Aug 052021
 


In mid-July, Ontario Premier Doug Ford suggested that Ontario would not be implementing a so-called ‘vaccine passport’ despite his government’s having previously suggested otherwise. But at the same time, private businesses and retailers in Ontario have been implementing their own versions of this divisive concept, some insisting that only those vaccinated may enter their premises, while others insist that those vaccinated may not enter their premises.

Either way, these establishments are guilty of discrimination and should be held accountable for these discriminatory practices. So says our guest Paul McKeever in a position paper developed for the Freedom Party of Ontario.

“Outlaw vaccination discrimination now!” suggests Paul, applying arguments and principles rarely heard (or understood) in the discussion of this very serious controversy. Up till now, the issue has been polarized and argued in an intellectual, moral, and philosophical vacuum, with each side blind to the strict context within which such a discussion is valid – the context of free trade.

Forgotten in the debate is the necessary acknowledgement that humans are rational beings and that the exercise of one’s rational faculty is essential to trade. Trade is based on consent, without which any exchange of goods or services cannot even be called trade.

Trade, therefore, requires an equal application of the law to all participants in any potential or actual exchange. Law facilitates trade. Indeed, both ‘property’ and ‘trade’ are creations of law.

The belief that private ownership empowers owners (engaged in trade) with a right to discriminate against selected members of the public is false. No such right exists, which is why not even governments have any such right.

This is an issue that transcends mere economic considerations or principles of supply and demand. Capitalism is a moral system and both ‘property’ and ‘trade,’ while creations of law, are moral concepts.

The law must reflect this reality because to do so is not only non-discriminatory but Just Right.

[- This broadcast is dedicated to the memory of Ted Harlson -]

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  3 Responses to “718 – Outlaw vaccination discrimination—now! | Paul McKeever”

  1. For the record, I do need to state my exception to the position offered by Mr. McKeever. I am willing to discuss the matter further; however, having been associated with Freedom Party since 1990 and with Just Right for more than 10 years, I do feel entitled to express my position that I find the notion of outlawing this kind of discrimination as contrary to Freedom Party’s founding principles of the non-initiation of force.

    I share the moral concern and frankly the disgust with regard to the examples of discrimination given, but any legal restriction on such discrimination would be a violation of freedom of association. This hurdle will have to be crossed if I am to reconsider my own position on the matter.

  2. I have to disagree with Paul McKeever’s August 3rd article, “A common but flawed and disgusting view on the purpose of banning discrimination”, it’s forerunner, “For Freedom” and position in this broadcast.

    The artciles successfully identified the collectivist premises of a chosen vs. unchosen moral view of discrimination.

    However, they also make an assertion that denies consent as the operating principle of a free society, and asserts the collectivism it claims to oppose.

    Paul writes:

    “Human rights laws ban discrimination on those grounds not because people lack the power to change those things, but because every individual *should be treated* as a human being, irrespective of the individual’s race, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender, disability, etc.. ”

    “Should be treated” is a moral assertion that people who might behave otherwise be compelled to behave according to the asserter’s moral preferences.

    Much in the same way that libertarians put politics ahead of (or devoid of) morality, Paul has put morality ahead of politics, essentially claiming that individual rights are not sacrosanct, and has forwarded a view that morality as such ought to *be* politics.

    Paul states:

    “When you take someone’s life, liberty, or property without his consent, you obviate that person’s rational faculty. In other words: you dehumanize him. Specifically, you deal with him not in the consensual manner that human beings interact, but as prey.”

    Keep in mind the word “take”.

    Attempting to continue from that premise, he later states:

    “Laws against discrimination on these grounds require landlords, goods/services providers, and contractors to deal with all individuals as rational individuals: as thinking, choosing, human beings. They require everyone to deal with every individual as a reasoning entity – hence as an individual human being – rather than as a prejudged member of an alleged collective or group. Human rights laws, when properly drafted, outlaw the dehumanization of human beings, in defence of the uniquely human mode of social interaction: consensual relations.”

    Observe that in this case nothing is “taken” from the person in question, and no one’s “consent” is in fact violated, expect perhaps the consent of the person who doesn’t want to deal with the other person, but is made to.

    Paul writes about “The Moral Wrongfulness of Prejudice” but answers a question no one asked.

    The question is not whether prejudice is morally wrong or not, as no one disagrees that it’s not, the question is “To what extent can morality shape politics, i.e., the the scope of government?” Is the government permitted to do anything so long as it has “morality” on its side?

    On the grounds of his argument, why is lying not against the law? When you lie to someone, you are engaging with them on the premise of them being your “prey”, are you not?

    Perish the thought, what if lying were to become a dominant means of people interacting with one another? Certainly that would mean people preying on one another endlessly. To avoid this perhaps we should outlaw dishonesty entirely. I mean it’s the rational thing to do, and we are rational animals, are we not? It’s incongruent with our true nature to lie, isn’t it?

    Curious how lying is in fact, not people’s general means of dealing with one another in Canada today. It is in fact an exception to how people generally behave. It’s almost as if when you engage in falsehoods other people stop trusting you and don’t want to be around you, so you end being punished for your lack of virtue.

    It’s almost as if, lying could only be fruitful in the long term, if someone’s social environment provided some perverse incentive to lie.

    Its almost as if those kinds of structural incentives could only exist in modern society if enacted by a force capable of maintaining them, i.e., a government.

    When we advocate for the government to legislate out what it defines to be people’s *expected* racism, expected bigotry, expected sexism, and so on, we are operating ourselves on a collectivist presumption of malevolence and guilt in others.

    Rights to be rights cannot conflict. One cannot simultaneously have the right to property and then only have the right to let the people the government allows you to onto that property, or conversely, compel you to have to let others onto your property or into their service. In the name of defending rights, Paul is creating in an unresolvable conflict between them.

    Section 15 of the Canadian Charter rightfully defines equality before the law, i.e., sets out “discriminatory” practices that the government may not act upon.

    However, the Canadian Human “Rights” Act is itself a violation of existing actual rights. It attempts to control not the power of the state, but the minds and property of its citizens. It is an attempt at thought control via the legislation of morality. It operates under a set of presumed values one must have in order to not be considered a criminal, even when holding those values is not tantamount to force or fraud against another.

    This way of thinking creates a precedent that leads to to further violations of actual rights in two ways. One, once one’s “correct” and “rational” morality ceases to be in the driver’s seat, there is nothing to prevent others of a different moral compass to assert their moral preferences in the future.

    Two, it creates a bureaucracy that categorizes and legally sorts people by their non-chosen attributes as well as by the culturally fashionable chosen attributes of the moment. In this way, the criticism of the things we are told should not matter are made to matter by the very people screaming most loudly that they should not.

    I’ll quote from Richard Hanania’s substack here, an entry entitled “Woke Institutions Are Just Civil Rights”:

    “In the book Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American, UC Berkeley sociologist G. Cristina Mora writes that, before government classification, there had been a “consistent empirical finding” that “Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans overwhelmingly considered themselves to be separate groups. They ‘didn’t really identify’ with one another, and they ‘didn’t really know what Hispanic meant!’” While the categories of white, black, and Native American make sense in the context of US history, later arriving groups have had their “official identities” constructed in Washington.”

    The bureaucracy that is necessarily spawned from “anti-discrimination”, “human rights” laws is not limited to the state itself, and is not limited to the soft-power assignment of collectivist identities from the top down, it expands to create corporate HR departments’ hyper-awareness of these differences, thereby enshrining the unchosen attributes of the individual as somehow essential to their character, and further politicizing the status of topical chosen attributes through hiring protocols, diversity quotas, and so on.

    In this way, the CHRA facilitates constant other-ization and collectivism, in the same way that portions of the Civil Rights Act has facilitated in the United States. Indeed, it has been a major ingredient in the rise of woke/cancel/”I’m offended” culture, and a major ingredient in Western culture’s ongoing other-izing and re-segregation.

    But if one asks Paul McKeever, he’ll suggest that it’s not those “human rights” that are a major cause of that segregating behavior, but in fact they are the only thing standing in the way of inevitable “cubby holing segregation”.

    He writes:

    “It is a view necessarily shared by those who regard the segregation of various Man-made collectives to be consistent with a free society.”

    And in the latter article:

    “Is a society in which individuals are effectively cubby-holed and segregated into different collectives, so as to be denied service by a guy who doesn’t want to serve you because he sees you not as a unique individual, but as member of a collective…”

    What is with this supposition of “cubby-holed segregation” as an inevitable result of not having “human rights” laws? Where is this premise offered as an argument rather than a presumption?

    It is not.

    Is Paul claiming that without these anti-discrimination laws, society will devolve into “Segregated cubby holes”? Does Paul mean to describe our current society (as influenced by these laws) or society as it would be without these “anti discrimination” laws to save us from our (his apparent premise, not mine) malevolent selves?

    Modern “Cubby-holed segregation” is a result of what he is in favour of: the elevation of inessential attributes as something politically essential on the grounds that people will by nature act irrationally towards one another in an otherwise free society, if not compelled to by the state.

    Such a destructive result as he fears is inevitable any time actual rights are violated, and especially in attempting to to violate them in the name of other so-called (human) “rights”.

    I’ll leave you with a quote by Ayn Rand, who properly differentiates between morality and the scope of its possible implementation in politics, i.e., law.

    “No man…has any claim to the property of another man. A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine–but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue–and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism. ” The Virtue of Selfishness, “Racism,” p.134, by Ayn Rand , Nov 1, 1964

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