality which is hard-to-determine.
This is an interesting and deep question! The game theory of life. I don't know the answer or if there is a clear answer, but I imagine there's generally a lot of risk involved in harming others for personal gain, and basic fear of individual or group retaliation (either mob or police) is a significant deterrent.
If you "believe" there's an objective morality, isn't that just another subjective position? You can't justify it, so why don't you abandon the notion and go with your selfish whims?
It's a flawed dichotomy. Morality is in your perception like how you know to respect other people's personal spheres. It's not based on rule based rationality or some axiomatic selfishness.
If you want to sleep well at night, you refrain from screwing people over in terrible ways. Probably you screw people over to the extent that you can get away with it in a moral-cultural sense, unless you're particularly saintly.
There were also any number of people who justified the use of the Atomic Bomb because it lessened the predicted number of losses incurred in the Pacific theater of war. This didn't stop the creators of the bomb from believing it was still better to opt for peace instead of it's continued use to lessen the total number of casualties in future wars.
I've worked with police who privately express feelings and take actions diametrically opposed to how they behave in a professional context.
That is only true if there are no universal preferences: things like self ownership, all things being equal, is always preferable to slavery.
If I want to kill all other people and I successfully kill everyone but myself, my preference has become universal but fulfilling that preference has not become any more moral.
Personally, I don't think morality is all that subjective, but more an emergent property of community identity. (Thus is inherently shared rather than inherently personal). I would way that Morality is, fortunately, relative.
So do you include the future and the past? If you include the future it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine the universality of a principle. If you don't include the future, that means that it is possible for the universality of a principle to change. Then As soon as one person is born who doesn't share a principle, the moral character of that principle vanishes?
I'm not what point you are trying to make by bringing in the concept of the perfect circle. I don't see at all how this relates to morality. The concept of a perfect circle is not universally shared currently, and certainly isn't historically shared universally. Even if that concept were universal, it would not make imperfect circles immoral.
Yes. I think the point of confusion is around "universality". I'm not talking about a unanimous agreement on preference between people born and unborn, I'm talking about attributes that define kindness (the set theory kind, not the Disney princess kind). I was hoping to make that clear with the perfect circle bit, but I wasn't aware of contention on the issue... pretend I said square, I'm pretty sure that is a safe universal definition. I have no opinion on the morality of geometry, but all squares share universal attributes. All humans share universal attributes as well, by way of biological imperatives - life is preferable to death, all things being equal and outside of coercion.
I think that covers mental illness, war, dying in a fire while rescuing kittens, emo cutting, etc.
If you could stop the pain without dying, would you still kill yourself?
If you could escape depression without dying, would you still kill yourself?
If you could find meaning in your existence without dying, would you still kill yourself?
If you could go to heaven (or whatever magic place you believe is better than your present situation) without dying, would you still kill yourself?
If you could kill yourself without dying, would you still kill yourself? (Weird I know, but for the sake of completeness)
Did I miss any good reasons to kill yourself?
Or is your 'universal attribute' some sort of 'ideal' that doesn't actually ever happen and thus is completely useless for defining the set of 'human' and 'not human', let alone 'moral' and 'immoral'.
I don't think that existence is subjective, so universal preference either exists or it doesn't. It has been a long time since I've sat in a philosophy class though, so I'd welcome a correction.
So if I were to tell you that I really did prefer to be a slave you would say I am not human? You are excluding as 'human' any individual who are not capable of understanding the concept of 'ownership'. Do you seriously believe that babies and the severely mentally handicapped are not human?
If you are operating with such a divergent notion of 'human' (and thus 'morality', 'universal' and 'preference') then there is no point in having any further discussion with you or considering anything you have to say.
You won't end up with any single seed values you can match any given instance against, but with multidimensional matrices that represents multidimensional scales.
Why? I can't just live morally and let my "opponent" do what they think is right?
I feel very strongly that people should decide what they think is right and fight for it.
I feel no need to convince other people that my morality is superior to theirs.
> I feel no need to convince other people that my morality is superior to theirs.
Those two statements are in direct contradiction. Fighting for your morality is convincing others of its superiority. Those two things are the same thing.
Unless your morality includes letting others come to their own conclusions about what is right. In that case, trying to convince others that they should let others pick their own morals would be self-contradictory.
I believe ISIS would agree with you whole-heartedly
I suspect ISIS would not agree with that statement, but with one that is slightly different:
"I feel very strongly that people should decide that what I think is right and fight for it."
So no, that implication really isn't there.
The lack of will to reform is not total amongst LEOs. The lack of political will to do many seemingly sensible things in this country is a moral failure that every citizen shares.
I suspect that you're right that it is a minority of LEOs that actually abuse their power (possibly a 49% minority, but possibly even as low as 10% or even 1%), but it's clear that there are many more - an overwhelming majority, who actively defend or passively ignore those who do. (I'm sure I only ever see the bad ones, but just about every statement by the Fraternal Order of Police makes me seethe with rage...)
Total lack of will to reform: no.
http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-document...
It seems to me there's a tremendous lack of will to reform abuses and criminal acts by LEO. Perhaps not "Total", but so marginally less than "Total" as to be functionally equivalent (in that "not all men" kind of failure to acknowledge reality...).
Police misconduct is real here and all over the world, as well, and will also continue to be fought. There are no quick fixes, and it's important to be outraged and voice one's outrage when we see it, but let's not give up and paint all LO with one brush, as their existence most certainly contributes a net positive to society.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#By_U.S._police_b...
What's funny is that you could talk to any number of law enforcement officials who believe that the moral failing is on the cryptography community for not providing a "backdoor" into encrypted communications. Or to restate, "Please, Apple, think of the children!"
Morality is, unfortunately, subjective. Part of the argument is in convincing your opponent that your morality is superior to theirs. Or, perhaps, that their stance violates their own sense of morality.