A general theme running through your post,
@S'task, is that you only seem to be able to refute my arguments by... not even engaging with them at all.
To claim otherwise is a very big ask, and a huge chunk of your argument is premised on this, but you are merely asserting it as true, you've done nothing to prove it is true.
When I said:
Culture is inherently intertextual; that is to say, different pieces of culture are connected to each other in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell what is "original" and what isn't.
Because all of our ideas are based on previous ideas that have come from other people, where "my" idea begins and "your" idea ends isn't very clear cut at all. That's my argument, and you don't even refute it. You just assert that I'm making an assertion, and that's it. In fact, if there's any candidate for something being an assertion, it'd be whoever wrote this:
Yes, many ideas are reused and broad concepts often shared; however, it's quite easy to tell that when a set of ideas are put into a single specific form, almost mathematically so.
That's one hell of an assertion, don't you agree? Especially since hardly anybody before seventeenth century philosophers like Thomas Hobbes believed this. So why should I? Where's the proof for this?
"If I read a book, and then a write down and resell the book as my own, even though I didn't originate the ideas, the book is mine and I am it's owner because I put the labor into copying the book and you refusing me it makes you a thief."
"If I beg the question hard enough and with enough vigor, I could possibly get away with not addressing the point of the argument."
And yes, you are undoubtedly begging the question. In order to make this "thief" argument, you have to basically ignore my argument, the "
a prioris" you seem weirdly averse to. And since we're arguing over whether these "
a prioris" are correct, you assuming they must be wrong is question-begging.
Here is this rights-based argument against intellectual property, spelled out as succinctly as possible:
1. Only by controlling something can one come to own it.
2. You cannot control ideas because ideas are universals, and humans can only control particulars.
3. You cannot own ideas.
4. Therefore, intellectual property rights don't exist.
In order for your "argument" to be anything more than question-begging, the thief scenario you used would actually have to be a logical extension of one or more of the premises. Let's see...
Premise one - You can only own what you can control. I take this to be presupposed by the labor theory of property, which I was assuming you accepted. Now, if you do believe in the labor theory of property but reject premise one, you'd be committed to the idea that pouring tomato juice into the Pacific Ocean would allow me to own the Pacific Ocean. I don't think you'd argue for that position. The thief scenario doesn't follow from this in any way.
Premise two - You cannot control ideas because humans could only control particulars and ideas are universals. Now, a universal can only exist in two ways: an abstract thought or an instantiation in a particular object's form. You can't control my abstract thoughts, obviously. They're mine. The form of the story you came up with is in your mind and in the minds of all readers who read your story, and you can't stop that process without restricting access to the particular paper you wrote the story down on. That paper is a thing you can control.
Now, you might be tempted to think "even if I can't control your ideas, I could control all expressions of your idea." And certainly, you could do that if you could control my actions and my property. But since I am neither an extension of your will nor your servant/slave, you don't control my actions. And since my property is my property, you can't control it without borrowing or stealing it, since it is previously owned.
According to intellectual property law, ideas nobody controls, when mixed with property I control by means I control, creates a cultural expression that you own? And if I don't believe this, then I must accept that a thief stealing an apple I control with his labor makes the apple his? This doesn't make sense.
Premise three follows from one and two, and the thief thing doesn't work because control is not sufficient for ownership. Again, to come to own something, must either take control of some previously unowned thing or receive it justly. Stealing something previously owned counts as neither of these.
Since the argument is valid, it appears that the conclusion - intellectual property rights don't exist - is true. Intellectual property rights rest on owning ideas. If you can't own ideas, you can't own property. So you are just begging the question. Please stop begging the question.
You never adequately addressed my rebuttal of this entire premise. As such, this a priori is again rejected because you've not demonstrated that your theory is more provable or accurate, you merely assert that it is and move on.
I never rebutted your rebuttal because you never made one. You have alternatively dismissed my argument as "Marxist" and therefore wrong or simply asserted "my
a priori theory is right and yours is wrong!"
Furthermore, this isn't a "premise" but an argument in itself. Again, I'll give a syllogism as follows:
1. Commodification affects cultural products through intellectual property law,
2. Commodifying something involves turning them into standardized consumer items to use and discard at leisure.
3. This causes cultural homogenization and the degrading of art.
You rebut neither premise nor do you argue that my argument is invalid.
This entire idea that cultural works have decreased in quality is, to be frank, utterly wrong. You simply have not been exposed to the sheer amount of bad media from the past because it's mostly been forgotten and lost, while the actual good stuff has stuck around.
First of all, your argument, in syllogistic form, appears to be:
1. There were was a lot of crappy art in the past.
2. Therefore, things haven't gotten worse.
There's a hidden premise here, but for the life of me, I can't see it.
Insofar as you assume that I think there weren't crappy works in the past, you attack a strawman. Let's see what I actually said.
According to this theory, the commodification of culture has leads to a situation in which mass corporations produce cultural products in an assembly line-like fashion. The end result is a kind of cultural sameness and the destruction of high art.
Now, for the final time, nothing in this theory implies that there weren't works of poor quality in the past. In fact, let there be as many low-quality works as possible! The amount of bad works that happened in the past is strictly irrelevant to culture industry as an idea. The question is whether there is less or more cultural sameness now, and whether there is less or more high art now. I hold that there is more of the former and less of the latter, as the theory predicts.
Now, am I right? Well, I notice that you don't rebut my observation of "there's no high art anymore." This is probably because this is a very popular talking point across the right wing, as seen
here,
here, and
here. They all have differing views on
why this is the case, of course, but they all are observing the same phenomenon. Of course, I'd like to hear you actually rebut the view by pointing out the overwhelming amount of high art coming out nowadays. Is there any good art? Where is the twenty-first equivalent of Shakespeare? Of Beethoven?
Cultural sameness, you do try to debunk - and good for you! But here's my question: it's one thing for cheap and formulaic novels and movies to exist in the late 19th and early 20th century - the culture industry theory predicts that too, since my formulation of it depends on copyright law, and copyright law existed back then. But the question is this: has the stagnation, the uniformity, gotten worse as IPs consolidated? The answer is "yes, yes it has." Even if you are correct about how literary fiction is declining because of elite capture, your theory wouldn't explain why we keep seeing the same IPs being sold to us over and over and over again. Why popular music has basically been reduced to a formula. None of these things are really addressed by your theory of "chronological crap filter." The culture industry theory is far more parsimonious, by contrast.
I'd implore you to actually refute the substance of what I say. When I look at what you write, you seem to be egregiously averse to actually tackling the meat of the arguments. The only time you actually made an attempt to rebut me was at the last point, which was actually tertiary to the overall argument. The culture industry arguments are a rebuttal to the claim that intellectual property leads to more creativity and higher-quality works of art,
a claim that you haven't proven at all. In contrast, the historical and rights-based arguments are key, and you bungled your responses to these arguments so badly that I could have just dismissed them as fallacious and called it a day.
I think your refusal to engage possibly has something to do with this harping on about
a priori reasoning. I use that kind of reasoning a lot, primarily because empirical evidence can be consistent with multiple theories at the same time. Therefore, it's important to have a more solid theory whose premises are backed by even more basic empirical observations. If you have a problem with this, then our differences go much deeper than an ethics dispute.