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From: kort@hounx.UUCP (B.KORT)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Nozick on Imposing Risk (The Boundary Crossind Dilemma)
Message-ID: <570@hounx.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 11:13:38 EST
Article-I.D.: hounx.570
Posted: Tue Feb  4 11:13:38 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 21:51:05 EST
References: <438@umich.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 27
Keywords: libertarianism, compensation, Nozick

Paul Torek reviews Nozick on the "boundary crossing" issue.  The
question arises, should one negotiate advance permission (and
compensation, if appropriate) before crossing another person's
boundary, or is it sufficient to compensate afterwards.

The dilemma arises because an agent does not have sufficient
advance knowledge of where the other person draws the line,
especially for first-time activities.  Imagine saying to a
midwestern farmer in 1952, "Hello, I'm from the Bell Sytem
and were putting in a microwave relay system.  Do you mind if
we shoot a 10 Watt beam of 4 GHz microwaves across your farm?"

Conversely, the mere act of expressing a preference may cross
the boundary of the person on the receiving end of the sentiment.
There is a current lyric in the popular music scene, "You have
no right to tell me how you feel."  If the utterer of this sentiment
holds it true for himself, then by symmetry he may be violating
the very same boundary when he expresses the sentiment to someone
else.

The bottom line is that permissions grow with maturity, and the
crossing of boundaries is unavoidable without perfect knowledge.
Perfect knowledge requires essentially infinite information
interchange rates, which far exceed the capacity of the human
I/O channels

--Barry Kort